Neil Postman wrote this in 1993. It still holds true today. Maybe even more so. [A] discovery which for convenience’s sake we may attribute to Procter and Gamble [is] that advertising is most effective when it is irrational. By irrational, I do not, of course, mean crazy. I mean that products could best be sold…
Category: Society & Culture
On the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition
Have you heard? After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age…
Is America an economic hothouse for growing psychopaths?
The past year has witnessed the rise of a kind of cottage industry of speculative blogging and associated online chatter about the idea that America’s ruling economic and political institutions — which have now, let us note, collapsed together to become one and the same — are ideologically and bureaucratically structured to attract and promote…
The NSA is building America’s biggest spy center, and “Everybody’s a target”
Recently, in response to Google’s Orwellian collapsing and combining of 60 separate privacy policies (the better to construct a Master Profile of its users for selling and surveilling), I took pains to extricate myself from the tentacular grasp of its many products. I’m now Google Free and Loving It (although I did, yes, include three…
Private corporation to U.S. states: “We’ll buy your prisons if you guarantee 90% occupancy rate”
Welcome to the rest of our corporate-consumer dystopian future. It’s nice to see/hear some politicians speaking out against this development, but we can rest assured that such protests won’t really matter, since all policy decisions are now automatically and universally determined by financial considerations (see the final line excerpted below), and thus, many or most…
The consumer as revolutionary: Steve Jobs’ brilliant, delusional, dystopian vision
The below-linked essay is, bar none, the single best piece I’ve read about the vision, legacy, and very dark long-term cultural implications of Steve Jobs and Apple. The writer, Evgeny Morozov (author of 2011’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom), delves into the deep history and philosophy of Jobs’ and Apple’s approach…
A Planetary Myth
Joseph Campbell once said that any new myth, in the “high” sense of the word as an overarching, meaning-making narrative, would necessarily have to be planetary in scope and nature, given the global outlook of our modern technological civilization. He said the famous image of planet earth as photographed from space — an image unknown…
The Occupy movement as global insurrection and revolution
Leave it to Daniel Pinchbeck to provide a predictably excellent statement of what the consciousness movement could or should be doing relative to the worldwide Occupy phenomenon. I heard a few days ago that he was scheduled to address the assembled protesters in New York City. This new and short piece at Reality Sandwich is,…
The new gothic horror: Madness and mystery in celebrity tabloid culture
It wasn’t one of my subscribed RSS feeds, Google alerts, or Twitter streams that alerted me to a recent and really interesting essay at The New York Times about the uncanny parallels between classic gothic literature and modern tabloid culture. Rather, it was my sister, who, appropriately enough, is a journalist based out of witch-haunted…
The world riots, nations shudder, Cthulhu wakes
What do Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eckhart Tolle, global economic collapse, Queensryche, Robert Bloch, Rage against the Machine, and proliferating riots around the world have to do with each other? Simple: They herald a period of cosmic, cultural, and human disruption.