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Bread and Circuses: The Hidden Machinery of Mass Distraction
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 28 2026
Pages: 406
Weight: 1.08
Height: 1.01 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if the greatest battle of the twenty-first century is not fought over land, oil, or money-but over your attention?
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal warned that a society distracted by bread and circuses could gradually surrender its civic awareness without realizing it.
Today, the arenas have changed.
Instead of gladiators, we watch professional sports, influencers, reality television, twenty-four-hour news, social media, luxury lifestyles, celebrity culture, and algorithm-driven entertainment.
Behind them stands an invisible economy competing for the most valuable resource on Earth:
Human attention.
In Bread and Circuses: The Hidden Machinery of Mass Distraction, Sebestyén István explores how advertising, consumerism, politics, sports, Hollywood, influencers, artificial intelligence, personalized algorithms, and the emerging AI-generated internet have transformed distraction into one of the world's largest industries.
This book examines:
- The ancient origins of Bread and Circuses
- The psychology of attention
- Why outrage, fear, and entertainment dominate modern media
- The commercialization of sports, influencers, and celebrity culture
- Consumerism and the illusion of identity through consumption
- Luxury, gambling, and the business of desire
- Artificial intelligence and the future of human attention
- The Dead Internet and algorithmic reality
- How individuals can reclaim their focus in an age of endless distraction
Combining history, psychology, economics, media studies, and technology, this book offers a compelling exploration of one of the defining questions of modern civilization:
Who controls your attention-and what happens when attention becomes the world's most valuable commodity?
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