R.I.P.

, Kill Your TV
Author(s): Alexander Zaitchik
Source: The Baffler , NOV-DEC 19, No. 48 (NOV-DEC 19), pp. 80-94

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26842288

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Derrick Schultz

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 Alexander Zaitchik

R.I.P.,
Kill Your TV
81

T
H
E

C
U
L
T
U
R
E

Thinking outside T
R

the idiot box U

S
T

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 When HBO announced it was making
a movie of Fahrenheit 451, it was a bit of
a headscratcher. Ray Bradbury’s novel
depicts a society gone numb on endless
loops of home entertainment. Why would
HBO, the nation’s great pioneer and
name-brand purveyor of endless loops
of home entertainment, produce a
devastating critique of itself—that is, of
television, a medium that Bradbury went
to his grave calling an “insidious beast,
82 that Medusa which freezes a billion people
to stone every night”?
Only one answer was imaginable:
HBO would do no such thing. It would
instead gut Fahrenheit of its core idea,
Kill Your TV, and remix the dystopia as an
extended, slightly edgy ad for Barnes &
Noble Classics. The network would switch
out the primacy of the story’s ubiquitous
television screens in favor of non-screen,
B
A
non-entertainment gadgets like smart
F
F
L
E
speakers. A remake along these lines would
R

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be roughly akin to a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World that used non-pharmaceutical stand-ins for the futurist all-purpose narcotic
that Huxley called soma. In both cases, the deviations would serve to soften or
remove any unsettling echoes with the latter-day cognates of the original plots—
mood-enhancing drugs in Huxley’s case, and “peak TV” in Bradbury’s.
HBO did indeed deliver a Fahrenheit devoid of television—a Jaws without the
shark. In the script written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, Bradbury’s “insid-
ious beast” barely makes an appearance, much less turns anyone to stone. Cut
from the story is a central character, Guy Montag’s TV-addicted wife, Mildred,
who spends her waking hours engrossed in interactive serial dramas displayed
on three giant “parlor” screens. In the original 1953 novel, Montag is distraught
but resigned to the fact that “No matter when [he] came in, the walls were
always talking to Mildred.” It’s during one of his wife’s regular viewing parties
that Guy finally snaps, setting him on course to torch his boss with a flamethrower
and flee the city’s boundless warren of living-room home box offices.
François Truffaut faithfully reproduced this pivotal scene in his 1966
adaptation of Fahrenheit, but the HBO version finds Montag curiously unmar-
ried. The holographic parlor screens in his tranquil space-age bachelor pad
appear only briefly; they feature no loud sitcoms or dramas, but a series of stills
from a search on the history of firemen. In the monitor built into the bathroom
mirror, a futuristic social media feed displaces the dramatic fare spit out by the
televisions of the original story. Other depictions of indoor screens in the HBO
remake are few, notably including a vintage Zenith-style turn-dial used by a
resistance cell to screen video manifestos.
None of the critics who mostly panned the remake found it odd that HBO’s 83
Fahrenheit presents a TV set as a symbol of the Resistance. Then again, since
they most likely regard 30 Rockefeller Plaza as a strategic bunker in their own
Trump-age version of the Resistance, why would they?

Boxed In
A decade into television’s remarkable cultural rehabilitation, the Kill Your TV
politics of Fahrenheit 451 is widely judged a fuddy-duddy non sequitur. The new
consensus includes the left-leaning tradition of culture criticism, traditionally the
incubator and trustee of the honorable project of studying and opposing televi-
sion as a powerful and insidious instrument of ideological control and mental
stupefaction. A generation raised on sponsored MSNBC and Daily Show clips,
Netflix and HBO Go shows slyly saturated with product placement (now called
“integration”), and social media feeds thick with video ads has convinced itself T
that “watching TV” is something their parents do, not them. They construct their H
E
viewing calendars a la carte style, using different delivery systems, you see. This
C
has somehow magically changed television content into something that is not U
television content. They don’t veg, which sounds passive and bad. They binge. L
T
By escaping its box and slipping into every crevice of our lives, television has U
R
performed the devil’s trick of making us believe it doesn’t exist. As its physical E
body thins and melts away, it becomes less enticing as an object begging to be
T
smashed, should anyone still want to smash it. Can there be a boob tube without R
a tube? An idiot box without a three-dimensional box? U
S
And if television no longer exists, neither do the criticisms long leveled T

