Last night I watched part of the movie Network. I hadn’t seen it in a long time, and it came as something of a minor shock. In 1976, when the movie was released, it was close to being a work of science fiction; Paddy Chayefsky’s vision of a near future in which corporate media had driven itself insane and corporate corruption had negated the last remaining shreds of demo. Last night, I realized to my horror that we have now reached the reality of what was once a projected satiric fantasy. We live – or, more accurately, we drown – in a seamless media delusion in which nothing can be changed or repaired unless it is wholly in the interests of our corporate master, who, in turn, have grown wholly and fatally myopic in their quadrant of the insanity. I could rant on at length, but, hell, it’s late. I’ll leave it to Howard Beale. More than just the “mad as hell” speech that everyone remembers. But don’t forget. They killed Howard Beale when his ratings tanked.
“So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.”
“So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.”
Yeah, but the thing is, it doesn't matter how big the Goliath corporations have gotten. In fact, the fatter and softer they get, the better.
ReplyDeleteBecause they're poised for a fall. A hard fall. Too big to fail? Please... Anyone flying below the corporate media radar knows the truth. Corporations are already done and gone. Most are just too stupid to know it.
At best, the most aware of the corps are desperately hoping to maintain appearances until the final crash bottoms out. Look at the world's tallest skyscraper in Dubai. It's all over now, baby blue. So long. Bye bye.
Because the real power is us.
The dirty secret is they need us far more than we need them. The only reason these multinationals exist is because enough people still buy Chinese junk at Walmart and Amazon. Or Monsanto frankenfood from Safeway. There are still enough people who fall for the world's second biggest lie that we need corn syrup and hydrogenated oil and blu-ray players to survive. Psh.
Corporate apologists are like battered wives, too scared to assert themselves. Begging their captors to go easy on 'em.
Call me Tanya.
But the majority of Americans are swiftly realizing that we don't need to support this lie. We don't need to buy HDTV. Or cable. It's not good for us.
We can wear used clothes. And barter for books. And get food from a local farmer co-ops.
We can keep everything within our own communities. Even if that means moving from cities to smaller towns where land is more plentiful.
And when everyone stops buying from Amazon and Walmart and cancels their Comcast? We starve out Mammon at the Mall of America. And the corporations are forced to either change for the better or they're gone.
And if they're gone, we've created a vacuum. A void. Holes to be filled by decentralized businesses started up by local entrepreneurs. By someones like you or me.
And we'll get back to knowing the people who receive our money because they are us. Living in our communities. And they use this money to buy what we ourselves make or do.
Hippies and small towns and our grandparents had it right all along.
So don't get angry. That time is past. Get active. The time to end the corporations is happening right now. We're breaking up their power. Through our own everyday actions. And through self-sufficient small communities.
The new counterculture is decentralization.
The tube died when we got online, where people live the lie... talking about changing the world & bringing down corporations on a netbook using a mainstream OS, paying an ISP a monthy fee for connectivity.
ReplyDeleteWe're suddenly going to support local gentrification because it's popular, like shopping at thrift stores when grunge was in the limelight. We're environmentally friendly so long as it gets us superficial acquaintances that are sexually attractive. We just aren't going to brew our own swill or smoke locally grown. We want afghan blue berry & northern lights, not what john grew in the modded aerogarden he has on a shelf nailed to the wall of his 4x5 windowless bedroom, we want smirnof & bacardi 151, captain's spiced rum rather than bubba's bathtub brew & Jethrow's firewater.
Also, violent oppression is always easy to overcome so we don't have to worry about not having weaponry that matches the products of billions of dollars worth of development & engineering. We'll just go to ground in small towns & rural communities where we'll stand out on thermal optics all the more. Our burned crops can be resewn before we starve... after all, we'll have each other, to cannibalize.
Decentralizing is definitely a positive move, because humans are much harder to subdue & control in small isolated groups.
WV= protab
I realised, sarcasm isn't enough... Read this carefully Matt, err, Tanya... We don't keep the tech & social infrastructures instead of adapting & modifying them, we break off into small groups & abandon our centralization around resources... we'll end up as slave labor & test subjects.
ReplyDeleteThey have the guns, but we have the numbers... but we won't if we decentralise & they will.
You want to get active, get into unionism, industry or politics & make something actually happen. Hell, just go feed the hungry wherever you are, there's plenty everywhere & volunteers are always welcome.
WV = reedera
Are these songs supposed to be ironic? They are all from the sixties and all more proof that pretty much whatever posture someone from that era assumed, they and their fans will do otherwise. Supporting Obama, for example, was really TAKING IT and voting for nothing less than a master of war. The fact that you all missed this is far more serious than the typical spying and money culling that has always gone on and always will. In fact, corporations used to monopolize and abuse workers and be shielded from liability to a much higher degree. Yet, if corporations and media have become a grotesque reality of nightmares past, so too the artists and revolutionaries. Even more so when you think about it. The focus should be on that, not wasting time being shocked and awed by the horror. You don't try to tame the python in the rain forest, you'd be a fool to negotiate, you watch your every step and tend to your own strength and weaponry, maybe leaving the pics of dead blonds to the wanker caste and focusing entirely on practical solutions such as the previous comments proscribed. Just because they've given you all this rope to hang yourself doesn't mean you have to treat it like a necklace.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that for Chayefsky Network was some kind of worst-case extrapolation, I think it was his take on things as they were at the time with a little satiric juicing, some absurdist flourishes.
ReplyDeleteMedia, anyway, is our, their monster. It ain't Lonesome Roads or Glenn Beck, it's the people they feed. You buy it all because you want to--it takes considerable energy and the mind's staggering capacity for suspended disbelief. Anybody want to buy a piece of the genuine cross from Glann Beck?
The Chayefskys and Schulbergs never quite new whether they had licence to blame the public as much or more as they did the demigods and corporations, but the irony is, sheep or no sheep (remember what the bandito Calvera said? "If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."), people in the fifties and sixties seemed a good deal more book-literate than they are today (today we're literate in some other ways).
Anyway, we've been picking over the bones of the golden age for an awfully long time.
Man, the comment you advise of used a quote from a song of the 60's. "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers" Jim Morrison... just saying.
ReplyDeleteWV = proud
I turn a little feral when told I should "focusing entirely on practical solutions." Doc40 is a place where I DO EXACTLY WHAT I LIKE!
ReplyDeleteIncluding leave out the word "be".
ReplyDeleteDecentralization is grand if you want to live in the 13th century.
ReplyDeleteDid you guys scroll down to the previous post about the Lakota? It kinda shows what happens to isolated communities in the modern world.
ReplyDeleteThere's a great big hole in Death Valley that leads to the Hollow Earth where we can all hide until the apocalypse is over.
ReplyDelete;) Who said decentralization = isolation or 13th century? Ha! Such a grand and wonderous leap for some so small.
ReplyDeleteIf it's not novus ordo seclorum, then it must be savagery? Our only two options - so sayeth the great Oz?
Nah. Sounds more like...well heeled puppies and fear. Or battered women, the kind who must wait 'til the dogs are fed before they sup.
[What'd you say, Mr. Twain? Ah yes... No doubt indeed.]
Good dogs.
Global corporations will scorch a fuck of a lot of earth before they go down.
ReplyDeleteTriskaidekaphobia intervention.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete