The story of digital addiction as the default condition in 21st-century America, the rule rather than the exception, is a story of mass capitulation to corporatist collusion between the captains of digital media, the hallowed halls of academia and government at all levels. It’s a story of entirely manufactured mass addiction to 24/7 convenience and efficiency and entertainment, a testimony to chemical destiny as the highest order of achievement for a species wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It’s a story of how we succumbed to a Brave New Digital World that champions diversity of everything except thought. Now, more than two centuries removed from the Age of Reason, it’s a story about the agonizing death of critical thought in the digital era and the banality of evil that rises like dark clouds of silent drones in its wake.
Many mistake blind obedience as the primary villain in Hanna Arendt’s brilliant book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But while pure evil may eventually manifest in blind obedience via otherwise nondescript and unremarkable technocrats like Adolf Eichmann, it takes root first in the absence of critical thought that precedes the rise to infamy.
Of course, addiction to logic or reason or dogma or any other narcotic is the exact opposite of critical thought. It breeds insularity and isolation. As late-stage addicts we lose our ability to identify with the Other, nowhere more apparent these days than in the current political environment (or on just about any college campus). We sacrifice our ability to think on the alter of the next fix with every breaking news alert on cable TV, with every Snapchat photo, every text, every Facebook “like” and every tweet. Like all narcotics, they offer succor and validation to keep us firmly ensconced in our addicted stupor — at least for the next few minutes. But once we lose the desire, time and ability to think critically, we lose our humanity and set the stage for the ascent of evil: unthinking and inhuman.
We criticize and demonize the foundation myths of the great religions as sheer superstition and wholesale surrender to irrational and misplaced faith while we blindly swallow the digital foundation myths — like digital accountability and the democratization of media — and the cult of expertise manufactured by advertising and marketing budgets measured collectively in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The result is a world lousy with experts…
https://youtu.be/HH_lY2PemIk
…where institutional accountability is measured in direct inverse proportion to size, and where the democratization of media is obliterated by the natural bias of digital technology to accelerate the consolidation of institutional power and wealth among those institutions — private and government alike — already far too powerful and far too wealthy. The inconvenient truth is that in today’s society the great world religions tolerate and promote far more meaningful dialogue and critical thought than the jealous god and high priests of digital media. The inconvenient truth is that 24/7 convenience and efficiency and entertainment turned against us early in the 21st century, and have now become the collective face for the banality of evil.