"Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," Part 2
Our Colonized Lives
This essay is Part 2 of a series devoted to Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. Part 1, last week’s essay, is here.
Late in my acting career in NYC, I signed up for a voice-over class. I had done a number of on-camera commercials, and even though they were soul-sucking, they paid the bills. Now that I had a child, voice-overs seemed as though they might fit better into the realities of my mom-life.
My pal Matt taught us the basics. There was a lot to master: identifying our voice and personality’s niche; learning and adopting various vocal tricks, like inserting a “bubble” (an almost-imperceptible laugh) into a phrase; and accessing our own internal states to create feelings in the listener.
During one class, Matt critiqued my attempt at a 30-second spot for Quaker Oats. “You’re hitting all the right notes, the flow is good, the rhythm is there. But you’re missing the emotion underneath.”
I knew he was right, but for god’s sake. “It’s oatmeal we’re talking about here, Matt.”
“Sure,” he said. Matt was a good sport. “But that’s not what you’re selling. You’re selling the warmth of your grandma’s kitchen, the nostalgia for those homemade cookies she used to bake with you when you were little. Right?”
I felt a pit in my stomach, but I nodded. He continued, “So try it again, this time putting yourself in that emotional state.”
“Okay.” I did it again, knowing full well I wasn’t nailing it. I said so the moment I finished. He agreed with me. “What’s the issue?”
I knew what it was. I had never in my life baked cookies, or prepared any comestible whatsoever, with either of my grandmothers. The scenario meant nothing to me. If I was going to make this spot work, I’d have to draw in emotion from some other memory.
“I got it. Let me do it again.”
I rummaged around in my internal storehouse, picked something, and did it again. My voice became cozy, oozing with intimacy and warmth. The words floated on top. Matt beamed.
“That was great!”
It was in that moment that I knew I was done with commercials forever.
ARGUMENT 2: Television is a “colonizing” experience.
Mander’s second argument concerns the emergence of “the controllers.” He maintains that television’s use as a colonizing medium was inevitable, and that “the technology permits of no other controllers.”
Before we tackle those ideas, let’s take a quick spin through the main definitions of the world “colonization:”
to take control of or subjugate a people or area, especially as an extension of state power;
the presence and multiplication of a microorganism (such as a bacterium) in or on a host; and
the act or practice of appropriating something that one does not own or have a right to.
Obviously, Mander’s use of the word is closest to that first definition. I’ll address the second one later in this essay, and the third will make an appearance next week.
Mander kicks off Argument 2 by describing how societies in the West rationalized destroying the natural world:
“To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money.”
But turning every available square inch of terrain and every raw material into a product wasn’t enough. It was —and still is — necessary to convince people to want those converted products. Or better yet, to need them. The oldest and simplest way to do that is to separate people from whatever they might want or need.
He tells an old story, one you may be familiar with. A native Pacific islander lives in a simple hut on the beach,
“picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it.”
That’s colonization in a nutshell, and it describes perfectly the fool-proof way to create need. Another way is to introduce an item that’s brand new and therefore scarce. A great example is Coca Cola’s arrival in Shanghai in 1927; its novelty guaranteed that people would clamor for it. (The inclusion of cocaine in the original recipe didn’t hurt, either.)
Mander offers another story, this one a research experiment done on chimpanzees isolated one to a room. Each chimp learned to press one of 12 available buttons to satisfy needs that were simple and cost-effective for the researchers to provide: a banana, a hug from a scientist, etc.
The big triumph? When the symbols were switched around, the chimps were still able to choose what they wanted by “reading” the correct symbol. Mander points to this study not as some significant breakthrough in understanding chimpanzee cognition, but rather an indictment of animal confinement. His takeaways:
The creature becomes dependent for survival upon whoever controls the new environment.
The creature becomes addicted to whatever experiences remain available in the new environment.
