Register
Centered Image

This was written in 1985. It's a little long-winded, but he argues pretty convincingly that television represented a major existential threat to humanity. The constant mind-numbing stimulation of one program after another after another, interrupted by advertisements, with information/news/content presented quickly and without context. He made this argument in 1985, when basic cable television consisted of ~30 channels and was only in about half of US households.

In two generations we went from 4 to 400 channels, high-speed internet, smartphones, facebook, youtube, twitter, tiktok. Think about that for a second. Our brains evolved over thousands of generations, adapting to a world that didn’t have screens. On evolutionary timescales, that is the same brain walking around in the world today.