A Violent Entertainment

1.

Violence is inherent to entertainment. It’s intrinsic to its constitution. Violent in its content, persuasion, domination, penetration, and consumption. The violence of consuming entertainment media is never acknowledged. Vicariously consuming media — parasocial relationships — should be understood as the process of vicariously self-harming. Self-inflicting emotional and mental harm combined with negligence of your physical condition. The ideal consumer places themselves in an ergonomic seating arrangement that allows you to stay in stasis for hours consuming your mealed entertainment. You lock in. You give in. You become something else entirely. The act of fandom, of fanaticism, of delirious addictive consumption. Listen to Land: Nothing human makes it out of the near future.

The definition of violent entertainment shouldn’t be taken as just talking about what the content of said entertainment is. Entertainment consumption itself is violence. Like a goose raised for foie gras being pumped with pounds of grains and fats down their feathered throats. You think they’re able to taste it? Do you think they care? You pump ASMR, Valorant, digital slots, porn, and Reddit into your eyes and ears, and you swallow them down from your mental esophagus into your mental stomach. Your churning acid cannot break down the stimuli you aim to digest. Foie gras tastes delicious, so what taste is on the tip of your digital tongue?

2.

No entertainment you consume can be digested into waste, it stays tumourlike. Keep gorging—your near future will resemble nothing human.

What would your mirror reflection look like if it showed your media body? Your digital presence is fed by your media diet. Your media mass index (MMI) will swerve higher than 25. You are obese on entertainment — pig-slopped to the nines.

Click the hyperlink of Project Graham: the photo of what a human designed to survive a car crash would look like. What would a human designed to survive mass consumption of media entertainment look like? A peek at fedora-adorned anime-porn basement-adjourned fans might give you an idea.

3.

The more you consume, the more you (want to) kill yourself. Maybe you should secure some SSRI’s! That way you can consume your serotonin enhancers to live your soma-numbed life in an even more numbed way. The solution to your cutting of your digital wrists is a painkiller, not putting down the knife.

There is no current alternative modernity to serve as an ailment to this. You can tell yourself to try to live an ascetic life, but apart from solitary confinement, no space will exist in the near future which will be devoid of stimulation. There is no life without stimulation, without entertainment. We have accelerated and will keep moving forward, creating the perfect entertainment. Media now is too powerful in its hyperstimulation of the uncontrollable animalisms of humanity. Push boredom and dullness down your throat. Make your liver disgusting enough so the data-harvesting algorithms pass by you and select a different livestock for slaughter/sale. But even the frailest goose is profitable for harvest. A goose who hanged themself can also be sold, their body frozen for later delivery. Even if the margins of profit are lower than the other obese livestock which dominate the pesticide fields of industrially farmed lives. You can try to live a different life, but know that to the controlling hand who determines your fate, it does not matter. You will be reaped like the other animals no matter how contrarian you are.

4.

When we fuse entertainment’s acceleration with life, we are left with a process that cannot be receded. I do not see a future where we stave off the advancement of new and more predatory entertainments. Liberals and democratic socialists think that you can vote for change, making small steps at a time. You cannot vote against the human impulses through which entertainment feeds on. There is no going back. There is not even a place in the public or private where people can even make a vote on this. The culture industry vaporizes any place for discussion, turning them into slophouses. The vast majority of society will never seek older forms of entertainment which have fallen out of favour. Silent films, Radio, Books, and Television have fucked off from societal disinterest. Short-form content shows us what is next to go: Long-form media content will be shot and killed, its dissected parts will take its place. But what will come after short-form content, an already dissected medium of previous multiple dissections. Our most popular mediums now are not anything new, but only seem new because they are microscopic remains of things we’ve never seen in such high up-close detail.

Movies turn into 50 30-second parts, Music turns into 15-second clips, Instagram turns into TikTok, YouTube turns into TikTok. Computers turn into phones, websites turn into apps, keyboards turn into digital touchpads, mice disappear, chargers become wireless, headphones turn into implants, eyes will simulate VR, wireless will refer to how people embed technology into themselves instead of the lack of wired technology.

TikTok will be supplanted by a new medium, which will be faster and even more unrecognizable. It is already druglike in the consumptive trance that occurs with doomscrolling and mass engagement with it. It will be nothing human or similar to anything that came before it, the perfect entertainment. The Entertainment. The content doesn’t matter because it is the act of being entertained, the sensation, that is consumed. Perfect entertainment refers to its creation of a consistent stimulating sensation in the consumer. A sensation of pain medicated by more entertainment, which causes more pain. Your tuberculosis treatment is a pharmaceutically prescribed skinny cigarette. A crack pipe is coming next.

Neo-China arrived long ago. Do you see it now? It’s not China that’s at fault, it’s your entertainment-riddled liver, your mechanically stimulated glands, your numbed and filled ear canals, your eye sockets full of electric light, your mind in the gutter, your heart which heaves and flutters. You crave this. You deserve this. You want it. You got it. You’re not human. Who are you? What are you?