The creature therefore reduces its own expectations to fit what can be gotten. Confined creatures that cannot fit this pattern go crazy, revolt or die.
It’s not a big leap from the chimp to modern-day human beings.
Separated from our natural environment like the sequestered chimps, “we have re-created ourselves to fit.” We’ve figured out how to get our needs met, and worse, we now view our artificially-created environment as perfectly normal.
It’s normal to live apart from family; it’s normal to sit all day, every day, indoors, under artificial light; and perhaps most conveniently for capitalism, it’s normal to buy every single thing we need and make nothing.
Andrea Engi, of
, wrote in her recent excellent essay, A Fed Bear is a Dead Bear:“We were once able to seed, harvest, forage, raise and hunt our food, to understand the wilderness and the soil and the animals and take from the earth what we needed to survive. Now we drive our cars over to the supermarket, walk through the sterilized aisles, throw boxes, bags and cans into our carts and call it food… Then we go home and open, mix, heat and serve whatever we’ve purchased no matter how far from real food it actually is.”
Her essay about a wild bear fed by human beings called to mind the video of a kindly older man feeding raw hotdogs to raccoons on his back porch. The 30 raccoons, each one rotund and dirigible-like, swarm him politely while he hands out ten pounds of frankfurters.
Watching the video, which has 34M views on YouTube, made me queasy, yet I am solidly in the minority. The vast majority of commenters said things like, “it reminds of the better parts of humanity and the world.” Unfortunately, I, like Engi, can’t see it as anything other than a sad mirror of our own dependence.
By the primary definition of the word “colonize,” we as an entire species have been colonized just like those poor primates. Television, in concert with what Mander calls tv’s “parent and child” — advertising — has effectively colonized all of us into human buyers first, human beings last.
We now exist within sort of an “I consume, therefore I am” philosophy of living, and not by accident. It didn’t just “happen” that way.
“Advertising is the instrument of transmutation. It lays the standard-gauge railway track from wilderness to human feeling, assisting in the transformation of both into a unified commercial form. Unplugged from our natural connection to the environment, we are replugged into a new consumer environment.”
Now that we are replugged, the purveyors of our consumer environment must keep that capitalist train running. Advertising keeps people buying, buying, buying and therefore working, working, working to earn money to do so.
“Advertising exists only to purvey what people don’t need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available.”
Think about it: how many ads for fresh fruits and vegetables have you seen in your lifetime? How about for sacks of rice or dried beans? Compare that to the ads you’ve seen for alcohol, breakfast cereal, snacks, or fast food. When it comes to edible sustenance, according to Mander, it’s pretty much only the processed stuff that’s advertised.
“But wait,” you might say, “weren’t you learning how to shill for Quaker Oats? Oats are pretty basic, aren’t they?” Yes, they are. But the de-husked, steamed, flattened, and lightly toasted for “stabilization” (the ability to sit on a shelf for years) rolled oats of Quaker are not the oat groats our ancestors ate. Apparently, groats need to be cooked for a long time so you don’t break your teeth on them.
But I digress.
When questioned about its role in commerce, the advertising industry always protests vehemently, shrieking that it’s “only a public service” that helps people satisfy their needs. Edward Bernays, the “father of advertising and public relations,” makes that same sinister argument in his seminal book, Propaganda, which I outlined in my essay, Yes, You Are Being Influenced, Part 2.
Mander, having spent decades deep in the belly of the Madison Avenue beast, is uniquely qualified to deliver this gem of a rebuttal:
“Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before.” [emphasis mine]
As soon as you start handing out tube steaks to raccoons, you most certainly are creating a need where there was none before.
In 1949, George Orwell published 1984, a novel depicting “Oceana:” a totalitarian society that engages in mass surveillance and propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking. I won’t draw all the menacing parallels — I doubt I need to, frankly — but Mander highlights an aspect of 1984 that is worth mentioning.
