The opiate of the masses

[next_migration]

I want to take this opportunity to point out one of the major unrecognized factors in the impending collapse of our civilization, namely television, followed by its monstrous offspring, the Internet. If I could get everyone to read just one book about our society’s predicament, it would not be the latest IPCC report, or the Limits to Growth update, or The Collapse of Complex Societies. It would be a profound book written by a former ad executive, the unfortunately named Jerry Mander (1978), called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Obviously, his campaign did not succeed, but the issues he raised are still very real, and the addition of the Internet and social media to television has worsened the situation by another order of magnitude. I cannot do justice to his careful, complex arguments in a few paragraphs, so you should read the book, but a brief summary is as follows.

 

First, Mander explores the mediation of experience at length. People living in natural environments constantly observe occurrences, cause-and-effect relationships, and consequences that are out of their control. They trust their observations of the world because they know that things they have seen are real, and are ignored at their peril. Modern people live in artificial environments shielded from or deprived of much of that experience. Television makes the problem worse because it can not only present an artificially limited reality, but show images of alleged realities, relationships, and consequences that don’t really exist. People easily come to think that they do not know what is real and what isn’t, so they must wait for official Experts to tell them what to believe. The feeling that reality is arbitrary, and that you cannot know what to believe so have to passively wait for others to tell you, supports the development of autocracy.

Second, he describes the colonization of experience. Inevitably, because of the cost of television infrastructure, it became dominated by large corporations that make their profits through advertising on a scale never before seen. They tailor its content, the “realities” presented, to create new “needs” and pressure you to buy more. You are made to believe that you are in physical or social danger, deprived, or defective without the product being pushed. “Any collective act ... is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units,” Mander explains. “Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience ... are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied.” By “productive” in this case he means: producing revenue for the corporations. If you make a good salary yet have big credit card bills that aren’t due to unavoidable medical debt, there’s a good chance you’ve been programmed like a consumer-robot by electronic media.

Third, there are potential physical effects of television, aside from the obesity-inducing effect of sitting in the La-Z-Boy for several hours a day. Staring at those screens has neurological effects that make the brain more passive, and you more vulnerable to manipulation. Beaming those images as light right through your eyes into your brain might not be good for your brain. (There is increasing concern about the effects of the heavily blue light spectrum produced by modern devices.) Scientific evidence on that point may not be conclusive, but it never could be so long as television is so central to our culture, and so profitable to our corporate elites, that it would be politically unthinkable for funding agencies to support research intended to provide stronger proof of its harms.

Fourth, television has inherent biases. Because of the limitations of the medium, Mander explains, TV does not easily convey complexity, warm or positive emotions, subtle understandings of other cultures, experiences of nature. Even when it tries to do a good job at those things, it can’t. It is good at conveying broad, simple things like anger and violence, which is why so much of our programming is sports or oversimplified news and dramas featuring violence and trauma that are designed to make us fearful and often angry. What it’s best at doing—again, inevitably, as a consequence of the format—is selling commercial products. Often those are products that are wrecking the environment now, and that we may not be able to count on getting in the future.

Moreover, to keep us watching the programs, which are naturally boring compared with watching the real world, long enough to get to the commercials, TV producers throw in lots of “technical events.” These are sudden changes in what is perceived, such as changes of scene, camera angle, distance, focus, or musical cues, which don’t happen in real life, so they startle the brain into paying closer attention. Mander’s Technical Event Test suggests counting the number per minute to find out how often your brain’s chain is being yanked. In programs, at that time, he estimated an average eight or ten per minute; in commercials, ten or fifteen per thirty seconds. He didn’t focus on the issue of how much so-called “attention deficit disorder” in children was simply the perfectly normal and natural result of spending thousands of hours watching programs that train one’s attention to expect an artificial boost every six seconds. The answer, though, is almost certainly: a lot.

Recall that Barbara Walter (2022), in How Civil Wars Start, placed heavy blame on social media for contributing to recent civil wars and outright genocides, such as that against Rohingya people in Myanmar. You may note that all of Mander’s objections to television apply to the Internet, often to an even greater degree: The internet is full of nonsense information and convincing videos that are not just distorted but outright faked; in its total disconnection from reality, gullible viewers are encouraged to adopt paranoid delusions, eating disorders, and dangerous, idiotic tricks like the Tide pod challenge. Social media algorithms deliberately steer users towards more extreme, more upsetting “content,” whether it is true or false, because being more upset causes us to read or watch more, which generates more ad revenue (and more personal data on us that can be sold to other corporations). Content that is nuanced or subtle, that reflects and promotes kind emotions, that refuses to divide the world into Us and Them, is less successful and, receiving fewer “likes,” is systematically downgraded. And of course, the internet encourages us to spend even more hours staring into the blue light.

