“The people of this country must have their amusement or the country will go red,” Will Hays reportedly said. Hays, the architect of film censorship in early Hollywood, knew that entertainment could be weaponized as a political manoeuvre.

This year is rife with amusements of all kinds, and they’re only getting bigger. One of the most inescapable ones, the Indian Billionaire wedding, was called “the wedding of the year” by The Cut. “Rihanna! Glass Palaces! Custom Versace!” screamed Vogue. The biggest stars, CEOs, and political moguls are in attendance, fashion magazines are feverishly dissecting the couture, and the diamonds and emeralds gleam many times over through a billion screens. It’s not so much the extravagance of the affair that stands out as particularly new; it is the mawkish praise and awe with which the culture has interpreted this gilded excess. Almost like the entire media establishment has capitulated into becoming a bunch of stans.

Spectacle has always existed. But rarely has it coexisted alongside a seemingly progressive, anti-elite sensibility and, what’s more, developed immunity to any critique. The messaging seems to be: politics is already in such tumult, why complicate entertainment? Let people enjoy things.

On the one hand: Communists and Socialists won France in a shock election, the Labour Party defeated the Tories in a landslide win in the UK; India’s billionaire-friendly Hindu nationalist party was humbled by the general election results; Brazil has a left President after years of Bolsonaro; the United States’ Democratic Party faces an existential crisis as people begin to see a cynical corporate agenda through its progressive facade. Big studios are even commissioning a bunch of “eat the rich” movies and shows to tap into the zeitgeist.

On the other: nobody is allowed to critique Taylor Swift’s monopolistic business model; you were a bad feminist if you didn’t approve of Barbie’s marketing machinery turning the whole world pink to sell more Barbies; one of the biggest TV shows about a feudal rivalry placed a plastic dragon on the Empire State Building; “pan-India” cinema is churning out content celebrating gods and nobility; and the wedding colossus that should have perturbed critics receives breathless stenographic coverage, documenting with amazement the sheer purchasing power of one of the world’s most powerful business moguls.

In 2019, a Vox article observed that the phrase “let people enjoy things” had become a fight against criticism. It was referring to a growing phenomenon on the Internet where, all of a sudden, feel-good optimism was being used as a rebuttal against any questions, dislike, or god forbid, negativity. Celebrities and public figures entreated everyone to be kinder; many even made kindness their whole brand. They work hard, after all, to give us entertainment, generously sharing their lives with the public. Our job is to like it or leave it (alone).

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle commissioned their own docu-series on the emotional toll of a critical press (lumping in very real racism alongside any bad press or criticism in general); an Indian actor urged people to be kind after being called out for spreading health misinformation; Kylie Jenner cried on-screen about the scrutiny over her appearance; a culture critic who thought Beyoncé’s politics are shallow was mercilessly hounded, doxxed, and threatened; many Indian actors and directors went on chat shows to assert that critics shouldn’t be allowed to do their jobs until they’ve made movies themselves; the list is endless. We’ve been strong-armed – through tears, confessions, anti-bullying/kindness/wellness foundations – into a consensus that not only is criticism pointless, it is also mean and harmful.

Rich and beautiful people have been at the forefront of an anti-intellectual pushback against “negativity” in public discourse for a while now. “Create something instead. Lift people up instead,” Ariana Grande said in a deleted post, lashing out at critics with the implicit suggestion that criticism is just a profession that piggybacks on the hard work of real artists. This has become the mainstay of all pushback against all critique: that criticism is just sour grapes and critics don’t “contribute” or “create” anything meaningful for the world. Unlike artists. Unlike powerful people sharing their happy nuptials with the world. The early 2000s paparazzi and tabloids, for all their problems, were arguably combative against the rich and powerful. They were antithetical to genteel middle class sensibilities and feared for their unabashed judgement and salacious headlines that spared no A-lister, royal, tycoon, or athlete. And the critics who were genteel still used to be critical. Then, Buzzfeed listicles enumerated the many ways a celebrity was a girlboss or a short king and kept a dutiful record of all their good deeds, which thrilled fans and entertained others, which generated clicks, which changed digital media forever.

