By Naomi Klein, from No Is Not Enough, which was published in June by Haymarket Books. Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine, among other books.
The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows on which the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to…
