::digitaldefection::

i didnt write this, but i certainly believe what the writer is saying. its an idea that’s been brewing in my head for several years now, but havent been able to articulate so well. (comment via metafilter)

I don’t watch TV. My joy isn’t linked to consuming products. Or owning things. My joy is linked to doing things.

Please, I don’t say this from a position of superiority, because I’m not. I’m just some guy. Hell knows I have problems. But it’s important to me, because, really, the consumerism and television and unhappiness things is very tightly linked.

*grabs soapbox, clears throat*

Sorry, but Adbusters is right: Because television tells you to.

YOUR TELEVISION IS LYING TO YOU. YOUR TELEVISION HATES YOU. YOUR TELEVISION THINKS YOU’RE STUPID, AND IT WANTS TO ENSLAVE YOU.

Now, before you run off and dismiss me as a raving tinfoil-hatted lunatic, please allow me to elucidate with less capital letters. If only for my own selfish goals of desiring to live in a world that isn’t totally fucking crazy.

Yes, I’m angry. I feel like I live in a sea of brain-ravenous zombies. I’ve walked through the quiet twilight in cities and towns of all sorts big and small and watched the ghostly, flashing blue flicker from nearly every home and room I saw. And no people.

There’s a certain Ray Bradbury short story about this, and a book as well - and I shouldn’t have to experience it as a reality. No one should.

I’m angry. You, frankly, should also be angry. Very angry. You’re being robbed.

Television isn’t real. “Well, duh”, you mutter.

However, for many people in the world and in the US, television has made reality fictional and the fictional, reality.

This is very bad. Sometimes to me it feels like some kind of fucked up collective exestential crisis of a magnitude that would shock even Orwell or Huxley to tears and gibbering madness.

Let me repeat that in a different way. Television has fictionalized its watchers. Many watchers of television believe that anything on television is somehow more real than their own experiences.

Television constantly hammers one single message home, over and over again: YOU’RE UNHAPPY.

That’s it. That’s what the message of television boils down to. That you’re unhappy. Look, this isn’t rocket science. Turn off the blinders, open your eyes and actually analyze the language that is being used. YOU’RE UNHAPPY.

But it’s more insidious then that. If it was only saying that you’re unhappy, we’d probably all ignore it, or better, destroy all the TVs, or take back the airwaves for our own.

But it’s worse. Television tears you down and then throws you a rope.

YOU NEED MORE STUFF TO BE HAPPY. WE KNOW YOU’RE UNHAPPY. BUYING MORE STUFF WILL MAKE USYOU HAPPY. BUY MORE STUFF. HAPPY. STUFF. BUY. STUFF. BE HAPPY WITH MORE STUFF. YOU’RE INCOMPLETE AND UNHAPPY WITHOUT MORE STUFF.

A rope to hang yourself with, for sure.

This is, of course, really fucking stupid. Stuff will never make you happy.

You know that creeping disappointment that sets in after whatever shiny thing you bought dulls and no longer gets you (human) attention for owning it and coveting it, after you realize you’ve fooled yourself (maybe for a little while) yet again…

You should listen to that. It’s real and valid and important.

That cycle, not the lack of stuff, is the source of the pervasive “dissatisfaction” you speak of, which I paraphrase.

Worse, television forces the watcher into inactivity. The watchers stop experiencing their own experiences. They forget what it is to do and be, themselves.

Television tells you to forget how incredibly powerful just simply living is - yet television somehow carefully never forgets to remind them how painful reality is.

Thus, television dulls the senses in cotton - the process of mediation and mediated experience - the lack of reality, the lack of true pain, terror, as well as true bliss and joy. All they have are the gauzy, fleeting illusions and colored shadows of highly amplified emotional scenarios.

Violence, infidelity - themes to enrage and titillate to break through televisions handicap of mediation, themes that resort to tried-and-true lowest common denominations of emotional manipulation and response - for there is nothing else that works in such a clumsy, stupid medium.

Television is your energy-sucking co-dependent alcoholic aunt with the bitter, acid, tongue and the pleasures of watching you fail.

Television is the vampiric, sneaking thief you happily invite into your home for dinner.

Television robs you of your time, your individuality, your wallet and money, your freedoms and innovations.

Kill it. Kill your television. Drive a stake right through its sick, black heart. Kill it before it kills you. Kill it before it kills all of us.

We would also do well to remember that “television”, by and large, is indeed actually owned by a number of extremely large conglomerates and corporations that have historically proven themselves to not have our best interests in mind or the purest motives on the agenda. When you watch certain channels, the parent company that owns a given network often owns a vast majority of sub-companies that make the products being sold - or have deeply structured shareholdings in the companies in question.

Do the math.

For the debaters and pedants: don’t go replacing the word “television” with “book” for the purposes of clever debate. Your own imagination - with or without a book - is much more useful to you than the passivist pabulum of television. Also, “stuff” does not equal “tools” or access to them, or sharing them, or using them. Go do something! Make art, or dance… make a toy! Go play a game. Sing a song. Try something new! Hell, fritter away your free time staring out the window and imagining passerby in silly hats. Anything! Just turn off that goddamn shit-talking idiot box once and for all!