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 against it. They become cultural relics, like rotary phones, fit only for basement
storage in boxes full of Jello Biafra spoken-word cassettes, or maybe usable as
punchlines in YouTube clips of Generation Z brats staring blankly at artifacts of
the pre-Facebook world. We have cut our cords, to the walls and to the past alike.
The critics’ reactions to the HBO Fahrenheit’s deletion of television served as
a clarifying gauge of this shift. Mostly, the response was crickets. The few
journalists who even noticed at all praised the choice in the interest of contempo-
raneity. As New York Times critic James Poniewozik put it, Bradbury’s focus on
mass media and television has been
rendered an “outdated . . . specifically
HBO did indeed deliver 1950s” concern, one that’s been
“flipped” by the rise of “niche and
a Fahrenheit devoid
social media.”
of television—a Jaws Has it, though? According to
without the shark. Nielsen, the biggest spike in TV
viewing history took place during the
first decade of the 2000s; by its end,
the average household had one or more sets running nearly nine hours a day.
The number has since settled at around eight hours. Leaving aside the small,
nimble screens featuring “niche and social media” that in fact mostly repurpose
television content, you’re still left with a volume of daily TV viewing equivalent
to the average workday. Indeed, eight hours is nearly double the amount of TV
Americans consumed when Fahrenheit appeared on new release tables alongside
Junky and Go Tell It on the Mountain. Think what you want about Bradbury’s
84 warnings of an antennaed Medusa, but these are not numbers you associate with
an “outdated, specifically 1950s concern.”
Just over a week after HBO premiered Fahrenheit 451, The Atlantic published
a straight-faced article titled, “18 New Shows to Watch This Summer.” You could
have found similar fare in two dozen other magazines and websites, whose TV
writers, working one of journalism’s only growth fields of the last decade,
struggle valiantly to keep pace with the sustained revelation of TV’s second
“Golden Age.” For our new cohort of critical gatekeepers, this blessed epoch’s
riches are so embarrassingly deep they render the warnings of last-century’s
gray-beard social critics and sci-fi authors obsolete. Anyone who denies that this
is a wondrous time to be alive and watching television is not just an asshole, but
an asshole who is morbidly password- and satellite-dish deprived. Against this
consensus, any artillery aimed at screens is reserved for the smaller ones associ-
ated with social media and the internet—though not because they have become
extensions of television, supercharging its mutation into a shape-shifting
T-1000, making it harder to escape, to smash and to kill, than ever before.
Here’s the funny thing about the HBO Fahrenheit’s nervous elision of
television under the guise of renovation: in Bradbury’s version, the TVs didn’t
have tubes, boxes, or cords, either. The TVs in the novel are connected to each
other via an internet-style network called a “circuit.” They are, in other words, a
B
prescient imagining of what marketing researchers today call social television.
A An early caricature of today’s media-driven acolytes of the “fear of missing out”
F
F cult, Mildred Montag desperately consumes the same popular shows as
L everyone else, mainlining the temporary illusions of community and belonging
E
R they provide, pausing only to pop pills and wonder who else is watching.1

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Mildred’s plan to buy a fourth screen for the living room’s remaining empty wall
even anticipates the ad industry term—“the fourth screen”—for the smart
phones and tablets that cover every interior inch of our waking lives. Jules Verne
flubbed his prediction of television’s arrival and omnipresence by some eight
hundred years; Bradbury correctly foresaw television morphing and multiplying
two generations out from I Love Lucy. His mistake was assuming the screens
would only get bigger, not bigger and smaller at the same time.

