Spectacle as engineered mass pleasure — the Entertainment cluster's consumer sibling
echoes
From: Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All
- Early text: "The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so.
Not For-Me or -You." … "It’s Us showing off for Us." … "The real Spectacle
that draws us here is Us." [08/13/1400–1600h, the crowd-theory passage];
"Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event" and the crowd
"expending months of stored-up attention" [same dateline, the "A theory"
stretch].
- IJ echo: The novel's Entertainment/spectacle preoccupation — pleasure and
attention as the thing a culture organizes itself around, the audience as a
mass that gives itself over to a show. The Fair is the benign communal version
of the appetite the samizdat weaponizes: a crowd that has come to spend its
attention on a manufactured spectacle. The "expending months of stored-up
attention" line is the attention-economy note the Entertainment runs to
lethality.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation