The Future of Entertainment — You are the Product
October 15, 2028
It’s Thursday night in 2028 — over a quarter of the way into the 21st century. For the past 42 years of our marriage, my wife and I have “gone to the movies” every Thursday night, watched at least one movie at home each week — first on VHS, then DVD, and now streaming — and watched one or two television shows per week, and each read a book or two per week. But “going to a movie” and “watching a TV show” has dramatically changed over the past 15 years. Now that we are semi-retired, we have the time, flexibility, and financial resources to consume media any time and way we want. But the choices are bleak, and frightening.
In retrospect, it all started when we were kids. We grew up in the second half of the 20th century when the two business models for entertainment were established — pay and advertising. We paid for books, theatrical productions, music, and movie rentals. We didn’t pay for television or radio. They were “free” to us but their creation and distribution was supported by advertisers. We knew we were being manipulated to smoke Marlboros, drive Mustangs, and drink Coke.
Our minds were being hacked[1], but the manipulation was so overt and clumsy that we just shrugged it off. We put up with the annoyance of advertising to get “free” news and entertainment.
Then, in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the internet and hacker culture, something started to happen. A hippie/libertarian/hacker mantra arose — “Information wants to be free[2]”. An ethos developed that information should be freely available to all. This was an altruistic idea to consumers of information and entertainment, but it conveniently ignored the need to compensate producers.
The music industry was the first hit, with Napster and file sharing. The economics of the music industry imploded and other media domains such as newspapers and magazines soon followed. Newsrooms around the world imploded and journalism was at risk of becoming extinct. Kids who grew up in that era embraced the idea that information should be free — and they refused to pay. Their ethos soon expanded to film, television, and the internet. This drove producers of content even further toward the advertising model.
The same people who felt information should be free were equally wary of advertising.
They knew that advertisers were trying to hack their minds and shape their behavior — so they developed countermeasures such as ad blockers and set top boxes to skip over advertising. As the countermeasures got more effective, advertisers went underground — first with benign hacks like product placement then with more insidious methods that used algorithms[3] to generate stories that very subtly manipulated and hacked our minds for commercial or political purposes. The first attempts were crude, but we saw through them and developed even stronger countermeasures. A cold war between advertisers and consumers developed where advertisers developed more and more sophisticated, insidious, and targeted hacks and consumers developed more and more effective countermeasures. It was a vicious spiral.
Hacking of our minds was dramatically amplified by Fox News and Facebook. While the stories depicted on movies and television shows have always had a point of view, they moved from entertainment to overt — and sometimes covert — attempts to polarize and shape tribal behavior. What started at Fox in news — a naked political agenda with a thin veneer of “fair and balanced” in the late 2010s moved into entertainment by 2020. Early signals were TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and Duck Dynasty — which fueled the culture that spawned the presidency of Donald Trump and later the formation of the hugely popular breakaway “New Know Nothing[4]” political party. News used to be about objective truth and movies and television used to be about entertainment or framing a story in a provocative fashion to get viewers to think. News became fake, and movies and television “entertained” by whipping emotions into a frenzy and fueled tribal identity and behavior by projecting and reinforcing an edgy sense of doom unless the tribe bands together to repel “the others”.
Rather than provoke us to think, entertainment reinforced our tribal preconceptions.
The public loved this– to the point of addiction. Primed by the reality TV mentality — stories were fueled by emotion and devoid of intellectual content. They reinforced biases and manipulated beliefs and behaviors.
Facebook also contributed. As Facebook’s business model became more and more powerfully lucrative and their algorithms became better and better at targeting advertising to their users, the entire Facebook experience became polluted with advertising. The ratio of actual social interaction — the intended purpose of Facebook — to targeted advertising dropped dramatically. Connected things started reporting usage data[5] which allowed for very targeted and customized advertising. It was creepy and disturbing.
Even millennials, who were used to getting information and entertainment for free by subjecting themselves to advertising, rebelled. Facebook and other social media platforms were in a quandary. They had conditioned their users to get stuff for free but had tremendously lucrative business models through selling information about their users (the product) to advertiser and others who wanted to influence those users (the customers). That drove advertising further underground. It became less overt and more like “infomercials”. Users would only tolerate advertising if it was packaged as entertainment.