Golden Globs
With every crank of the media history wheel, clamor over one medium disap-
pears into the uproar set off by the next. Fierce debates raged around novels,
newspapers, and comic books. Radio was once a source of great fear and suspi-
cion, blamed for dumbing down culture, threatening democracy and producing
Hitler—until television came along. Now the internet has moved our focus
down the line, retroactively bathing television in a flickering amber glow. TV is
our friend from a simpler time, when Walter Cronkite guarded the news and
everyone watched the same Thursday Night Movie. Those were the days.
This shared nostalgia is a false memory. A roaring debate raged around TV
into the new millennium, surviving both The Sopranos and the rise of prime-time
liberal stars on MSNBC and Comedy Central. It was only around the time of
Obama’s reelection, better known as the final season of Breaking Bad, that the TV
debate became unrecognizable, transformed into dueling episode recaps and
debates over which shows deserved temple status in an age when television is
praised in language once reserved for Periclean Athens.
85
Television’s opponents had always hoped the medium would get worse—so
bad, in fact, that a critical mass of people would reject it and then, just maybe, the
system it propped up and propagated so effectively. But it didn’t get worse; in the
new century, in some cases, it’s true that the entertainment got better. The best of
the new shows, beginning with The Wire, did indeed contain “novelistic detail.”
Comcast and Viacom sponsored nightly left-ish satire and commentary. Anyone
who ever waited hours in line at the local art house for Spike and Mike’s Sick and
Twisted Festival of Animation could only marvel at the existence of Adult Swim.
But the deep case against television was never about the content. In the sunrise of
the new “golden age,” like a siren call from afar, the critiques of television
developed over the years could still be heard: critiques about the design, impacts,
and interrelationship of the medium’s form, content, and political economy.
These critiques had been gaining audience and urgency for decades. They
served an important function. Then a fat and brooding mafioso from Staten
T
Island sat on them, and the left forgot where it came from, in the flick of a switch. H
E

Hot and Unbothered C

U
Compared to the moral panics that historically greet new media, television L
T
enjoyed a smooth reception. It made a few high-profile cameos in anxious tracts U
R
of postwar social science and philosophy, but was largely ignored for decades. E
As trenchant an observer as C. Wright Mills all but dismissed TV, writing in
T
R
U
1. Truffaut’s 1966 movie goes further, anticipating and having the actors turn to the camera and tell Mildred, S
satirizing the psychology of social media validation by with rote enthusiasm, “You’re absolutely fantastic!” T

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 1953, “All of the ugly clamor of the radio, which has now been visualized on
television, has become so much a part of the texture of our daily life that we do
not truly experience it any more.” Dwight MacDonald, perhaps the critic
best-suited by temperament to fit the crypto-reactionary caricature of the
scolding anti-TV elitist, was a movie critic for the Today show. Paul Goodman
took the technology most seriously, seeing the box as the shape-appropriate
symbolic cornerstone of a conformist consumer society. The world of televi-
sion, wrote Goodman in 1963, is “a peculiarly pure product of our public policy
of an expanding economy with artificial demand (plus annual increases in the
arms budget), to maintain both high profits and adequate employment. It has
the aesthetics and human values that fit that policy.”
The Beats intuited that television was somehow central to the functioning
of the American Moloch— “America this is the impression I get from looking at
the television set /America is this correct?” asked Allen Ginsberg in 1956—but
the subculture’s position on TV was mostly one of recumbence. It was
Hollywood that provided some of the first pointed attacks on its upstart rival for
America’s attention. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit depicts the living room TV
as a self-aware episode of The Twilight Zone might have done—as a hypnotizing,
violent, undifferentiated disturbance. “Kick that television in,” says Frederic
March. “Kick it in and stomp it if it gets in the way of the family.”
The 1960s appeared to offer ripe conditions for the rise of a mature
anti-TV politics. Strangely, television got something of a pass during the decade’s
youth-led great refusal. Despite the supposedly formative influence of Herbert
Marcuse, who described TV as a prime enemy of oppositional thought in his 1964
86 tract of Marxist negation, One-Dimensional Man, the generation’s activists,
weaned on TV, saw the medium as quasi-heroic. It brought down Joe McCarthy,
assisted the rise of the civil rights movement into national consciousness, and
seemed to be an inadvertent ally in turning the country against the Vietnam War.
They also didn’t mind the attention of cameras. Among the indelible chants of a
generation known for its narcissism was “The Whole World is Watching.”

