Stop speedrunning to a dystopia

We need more warnings about amusing ourselves to death

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

There’s been a string of recent news of big tech corporations doing—or at least testing—things that can be described as “pretty evil” without hyperbole. What’s weird is how open all the proposed evil is. Like bragging-about-it-in-press-releases levels of open.

A few examples suffice, such as the news this month (reported in Harper's) that Spotify has been using a web of shadowy production companies to generate many of its own tracks; likely, it’s implied, with AI. Spotify’s rip-offs are made with profiles that look real but are boosted onto playlists to divert listeners away from the actual musicians that make up their platform.

Meanwhile, child entertainment channels like CoComelon are fine-tuning their attention-stealing abilities on toddlers to absurdly villainous degrees.

The team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.

It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes—a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut—each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

I, too, cannot look away

More recently, it was revealed that Netflix will be purposefully dumbing down its shows so people can follow along without paying attention.

Netflix leadership has begun mandating that shows and movies which fall into this category feature lots of dialogue where characters clearly explain what they're doing and announce their intentions. The purpose is to ensure that users who aren't watching, and only partly paying attention, can keep up with the story and follow along while distracted. The result is an abundance of exposition by characters recapping things they just did, are doing, or are about to do.

So the kids’ shows are slop, and now adult shows will be slop too as characters narrate their own actions and repeat everything twice to make up for lapses in attention as people scroll on their phones.

And then, right on the heels of this, it turned out Meta has been filling up Facebook and Instagram with bots on purpose, like this new AI “Momma of 2,” in order to flatter us with fake attention.

Doesn’t this make the platform seem vibrant with life?

To provide context for the criticisms of these moves here: I’m not normally someone who gets mad at companies for just existing. I don’t hate commerce. I grew up selling books, now I sell writing and ideas. I root for small business owners and for innovative startups alike. But lately some decisions have been explicitly boundary-pushing in a shameless “Let’s speedrun to a bad outcome” way. I think most people would share the worry that a world where social media reactivity stems mainly from bots represents a step toward dystopia, a last severing of a social life that has already moved online. So news of these sorts of plans has come across to me about as sympathetically as someone putting on their monocle and practicing their Dr. Evil laugh in public.

Why the change? Why, especially, the brazenness?

Admittedly, any answer to this question will ignore some set of contributing causal factors. Here in the early days of the AI revolution, we suddenly have a bunch of new dimensions along which to move toward a dystopia, which means people are already fiddling with the sliders. That alone accounts for some of it.

But I think a major contributing cause is a more nebulous cultural reason, one outside tech itself, in that a certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare. In the 20th century a mainstay of satire was skewering greedy corporate overreach, a theme that cropped up across different media and genres, from film to fiction. Many older examples are, well, obvious.

From John Carpenter’s They Live

To pick a niche: novelists in particular used to be stalwart in their warnings about attempts to entertain us to death. Writers like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace built entire careers on the idea American society is headed toward super-stimulation by its corporate overlords. Not only is there a video in Infinite Jest so entertaining you literally die, but in its close future, dates have become billboards, so the novel skips around temporal locales like the Year of the Dependable Undergarments or the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.

I found this stuff deep in college, but frankly it became a bit more juvenile with age; funny at best (a la Wallace), overwrought at worst (a la DeLillo). I could never forgive DeLillo for his novel The Silence, set during a blackout that destroys the hopes of a group of friends for watching the Super Bowl. Some in the group essentially have mental breakdowns; one just stares at the blank screen, another keeps repeating “football.”

Stove dead, refrigerator dead, heat beginning to fade into the walls. Max Stenner was in his chair, eyes on the blank screen. It seemed to be his turn to speak. She sensed it, nodded and waited.

He said, “Let's eat now, or the food will go hard or soft or warm or cold or whatever.”

They thought about this, but nobody moved in the direction of the kitchen.

Then Martin said, “Football.”

A reminder of how the long afternoon had started. He made a gesture, strange for such an individual, the action in slow motion of a player throwing a football. Body poised, left arm thrust forward, providing balance, right arm set back, hand gripping football…. He seemed lost in the pose, but returned eventually to a natural stance.

