Amusing Ourselves to Death

Media, Palestine, Narrative Control

Neil Postman warned us, in language more restrained than Orwell and more academic than Huxley, that the end of democracy might not come via boots and batons, but via laughter, distraction, and passive surrender to spectacle. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he drew a line from the media’s obsession with entertainment to the erosion of reasoned public discourse.

But even Postman couldn’t have foreseen how thoroughly entertainment would become the architecture of control itself. Today, it’s not soma or satire that keeps us docile, but narrative supremacy. Not censorship in the Orwellian sense, but the Huxleyan deluge: curated outrage, selective empathy, algorithmic erasure.

Take the case of Gaza. The suffering is not hidden. The footage is everywhere. But every image of a child in rubble is met with a counter-image of a hostage, a slogan, a badge of moral immunity. This is Hasbara not as strategy, but as spectacle. It is not information warfare; it is emotional choreography. The goal is not to win the argument, but to shape the stage so thoroughly that no argument can begin.

Here, Postman meets Gramsci. What we are witnessing is not just the degradation of discourse, but the imposition of cultural hegemony: a moral framework so deeply embedded that it feels like common sense. Palestinians are framed as inherently suspect, their grief pre-emptively invalidated. Their voices are not silenced; they are crowded out by louder, state-sanctioned mourning.

This is why UNRWA is now the designated scapegoat. Not because it is uniquely corrupt or dangerous, but because it is the last bureaucratic vessel in which Palestinian personhood is still formally recognised. Delegitimising it is not a policy position. It is a narrative tactic. If UNRWA is corrupt, then Palestinian children are not children. If its schools are propaganda mills, then the bombs that hit them are cleansing acts. The message is clear: even their aid workers are suspect. Even their teachers are militants. This isn’t oversight. It’s moral sterilisation.

TikTok, once imagined as a subversive tool of Gen Z resistance, now behaves no differently than older platforms. Pro-Palestinian content is shadowbanned, de-prioritised, buried. The feed remains cheerful.

We are not amusing ourselves to death anymore. We are being fed to it.

This is the endpoint of Postman’s anxiety: a society where truth is available, but unfelt. Where trauma is content. Where war crimes are debated through the same dopamine loops as cat videos and drink recipes.

Hasbara does not ban your dissent. It simply makes sure no one sees it, and if they do, it ensures they feel nothing.

That is hegemony. That is control. And it looks nothing like Orwell. It looks like LinkedIn, Instagram, and comment threads, where grief is met with slogans and memes.