Global Village Idiot

Then there was the retarding influence of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian
celebrity academic who served as a hype-man for television throughout the
decade. McLuhan famously believed sitting in front of television made people
active participants in a shared drama, one told over the giant campfire of a
global electronic village. He didn’t care much about this drama’s content or its
sponsors, or that everyone in the audience was sitting alone in a dark room
staring at a box, subjected to a stream of manipulative ads. McLuhan thought
television’s visual immediacy, its “coolness,” made it inherently revolutionary.
Though McLuhan denied ever doing LSD—he called it the lazy man’s
Finnegans Wake—he wrote like an acidhead about cosmic consciousness, and
planetary vibrations. This trippy packaging of imputed televisual virtue
B
resonated, as it was clearly designed to, with the counterculture. Indeed,
A many veteran hippies followed McLuhan into the 1970s, when he transposed
F
F his rhetoric about “universal understanding and unity” from TV onto
L computers, providing a readymade script for internet utopians on the make like
E
R McLuhan’s disciple Stewart Brand.

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 McLuhan could only delay the inevitable reckoning with TV. On the eve of
Richard Nixon’s election, the novelist and screenwriter Harlan Ellison launched a
column for the Los Angeles Free Press, the country’s underground newspaper of
record, called “The Glass Teat.” In each column, which ran until 1972, Ellison
performed vivisections on prime-time programming to demonstrate the many
ways television was no innocent technology, but a weapon in service of the
System. “They’ve taken the most incredibly potent medium of imparting
information the world has ever known,
and they’ve turned it against you,”
Can there be a boob tube Ellison wrote in the inaugural column.
“To burn out your brains. To lull you
without a tube?
with pretty pictures. To convince you
that throwing garbage in the rivers
after your picnic is okay, as long as the factories can do it . . . To convince you that
Viet Nam is a ‘struggle for Democracy.’”
As good as Ellison could be, his critique was limited by his obsession with
content, and his blistering reviews of popular shows often sounded like the
outbursts of a disappointed lover, a hipper version of the guy who spends all night
in his recliner with a remote in hand, screaming, “I can’t believe they make me
watch this crap!” Rarely did his writing cut as swift or deep as the anti-TV songs
that began to appear in the first Nixon years. In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron released the
legendary proto-rap track, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which was
soon followed by The Mothers of Invention’s “I’m the Slime,” in which Frank
Zappa intones, “You will obey me while I lead you / And eat the garbage that I feed
you. . . Have you guessed me yet? / I’m the slime oozin’ out from your TV set.” 87
It’s pleasing to imagine the sociologist Herbert Gans listening to Scott-Heron
as he penned an essay in 1972 for the American Journal of Sociology decrying a
“drastic famine” of television research. The only people with any interest in
studying TV as a medium, Gans marveled, worked for the media companies and
their advertisers. His fellow professors, he surmised, may be too smitten with their
televisions to cast a critical eye. But that was hardly an excuse. That same year,
Nielsen reported TV was nearing a saturation point: 96 percent of U.S. households
had at least one television running six hours a day—and eight hours in homes with
children. There was a lot of overdue work waiting to be done.

Unreason and Counterrevolution

Activists, meanwhile, had begun to survey a post-sixties landscape dominated
by a capitalist system that had absorbed and deflected its radical opposition. T
The odd television sitcom by Norman Lear was what passed for progress, even as H
E
the same Fortune 500 companies continued selling the same consumption-based
C
economy and worldview as they did during Howdy Doody. Only now they U
marketed their obsolescent wares by mimicking the style and language of a L
T
commercialized counterculture. U
R
For some who once sat at McLuhan’s feet, this realization chimed fortu- E
itously in unison with the publication of the first full English translations of
T
Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings. As the imprisoned leader of the Italian R
Communists during the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci developed the idea of U
S
“hegemony” to explain how class domination and ruling ideologies are T

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 reinforced and propagated, often subtly. Unknown thousands of newly opened
eyes slowly turned to the flickering box in the corner. The whole time, the calls
had been coming from inside the house. Activists and academics influenced by
Gramsci, notably Todd Gitlin, began looking anew at television as a vector and
enforcer of ideology. The more they looked, the more Gramsci’s ideas functioned
like the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s 1988 anti-TV classic, They Live! Those
groovy Coke commercial hippies harmonizing their desire to grow apple trees
and honey bees? They’re aliens. TV Guide? It’s a fucking cookbook.

