What do Adam Sandler movies, Family Guy, Candy Crush and Playboy centerfolds have in common? They're entertainment aiming to evoke the basest human instincts and ultimately demoralize you. The gross-out jokes, the incessant gore, nudity and flashiness are meant to hyper-stimulate the senses to the point of numbness. Why? It turns out that the best customer is a numb one. A company looking to maximize profits would also want to instill in the consumer a sense of helplessness, depravity and isolation. Makes sense? If not, it will in just a moment.
The essence of capitalism is constantly increasing profits. It's not enough that a company does well; a company has to do significantly better than last month. Innovation that would normally lead to increased profits comes through massive effort and at times is purely accidental, which no company wants to rely on. Executives who focus on status quo or innovating are ousted and replaced with those who will do whatever is legally allowed to maximize profits.
When one company does this, its competition does too, sending the entire section of the market into a downward spiral when it comes to quality of whatever it is they're offering. Company executives thus come to the only reasonable conclusion: minimize costs in producing content and maximize revenue from any given customer. In this way, profit margins can steadily increase. Thinking without any moral constraints, because that's how corporate executives think, how would you extract maximum revenue for any given piece of entertainment content?
First, you'd be following trends because they have verifiable market impact and a known customer base, with numbers to back them up, allowing the least amount of time and money spent on data gathering and market research. Again, never rely on innovation but do change things up a bit so that you can't be sued by competitors. Shamelessly copy things to cut down on production costs whenever you can get away with it.
Second, you'd want to have such an employee base that can be harnessed as needed to produce content on the spot, meaning underpaid, overworked and stressed-out workers (since workers are consumers too, demoralizing them has a bonus effect of increasing overall customer base). Workers should be laid off regularly to keep the remainder in constant terror, which would make them give 110% at work, and also temporarily make financial reports seem to show growth.
Third, the content itself should have a glossy appearance to compete in the market and fool the audience into purchasing it; lawsuits for false advertising should be considered par for the course. This implies spending most of the budget, which can go in the millions of dollars, on marketing rather than actually making quality content. In fact, investing in innovation simply means other companies who have better marketing will rip off your innovation and make money off of you. If money is spent on quality, make sure the majority of investment is in customer-facing aspects, such as demos and other instantly consumable content that can't be directly copied. The glitzier, the better.
Fourth, consumers should be made addicted to the content in any way possible. Here's where proprietary research into human psychology and physiology comes in, allowing corporations to finely tune their products for maximum consumption. That's why all those fancy animations and jolly messages in Candy Crush – each sparkle and message bubble is scientifically designed to distract, soothe and exhilarate just when you're about to get bored of the game. At first, there's a deluge of stimulation but that tapers off into a trickle; if the user wants more progress or stimulation, he has to open up his wallet. Cooldown-based game mechanics and other ways to frustrate the customer work too as they make the tidbits of pleasure seem that much more intense.
Fifth, all ideals need to be steadily eroded or consumers won't be buying your or your competition's sewer-tier products at a deluxe price. Here's where companies finally look at one another and silently nod; they have to do this together or nobody gets any money. Erosion of ideals can be done through peer pressure or pervasive exposure, whereby children are inundated with demoralizing entertainment products from the earliest age possible. Making deals with schools to present the entertainment product as a legitimate way to help children works too, which in the case of video games is known as "edu-tainment". The art of doing all of these at the same time is called marketing.
Annoyed by ads? They're meant to annoy you and eventually just have you sublimate aka. unconsciously adopt their influence. When one company becomes successful through marketing, all other follow suit and the entertainment market becomes filled with instantly accessible, hyper-glitzy, overblown products that have barely any redeeming qualities. This applies to almost everything in the mainstream entertainment, with the end result being a downtrodden workforce of productive people hidden behind the curtain or perhaps across the ocean, market filled to the brim with low-quality products that all draw on the same set of formulas and consumers who have had all the nuance from their mental processes shaved off through bombastic marketing.
