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For all the noise, not much changes in politics, says Ted Gioia. So forget about it. “All the action now is happening in mainstream culture” – and that is “changing at warp speed”. Not for the better. In fact, 2024 may be the most “fast-paced and dangerous time ever” for our culture. “I want to tell you why entertainment is dead. And what’s coming to take its place.”
Dumb and dumber
You might think there are basically two options – entertainment (giving the audience what they want) or art (making demands on people for higher goals). But you’d be “dead wrong”. Entertainment has long been on a “growth tear”, so much so that anything “artsy or indie or alternative” got squeezed out. Now it’s even worse: entertainment is being replaced by “distraction” – scrolling through social media videos of someone “twerking” or of “pets looking goofy”.
Distraction is now a huge business and “will soon be larger than the arts and entertainment industries combined”. Disney is in crisis – everything is shrinking except the CEO’s pay cheque. Paramount just laid off 800 employees and is looking for a new owner. The TV business “hit a wall” in 2023 after years of steady growth. Music may be in the worst state of them all.
But this is more than just the “hot trend of 2024”. It will go on forever because it’s based not on fashion or aesthetics, but addiction. Our brain rewards brief bursts of distraction with hits of dopamine, which make us feel good. Which makes us desire more, so we do it again. Which then becomes a habitual behaviour, which we keep on doing even when it doesn’t feel good anymore, and even makes us depressed, because we feel we can’t help it. This is a familiar model for addiction and now it is getting applied to the culture at large and to billions of people – “unwitting volunteers in the largest social engineering experiment in human history”.
The tech platforms making fortunes from facilitating this are not the equivalent of the Medicis or other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create “a world of junkies” – because “they will be the dealers”.
You thought artists had it tough back in the day? Even the dumbest entertainment “looks like Shakespeare” compared with our new dopamine culture. So don’t be surprised
