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Welcome to the Program

And production said “let there be light” and there was light. You awake trapped somewhere that looks vaguely like Calabasas with a dozen half-dressed strangers. The abrupt click on of a fluorescent light from some unknown power that be signals that your day has begun. You have no phone, no outside communication, and no clocks. There’s unlimited champagne but a suspiciously little amount of consumable food. Unclear whether it’s 2 PM or 2 AM. Privacy is long gone, what food exists is rationed, and every week, someone is executed (banished to the sound stage 30 ft outside of frame).

These are the dystopian imaginings of the 90s kids with cable we couldn’t tame. It’s the Saw-adjacent house arrest premise of Big Brother, the pre-frontal pickled liver petri dish of Jersey Shore, and the prison visit inspired relationship building of Love Is Blind. And it’s designed to make people crack and spill their mess into the living rooms of audiences around the world..

Alchemists of the Unhinged

Reality TV producers  are some of the most creative and intentional designers in the world. They engineer, with psychologically depraved precision, environments to encourage tables flipped in rage, romances of convenience, or total psychological breakdown, whichever makes the best television or has the most meme potential. The splendor of the Bachelor mansion? A pressure cooker for disorganized attachment and competition over an anti-prize of a man. Love Island? A clockless void where contestants form deep bonds as the only alternative to doing literally nothing all day. Even Cake Boss is a masterclass in pressure as performance art, stripping people down to stress responses in tear-stained aprons.

These shows have always fascinated me from a sociological perspective, not just because of their micro-reflection of the larger world, but because they force me to constantly wrestle with (and often lose to) the existentially not-so-chill awareness that our environments are never neutral. Just like the Survivor island withholds food to create shitshow fertilizer, the space we exist in, our workplaces, our cities, our social media feeds, is never designed by accident.

Who Produced Our Fuckass Society and Why Wasn’t the Showrunner Fired Years Ago?

On reality TV, the answer is obvious. Love Island producers benefit when contestants fall in love under false conditions. Bravo benefits when its Housewives get into fights on Scary Island stocked with free alcohol. But the real designers of our spaces—our offices, our cities, our institutions—are often behind the curtain.

Take workplaces. Just like reality TV shows, offices are designed to influence behavior. Open office plans encourage visibility (read: surveillance). Strict schedules dictate when we eat, how long we pee, and how many exact minutes we can dare to take for ourself during the 9-5 hours. Remote work? A fundamental reshaping of the workplace “set,” one that has caused pushback from the people who benefit from keeping workers on-site and overworked.

Or think about public spaces. Urban design determines who feels welcome in a city. A park with plenty of seating invites people to linger, gather, and covertly day-drink. A bench with armrests every two feet? That’s not just a design choice—that’s an anti-human measure, meant to prevent anyone from sleeping there. Algorithmic design works the same way. Social media platforms tweak our feeds to maximize engagement, not necessarily our well-being.

The parallels between reality TV and real life are everywhere. The question is, how often do we realize we’re living inside someone else’s design?

The Cameras Are Rolling – We Just Can’t See Them

Spoiler: design isn’t just about production—it’s about power. Who gets to shape the environment? Who gets to set the defaults? Who benefits from those defaults being left unquestioned? 

When we look at reality TV, we know it’s produced. Real life on the other hand? We’re conditioned to treat it as natural, normal, expected, and inevitable.The edit happens before you even show up. It’s baked into the system. The expectations. The assumptions about what winning looks like and who gets to have it. We are in the scene, hitting our marks, following the script and we never even realize the cameras are rolling.

That’s the thing about power when it’s done well, it’s invisible and insidious. It doesn’t need to shout. It doesn’t need to coerce. It just hands you a sparsely decorated megamansion and a storyline and lets you perform yourself into compliance, contention, or chaos.

None of this is neutral. It’s not just how things are. These are decisions—made by someone, and almost always very far removed from the people most affected by them.

You ever watch your show and scream at the screen because you know the producers set someone up? Because the game was rigged? That same instinct – we need to bring that to our institutions. If someone keeps getting cut out of the story of success, maybe it’s not because they lacked initiative. Maybe the whole edit was built to minimize them. To flatten complexity. To make it easier to sell a clean narrative to advertisers, the network, or their millions of mid-western white viewers. 

In media, we know who the edit is for. But in our everyday institutions, we’re still pretending there isn’t one.

But what happens when we see the set and refuse it? What if we treated the world like a show in mid-production—something we could recut, reframe, or scrap and rewrite completely (Clare Crawley, liiberatory resistance icon)?

Because if the environment can be designed to shape us, then we can shape that shit right back.

The Power of Intentional World-Building

The good news is that just as these environments are designed, they can also be redesigned. We already see this in action.

• Unions are a form of world-building. They redesign workplaces to prioritize worker rights, rather than just corporate profit.
• Mutual aid networks are world-building. They create safety nets outside of government institutions.
• Cooperative housing and community-led urban planning are world-building. They challenge the idea that cities have to be designed around developers, rather than residents.

If Love Island can manufacture a setting where “the Honda Civic of male attractiveness” are coveted by multiple women, then anything is possible; we can design environments that encourage trust, collaboration, and liberation instead of stress, burnout, and scarcity.

Reality TV isn’t just a guilty pleasure. It’s a mirror, a hyper-curated social experiment that lays bare just how profoundly how quickly human behavior can shift and marbles can be lost and gained under the right (or wrong) conditions. It’s proof that simple tweaks, no clocks, no outside world, all attention funneled toward one goal, are all it takes to create an entirely different reality. 

The environment is the manipulation. The drama is the design. And that’s why no amount of personal development can outpace a rigged production. You can’t out-rehearse a script that was was structured to keep you small, drunk, angry, or crazy.

So What to Do Other Than Spiral?

We notice and we resist. We break the fourth wall. We stop playing for the cameras and start asking who’s in the editing room. Who gets to make meaning and tell the story here? Who gets to choose what counts as progress, professionalism, or even possibility?

The level of scrutiny and precision we use when dissecting the latest group trip-induced meltdown on Bravo to the hyperproduced antics of the world around us -is critical to apply to the systems we move through every day?

Take Survivor. On the surface, players clash because they’re “untrustworthy” or “manipulative.” But if you zoom out, there was a meticulously engineered recipe for mistrust: chronic hunger, isolation, the constant threat of elimination, secret ballots. The game is rigged to breed suspicion. And it’s not a flaw of the design, the dysfunction is the premise.

So the real work isn’t just noticing the design. It’s saying “fuck the producers” and rewriting our role in the story. We start producing a new season where the plot twists come from our values, not their agenda. Where collaboration isn’t bad for ratings, and care isn’t cast as weakness.

Because if one small change in the conditions can send people spiraling into chaos, then maybe one intentional shift can move us toward wholeness.