>>472077Moreso a bread and circuses type thing in times of crisis.
I hate that term because reactionaries themselves use it to describe actually progressive things like gay pride parades, but it's accurate here. Another way to view it (celebrity gossip) is as a kind of pornography, just one of the lowest outputs of culture, the pornographic counterpart of history and biography, that still turns a profit because it titillates bourgeois sensibilities of individualism and schadenfreude.
Picunrelated but a nice film.