在一個勇敢的新數碼世界法西斯主義的冒升

在一個勇敢的新數碼世界法西斯主義的冒升
The Rise of Fascism in a Brave New Digital World

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley

We are watching Huxley’s dystopian vision of a Brave New World controlled by state-sanctioned addiction unfold right before our eyes. And true to Huxley’s prescience, we rather enjoy it. The only surprise is that the operative pharmacological agents he warned against aren’t delivered in pill or liquid or other physical form, and we don’t call them soma or heroin or crystal meth or crack.  They’re delivered in bits and bytes instead, and we call them media.  Consider…

• The average American household has only 2.75 people, but 3 TVs and 6 Internet devices.
• The average American family spends more money each month on media consumption than on groceries or electricity.
• The average American consumes 12-15 aggregate hours of digital media per day.
• The average American child consumes more than 10 hours of digital media per day.
• The average American smartphone is checked every 6-12 waking minutes.
• 70% of Americans binge view.

The jury is in and the verdict is irrefutable: A pervasive and pernicious meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We are born into and live our lives in a completely immersive screen culture whose primary directive is to search for, find and ingest media all day long — virtually every waking minute.

https://www.activistpost.com/2018/11/the-rise-of-fascism-in-a-brave-new-digital-world.html