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posted by martyb on Sunday April 30 2017, @08:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the pleasure!=joy dept.

In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.

[...] Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy.

[...] Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That's the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans' "vast descent into triviality," and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans' great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.

In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.

Or perhaps they hadn't. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They'd been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn't Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "In Huxley's vision," Postman noted, "no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history." Instead: "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."

The vehicle of their oppression, in this case? Yep, the television. Which had, Postman argued, thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life—and not just in the boob-tubed, couch-potatoed, the-average-American-watches-five-hours-of-television-a-day kind of way that is so familiar in anti-TV invectives, but in a way that was decidedly more intimate.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/are-we-having-too-much-fun/523143/

Are we having tooooo much fun ?


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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday May 01 2017, @08:44AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Monday May 01 2017, @08:44AM (#502189) Journal

    Thanks for the link. I, too, want to open my own business, but am perplexed by the myriad legal environment of not stepping on someone else's toes.

    I can barely afford to do the research to design my product line. Hiring someone is simply out of reach, as not only do I have another wage to pay, I also have to hire someone else to pave the way with the tax and worker-rights people to make it all legal.

    Once I get going, now I run the risk of a "submarine patent" surfacing, or someone else bigger just wants to pick a legal fight I simply can't afford.

    Our Congress has passed all sorts of law for the big guys so they don't have to compete with smaller guys. Patents, Copyrights, and quite broad interpretations thereof.

    But the big guys are also international. They can readily relocate their business base to whatever nation grants them the most favorable tax treatment. Yet they expect the United States Military be called in to protect their claims if it comes to that, even if they relocate so as to evade United States Tax.

    If I were Trump, I would tell all these businesses threatening to leave the United States.... "Fine - do what you want - but don't expect US to protect your patents and copyright if you defect - that is now the responsibility of those you pay your tax to - leave and you and your belongings are no longer under United States Law backed by the United States Military."

    I am quite fed up with all this law that lets us see someone else do something and make a buck, while telling us we can't go and do likewise to make ourselves a buck.

    Stuff like who can have rounded corners on a phone.... sheesh... this kinda crap has gone way too far. Why get into building stuff if there is so much more money to be made in litigation and banking?

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @12:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @12:25PM (#502236)