Conclusion

Abstract

By the end of the twentieth century, the arsenal of entertainment revealed itself to be the culmination of an almost two-centuries-long process. The initial stages of this development began in the heady days of the Industrial Revolution when Great Britain (and later the United States) supplemented traditional deployments of military capability with the instruments of soft power. In the succeeding years, however, information and entertainment became a means of power projection in their own right, integrating themselves into a larger assemblage of global command and authority. Today, this vast and omnipotent apparatus of spectacle assumes much of the responsibility to enforce daily imperial discipline and is poised to preserve an era of planetary stability managed under American auspices. Colonial armies, smothering bureaucracies, or any of the other previous trademarks of a stifling imperial structure are absent in a world where many of the trivial desires and discontents of subject people can be satiated or neutralized. This new global capability, made possible by the advancement of mass communication technologies, makes the American Empire unique among its imperial predecessors and gives it the ability to weather the storms of economic downturn, popular dissent, and social unrest into the foreseeable future.