Like the Colosseum, the streaming platform and the media feeds are tools of social control. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.
It is no accident that athletes and singers are being idolized. It is a tool of social control.
Let’s be fair first. Celebrity culture does something real and not entirely negative: it gives young people a path that has the appearance of being accessible. The boy from the poor neighborhood who watches the footballer and thinks — I could do that. The aspiration is genuine, the effort it produces is real, and the meritocracy of the playing field is one of the last functioning meritocracies we have. This is worth acknowledging.
But…
But the real hero of our world is the entrepreneur. The person who sees a problem, builds a solution, risks everything, fails, rebuilds, and produces something that didn’t exist before — something that employs people, solves problems, improves lives.
This is the most consequential human activity available in peacetime. It is also the least celebrated. No stadium. No album. No algorithm promoting it to your feed.
Kids today should have posters of Elon Musk in their rooms. Not because he is perfect — he is not — but because he represents something the footballer and the pop star cannot: the proof that building something extraordinary is no longer the privilege of the connected, the credentialed, or the well-born. A South African immigrant with a physics degree and a maniacal work ethic built the most important rocket company in history, the most consequential social media platform in the world, and the electric vehicle that forced every car manufacturer on earth to change direction. The path is real. The path is open. The path requires everything you have. That is a better poster than any footballer.
The ruling class uses bread and circuses, celebrities and sport, to distract the masses while they get on and rule:
The Roman citizen who once governed the republic received, in compensation, bread and circuses. The crowd’s attention was managed toward the arena and away from what actually mattered. The gladiator was famous, desired, and owned. He had no power. The crowd worshipped him and went home. The emperor decided everything.
The algorithm is the modern arena management system. It selects for what produces engagement – the immediate, the visceral, the emotionally legible. The footballer’s goal is instantaneous and universally understood. The entrepreneur’s breakthrough is slow, complex, and requires context to appreciate. The algorithm is indifferent to the builder — and indifference, at scale, produces invisibility.
Woke nastiness:
The Frankfurt School completed the mechanism. By attacking the concept of what is worth admiring — declaring that excellence is a power construct, that the hierarchy between the important and the entertaining is itself oppression — it removed the cultural framework that would otherwise orient attention toward what matters. If nothing is genuinely more admirable than anything else, the footballer and the person curing disease are equivalent. And the footballer has better marketing.
In the shadows:
Meanwhile, in the shadows, entrepreneurs and researchers backed by AI are building the actual future. Defeating diseases. Building rockets. Rewriting energy. Quietly. Without a stadium.
The civilization that built the Parthenon, the Sistine Chapel, and the moon landing understood that some things are more important than others – and organized its attention accordingly. The civilization that has forgotten this distinction fills the arena, watches the gladiator, goes home, and calls it culture.
The Colosseum is the ancestor of the streaming platform, an ancient institution of Roman control:
It held fifty thousand people. Admission was free. The shows were funded by the state. The emperors who built and maintained it understood something that every administrator of mass distraction has understood since: the crowd that is entertained is the crowd that is not asking questions. …
[Its] function: the systematic provision of spectacle to a population that was progressively stripped of political power.
The Roman citizen who had once voted in the assemblies, served in the legions, and participated in the governance of the republic now received, in compensation, bread and circuses. …
The thumbs up, thumbs down decision — the crowd’s power over the defeated gladiator’s life — was the Colosseum’s most sophisticated political invention. It gave the crowd the sensation of power without its substance. You could decide whether a man lived — but had no say in taxation, war, grain supply or succession. You had thumbs. The managed democracy — participation without real power — is two thousand years old. …
When Maximus asks, “Are you not entertained?” he is exposing the mechanism with contempt. The crowd cheers louder. This is not stupidity. It is the rational response of people given no other way to participate.
The Colosseum is the ancestor of
- the streaming platform,
- the social media feed,
- the algorithmic content delivery system, and
- the 24-hour news cycle.
Each one provides spectacle calibrated to the crowd’s appetite, substitutes consumption for participation, and generates in the audience the sensation of engagement without the substance of power. The thumbs have migrated from the arena to the screen. The gladiators have become influencers. The emperor has become the algorithm. The bread is delivered by app.
And here we are.