Citizens of Oceana have been taught to believe that the natural world is primitive and savage, a dangerous place. Safe inside their homes, where television lurks in every room, city-confined people must ask special permission to visit any natural landscape.
It makes sense within the world of 1984, for the same reason it makes sense in our world today. Unmediated nature is dangerous… for anyone who wants to control your thoughts. There is no way to fill your mind with ideas that are not yours. There is nothing to buy or sell to you out there in the desert, or on a mountain range, no profit to be had. There is no television there.
Unless, of course, you willingly and happily bring your television hiking with you — an absurdity in 1949 and even 1977, but exactly what the spread of smartphones has now enabled.
Remember the second definition of colonization? “The presence and multiplication of a microorganism (such as a bacterium) in or on a host.” How’s this for a creepy metaphor:
If you think of humanity as the host, and television as a single microorganism that infected us, it follows — to me, at least —that smartphones are television’s subdivided, scattering spawn, broken free from its original stationary confinement and multiplied exponentially, traveling throughout the host to infiltrate and overtake all of its cells, aka individual human beings.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit much. Maybe not. Regardless, one fact has remained reliably steady since 1977:
“a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness… in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it.”
In 2014, Mander delivered a staggering statistic to an audience gathered at Cooper Union in NYC to hear scholars, authors, and activists discuss “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth.” He said, “Between 1945 and 2013, U.S. corporations spent 500 trillion dollars on advertising, by far most of it in television, all celebrating the same worldview.”
That’s right, folks… half a QUADRILLION.
That is a shit-ton of money to spend on nothing more than convincing people to buy stuff. Mander’s former colleague Howard Gossage is far more eloquent, calling it “A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose.”
“The few.” That’s exactly who it is. And it’s not hard to trace how “the many” became “the few.”
After the manufacturing frenzy of World War II pulled us out of the Depression, the economy relied on continued consumption to keep it afloat. Advertising, hitching a ride with television, convinced the post-war American public that buying stuff was their patriotic duty. (Sound familiar? George W. Bush reassured a shaken post-9/11 America by urging people to spend.)
From 1946 to now, commerce has grown exponentially, in no small measure due to advertising. Corporations have metastasized and gobbled one another up, concentrating wealth while diversifying their holdings, thus ingeniously avoiding the “monopoly” moniker. Amazon, for example, owns companies as diverse as MGM, Whole Foods, and Zappos.
If you’re curious, here are the top 100 companies by advertising dollars spent in 2020. At the top, (surprise!) is Amazon, who in 2022 spent more on advertising than any other retailer in history: $20B. In one year.
Then there are capital investment behemoths like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which control the great majority of shares of the world’s largest corporations, not just the United States’s. Combined, those three manage over $15 trillion in global assets.
At the same time these “controllers,” as Mander calls them, have engorged themselves on mergers and acquisitions like ravenous ticks, Western governments have slipped slowly into subordination and irrelevance. Instead of serving the true needs of the people, governments now answer to the mega-multinational corporations and organizations that dominate ideology and control behavior.
Which they do by shaping the world to serve their own needs. Have you ever wondered why we all believe that “bigger is better”? I think it’s baked into messaging to normalize the concentration of power. Not only do we think that ginormous corporations are necessary and good, we praise them as evidence of success in the world. “Go big or go home!”
“…we have come to believe in an artificial economic construct propagated by the people who benefit from it and who control the media that explain it to us.”
I love that quote. He’s still right, 46 years later. There are six companies that own almost all media. And which companies are the largest shareholders in those six? With some minor exceptions, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Go ahead, look it up. I did.
As A. J. Liebling once said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
Here’s where it gets really interesting, in terms of technology. According to Mander, not only have we accepted colonization as Situation Normal, we also can’t sense “the rightness or wrongness of each new technological wonder.” Yikes. I can relate to this.