Max was back to his blank screen.

I threw the book across the room (it was so thin it flew like a frisbee). Like, wow, have you ever thought about how people worship the Super Bowl like it's a religion? Have you ever thought about how much we need TV? It felt dorm-room-level deep. In real life that scene would never happen. Blackouts are exciting, familial. People laugh more, come together in the dark, busy their hands (there’s a much better blackout scene where all of New York City goes dark in, ahem, my novel The Revelations). Characters choosing to watch a blank screen like zombies and repeating “football” is too on-the-nose. It offended me as a novelist, the way a cook would be offended at finding too much salt in their entree.

Not reserved to fiction, the same theme cropped up in cultural criticism prominently (often with more successful treatment than DeLillo). E.g., in Neil Postman's famous 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, he posits that the original American culture was heavily typographic—that is, it “took place” via printed text, which entailed complex arguments that in turn engendered a longer attention span. A culture’s popular mediums are its mediums of thought, so Postman warned about the switch to the new visual medium of television, with its brevities and seductions of images.

But from the vantage of today, after having lived through when the cultural change Postman warned of reached maturity and arguably completed its life cycle by giving way to online content, even parts of Postman’s work can occasionally feel exaggerated in direness.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore, and this is the critical point, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law, and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, boardrooms, churches, and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other. They entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas. They exchange images.

Great paragraph.

But, huh, do we Americans really no longer talk to each other in boardrooms and churches and operating rooms, and instead entertain each other? In an operating room, do the nurses now perform a choreographed dance? Is there a laugh track as the piping hot and ready-to-burst appendix is lifted out? Postman’s diagnosis there feels, charitably, like a stretch. And do we really exchange images instead of ideas? Eh, that one’s more debatable. Maybe group chats morphing into strings of meme sharing proves Postman right, and we really do just exchange images now.

I’m not claiming the Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death theme is totally gone from our culture. It still crops up in public debate, and it still has power: Meta pulled those seeded AI bots after public backlash (but various statements make it likely they’ll return). Yet consider the bevy of dismissive responses to psychologist Jonathan Haidt when he dared suggest that smartphones are bad for kids in schools. To me it seemed a knock-down case. Of course smartphones can be unhealthy! They’re unhealthy for adult public figures, from the richest people in the world to famous actresses to our incoming president—you think pre-teens are immune?!

Maybe the quibbling with Haidt over the minutiae of studies is because people have high standards of evidence. More likely, people are (a) scared of becoming old fogeys and (b) have been inured by over-hyped past warnings. Especially in the latter half of the 2010s, it began to feel like the critic who cried wolf. Sure, we became a visual culture instead of a typographic culture, but it wasn't that bad. Sure, smartphones destroyed communal life and replaced it with online life, but it wasn't that bad. Right?

Critiques of these changes feel out of style, as old as DeLillo. It didn’t help that from ~2012 to ~2024 the arts were heavily focused on politics and personal identity. Which can make great themes for art, if pulled off correctly, but the trend so outweighed everything else there was little room for satire and criticism more broadly. All to say: for overdetermined reasons satires about media consumption and corporate overreach and close-world dystopias have gotten noticeably rarer in mainstay genres like movies, books, etc. And while the reach of artists critiquing superstimuli culture wasn't always nationwide, they did often reach the right people at the top of the social hierarchy and it all trickled-down.

Now, if asked to name the last truly popular and incisive tech satire, I’d go with the TV show Black Mirror, which premiered, guess what, 14 years ago. Since then, a couple startups have proudly announced plans to do the exact thing that Black Mirror said not to do. Which probably indicates my personal taste for a subtler satire is too refined—what is too much salt for me is, apparently, way too little salt for plenty of consumers, who then mistake it for sweetness.

So I’m forced to say it: We need more artistic and cultural criticism of close-world dystopias! Forced quite literally here, by the abundant examples of real corporations acting as if they were antagonists in some postmodern DeLillian or Wallacian story bent on amusing us to death.

In which case I’ll admit I was wrong in my judgments. I simply didn't realize what all the on-the-nose criticisms were keeping at bay.