Keeping up with the Benjamins is certainly a bottom trawling psychological mechanism in the chest of tools employed by media, but I don’t think it accounts for

Keeping up with the Benjamins is certainly a bottom trawling psychological mechanism in the chest of tools employed by media, but I don’t think it accounts for the sum state. Genuinely astounding and wide reaching works are actually pretty rare when you compare them to the vast sea of lesser works. Entertainment lives on a string of less frequent and more singular booms, but the industry that pops up around it survives off the hype or lack thereof between. So, they push quantity over quality and authenticity, and reprogram consumers around that hype train. Worse than that, they might reach for dark patterns to artificially and negatively prop up engagement, which rots the whole thing from the inside out.