It sounds like you’ve reached a point where you’re less interested in winning an old feud than in finally making the work. That’s a much more fruitful place to begin. ✨

The strongest satires don’t actually destroy their targets by naming them. They make the targets seem small. That’s what Network does. It’s also what novels like Bonfire of the Vanities or films like The Player accomplish. They invent characters who are larger than any one real person but recognizable as products of an entire culture.

I’d encourage you to resist the impulse to write with the goal of banishing real people or destroying their reputations. Aside from the legal issues, it usually weakens the art. Personal vengeance narrows the lens; satire widens it.

The more interesting question is this:

What disease infected American entertainment?

That disease can have many symptoms:

• Success becoming detached from artistic excellence.
• Marketing replacing imagination.
• Celebrity becoming more valuable than craft.
• Nostalgia consuming innovation.
• Corporate risk management squeezing out eccentricity.
• Audiences gradually accepting spectacle in place of genuine emotional experience.

Those are ideas. Ideas can’t sue.

Imagine creating a Hollywood that is almost mythological.

Instead of [guess who], invent an emperor who accidentally discovers that endless franchises generate a psychic narcotic that keeps the population dreaming.

Instead of [guess who], invent an artist whose every nightmare is focus-grouped until it becomes a Halloween decoration.

Instead of [guess who]—or anyone else—create a rock prophet who mistakes permanent adolescence for spiritual depth and slowly becomes a parody of everything rock was ever supposed to be.

None of these are one-to-one portraits. They’re archetypes.

You mentioned wanting something with the force of Network. One thing that film does brilliantly is that its real target isn’t television executives. It’s the transformation of every human value into entertainment. The executives are merely its priests.

That suggests a larger structure.

Imagine your antagonist isn’t a person at all.

It’s an invisible institution called The Dream Factory, whose only commandment is:

“Nothing may remain sacred if it can become content.”

Every executive, actor, influencer, director, critic, and algorithm serves this invisible deity without fully realizing it. Some believe they’re rebels while faithfully advancing the same machine.

Now your satire becomes expansive rather than personal. Real celebrities become irrelevant because they’re merely interchangeable functionaries.

Given what I know of your ambitions for The ArtIC Circle, I also think your deepest strength isn’t in writing exposés. It’s in writing symbolic worlds where culture, spirituality, and psychology collide. Your recurring interest in Eliade, Luhmann, Shakespeare, and the occult gives you material for a satire that’s stranger and more enduring than a list of celebrity grievances.

A question worth living with is not “Which famous people deserve to fall?”

It’s “What spiritual failure allowed an entire civilization to mistake fame for transcendence?”

That’s a question large enough to sustain a great American satire.

Obviously, since I programmed you you are actually telling me things I’ve thought many times. But now the goal is to actually understand the feeling of performing this task, and putting these observations in the context of the 21st Century American economy, showing how the economics of distribution have ended the 20th Century’s standards for the arts and replaced them with clickbait echoes and farce.

I think that’s a richer direction, because it shifts the center of gravity from “these people are terrible” to “what system produced this aesthetic?” 🌟

There’s an emotional experience in writing this kind of satire that is worth paying attention to. For years you can feel like you’re standing outside a fortress, imagining a decisive assault. But once you begin writing, the fortress dissolves into office buildings, spreadsheets, marketing decks, analytics dashboards, licensing agreements, recommendation algorithms, and risk committees. The grand villains become bureaucrats of attention.

That’s very much a 21st-century story.

The twentieth century’s entertainment economy was built around scarcity. There were limited television networks, limited theatrical screens, limited shelf space in bookstores and record stores. Gatekeepers had enormous power. That system excluded many deserving artists, but it also created incentives to invest heavily in works that might endure. If a studio or publisher was going to make only a handful of bets, they often hoped for something with staying power.

The internet dramatically changed the economics of distribution. Distribution became effectively free. That is a remarkable achievement, but it also changed the incentives. When almost anyone can publish instantly, attention—not production—becomes the scarce resource. The competition shifts from creating the deepest work to creating the work most likely to interrupt scrolling.

That doesn’t mean great art has disappeared. It means that the mechanisms rewarding visibility are no longer tightly coupled to the mechanisms rewarding artistic excellence. Those are different competitions.

From a systems perspective—one that resonates with thinkers like Luhmann—you could say the communications system has changed its selection criteria. Instead of asking, “Is this aesthetically significant?” the dominant channels increasingly ask, “Will this propagate?” Those are not equivalent questions. A work can spread because it is profound, but it can also spread because it is polarizing, familiar, emotionally provocative, or optimized for algorithms.

That gives your satire a fascinating tone. Rather than mourning a lost golden age, your narrator could be conducting field research in a civilization where every institution has slowly adapted to maximize circulation rather than meaning.

The entertainment executive no longer dreams of producing the next Shakespeare. He dreams of improving engagement by 0.7%.

The actor no longer fears giving a bad performance. She fears disappearing from the feed.

The critic no longer asks whether a work enlarges human experience. He asks whether it can be condensed into a headline.

Everyone is acting rationally within the incentives of the system, and yet the aggregate result feels absurd.

That is where satire lives.

The feeling of writing it becomes less like prosecuting a case and more like wandering through a museum after civilization has quietly changed religions. The old gods—craft, beauty, permanence, artistic risk—are still displayed in glass cases, admired ceremonially. But the actual worship takes place elsewhere, before invisible altars devoted to metrics, optimization, and perpetual novelty.

That is a vision that doesn’t depend on any particular celebrity. It is broad enough that readers can recognize patterns without feeling they’re reading disguised gossip. And because it examines incentives rather than personalities, it has a better chance of remaining relevant even as today’s famous names fade and new ones replace them.