Colossal Youth
The cultural turn against television that followed in the 1970s and 1980s was not
a movement of people who read Gramsci, or even Gitlin. The twentieth-century
trope of the anti-TV snob—the insufferably pompous pipe-sucking virtue
signaler who brags about not owning a TV set at every opportunity—seemed
designed to deflect attention from the true face of TV rejection. Adolescents
forming their politics in 1977 or 1997 didn’t see Kill Your TV stickers on BMW
bumpers (though perhaps on the odd beat-up Volvo). They saw them on Peavey
guitar amps, skateboards, and bass drums. As a target for adolescent rebellion,
television was almost too perfect: It was the totem of a dull and passive domestic
life and the lobotomizing tool of the state and corporate tastemakers. What’s not
to hate, reject and smash?
For decades, depictions of television as a mind-numbing, soul-curdling
technology were recurring motifs in both radical political circles and under-
88 ground music scenes, especially but not exclusively punk, hardcore and political
hip hop. The English kids who blasted The Normal’s “T.V.O.D.” in council houses
during the late ’70s were nobody’s cartoon snobs. It was an army of disaffected
latch-key Reagan youth, not an alliance of Ivy League English departments, that
built a cult pedestal under Repo Man, a film premised on teenager rebellion and
escape from TV zombie Boomer parents. (It is part of the film’s lore that an
early version of the script rejected by the studio included a scene in which Otto
burns down his house while his parents zone out to their televangelist.) The
working-class macho of early Black Flag, whose ironic ode to prime-time, “TV
Party,” anchored Repo Man’s soundtrack, articulated the disdain of an entire
ecosystem of independent record labels and publishers. As a teenager in the early
and mid ’90s, my politics were forged in part by the music around me, songs like
Gorilla Biscuits’ “Stand Still” (“It steals my time and wastes what I’ve learned /
I’m holding out for a better deal, for something real”); Public Enemy’s “She
Watch Channel Zero?!” (“I’mma take your set and I’mma throw it out the
window / . . . her brain’s been trained by a 24-inch remote”); and Rage Against
the Machine’s “Bullet in the Head” (“Corporations cold turn ya to stone before
ya realize / They load the clip in, omnicolor / Said they pack the nine, they fire it
at prime time / The sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz”).
The loud hatred of TV was instinctive and thoughtful, necessary and healthy.
B
It also served as a portal for a lot of adolescents to the next stage of their political
A education. The world is a scarier place without it.
F
F This portal was still young when the first great public TV burning was
L masterminded, not by German émigré philosophers who hated jazz, but by a
E
R freeform Bay Area art troupe called Ant Farm. On July 4, 1975, years after the

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 first bra burning, the collective celebrated an “alternative Bicentennial” by
driving a 1959 Cadillac Convertible at high speed through a flaming pyramid of
45 televisions in the Cow Palace parking lot. They called it a “Media Burn.”
Unlike the arcane and endlessly debatable meanings of today’s art and media
89
spectacles, its message was straightforward: Fuck television—destroy it. But
even the literal burning of a mountain of televisions proved difficult to decode
for the confused local news scrum in attendance. To spell things out, an Ant
Farm member delivered a speech in the voice and cadence of John F. Kennedy.
“Television can only produce autocratic political forms, hierarchies, and
hopeless alienation,” he said:

Mass media monopolies control people by their control of informa-

tion. In our vast society, it is virtually impossible to escape the
influence of commercial advertising. And who can deny that we are
a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? . . .
Now, I ask you, my fellow Americans, haven’t you ever wanted to
put your foot through your television screen?

