Have you considered that the rational bond villains use celebrities as a visibility and accountability shield to accomplish goals that would otherwise be shut down if proposed directly?

"Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine" - George Monbiot

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebr...

Yes if you were to apply the Mcleod Corp pyramid they would be he clueless layer, happily indoctrinating the loser layer at the behest of the sociopath top.

It was my understanding that the loser layer understands what's going on though, which should inoculate them from indoctrination. Celebrities would then be the ones who keep the clueless from becoming losers.

Well, going too deep, there are three parts of the loser layer; committed losers, future clueless, and future sociopaths. The committed losers are aware and say things like “msm has always being lying”, future clueless are aspiring influencers, and future sociopaths are just waiting for the right opportunity to advance.

Rupert Murdoch was overtly portrayed as a Bond villain in one of the late ‘90s films...

Interesting, that's how I remembered it too!

However, Wikipedia says: "While many reviewers compared Elliot Carver to Rupert Murdoch, Feirstein based the character on Robert Maxwell." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies)

Either were just Edward Burnays archetypes.

I have, and you can make the case that this is what's happening, and use Trumps 2017 tax cut as a very good example of elites complaining about him, but successfully using him for their own ends.

And that would be true, but I don't believe that overall, since it presupposes that just because someone is a celebrity, they are necessarily some sort of mindless, insentient vessel that optimizes for fame and can otherwise be controlled. Why shouldn't Kim Kardashian have strong-but-misguided opinions like any other random person? And wouldn't her existing fame make her way less amenable to influence by unknown individuals? To use a real-life example, much of Trump's immigration obsession is not shared by the elites who benefited from his tax cuts.

Ultimately, I don't believe it because I don't think any person can be as easily influenced as this scenario implies.

Useful idiots work freelance, because any longer and they become a liability. I think there is a vast pool of freelance celebrity today, with a deep bench of influencers attempting to expand it further. So if Kim doesn’t work tomorrow, someone else will. The difficulty with Trump is that his office has a 4 year appointment and he accomplished his goal in 2, leading to 2 more goalless years.

Sounds like the Hitchhikers Guide.

There was a PBS documentary almost two decades ago called Merchants of Cool, which discusses exactly the issue of celebrity status and how it is used to buy and sell “cool” to teenagers in order to influence their buyin decisions. What is scary is that this documentary was shot long before smartphones and social media - I imagine the effects are amplified by orders of magnitude since the proliferation of social media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctC56owCBJg

I wonder if the present is more determined by the fact that the generation that used to be teenagers two decades ago are now in their prime years, rather than the latest greatest technology based social distruption.

The Frankfurt school tackled the negative societal side effects of mass media and celebrity directly. Unfortunately, their work is rigorous, complex continental philosophy and so is relatively unknown in the states and does not have the popular appeal of a critique packaged as something more accessible like dystopian fiction.

They're worth checking out though if this sort of "pleasure"/entertainment/late capitalist dystopia theme interests you. Marcuses's One Dimensional Man is probably the work that relates most directly to this sort of thing. Horkheimer and Adorno's work also relates, but less directly, and it's less accessible. A sufficient background in the history of philosophy is prerequisite.

The Faint is also a great synth pop-punk band that quite frequently explores these issues in their music. Coincidentally, they just released an album this past Friday aptly titled Egowerk. Their older album Fascination is also great.

Century of the Self is another resource you can check out. It's a documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays and the radical shifts in advertising that he helped instate.

Well, for something US-made and more appealing to the less-continental reading tastes, Christopher Lasch is perhaps mandatory on this subject:

The Culture of Narcissism

The Revolt of the Elites

Haven in a Heartless World

The Minimal Self

and so on.

Don't forget Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUNPMPrxvA

Ironically, Idiocracy was too optimistic. The "idiots" of the future still ultimately respected knowledge and facts. They made the main character president once he clearly demonstrated he was the best person for the job.

In real life they'd just say the "big government deep state" is spreading "fake news" about Brawndo.

sure, it has electrolytes

That's what plants crave.

Well, the US does currently have a president who got (at least partly) famous in the Pro Wrestling circuit, so big points there. But it's only a superficial resemblance.

President Comacho saw a real problem (lack of food), realized he needed help tacking the issue, sought out literally the smartest person in the world, followed his advice and solved the issue.

President Trump makes up problems, staffs his cabinet with some of the lowest quality members those offices have ever had, discards virtually all expert advice (In his own words, he only consults himself because he has a "very good brain") and generally seems to exist solely to troll people.

So even though Idiocracy seems to have hit it right on, it didn't. Mike Judge still could not make the mental leap required to make Comacho different from what he already knew (and I don't blame him).

Some African countries are now literally living idiocracy (or are already past the initial optimistic phase when things still somewhat worked).

Spot on.

I would add that Idiocracy's theme was the dumbing down of society, but in spite of society's failings the democratic government continued functioning well in working on the citizen's best interests. Unfortunatly Trump's government appears to be doing the exact opposite, to the point of looking as a government ran by anarchists trying to undermine it from within. That's arguably far worse than Idiocracy's central theme.

The current administration, the one you called Idiocracy, stood up against dictatorship China and exposed the bubble mirage that was the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is now crashing hard. This current administration did what many said was impossible: wage increases in the age of automation and globalization. This administration has US economy growing at 3%, when most other global economies are going into recession. This administration gave jobs and money back to the main street people, when corporations were eager to give those to the prison labors in China.

You might be reading/watching the mainstream media too much.

You might be attributing too much to the actions of this administration.

And fwiw, real wage growth doesn't look that great. It has actually been negative for the last few months.

I don't think "standing up to dictatorships" is a very strong argument for this administration.

Idiocracy would count if it were released in the 20th century. It was released in 2006.

Mandatory alternate perspective: Cracked on why Idiocracy would actually be a utopia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E

It's hard to see celebrities as anything other than an especially visible subset of people clawing their way into the ranks of the wealthy. Hereditary celebrity is possible, but wealthy celebrities mostly don't try to make their children celebrities. The ones who seem (subjectively) like the smartest choose to gift their children the traditional advantages of wealth, education, and connections.

To add a current day example:

Jay-Z and Beyonce's child has their Instagram professionally done: https://www.instagram.com/blueivy.carter/?hl=en

Almost all rich celebrities have that.

Even Instagram only, average wealth, influencers, making like $1M a year or so, have whole teams of people working for their Instagram.

I sometimes think that the reason we don’t have these bond villains is because we were on the lookout and stopped them. And that caused us to miss the boiling frog situation of a ruling class of celebrity attention spinners.

1984 has zero celebrities - they don't and can't exist in that world.

The only figure with a face is big brother, and he didn't exist. I think Goldstein had no face?

If the proles (85% of the population) had celebrities, they would not be actual people : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolefeed

"Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population."

"What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."

"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means"

How about The Running Man? I never read the book but I believe the villain was a game show celebrity, same as in the movie.

"A Face in the Crowd" comes close, with Andy Griffith playing a populist hero who gets involved in politics. Near the movie's climax, the front-runner offers him the position of "Secretary for National Morale".

I’ve noticed that he villains are almost always corporations, or backed by corporations in a way or another.

But they are always obviously evil corporations. They never have a hip logo with cute aesthetics, and a sneaker clad hoodie wearing slacker founder. The movie Next Gen on Netflix is a good example of this though. The evil corp in that movie is basically Apple.

Hunger Games was sort of painting celebrities as the ruling class