Overall demoralization is actually necessary to create this kind of market. Productive people need to be told they can't succeed unless they're working for one of these soulless corporate content treadmills while consumers need to be overwhelmed with garbage and marketing efforts until they accept it; ridiculing quality products as quaint and outdated works too. Marketing then serves another purpose by also demoralizing any competition, resulting in mainstream entertainment products everyone hates but buys regardless. What are you supposed to do?
What does it mean to have fun? In short, I'd define it as exploring one's own capabilities. If you observe children at play, they're doing random things and reveling in the discovery of their own possibilities. In essence, this is what fun means and the shocker is – we don't need an outside source of stimuli to have fun. The current mainstream environment is meant to stimulate production and consumption, stimulating financial growth at the cost of losing morale and standards.
You see, the entertainment market also wants to block self-exploration; why would you spend time or money playing Candy Crush if your imagination is good enough? Therefore, imagination needs to be wiped out for the benefit of corporate shareholders. People growing up in this kind of environment are steeped in demoralization efforts that want to block any kind of spiritual, emotional or mental growth, otherwise they would stop being hyper-consumerist.
The worst part, one that should make you righteously angry if there's a living fiber in you, is that all these companies cheat to produce this kind of entertainment. For example, Playboy centerfolds are meticulously photoshopped until they appear flawless, without any stretch marks, cellulite, pimples, acne or birthmarks. Think about it – people buy the magazine for the centerfold so why would the owner company rely on chance to find that one perfect girl with a perfect skin? Take an average girl, overwork her, underpay her, degrade her to accept poor working conditions and perhaps even make her thankful for the pittance she gets paid, snap pictures, have overworked, underpaid workers photoshop them and make tons of money.
Buying these products means supporting this kind of work ethic and siding with exploiters. What's interesting is that "morale" is defined by TheFreeDictionary.com as "The state of the spirits of a person or group as exhibited by confidence, cheerfulness, discipline, and willingness to perform assigned tasks". The root of the word is in French "morale" that also conveys the notion of morality but digging deeper reveals another root, this time Latin: "proper behavior of a person in society," literally "pertaining to manners". Therefore, giving attention to this kind of content eats away at your manners, ruins your proper behavior, destroys willingness to do what you're meant to do while chipping away at your discipline, cheerfulness and confidence. Don't you feel miserable after watching an Adam Sandler movie? Now you know why.
All mainstream entertainment production works like this and results in de facto slavery, except that it can be out of our sight, perhaps done by toddlers somewhere in Malaysian sweatshops. Just go through this text again while ignoring the word "entertainment" and compare the statements to the observable status quo in food, music, fashion and other industries – it's all the same everywhere. To call this out means to poke the most lucrative businesses in the eye; to try and change something means pulling back the curtain, revealing the council of CEO elders and spitting in their faces all at once.
Still, I don't believe there is an intentional, grand conspiracy to destroy creative drives of the common man; perhaps realizing it's all coincidental is all the more infuriating. I think the assault on our senses just so happens to ruin our morale but the primary goal is making us an obedient little consumer who looks up to faceless corporations for everything. We're expected to idolize these CEOs, copy their business strategies and shamelessly exploit the environment and our fellow man for instant profits. Is that the only way to success? I honestly believe it isn't and even that kind of "success" is ephemeral and overblown at best. I think even these CEOs realize it's a scam but they fake it until they make it.
What we need is a mass of small, independent entertainment producers who aren't doing it for the money. It all comes down to having a higher ideal, some kind of a goal in life where you use your career and skills, whatever those are, to produce whatever brings you closer to that ideal and then sharing it with the world. After that, you will no longer be swayed by corny movies, terrible match-3 games and photoshopped pictures of plastic women.
Who you are and what you do matters, from one day to the next. Every moment of engagement with this kind of sewer-tier entertainment is a vote for that kind of system, so if you want to bring it down and simultaneously lift yourself up, starve this kind of entertainment of your attention. Consciously refuse to play video games with cooldowns, microtransactions or other exploitative mechanics meant to lure you in and suck you dry. Use your imagination, create your own worlds and, who knows, you might even start sleeping better.