Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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The conversion process within the human is directed at experience, feeling, perception, behavior and desire. These must be catalogued, defined and reshaped. The idea is to get both ends of the equation in synchrony, like standard-gauge railways. The human becomes the terminus of the conversion of plants, animals, and minerals into objects. The conversion of natural into artificial, inherent in our economic system, takes place as much inside human feeling and experience as it does in the landscape. The more you smooth out the flow, the better the system functions and, in particular, the more the people who activate the process benefit. In the end, the human, like the environment, is redesigned into a form that fits the needs of the commercial format.

People who take more pleasure in talking with friends than in machines, commodities and spectacles are outrageous to the system. People joining with their neighbors to share housing or cars or appliances are less "productive" than those who live in isolation from each other, obtaining their very own of every object. Any collective act, from sharing washing machines to car-pooling to riding buses, is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units and private homes. Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience, from sexuality to breast feeding to cycles of mood, are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied, who seek vaginal sprays, chemical and artificial milk, drugs to smooth out emotional ups and downs, and commodities to substitute for experience.

As long as the process of mediating between people and natural nonconsumer experience is encouraged, the big wheel keeps turning and we all turn with it.

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Not long ago I learned of a laboratory experiment which mirrored this process of reshaping needs to fit environment. Some chimpanzees had been isolated, one to a room, and were being taught to communicate with a team of scientists by way of symbols. Whenever they had a need or a desire they would push buttons. If they wanted a banana, they located a button marked with a symbol of a banana, pushed it and a banana came down a chute.

Other buttons had other symbols. There was one for water and one for changes in lighting. There was even one that requested physical affection. When the chimp pushed it, a human scientist would enter the room, hug and play with the chimp for a time, and then go back out the door.

The chimpanzees' world of experience was reduced to what they could ask for with these buttons. What could be requested, of course, was limited to what the scientists had thought to provide. Since cost was a factor in the experiment, the scientists did not attempt to duplicate the kinds of experiences the chimps formerly enjoyed in the forests. The scientists provided the experiences which were convenient for them to provide in a lab. I think there were twelve in all.

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