Enraged public attention and billionaire waste form a mutually reinforcing symbiosis

Evidence

This frustration will not mean the end of public displays of excessive wealth, only a continued symbiosis between enraged attention and wasteful excess, intertwined in a mutually reinforcing cultural death drive in which total waste, total exhaustion, and death and destruction are the ultimate outcomes—a realization of the complete, luxurious expenditure imagined by Georges Bataille. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 373

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why cancel-culture critique of elites fails—the anger itself feeds the attention economy. Relevant to reader’s creator analysis. — connects to: Socially necessary waste rationalizes science and technique — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 230; Billionaires seek unchallenged power over who knows, deciding, and behavior modification — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 877