Kick’s roofied mediatized cocktail of entertainment, hate speech, and radicalization demonstrates the path unregulated entertainment has ahead as technologies continue to get more accessible, and entertainment becomes even more entrenched into every sphere of life. The harmful spectacle that is more alluring, more enticing to consume. This is the process of Addictainment, the societal outlet for a violent entertainment.

It is truly fantastic that no matter where you are, there’s a good chance you’ll be recorded or photographed. You have no control, no say over this at all. The man, six stories up on the wrong side of the balcony, looks down to see a sea of phones. Suicide becomes a vaudeville act.

All life becomes mediatized, experience now consumable via multistimuli form. An experience is not lived through in these conditions, instead you live a life of a perma-voyeur. Simultaneously hyperstimulated and unsatisfied, two magnetized points through which you cycle through.

We’ve witnessed a rapid resurgence of analog technology, with vinyl records and film cameras sparking revitalized interest among younger audiences. This phenomenon is a testament to our generation's collective fascination with the past, our attempt to find a semblance of authenticity or a connection to the tangible, in a vastly digitized world.

Videodrome (1983) is body-horror technophobia galore. CMNSU movie reviewer Kofi takes a look at David Cronenberg’s McLuhan-inspired film.

Pig Slop Part 2 (Remastered 3024)

The story goes like this:

Anyone else ever been jarred from what someone else has as their phone wallpaper? I have a bad habit of looking at other people’s phone screens on transit. I’m fascinated by it. Little glimpses into people’s lives.

I think my phone spends more time charging than it does vice versa. This is mentally sound. In fact, I don’t trust the battery status to just show me a green, yellow, or red to signify what my battery level is at. I want to see the exact percent I am currently operating at—how much abstract time remains for the object of my love and adoration to continue serving me.

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 media mass index (MMI) will swerve higher than 25. You are obese on entertainment—your consumption is violence.

The consequence of our contemporary era’s understanding of the utilization of creativity is a desire for control over the emotional/material conditions of life that leaves a wallowing want for more. Contemporary mimicries of creativity are realized as an unauratic, surface-level embodiment of segments of meaning that lost their genuineness long ago—appearing, but like lensless spectacles.

Headphones render life itself into silence. You experience a deep sensorial and emotional inner life, but you withhold that, determining that this is a gift for yourself, allowing it to ring through your head as your ears follow suit. And when you’re forced to go out into the world without your trusty earsidekick—you struggle to rekindle what life used to sound like. An alien in your own commute.

This country needs energy. Imagine the things we could do if we all moved faster, if we all ran and sped TOWARDS change. We need to be running daily, no more walking, NO MORE WALKING. RUN to the polls, RUN to the grocery store, RUN to a psychiatrist and get a stimulant prescription. Run back a month later and ask for a HIGHER DOSE. Run a CELSIUS© down your throat. SWALLOW NICOTINE GUM WHOLE. We need to put our pedal to the metal and MOVE. We’re running out of time.

Multitasking Man is the embodiment of someone who has lost control to their infinite appetite for distractions. Multitasking work with entertainment. The behavior the symptom of a deeply addicted individual, one who lacks agency unless certain stimuli are fried to satisfatory numbess. Only the extent of your ever-dwindling agency is the determiner of whether you rise into productivity or continue swallowing water, sinking into stasis.

Consuming short-form content is a process of self-harm. Drawn-out long-form suicide, via short-form bursts of unfeelable pain. The most shameful form of suicide. It is the slow death of your attention span, a slow descent into mental/emotional subordination, the process of losing a temporal grasp of your life. Waving a dilapidated goodbye to your newly disfigured consciousness as you surrender fully to The Entertainment.

Every month I am greeted by a new, increasingly worse UI. Everything degrades, everything rots. But iTunes’s clunkiness and customizability felt more physical if that makes sense. It was pleasantly cumbersome in its depth of options, a right click would lead to 20 different selection bars, each with their own drop-down menus of possible query. Spotify on the other hand, feels like an attack on the intelligence of anyone who uses it.

Online entertainment media has created a want for novelty only if it is within the relations of trust, the insane level of intimacy they have built with their pre-existing objects of consumption. It’s a form of engagement with already consumed media that thumbnails function to. A thumbnail’s role is in complete relation to trust.