The evils of tech or the evils of mass media? “The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.” – Christopher Lasch
On November 20th, David Brooks published an article in The New York Times that begins with the question, “How Evil is Tech?” Good question. Better than the rest of the article. Here’s my response…
The mainstream media’s recent rush to vilify digital media as disruptive, addictive and arrogant is more than a little hypocritical. It’s also a pretty convenient way to smear your competition in a massive media turf war, a war whose digital high priests and drug lords are winning hands down.
Digital notwithstanding, American history is lousy with industries that deliberately and secretly invoked addiction in the design, marketing and sale of products that have killed tens of millions Americans since World War II. Over the next two or three years alone, more Americans will die from addictions to tobacco, sugar and fat than have died in all our wars combined — guaranteed. Those industries (and their paid proxies in government and academia) all turned to the media as the corporate tool of choice to promote and defend their addictive and often deadly products decades before the Internet emerged. And alas, the amount of fake news generated over the past century via compromised relationships between commercial media franchises and major advertisers would fill countless libraries.
Those who read my work know I’m not defending the Silicon Valley robber barons who continue to enrich and engorge themselves at immense expense in time, money and freedom for the rest of us. Merely suggesting that sheer arrogance and fake news didn’t begin with digital. Seems like drinking your own Kool-Aid just comes with the media territory these days. Sad and pathetic…