Contemporary entertainment produces enthrallment in abjection rather than escapist delusion.

Evidence

But the mode and genres of immediacy now suggest a different function for favored entertainment: not evasive delusion about but deeper enthrallment in the spectacle of mass abjection, an enveloping total sensory engagement with too-real social distortion. Faddish genres like cringe and edgy sci-fi practice exposure and extremity, magnetizing us infrangibly to the brutalizations of the known world. If past crises like global war or nuclear annihilation yielded mediums and media shaped by fracture and fragmentation, rupture and disorientation, the metastasizing crises of the twenty-first century seem to beget something else: total absorption, the loss of mediation itself. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 37

Categorization

• XREF: This revises the older Adornian ‘amusement is the prolongation of work’ line her tradition inherits — immediacy’s entertainment isn’t distraction from the world but deeper absorption in it. That’s the updated twist worth engaging. — connects to: Contemporary observers saw television’s dual potential for art and cultural opiate. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 440