Spectacle, abjection, and the conspiracy of pretended joy — the industry of pleasure watched anyway

echoes

Early text: "the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it’s still an art form"; "the whole cynical postmodern deal"—"but we all still seem to watch. To care"; "we know the whole thing sucks"; the CES adult floor — "Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party."; Vegas as "an enormous machine of exchange—of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost." [Oscars-vs-AVN framing; the CES floor; the Vegas ¶] [e-text]
IJ echo: The novel's account of a mass audience that keeps watching what it knows is bad for it — the compulsion the Entertainment weaponizes, and the spectacle-culture (InterLace, the Show) IJ satirizes. The essay's "we all still seem to watch. To care" is the demand side of the same problem the samizdat is the supply-side limit of.
Weight: shared-preoccupation