Big Tech is Like Pro Wrestling

The French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote about wrestling in 1957. He wasn’t writing about sport; He was analyzing a form of entertainment that reveals something important about how spectacle works, and his argument was that professional wrestling is pleasurable not despite being scripted but because it is scripted. The audience is not there to watch a fair athletic contest. It is there to watch the theatrical enactment of moral archetypes: the villain who cheats openly, the hero who suffers before triumphing, and the referee who is briefly fooled before justice prevails. The industry term for this collective fiction is “kayfabe”. Wrestlers maintain kayfabe in public appearances, in interviews, and on social media, even though every adult in the audience knows that wrestling is a performance. This isn’t deception: it’s a mutual agreement to treat the fiction as real to make the experience more emotionally satisfying. When a wrestler breaks kayfabe—acknowledges the performance from…