#756: Are you not entertained?
Plus: Bookstreaming, weather influencers and sad subreddits
Today’s edition of Links is a short essay on the politics of spectacle, or maybe the spectacle of politics, and how that explains the state of many things right now. If you appreciate my thinking and writing on topics like this, a paid subscription might be for you. Paid supporters keep the lights on here and make my work available, for free, to all subscribers.
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Forgive me for quoting the noted human trafficker Andrew Tate, but I’m stuck on something he said on a right-wing business podcast last week. Tate, you may recall, was controversially filmed at a Miami Beach nightclub last weekend, partying to the (pathologically) sick beats of Kanye’s “Heil Hitler” with a posse of young edgelords and manosphere deviants. They included the virgin white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the 20-year-old looksmaxxer Braden Peters, who has said he takes crystal meth as part of his elaborate, self-harming beauty routine and recently ran someone over on a livestream.
“Heil Hitler” is not a satirical or metaphorical song. It is very literally about supporting Nazis and samples a 1935 speech to that effect. But asked why he and his compatriots liked the song, Tate offered this incredible diagnosis: “It was played because it gets traction in a world where everybody is bored of everything all of the time, and that’s why these young people are encouraged constantly to try and do the most shocking thing possible.” Cruelty as an antidote to the ennui of youth — now there’s one I haven’t quite heard before.
But I think Tate is also onto something here, about the wider emotional valence of our era — about how widespread apathy and nihilism and boredom, most of all, enable and even fuel our degraded politics. I see this most clearly in the desperate, headlong rush to turn absolutely everything into entertainment — and to ensure that everyone is entertained at all times. Doubly entertained. Triply entertained, even.
Trump is the master of this spectacle, of course, having perfected it in his TV days. The invasion of Venezuela was like a television show, he said. ICE actively seeks out and recruits video game enthusiasts. When a Border Patrol official visited Minneapolis last week, he donned an evocative green trench coat that one historian dubbed “a bit of theater.”
On Thursday, the official White House X account posted an image of a Black female protester to make it look as if she were in distress; caught in the obvious (and possibly defamatory) lie, a 30-something-year-old deputy comms director said only that “the memes will continue.” And they have continued: On Saturday afternoon, hours after multiple Border Patrol agents shot and killed an ICU nurse in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street, the White House’s rapid response account posted a graphic that read simply — ragebaitingly — “I Stand With Border Patrol.”
Are you not entertained?
But it goes beyond Trump, beyond politics. The sudden rise of prediction markets turns everything into a game: the weather, the Oscars, the fate of Greenland. Speaking of movies, they’re now often written with the assumption that viewers are also staring at their phones — stacking entertainment on entertainment. Some men now need to put YouTube on just to get through a chore or a shower. Livestreaming took off when people couldn’t tolerate even brief disruptions to their viewing pleasure.
Ironically, of course, all these diversions just have the effect of making us bored. The bar for what breaks through has to rise higher: from merely interesting to amusing to provocative to shocking, in Tate’s words. The entertainments grow more extreme. The volume gets louder. And it’s profoundly alienating to remain at this party, where everyone says that they’re having fun, but actually, internally, you are lonely and sad and do not want to listen — or watch other people listen! — to the Kanye Nazi song.
I am here to tell you it’s okay to go home. Metaphorically speaking. Turn it off. Tune it out. Reacquaint yourself with boredom, with understimulation, with the grounding and restorative sluggishness of your own under-optimized thoughts. Then see how the world looks and feels to you — what types of things gain traction. What opportunities arise, not for entertainment — but for purpose. For action.
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the rise of the right-wing insult AWFUL, for “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.” I have wracked my brain for potential dude equivalents and ended up with CLAMP, for Caucasian Liberal Affluent Male Progressive. Admittedly doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Postscripts
Bookstreaming. ICE on ice. Pity the 2026 grads. The rise of weather influencers and highly specific vibe-coded apps. Where crystals come from. How the monoculture fell. What TikTok’s new ownership means for you. (TL;DR: We don’t entirely know, though the app’s retraining its algorithm on US data and will collect your precise location in the future.)
The AI productivity paradox. Generative AI still can’t dance. The Trump appointee radicalized in the Gawker comments section and rage bait comes for advertisements. Grok deepfaked 3 million sexualized images in just over a week. If this is sincere, which … I really can’t tell … it’s the saddest subreddit I’ve ever seen. Last but not least: “Great art isn’t supposed to be easy.”
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That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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