I submit that we aren't naturally addicted to spectacle. Humans are temporarily attracted to novelty (curiosity). Spectacle is a constructed addiction. It takes a certain conditioning to get people to constantly react to it, and the marketers have been using several techniques to enhance the response to spectacle for profit. They get a tax deduction for brainwashing children to respond to ever bigger spectacles, but that's because we get burned out on any one spectacle.

I don't think it's that humans per se are addicted to the Spectacle: but our marketing systems certainly are. "If it bleeds, it leads" absolutely applies to Trump. That guy vomits spectacle every time he opens his mouth, and the beer and truck sellers (and especially the data miners) are addicted to Trump's random stupidity and absolute carelessness.

That's why it works, I think: everyone has been so inundated with 'caring' and 'branding' that absolute carelessness has become a brand in itself.

"How many fucks don't I give", etc.

Bullshit v bullshit markets with a social cost for not having a particular brand of bullshit (liberal or MAGA).

It's not that people seek hyperreality: it's that civilization itself cuts people off from reality, leaving them unable to find a path to any real ground, and Money and Religion pretend to offer one, but never actually have to deliver it.

The balloon eventually collapses on itself, or floats so high that it pops, but people living on the surface of the balloon see perpetual growth and expansion.

ref: "Coercion: Why we do what They say" -Douglass Rushkoff