Devoting one’s leisure time to staring at screens is incompatible with a flourishing culture and participatory democracy, even if those screens were not teaching us to treat one another as enemies, which they certainly are. After you get off work, do you want to go to a city council or school board or party meeting? Probably not, if it conflicts with “your favorite programs.” Do you want to play ball or garden or volunteer with your kids on the weekend? Not if your weekends consist of a dawn-to-dusk string of sports broadcasts. And then there are the jobless young men who sit in their mothers’ basements watching various extremists’ recruitment videos, many of whom could soon have jobs if they spent the same amount of time developing technical or social skills. Playing video games—the best of which really are fun and engrossing, I admit—for twelve hours straight is a bit less passive, but still means not doing something with that time in the real world, which could result in real personal growth and more substantive and lasting satisfaction.

Many Americans feel that they don’t have time or energy, after work and commuting and unavoidable housework, to pursue a hobby or volunteer work, or exercise or continuing education, or even to play with their kids or cook from scratch. Some of us really don’t. But I promise that if you watch TV, or YouTube, TikTok, your Facebook feed (or “Meta”—whatever you say, Zuck), or any other screen, for more than ten hours a week, you do have enough time to take up a new activity and become good at it—if you cut out the screen-staring, or cut it way back. You may think that TV is preferable because you are exhausted and stressed after work, and TV helps you to relax. It doesn’t, really; it helps people to feel passive and vegetative, but not actually refreshed. If your work is physical, a leisure activity that is physically easy but mentally stimulating would do you much more good; if your work mostly requires mental focus, a leisure activity that gets you using your hands or body would do you more good.

So, I’d suggest detoxing from TV, streaming video, social media, and all similar stuff for a while and see how you like your life without it. You might go cold turkey, or if you have family members who would go berserk, you could propose a phased withdrawal. If at first you feel stressed and bored without it, find other things to fill your time and see how you feel when you’ve adjusted.

If you’re in a situation where your kids, by virtue of youth or local paranoia, can’t play outside alone and you have been using the boob tube for several hours a day to keep them pacified, you obviously had better not deprive them of the tube except as you simultaneously help them develop other pleasurable activities to occupy their time. Encourage playing with non-electronic toys and puzzles, reading whatever they choose from the library (and don’t judge!), helping with cooking and other housework, or doing inexpensive crafts, as examples of activities that don’t involve screen-staring. If they’re old enough, encourage them to join the Boy Scouts or 4-H, if that’s available in your area, and start doing projects of their choice. At first they may find these things boring compared to electronic stimulation, but keep trying to reduce the percentage of their time spent screen-staring. See how much their attention span improves as you wean them off the screens. They’ll be much better off for it in the long run.

If your kids aren’t already living and posting their entire existence on social media, strongly discourage them from starting in future; if they are, try to wean them off. Make sure they know how ridiculous the practice is, that internet “followers” don’t really know or care about them, and that corporations are recording every mouse-click to use against them in future. They will only believe you, of course, if they don’t see you checking your social media ten times a day and bragging about your upvotes. Set a good example.

If you decide to move to a smaller, safer or more libertarian community where you’ll feel more able to let the kids play outside, perhaps that could give you the opportunity to cut off the tube altogether. You could explain that you’ll be moving and not bringing the TV with you, because there will be so many fun, exciting things to do in the new home that it won’t get enough use to be worth the space. Of course, you still want to be able to get urgent local news and weather reports. You can usually do that with a radio, or if you have a computer, you can buy a $70 gizmo to stick in the USB port that allows it to pick up digital TV signals. Do not, however, subscribe to any internet-TV services.

Or if you really want to keep your TV so you can watch movies or avoid looking like weirdos to your addicted neighbors, stick it someplace out of the way where you can turn chairs towards it on the occasions when you want to watch a specific program. Don’t set it up as the focus of your living room with all seating facing it, like the altar at the front of a church. That sends the message that it, not your family members or guests, should be the regular focus of your attention. The less TV, online “influencers,” and similar stuff you watch, I promise you, the more contentedly you will find yourself living, and the more easily you will adopt a frugal, lower-carbon way of life.