If you ever needed definitive proof that Western civilization has not only peaked but is currently careening down the other side of the mountain in a shopping cart filled with burning manure, look no further than the High Court in London this week. The spectacle currently unfolding involves Prince Harry, Elizabeth Hurley, and Associated Newspapers—the publisher of the Daily Mail—locked in a legal death spiral over the alleged misuse of private information. It is a perfect microcosm of our rotting culture: the wealthy fighting the morally bankrupt over the right to monetize the concept of 'privacy,' all while posing for the cameras they claim to despise.

Let us start with the star witness of the hour, Liz Hurley. The reports tell us precious little about the legal nuances of her testimony, likely because legal nuances are boring and don’t sell ad space for wrinkle cream. Instead, the breathless stenographers of the press—PA Media, in this case—have provided us with the only details that apparently matter in a court of law: the wardrobe. We are told, with the gravity usually reserved for state funerals, that Ms. Hurley stepped into the witness box wearing an “emerald green knitted dress, black suede boots, and carrying a cream handbag.”

Thank god. I was worried she might have shown up in a burlap sack, rendering the entire judicial process null and void. The fact that the press wire focuses on the suede boots while the subject matter is the “misuse of private information” is an irony so thick you could choke a horse with it. Here is a woman testifying that a newspaper violated her boundaries, while the press pool describes her accessories like she’s walking the red carpet at a perfume launch. And let’s be honest, she knows it. The courtroom is the new catwalk for the aggrieved celebrity class. If you aren’t color-coordinated while suing a tabloid for invading your life, are you really a victim? It is performance art masquerading as justice, a symbiotic dance where the celebrity needs the flashbulbs to validate their grievance, and the press needs the grievance to sell the photos of the boots.

Then there is Prince Harry. The Duke of Sussex. The man who fled the crushing, invasive atmosphere of the British Royal Family to find a quiet, private life in Montecito, accompanied by a Netflix crew, a ghostwriter, and an endless press tour. He sat in court, presumably radiating that specific frequency of self-righteous misery that has become his trademark. Harry’s war against the tabloids is the most exhausting crusade of the 21st century. He is fighting the dragons of the press, oblivious to the fact that he feeds them every time he opens his mouth. He hates the Daily Mail, yet his entire relevance is sustained by the ecosystem the Daily Mail created. Without the villains of Fleet Street, Harry is just a ginger guy with a trust fund and no discernible skills. He needs them to be monsters so he can be the martyr. It is a closed loop of toxicity.

And let us not let the defendant off the hook. Associated Newspapers, the monolith behind the Daily Mail, stands accused of unseemly information gathering. I am shocked—shocked, I tell you—to hear allegations that the tabloid press might have used underhanded tactics to find out which sandwiches a celebrity ate in 2004. This is an industry built on the premise that the public has a “right to know” things that are manifestly none of their business. They are the sewage treatment plant of the information age, processing the effluence of human behavior and packaging it as news. Their defense usually boils down to the idea that because these people are famous, they have forfeited their humanity. It is a repugnant stance, but one that the public voraciously supports every time they click a link about Liz Hurley’s “ageless” physique.

What we are witnessing in that courtroom is not a battle between good and evil. It is a battle between two different species of parasites fighting over the same host: the public attention span. On one side, you have the celebrities, who view privacy as a luxury good—something they can turn on and off like a faucet depending on whether they have a product to hawk. On the other side, you have the tabloids, who view privacy as a barrier to trade, an obstacle to be circumvented by any means necessary.

The tragedy is that the court—an institution theoretically designed to handle murder, fraud, and the crumbling infrastructure of the state—is bogged down by this pantomime. While the economy craters and the geopolitical landscape resembles a dumpster fire, we are forced to care about whether the Daily Mail hired a private investigator to listen to Liz Hurley’s voicemails. The resources, the time, the sheer intellectual energy wasted on this clash of egos is staggering.

So, Liz Hurley took the oath. She wore green. Harry sat there. The lawyers billed by the hour. And the world continued to turn, indifferent to the plight of millionaires sad that the billionaires who own the newspapers were mean to them. It is all so incredibly stupid, and we deserve every second of it.