Eventually, social media users could no longer discern advertising from entertainment.
This turned out to be a boon for Facebook and the social media platforms but a disaster for the content providers and consumers. Advertisers learned that advertising packaged as entertainment was more powerful at influencing behavior than overt advertising, so they spent even more money to shape behavior, thus fueling the revenue, profits, and power of the social media platforms. As social media platforms got better and better at targeting this entertainment camouflaged as advertising, it enhanced the tribal “echo chamber” effect. Consumers of entertainment did not even realize they were being targeted with entertainment designed to shape their viewpoint and behaviors and thus, did not even try to seek out alternative points of view. They increasingly believed the world depicted in the stories targeted at their tribe was the real world. Fake news became real.
The methods to manipulate entertainment were pioneered by advertisers for commercial purposes — to get people to buy stuff — but they became powerful tools for political interests getting people to support them.
The Russian hacking of the 2024 US election that led to the successful campaign of the New Know Nothing Party’s Bannon/Mnuchin ticket was just one example. The experience of both President Bannon and Vice President Mnuchin as film producers[6] gave them the insight and contacts to use the entertainment system to manipulate the American public resulting in enormous concentrations of political power in groups that did not represent the interests of citizens. Given the reality distortions of the media, few citizens understood they were being manipulated and that the government was serving not their interests, but those of the political donor class bent on protecting and increasing their personal wealth.
In addition to entertainment as tool of commercial and political manipulation, the stories being told were just vapid. Since entertainment was being used to shape attitudes and behaviors, the stories mostly created and reinforced stereotypes. They didn’t frame the world differently or provoke us to think critically.
Indeed, the echo chamber effect was so strong and the advertising targeting algorithms so powerful that it became difficult to discern that we were in a tribal box and find alternative points of view. It was as if they there were no other points of view.
Reality TV, action movies, and improbable sci-fi and fantasy movies all became enormously popular and easy to manipulate. Original content was rare and endless sequels abounded. What entertainment available became vapid, repetitive, and predictable.
This was ironic because the delivery methods for entertainment were astounding. Home televisions got bigger and bigger and more and more realistic. Surround sound and huge screens created almost lifelike experiences. We used to like to go to a movie theater to see beautiful cinematography on the large screen, but home entertainment technology made this unnecessary. Virtual and augmented reality matured (after the 5th virtual reality winter) and home AR/VR had enough fidelity and performance to make for compelling immersive experiences. Augmented reality adorned the world with fables, phantasies, and subversive advertising — sometimes indistinguishable from reality. Streaming got super-fast and the early glitches with streaming interfaces and subscription/consumption models were ironed out. Prices were low (or free, given advertising support) and there was an abundance of content available (albeit all pretty lame). Homes routinely featured media rooms and other so the experience of consuming media was fabulous. If only there was something worth consuming.
There was, of course, a dark side to this.
Production methods got so good that it was impossible to discern live action from computer generated entertainment[7].
This further hacked our minds because it became more and more difficult to discern reality from fiction and it let algorithms tune and target stories to subtly manipulate our minds. After a long period of commoditized experience, theater venue owners finally woke up to the need to focus on user experience. The vanilla movie theater of old gave way to almost theme-park like experience with comfortable seating, food and drink, and outrageous experiential entertainment that combined physical and virtual space as theater operators tried to lure customers into their venues. Interactive and participatory entertainment — games merged with movies and film became commonplace. It was cool occasionally, but sometimes it was just too much.
October 15, 2028
Which brings us back to the present, and our choices in entertainment. Given our desire for entertainment that sheds light, speaks the truth, or provokes critical thinking, the choices are few in movies and TV. We love to read. While there are some early warning signs that books are being hacked, too, they — so far — seem relatively untouched by manipulation algorithms. Amazon has successfully continued to make us believe we should pay for books — albeit at much lower prices than physical books. This kept them relatively free of advertising and mind hacks. Books still offer provocative and entertainment that invites critical thinking and questions the status quo. Maybe our best choice is to fire up our wide-screen Kindles and curl up with some good books.
