#amusingourselvestodeath — Public Fediverse posts

"We need more artistic and cultural criticism of close-world dystopias! Forced quite literally here, by the abundant examples of real corporations acting as if they were antagonists in some postmodern DeLillian or Wallacian story bent on amusing us to death." // #ErikHoel

#TheIntrinsicPerspective #AmusingOurselvesToDeath
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/stop-speedrunning-to-a-dystopia

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

The State of the Culture, 2024 by #TedGioia is a great read. #NeilPostman #AmusingOurselvesToDeath vibes.

#Art #Entertainment #Engagement #Attention #ADHD #Distraction #Retention #Gamification #SocialMedia #TechGiants #TikTok #Facebook #Instagram #YouTube #ExtendedReality #Apple #Dopamine #Addiction #Depression #Anxiety #Anhedonia #BraveNewWorld #LateStageCapitalism

🇪🇺 “Together we stand up and say ‘no’ to Neo-Fascism.”

🇺🇸 “Miley, who are you wearing?”

#AmusingOurselvesToDeath

In this 1993 talk, Neil Postman highlights a deeply concerning aspect of modern media. In Postman's words:

"For most people, the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible. There's almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. [...] There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxgCoHv_aE&t=972

Now, Naomi Klein gives us a description of the bizarre mirror world that's emerged since, of a "growing right-wing alternate universe of misinformation and conspiracies that, while identifying real problems, opportunistically exploits them to advance a hateful and divisive agenda." https://www.democracynow.org/2023/9/14/naomi_klein_doppelganger

#NeilPostman #NaomiKlein #Doppelganger #AmusingOurselvesToDeath

> Words cannot guarantee their truth content. Rather, they assemble a context in which the question, Is this true or false? is relevant. In the 1890’s that context was shattered, first by the massive intrusion of illustrations and photographs, then by the nonpropositional use of language. For example, in the 1890’s advertisers adopted the technique of using slogans.. jingles started to be used..
#NeilPostman's #AmusingOurselvesToDeath, #NonPropositional language seems related to #OnBullshit

Ok #Toronto, I did eventually find out what #Diddywahdiddy meant, but what the heck is #ticketyboo?

Maybe I don't want to know? 😅

#newspeak #canpoli #ontpoli #matureresponses #dumpsterfire #amusingourselvestodeath

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.