Day 40 - "TV is the most efficient medium ever invented for cloning"

Among other things, Jerry Mander ran around with the Merry Pranksters & put out a book called Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. This is from a piece he wrote a few years ago:

Tom Hayden once said to me that television "is the biggest subject in the world that we have stopped talking about." He's right, because TV is the most efficient medium ever invented for cloning corporate consciousness.

In the US, television is the main thing people do. It's replaced community life, family life, culture. It has replaced the environment. In fact, it has become the environment that people interact with every day. It has become the culture, too-and I'm not talking about so-called popular culture, which sounds, somehow, democratic. This expresses corporate culture, and damned few corporations at that...

This situation is really weird. It's almost sci-fi in its feeling and in its possibility for autocratic control-the few speaking to the many. If you were an anthropologist from the Andromeda Galaxy sent to study Earth people and you hovered over the US, chances are you'd report back something like this:

"They're sitting night after night in dark rooms. They're staring at a light. Their eyes are not moving. They're not thinking. Their brains are in a passive/receptive state; we've measured them as 'alpha' waves (which, by the way, heavy viewers get into), and nonstop imagery is pouring into their brains-images coming from someplace they're not, thousands of miles away. These images are being sent by a very small number of people, and the images are of toothpaste and cars and guns and people running around in bathing suits. The whole thing looks like some kind of weird experiment in mind control."

And that is exactly what it is.

In the US, the average television viewer is seeing about 23,000 commercials every year. The specific content of those messages may vary, but the intent is identical-to get people to view life as a nonstop stream of commodity satisfactions.