Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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The Situationists are correct. Whenever we buy a product we are paying for the recovery of our own feelings. We have thereby turned into creatures who are the commodities we buy. We are the product we pay for and all life is reduced to serving this cycle. Life and commodity achieve absolute merger; the ultimate stage in the inexorable drive of the system to convert all raw material into "valuable" commercial form. Advertising is the internal delivery system for this bizarre process.

The Delivery System's Delivery System

There is one additional factor, however. Advertising itself requires a delivery system. This has been the role of the mass media. All the media have done an excellent job of placing advertising inside people's heads, but some are better at it than others. Television is by far the best, because it has nine natural advantages.

1) Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too. Therefore it is physically consistent with the prevalent reality. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost.

2) Television changes the nature of artificial environments from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside.

3) Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it aids commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone.

4) Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone's awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it.

5) Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence.

6) Though television passes for experience, it is really more like "time out," as we shall see later. It is antiexperience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the world. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other.

7) By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising.

8) By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison.

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