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If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.

AGT is a petri dish in which new technologies of spectacle creation are born and refined. The most recent season (#15) brought together a series of reality TV “technologies”, ones designed and implemented to create the simulation of genuine emotion.

Some of the other authenticity-constructing technologies within AGT are the golden buzzer, the voting systems, and “saving” rounds. Each of these ideas represents an aspect of the show’s spectacle, its gravitas.

Vibe Coding’s vertical leap in abstraction also comes with a sideways stumble into non-determinism.

It has to advance the spectacle ad nauseum, via the usage of simulatory social technologies. Through imitating authenticity, “reality” T.V partially undermines the very capacity for authentic social interactions.

Simulacral technologies such as these have the potential to bleed outward into cultural hegemonies, apparently resulting in infections of meaning. However, the conditions of postmodernity are in some regards centered around a revealing, rather than a creating. Authenticity appears to be corrupted by the forces of capital and spectacle, but in... See more

The result of these technologies are simulacra, duplicated bodies of the “authentic” and “real”. The stakes are meticulously manufactured. In these cases, there is no original. It is narrative all the way down. The technologies copy ideas from other talent shows and reality T.V in general, but it is unclear if such ideas originated with reality T.V... See more