Planning the Next Great 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.