So now, a popular Instagram account's comments were flooded by hundreds of users emphasising the importance of spreading positivity and “celebrating love” – all on posts criticising the aforementioned wedding. The idea is that entertainment shouldn’t be taken so seriously. Entertainment is for enjoyment; actors, musicians, billionaires getting married and members of the royal family are all purveyors of enjoyment. A public good and, by extension, a moral good. Enjoyment, in this calculus, is not political; it is merely passive, feel-good, a dopamine-hit for people fatigued by the daily grind. Politically inert. And so the media is in a frenzy to simply document, not interpret, what the rich and powerful do. This ideological distancing does a weird thing to the culture. It takes us back to feudalism.

Consider when The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximillian I, commissioned “The Triumphs of Maximilian” in 1512 – a print collection showcasing his own grand processions. Seven hundred copies were printed and distributed to friendly princes and cities. According to Roy Strong, the former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, these festival books (as they were called) contained "an idealisation of an event, often quite distant from its reality as experienced by the average onlooker. One of the objects of such publications was to reinforce by means of word and image the central ideas that motivated those who conceived the programme." It’s probably not a coincidence that this form of coverage originated in feudal monarchies, when there wasn’t really a lot of space for dissenting – or even slightly unhappy – opinions.

One of the first times a newspaper did this was in 1884. The New York Times reported on a wedding that changed New York: the union between old and new money. The Astor wedding, as it came to be known, made wedding announcements in: the Times, accordingly, allowed the public to witness the sensation as the paper “vividly conjured the gown bedecked with diamonds and orange blossoms, the $75,000 necklace draped across the bride’s décolletage and… every opulent gift on display.” But the Gilded Age also fuelled political novels and the rise of cheaper newspapers that began to advocate for the public interest – in short, there emerged a media culture that implicitly resisted what they viewed as corruption and excess.

Through the last few months, much of mainstream pop culture coverage has been in the form of primers, exclusive sneak-peaks, and collections of vignettes conveying the splendour of such things as weddings, marketing gimmicks, concerts, and conventions. You will find “everything you need to know about it” (predictably, a recent New York Times piece promised to share “what we know” about the aforementioned “wedding of the year”) sooner than you might find a copy of, say Society of the Spectacle on the Internet. The latter is a text in which the French philosopher Guy Debord argued that subcultural images, words and icons become co-opted by the mainstream, with the intent to depoliticize them; he called it “recuperation.” That’s how you get straight people doing a very straight wedding or a very straight display of affection at a concert mothering, eating, and slaying.

It’s tough to say anything about icons today because the icons are arguably a new kind of aristocracy. They enjoy the fame, power and prestige that money can buy – plus public adulation for those very things. Money, today, buys you not just any kind of adulation, but the kind that is averse to criticism. If the nobility of yore acquired legitimacy through the idea that they had a divine right to be kings because the gods chose them, the powerful moguls of today enjoy a mercantile right to be kings. The free market’s invisible hand chose them. Maybe it’s some kind of special sauce, maybe it’s hustle, but whatever it is, it earns a few individuals unfettered access to public space, memory, attention, time, good vibes, all. This is true of Taylor Swift, who enjoys what sociologists call “affective citizenship” – a kind of social contract with fans who swear their fealty to her, drawn to her emotional appeal. And it is true of all celebrities, all influencers, all hypervisible and powerful people – the neo-nobility – who demand loyalty in exchange for spectacle, feeling, creation. A bad word paints the speaker as borderline treasonous to a culture that has submitted itself into enjoyment.

The icons, for their part, have begun to lean into the feudal dynamic. City police have announced traffic closures for a wedding that they referred to as a “public” event. King Khan will star in a film called “King.” Swift has trademarked popular names and phrases as her own, including her three cats’ names: “Meredith, Olivia and Benjamin Swift.” None of it is all that serious. And the media knows how to play its part: like a good arm of the political establishment, separates the politics from the entertainment – keeping the country, and the world, from going red.