Until recently, I’d never really questioned technology’s inherent value. Like many others, I subscribed to the preemptive argument Mander lays out at the very beginning of the book: technology is agnostic, neither good nor bad, moral or immoral. It’s “a benign instrument, a tool.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. On the surface, it seems totally reasonable. You can use a knife to create a gourmet meal or end someone’s life — the knife itself has no intrinsic ideology attached to it.
But what about a guillotine? Isn’t that technology designed for one purpose only, and doesn’t it presuppose the necessity of capital punishment? Why else would you have one? To slice bagels?
The reason I’ve never questioned technology’s inherent value is clear. As Mander said in a speech he gave in 2014, “All information about technology we get comes from the people who invent, promote, and sell it.”
The purveyors of television want us to believe that it is a tool for greatness: it educates, entertains, broadens our horizons, bridges distance. Sometimes it does those things, but that’s not its true purpose. Its true purpose is to sell. Period.
“It is a moot point whether those who control television knew what the outcome would be when they dusted it off after the war and sent it out to sell. Whether they invented television for that purpose or it invented them, the relationship was symbiotic.”
Mander also said in 2014 that we now “equate technological evolution with evolution itself,” which is another mind-blower,. Again, of course we do.
Monsanto (now Bayer), Apple, Google, Pfizer, and all the rest have spent billions on ideological hot dogs that we’ve voluntarily swallowed whole. The packaging on those weenies reads: “whatever technology [insert name of corporation here] creates is nothing short of wonderful. Their tech solutions are the pinnacle of human achievement, a vision of thrilling planetary tech-utopia. They’re just innovating do-gooders, leading the way.”
Consider this gorgeous one-minute spot Monsanto produced at no small expense, just to remind us that farmers are important (so helpful!):
Isn’t it preferable to bask in the glory of Farming at Dawn in America™ than to think about how Monsanto/Bayer has settled over 100,000 Roundup “cancer lawsuits,” paying out about $11 billion as of May 2022? Or that glyphosate-rich Roundup is still for sale — though only for farming/agricultural use? (Oh, phew.)
Mander reminds us that it has always been, and continues to be, a one-sided story, one in which corporations — the controllers — play the hero, gilding themselves in aw-shucks humble bragging about their “humanitarian missions,” while downplaying their true purpose: promoting “corporate profits and ferocious economic growth.”
How can Mander, or you, or I, or any differing viewpoint with a puny megaphone, compete with the trillions spent to broadcast their own narratives? As he states, “The rich” can “simply buy access to the public mind.”
During Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Rogan seemed genuinely shocked that the vaccine narrative he has subscribed to forever is not actually supported by research. (Have a listen, if you’re similarly convinced that the mainstream story is the truth.)
Rogan asked the question many people ask: how can a narrative that’s wrong be believed by so many for so long? Mander shows us. The only narrative we hear is the one that is paid for, and no one but the wealthiest can pay for it. In this case, it’s Big Pharma. In the case of food supply, it’s Big Ag. In the realm of public policy, it’s Big Government. Remember, “The technology permits of no other controllers.”
Although there’s no term like Big Retail for the realm of consumer goods or Big Fashion/Big Beauty for the realm of clothing and makeup, there might as well be. Those realms advertise as hard as the others, perhaps even more so. Walmart was #10 and L’Oreal was #14 in the top 100 companies by advertising dollars.
Beauty companies spent an estimated $7.7 billion on advertising in 2022, peanuts compared to the over $100 billion revenue they rake in yearly worldwide.
, a Substacker whom I follow for her generous, real, hopeful stance, writes this in a recent article:“The disconnection from our ancestors, communities, and bodies is by design. We are easier to use, control, and discard when we fret over how we fit in, what we look like, and who still likes us.”
Yes. It IS by design. The 500,000,000,000,000 dollars spent between 1945 and 2013 evinced the same worldview: we are not whole, and the only way to become whole is to HAVE MORE.
And that worldview is how controllers keep the merry-go-round of consumerism spinning round and round.
