Digital Nation? No Thanks!
By Peter Crabb
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/654/1/

One of the brilliant insights in Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel Ishmael is that modern industrialized people do not know how to live. Humans have long been cut off from the contingencies of nature, first as a consequence of discovering the wholly unnatural skill of growing reliable food supplies in one place, and later as a side effect of learning how to manufacture wholly unnatural objects and environments. The resulting alienation from nature and from our ancestors’ nature-adapted ways of life left us clueless and susceptible to being sold ideas about how people should live, usually by the most audacious psychopath in the group. Systems of dos and don’ts and fear-inspiring superstition kept the overworked and underfed serfs and slaves distracted with mythology, rituals, “moral” prohibitions, and unrestrained baby production. Except for the rare Spartacus, the serfs and slaves didn’t have the time or energy to give any trouble to the soft, overfed elites living in white palaces. They simply went along with the program.

Some things just don’t change.

Today the industrial capitalist elite is hard-selling a mythology-based way of life that undermines human potential and the capacity for sustainable communities. As part of the pitch, PBS (the P variously standing for Petroleum, Pharmaceutical, Pentagon, Propaganda, or Phone, take your pick) aired the Frontline program “Digital Nation” in February, 2010, a 90-minute infomercial selling tv-viewing serfs the notion that junk technologies are good for them.

At the outset, the producers give their game away with the announcement that “Major funding is provided by Verizon Foundation.” Indeed, the look of the just-released DVD is quintessentially Verizon: images of attractive young people gazing happily into cell phones. In real life, of course, most cell phone users are visibly bored or frustrated or downright angry as they desperately clutch their gadgets. But this video is not about reality. It’s an outline for a business plan that uses Madison Avenue-style myth-making to seduce the audience.
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To read the complete report, go to
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/654/1/

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