T
H
Cathode-tonia E

C
Two years after the Ant Farm’s act of pyrotechnic propaganda, the journalist U
Marie Winn published the first critical investigation of television as a medium. L
T
Because so little research existed on the subject, The Plug-In Drug relied mostly U
R
on anecdote, interviews and conjecture. But its conclusions—that television E
was addictive, increased aggression, slowed cognitive development,
Derrick Schultz

T
decreased test scores, weakened families and enervated the innate human R
ability to play, to amuse ourselves, to sit still and fill our minds with our own U
S
thoughts—resonated with a national audience who suspected she was right, T

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 even if no one had ever made the case. The book was a bestseller.
A year later, Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
offered a deeper, more radical critique, correcting what Mander called Winn’s
failure to apply her findings “to the power drives of the wider society.” These were
drives Mander understood well. He wrote as a repentant enabler of the TV plague
after fifteen years as an ad and public relations man, including five years as the
president of the San Francisco advertising agency Freeman, Mander & Gossage.
His own Montag-like snap came during a 1968 cruise through the Dalmatian
Straits, when he attempted to appreciate a brilliant natural scene before
him—“rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky, and colors as bright as a desert”—and
realized he couldn’t. “I felt nothing,” he
writes. “Something had gone wrong with
Corporations quickly me.” That something was television.
learned to control this Mander returned to San Francisco,
dissolved his agency and opened the
new world. country’s first marketing firm for
nonprofits, Public Interest
Communications. Working on environ-
mental and human rights campaigns, he noticed his clients were basing strate-
gies entirely around garnering maximum television coverage. The splintered
movements of the 1970s were “media based” and “derivative of the needs of ”
nightly news segments that “determined the style and content (or lack thereof )
of all political action.” The logic of TV encouraged spectacle for its own sake,
making it difficult to explore complexities or connect issues—pollution, alien-
90 ation, war, poverty—into a coherent worldview and struggle.
“Overall understanding of the forces that were moving society seemed to
be diminishing,” Mander wrote. A televised “glut of information was dulling
awareness” and encouraging passivity and confusion, not clarity and involve-
ment. The revolution, in other words, would not be televised.

Form Obliterates Function

The thesis of Four Arguments is built upon the rubble of an unflinching assault on
Marshall McLuhan—one that is both entertaining and necessary. While McLuhan’s
biggest ideas were important and sound—a society’s technologies determine the
nature of its thoughts and conversations; modern communications make a global
culture possible—much of what he wrote was nonsensical, wrong, or reflected a
disqualifying lack of interest in the political economy of modern media.2
Mander marshaled his insider’s knowledge of television to turn McLuhan
on his head. The medium was not just the message; it was the problem, and an
irreformable one. He argued that television was best suited to advertising and
propaganda, that it destroys the capacity for sustained and critical thought,

2. Anticipating his acolyte Jean Baudrillard, McLuhan
treated all knowledge as undifferentiated “data,” once
B describing the explosion of an atom bomb as “pure
A information.” But McLuhan didn’t think immersion in
F TV’s chaotic image-scape resulted in apathy, confusion,
and the degradation and ultimate disappearance of
F
meaning. He thought it did the opposite, elevating
L and energizing viewers into meaningful dialogue and
E action. This misplaced faith in TV could lead him into
R idiocies such as the claim, made in Understanding
Media, that TV “has ended the consumer phase of
American culture.” With McLuhan it’s not clear if this
is cause for celebration or lament. In the same book,
McLuhan extols advertisements for “represent[ing] the
toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of . . . highly
skilled and perceptive teams,” the products of which
are “magnificent accumulations of material about the
shared experience and feelings of the entire commu-
nity.” Ads weren’t directed at the viewing public, they
emanated from it.

