Likely not, the production cost-savings from reality-TV and its manufactured audience demand may never end (see AI).
If reality television began as a crude simulacrum of real life, today the opposite can feel true — that actual life is approximating reality television, and we’ve all been conscripted as cast members. We have arrived at the final stage of the genre’s cultural logic: people with no connection whatsoever to the genre living as if they are reality stars. The contagion has leaked from the lab. We are in a period of unchecked community spread.
Some of the most successful people in the world — like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — now prefer to parade around crudely constructed reality-villain alter egos instead of simply being whoever it is they actually are. It works greatin Congress, too. “I don’t think you know what you’re here for,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a fellow House Oversight Committee member, Jasmine Crockett, back in May. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
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The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening. Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.
If you pick up your son from school tomorrow and find he’s been operated on to change his gender during 4th period, only to return home with your new daughter to find your cat being grilled by Hannibal Lecter in your back yard, don’t say Trump didn’t warn you.
In professional wrestling, kayfabe is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged.
