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My mother used to write some of those magazine articles — “I Lived in My Car,” “I Married to Get a Green Card,” that kind of thing, and she enjoyed doing it.
For the reader, this kind of thing can generate personal interest along the lines of the old Ann Landers or Dear Abby newspaper columns.
I feel exactly the same way. Long ago, Survivor got busy teaching young people that cheating, backstabbing and phony, devious "affection" was the way to get ahead.
I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.
It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.
“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”
“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)
“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”
In America, the word “freedom” rings out like gunfire.
“Today we hear it used to shout down and bully school boards during their public meetings,” noted Bob Minor. “Nurses, school teachers, flight attendants and people just walking down the street have heard it used by people while the shouter assaults them.
“Freedom” has become a meaningless moron word, having “…attained a status so undefined, so empty of a definition by those who constantly hide behind their invocation of the term, so lacking in thought about what it could mean, that it seems to be an excuse to do whatever one wants and to hell with those others affected by whatever it is someone wants to do."
As one wise wit once said, “The absolute funniest art of capitalist ideology is that they somehow managed to convince everyone that ‘freedom’ meant the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance.”
The sad truth is beyond their rhetoric, a lot of Americans have never been comfortable with real constitutional liberty. They find the winds of freedom frightening, not bracing. They’d really prefer to smooch some strongman dictator’s bottom and just CALL that “freedom.”
“Freedom, among the base of Trump’s Republican Party, means license to do whatever you feel like on impulse — too bad about the cop you concussed on Jan. 6th, or the elderly woman deathly ill from COVID because you refused to wear a mask, or the election worker now in hiding because of your death threat,” Mike Lofgren wrote. “This kind of freedom is the freedom of the Freudian id, bursting out of its civilized constraints like the alien creature in John Carpenter's The Thing.”
What Republicans MEAN by “freedom” is they want perfect freedom for themselves (including the freedom to commit crimes) and they want you clubbed over the head by cops or the military the moment you say or do anything they don’t like.
Republicans love to shout “freedom!” while silencing everyone else in sight.
For a propagandist, news isn’t relevant and/or interesting factual information to which the public is entitled. It’s a weapon to be deployed for the purpose of deception.
The American media scene in the 21st century cannot be understood at all without constant reference to that fact.
The problem is that at least half the country is being fed a largely fictional narrative, every day, and accepts it to be true. That’s the Fox News Effect.
I realized more than 20 years ago that if lying propaganda could be substituted for news, this country’s ruin would follow in short order.
The whole hackneyed concept of being “seen” now has narcissistic vibes.
What we actually need is to be moving toward a principled goal — whether we are “seen” to be doing so or not.
Watch for all the commercials in which people talk to various duplicates of themselves, often more than one. These “selves” have all emerged from their smartphones, I think. The algorithms endlessly echo us, even as they manipulate us.
"The essence of Trump’s message and of Trumpism itself is this: “Tear it down. It’s shafted you, it’s rigged, and it cannot be redeemed.” This is exactly what Trump means when he says with deadly seriousness, “I am your retribution.” That is, “I am your retribution against a society that has shafted you.” The fact of Trump’s resilience is the proof of the depth — and the breadth —of this sentiment. It is fanatically shared by tens of millions of people. We ignore it at our peril.
"But “tear it down” is not a viable governing policy principle, which is why Republican policy proposals are nothing so much as nothing. There’s no “there” there. There are no actionable actions that can be acted on. It’s just vituperation, rage, conspiracy, histrionics and bile."
“We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our TVs while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
“Let me have my toaster and my TV and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone.
"Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad …”
— Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976). I always made that movie the capstone of my journalism ethics class.
The whole of the American consumer advertising industry is dedicated to helping us forget that lesson, if we were ever smart enough to learn it.
Right wing trolls always seem to think that you work for them, and are always demanding that you supply them a variety of carefully researched answers that they will reject out of hand if you were to be so foolish as to bother to answer them. I like to remind them to shove all that up their ass.
“Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did.
“Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them. And we need to know how to control consciousness — a skill that most people have not learned to cultivate.
“Surrounded by an astonishing panoply of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated."
Watching a half-century-old discussion between Rod Serling and James Dickey about the problematic lack of intellectual quality on network television.
Like a visitor from the future, I can now answer their questions for them: TV’s abdication of its public responsibility was ultimately even more disastrous than they feared.
Stupidity and ignorance won the day, electing an insane clown as president of the United States by appealing to citizens who snarl at scientific fact and prefer to believe whatever ugly supernatural fantasy coddles their vacuity and scratches the itch of their nastiest prejudices.
Corporate executives and government officials might not have been able to stop all this from happening, but they could have tried.
Instead, they did quite the reverse.
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| All in the interest of returning power to the Republicans who've wrecked the country. |
“The play, inspired by an actual incident that had recently taken place in Cicero, IL, was about a group of suburban neighbors who were so perturbed when a black family bought a home on their block that they banded together to stop the move, and eventually resorted to outright vigilantism to accomplish their end. In the final, blue-penciled version that went out over the air, the black intruders had been changed to a white ex-convict and his family.”
After all, the denizens of the Madison Avenue red light district knew that television could not suggest that you shouldn’t terrorize and maim black people.
That might sell fewer tins of floor wax.
And that would never, ever do.
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The primary
problem with the American system right now is the complicity and corruption of
the corporate news media, which lets the right-wing arsonists burn what they
like without ever sounding the alarm.
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What we have is a corporate
media overwhelming tilted right, and frightened of even challenging glaring
Republican lies. When Rudy Giuliani lied on national television that we had NO
domestic terrorist attacks under George W. Bush, ABC's "liberal"
coward George Stephanopoulos was afraid even to call him on it.
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