Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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If suburbs are capitalism's ideally separated buying units, and suburbs can be built profitably, then we must create humans who like and want suburbs: suburb-people. Since before the existence of suburbs there were no suburb-people, advertising has the task of creating them, in body and mind.

Since before the creation of electric shavers or hair dryers or electric carving knives people felt no need for these things, the need was implanted into human minds by advertising.

Advertising is the instrument of transmutation. It lays the standard-gauge railway track from wilderness to human feeling, assisting in the transformation of both into a unified commercial form. Unplugged from our natural connection to the environment, we are replugged into a new consumer environment.

To the degree that advertising reaches us, occupying our time and thought, it keeps us vibrating within strict limits. If forty million people see a commercial for a car, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at that moment, all those people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all.

Of course, advertising people will argue against the notion that the purpose and result of their activities is to unify and homogenize people and culture. They are forever speaking of the dazzling array of choices our market system provides and how advertising provides the information we need to make choices.

It is an ominous sign that so many people can accept this argument, which confuses diversity of product choice with diversity of lifestyle or thoughts. It ought to be self-evident that if I choose a Ford and you choose a Volvo, we are not expressing diversity, we are expressing unity. Moreover, if you and I at any one moment are both occupied with mental images and feelings related to products -any products-rather than some experience which is not connected to purchasing, then in terms of the commodity system, the gross national product, and the world of advertising, we are indistinguishable; we have merged as "market."

While it might matter to Upjohn or Gutter Laboratories which drug a consumer buys, both are in agreement that they benefit whenever people seek any drug rather than a nondrug solution to a problem.

Advertising, then, serves to further the movement of humans into artificial environments by narrowing the conception of diversity to fit the framework of commodities while unifying people within this conception. The result is a singularly channeled mentality, nicely open to receiving commercial messages, ready to confuse brand diversity with diversity itself, and to confuse human need with the advertiser's need to sell commodities.

The Inherent Need To Create Need

Advertising exists only to purvey what people don't need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point.

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