Mander summarizes Argument 2 this way:
“The result is a singularly channeled mentality, nicely open to receiving commercial messages, ready to confuse brand diversity with diversity itself, and to confuse human need with the advertiser’s need to sell commodities.”
I’d summarize it like this:
Freedom to choose whichever product you want is not freedom.
Freedom to not choose any product at all, is freedom.
Let’s return to that voice-over class from long ago.
On that fateful day, something changed. Like Mander, I had been a willing participant in perpetuating the system, offering up my Midwestern appearance, my acting talent, my trustworthy demeanor, and my optimistic outlook to the maw of commercials. I had always referred to it as “soul-sucking,” but said it lightly, ironically, never allowing myself to explore how inauthentic and cheap I felt.
Sure, I had told my commercial agent from the start that she needn’t bother sending me out for cigarette, alcohol, or pharmaceutical ads, knowing that I couldn’t muster up even one iota of genuine enthusiasm for any of those products and therefore would not book any of those jobs. Understanding woman that she was, she agreed.
“It’s a stepping stone to ‘real’ acting,” I had told myself, “plenty of other actors would kill for these gigs,” both of which were entirely true. My aversion to doing them seemed unique among every single other actor I knew.
It was certainly unique in that class taught by Matt, who, noticing my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to his enthusiasm, followed up with me.
“What’s going on, Mary? You nailed it.”
“Yeah, I did.” Suddenly, I found myself saying, “All in the service of selling more stuff,” with a bubble in it to soften it.
Matt was not fooled. “Um, yeah,” he said, pointedly. “That’s the job.”
“Of course, right,” I backpedalled a bit, not wanting to offend. “I just… I don’t know, it seems like people have plenty of stuff already…” I trailed off, feeling the stares of the other actors in the class. Who is this heretic?
There was a pause, and then Matt stated, not unkindly but with a firm tone and no bubble, “If that’s a problem for you, you’re probably not in the right line of work.”
I knew he was right. I knew something had fundamentally shifted inside me. But why that day, out of all the others? I still don’t fully understand it.
Did the use of my voice, separate from my body, amplify the ersatz nature of what I was doing? When I acted in on-camera commercials, I could step into the “reality” of the situation and trick myself into believing it: I’m a “young mom;” now I’m a “pet store owner;” now I’m a “dental office receptionist.”
Voiceovers, by contrast, didn’t provide that option. I was not whole; I was a disembodied voice. This whole operation was clearly a deception. I had to scavenge my personal history and private emotions, sacrificing them on the altar of Quaker so that my vocal performance would trick listeners into experiencing enough nostalgia and insufficiency that they could only be soothed and satisfied by buying a canister of rolled effing oats. Ugh.
Or was it my new identity as an actual, real-life mom? Did I just not care as much about my “acting career” — such as it was — anymore? Did I feel a heightened responsibility for the world I had brought my new son into, as well as a deeper need to align with my true values?
I don’t know. But somehow, the advertising industry’s mask had fallen off, revealing the grinning, voracious monster underneath, and I was NOT a fan. I couldn’t dance with this beast any longer. I was done.
“Confined creatures that cannot fit this pattern go crazy, revolt or die,” says Mander. Now I know: not being inclined toward mental instability or suicidal thoughts, I really had only one choice.
Perhaps you feel the same way.
I really love how you weave exposition, content, personal history, and historical facts within your essays. What a rich canvas! Looking forward to part 3!
Mary, I read this the day it was posted and meant to reply, but I guess I got distracted. This is one excellent piece of expository writing, if I can call it that, only you make it so much more interesting with all your clever and entertaining digressions. However, I was disgusted to read all you had to share with us. It was enough to piss off the Pope (maybe, who knows), the way we have all been colonized as you say, into "human buyers first, human beings last". Yup, you got that right! Thank you for all your hard work and your outstanding research. I look forward to the next installment, in some masochistic kind of way. LOL.
xox