Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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Meanwhile, other technological systems have also become larger and more monolithic at the same time. Transportation systems, for example, have advanced from horses to horses and buggies to railroads to cars and trucks on freeways to SSTs. Long-distance communications systems have gone from telegraph to telephone to radio to television to satellite. As these technologies grow, their power and influence grows with them, but the number of people who control them shrinks.

In a capitalist, free-enterprise economy, that the controllers of the communications systems should become personally acquainted with the controllers of the energy systems, the transportation systems and so on and eventually begin to cooperate with each other ought to be obvious and predictable. The fact that it is not obvious to moat of us, at least not so obvious that we act to stop it, has allowed matters to "pop" organically into still larger and more monolithic patterns of domination and control at each turn of the cycle, affecting human lives and political organization.

At some point we begin to call this a conspiracy. Humans get together and discuss how beat to help each other concentrate power. But the human conspiracy didn't begin the process. It resulted from another, less personal though more basic, conspiracy: a conspiracy of technological form. The patterns of life, the social and political systems, the narrowing style of thinking about the world and the technologies that both result from and foster these trends are the ground upon which the conspiracy can grow.

In this chapter and the one which follows we shall see how television and its parent and child, advertising, have contributed to this process of concentration, and how it was inevitable from the moment of its invention that television would be used this way. Later, we will also see that no other use of television makes much sense or, in any practical way, is even possible.

The Creation of "Value"

In transforming natural environments into artificial form, the United States is the most advanced country in the world. This is not an accident. It is inherent in our economic system.

To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money. This is because in the act of converting the natural into the artificial, something with no inherent economic value becomes "productive" in the capitalist sense.

An uninhabited desert is "nonproductive" unless it can be mined for uranium or irrigated for farms or covered with tracts of homes.

A forest of uncut trees is nonproductive.

A piece of land which has not been built upon is nonproductive.

Coal or oil that remains in the ground is nonproductive. Animals living wildly are nonproductive.

Virtually any land, any space, any material, any time that remains in an original, unprocessed, unconverted form is an outrage to the sensibilities of the capitalist mind. Iron, tungsten, trees, oil, sulphur, jaguars and open space are searched out and transformed because transformation creates economic benefits for the transformers.

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