The Boob Tube Does Surveillance Porn
Person of Interest and Homelandby Kelley B. Vlahos, October 11, 2011
Author Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Government-through-terror works, on the whole, less well than government through nonviolent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women, and children.”
Writing this in 1958, Huxley hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
But the eerily perceptive futurist, who in 1932 published the ultimate government-through-nonviolent manipulation nightmare,
Brave New World, nonetheless pegged television as the medium through which his dystopian vision would be realized in the Western world. He was right: Television for decades has been the velvet whip with which powerful social, political, and commercial forces — the so-called establishment — have relentlessly endeavored to keep us all in a conformist stupor.
Well, he would have been really ratified by this pair of new dramas debuting on television this fall. Showtime’s
Homeland and CBS’s
Person of Interest are nothing less than post-9/11 government propaganda wrapped in slick, modern cinematography, fronted by pretty people and delivered with supposedly “complicated” plots and characters. Think
24 3.0 — except that now, we don’t cheer the government breaking every law of war and man to bag foreign terrorists. Instead, we countenance the suspension of the Constitution as it applies to us, the American citizen, in the interest of national security (Homeland) and law & order (Person of Interest).
One might be tempted to say “Who cares?” — television is an ancient medium that must compete with the Internet and every other social-entertainment device for attention. But TV is still one of the great equalizers and the hearth of the home. It’s where most people continue to get their news, and according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American still watches
four hours of programming a day, or 28 hours a week. The average household has at least two television sets. Total annual TV hours watched in America: 260 billion.
Don’t forget, you can watch TV online now too (that’s how I came across these “hot” new series), and let’s be serious, Huxley would be impressed at how deftly the Net itself has been corporatized and manipulated into the next-gen conformist tool: Millions of people a day spend millions of dollars and that many hours cultivating
fake online farms and simulated friendships, producing nothing but profits for big game and social media moguls like Zynga, Facebook, and Google. “Time wasters” are the road to passivity and ignorance, and they don’t just come in the form of silly sitcoms and game shows.
But
Homeland and
Person of Interest are far from time wasters. They’re indoctrination. And here’s why.
Read More:
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2011/10/10/hollywood-loves-surveillance-****/Note: replace **** in link with
porn (Need to find a new hosting server for Global Gulag, this forced word censorship by the host is getting ridiculous).
