The Twilight of Entertainment, the Hegemony of Knowledge and New Year’s Eve With Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan

For nearly a century, consumer society taught people to admire visibility. Actors, singers, footballers, Formula One drivers and, more recently, digital influencers became symbols of personal achievement. The article argues that societies repeatedly confused fame with performance, audience size with relevance and public exposure with real value.

Entertainment itself is not the target. Every healthy society needs play, sport, music and escape. The problem, the author says, began when entertainment stopped being recreation and became the main mechanism through which communities imagined their future. That model is now beginning to crack under the combined pressure of artificial intelligence and the way major powers are reorganizing social prestige.

Television once operated through a monopoly of access. A relatively small number of producers created content for millions of passive consumers, and stars gained influence through the scarcity of their appearances on screen. Whoever controlled the screen controlled much of the collective imagination. AI is dismantling that structure through synthetic content, extreme algorithmic personalization and the instant reproduction of images, voices and text.

When any image can be generated algorithmically, virtual characters can attract millions of followers without biological existence, and the traditional celebrity loses its symbolic monopoly. An excess of images, the article argues, inevitably devalues conventional fame. Value instead moves toward the ability to understand, design, program and control the complex systems producing that content.

The author presents this shift as a national challenge for Romania. While major powers turn science into a source of prestige, Romania risks becoming a spectator in a world built by others. The emerging hierarchy will favor knowledge, education, innovation and mastery of complex systems over mere visibility.

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AI moves the center of power from the attention economy to the knowledge economy.