REALITY BITES... THE DUST
With each technological advance that supposedly improves our lives, we move closer to a simulated reality. How did we get this way? The culprit, it turns out, is our desire to be entertained
The exact moment that reality died is hard to pin down, but it was probably much earlier than you think. In 1962, historian Daniel Boorstin warned of its demise in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. “We risk becoming the first people in history,” he wrote, “to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”
And now we are living in them. We prize image over the empirical, favour make-believe above reality. And with each technological advance that supposedly improves our lives, we move closer to a simulated reality, closer to The Matrix. These illusions influence what we buy, what we watch, and even who we vote for. How did we get this way? The culprit, it turns out, is entertainment.
In Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, author Neal Gabler wrote that entertainment has become “the most powerful and ineluctable force of our time, a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.” Boorstin argued that reality was doomed with the birth of photography. Images became more seductive, and ultimately more important than what they were portraying. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard went so far as to say that photographs led to “the death of reality,” because they replaced the real thing.
When moving pictures came along, the seduction became much stronger. Before movies, fame was usually attached to achievement, reserved for politicians or war heroes or scientists who had done something meaningful. But the movies gave us celebrities who hadn’t necessarily achieved anything other than pretending to be something they were not. That didn’t stop us from worshipping them, though. While heroes create themselves, only the media can create celebrity.
Once established, they proved to be a powerful commercial and cultural force, selling books, TV shows, perfume, clothing lines, diets and political views. The power of that celebrity was revelatory, and it quickly spread. “The star system has reached far beyond the movies,” Boorstin wrote. “Wherever it reaches it confuses traditional forms of achievement. It focuses on the personality rather than the work.”
This was in 1962, decades before the Kardashians were thrust upon us. With the rise of reality television, celebrity lost even more restrictions and finally devolved to everyone. The first reality TV show is generally acknowledged as An American Family, which aired in 1973 on PBS, and followed a family going through a divorce. It wasn’t until the 1990s, however, that the genre exploded, first with Real World and then, Survivor, which spawned dozens of shows following similar formats.
Reality television was cheap to produce, it drew an audience, and it presented its own version of “real life” as entertainment. At first, those who appeared on reality TV had to be screened and coached. But now that a generation has grown up with these shows, everyone knows the drill. The plot lines are scripted, the conversations prompted and edited, and participants are aware of which archetype to inhabit: diva, bitch, boor, schemer.
With The Apprentice in 2004, however, the genre went a step further, creating a character based on a real person. Bill Pruitt, one of the show’s producers, said they made the character of “Donald Trump, real estate tycoon.” At the time, he wasn’t a billionaire, had made some disastrous business decisions, and was having trouble borrowing money. Trump’s own boardroom was, in fact, too shabby to use for the series, so they built a set.
Trump actually makes an appearance in Gabler’s book, which was published 16 years before The Apprentice aired. In Life The Movie, he is described as the embodiment of the new celebrity businessman, someone who understood that “a businessman’s job was not only management of assets but the management of images.”
And now he’s the Entertainer-in-Chief. Like Ronald Reagan, Trump evokes a cinematic version of America when it was great: an unstated time, though roughly from 1941 until The Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan. And it was a great time to be alive — though less great if you were black, or gay, or a woman or a minority or a Cubs fan.
At his many rallies, Trump is strong, fearless and decisive in his rhetoric. That reality doesn’t intrude on this image is testament to its power. Television was once how you campaigned; now it’s how you govern. Trump has wholly inhabited the image of the righteous, evangelical defender of the American Way of Life. And what is “the American Way of Life?” Its most vivid incarnation comes from film and TV, from The Sands of Iwo Jima to Leave it to Beaver; from The Cosby Show to “Go ahead, make my day ...” And these images are far more potent than any divisive, rust-belt reality.
Trump’s reality is what he has constructed, but he isn’t alone. We choose an image, a movie rather than a leader these days. Do you want a Hallmark weepie with a strong romantic lead and lots of tears and apologies (Justin Trudeau) or do you want a Dolph Lundgren straight-tocable action film (Doug Ford)? An inspiring Norma Rae story (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former waitress turned Democratic nominee for Congress) or a rogue cop flick (Maxime Bernier)? We have evolved from homo sapiens to homo scaenicus: man the entertainer.
Just as the movies altered who we choose to celebrate, the newest iterations of media have changed who we elect to govern us. As Daniel Boorstin wrote 56 years ago, “We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the day.” P.T. Barnum noted that not only was it easy to deceive the public; but they enjoyed it. It was part of the entertainment.
And now we need to be part of the entertainment. When you overhear someone describe a confrontation with their boss or colleague (“I told her, ‘You don’t like it, you can stick it.’ Oh I told her!”), you know it isn’t what actually happened. The version being told is more cinematic, it gives the teller the best lines, and those lines are likely delivered with more emotion and conviction than what she actually said. Which version is more real to her? The mundane, possibly humiliating real version, or the movie version? Even for those of us without YouTube channels, performance is a part of daily life. For some of us, it is daily life.
There is infotainment and advertainment and edutainment. Food, sports and retail have all embraced its possibilities. When you walk into a Gap store to find the employees wearing headsets, what is happening? Are they going to break into song? Order a carpetbombing of Syria? What kind of khaki-related emergency would warrant the need for instant, battlefield-style communication? The headsets are designed to create a sense of urgency, of drama, to bring the shopping experience into the world of entertainment. The fact that there is no actual show doesn’t matter; it looks like one.
Which brings us back to The Matrix. At the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History in 2016, philosophers and physicists argued about the nature of reality. Could our entire world only exist on someone’s hard drive? Are we all just simulations? The moderator, Neil deGrasse Tyson, put the odds at 50-50. “It is easy for me to imagine,” he said, “that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”
Simulation theory posits that as our computing power increases exponentially, a future version of ourselves, or possibly a higher being, has created this reality, in which we are unconscious citizens.
Essentially, we are all fake news.
Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, argued that we aren’t interesting enough to be simulations. “We mostly are interested in ourselves,” she said. “I don’t know why this higher species would want to simulate us.” As a higher species, you could see having fun with, say, Winston Churchill or Mick Jagger or Madonna, and now, of course Trump. But what higher being would have the patience for those billions of supporting roles: the accountants, factory workers, toll booth operators and greeters? Economist Robin Hanson argued that if we are, in fact, simulations (sims in the parlance of the simulation theorists), then we need to strive to be entertaining to avoid being shunted off to a non-conscious, low-fidelity part of the simulation, the virtual version of fly-over country.
So either way, it all comes down to entertainment. If a bored teenager living in their parents’ basement on another, much higher plane has created all this for their own amusement, then that explains a lot. But whether we’re living in a simulation or we’re living in whatever passes for reality these days, you’d better be entertaining, or it’s hasta la vista, baby.