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shatters historical perspective, and stunts the individual’s ability to feel or
experience deeply. “Television offers neither rest nor stimulation,” he writes.
“Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of
mind, relaxation, or renewal.”
Even when it tries to deal with oppositional subjects and themes, such as
non-materialist values and worldviews, or the systemic causes of inequality and
environment destruction, television shoehorns them into deforming narrative
tropes and splices them into oblivion. Words and images can only be forgotten as
they flow into the next commercial, the next show, ceasing only with the orches-
tral version of the national anthem that for decades brought broadcasting on the
networks to a temporary, staticky rest.
Mander framed Four Arguments around the planet’s deepening ecological
emergency. The reigning paradigm of consumption and growth could not be
questioned, let alone disrupted, he argued, so long as television was setting the
terms of our thoughts and debates, not to mention limiting our very ability to
think and debate. Four decades later, Mander’s arguments hold up all too well.

Binging Without Purging

A sustained burst of anti-TV books followed the salvos by Winn and Mander. In his
1979 broadside against the terminal self-involvement of postwar American life,
The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch referenced television often. The
following year, Vance Packard updated his Eisenhower-era expose of television
advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to
Death warned that the West was entering the screen-and-pill entertainment coma
91
described in Huxley’s Brave New World.3 In 1986, Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting began publishing its newsletter, Extra!, which continues to valiantly
catalogue every new reason to avoid commercial broadcast news. In 1988, Noam
Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, a narrow but
damning study of the structural biases of the major networks’ news departments.4
In 1992, Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information dug into the link
between television and humanity’s accelerating glide-path toward environmental
ruin. McKibben’s previous book, The End of Nature, had laid out the new science of
climate change. Missing Information explored how TV made the changes mandated
by the grim findings of environmental science difficult, if not impossible, to realize.
The book was structured as a kind of diary documenting McKibben’s viewing of
well over one thousand hours of cable television—nearly every minute of program-
ming on 93 channels during a 24-hour period—and then comparing the experience
with sitting on a remote mountaintop in the Adirondacks observing nature and
T
contemplating humanity’s place within it. The result is a personal account of how H
the chaotic and never-ending “flow” of television cracks and cheapens our E

experience of the world, destroying our ability to form coherent narratives about C
U
L
T
3. Many of Postman’s points were made better and 4. There was a countervailing trend during this same
U
earlier in Four Arguments, but Postman acknowledges period. The “populist” turn in media studies during the R
Mander by name only once, in a pissy dismissal of 1980s led to an academic cottage industry committed E
“preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite to understanding television, not as an ideological en-
position outlined in Four Arguments Against Television.” forcer and enemy of thought, but as a site of audience T
Postman may have been triggered by Mander’s assault agency, engagement and “resistance,” where the only R
on McLuhan, and goes out of his way to huff at the thing worth criticizing was a lack of representation.
“fashionable disavowal” of McLuhan by scholars who
U
“were it not for [him], would today be mute.” S
T

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 what we are, and should be, doing here. Even after we shut the TV off, we are
unable to process the information we most need to educate ourselves about “the
physical limits of a finite world. About sufficiency and need, about proper scale and
real time, about the sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the elements,
about the need for community and for solid, real skills. About the good life as it
appears on TV, and about other, perhaps better lives.”

The Off Position

Around the time these words appeared, two twenty-something D.C. housemates
named Henry Labalme and Matt Pawa were having late-night conversations
along similar lines. They decided that saving the planet meant killing TV, and that
killing TV required more than just publishing another book. In 1994, Labalme
and Pawa launched TV-Free America with the goal of cutting household viewing
time in half within a decade.
TV-Free America, whose advisory board members included Marie Winn and
Jerry Mander, made no mention of hegemony, capitalism, manufactured desires
and consent, or environmental tipping points. The group focused instead on the
personal and social benefits of reducing exposure to the “passive, sedentary and
non-experiential” medium. As Labalme explained in 1997, the intention was “not
to beat people over the head with this idea that TV is rotting their brain, that it’s
destroying their communities, but to say, try life with a little less TV and a little
more time, and you’ll have more fun.”
This moderate approach helped build “TV Turn Off Week” into a mainstream
92 global phenomenon. Between 1995 and 2000, the organization’s signature event
signed up more than 50,000 partners worldwide, mostly schools, social clubs,
community organizations, and religious groups. It racked up endorsements
from twenty-five governors and Bill Clinton’s surgeon general. Even Pope John
Paul II got in on it, calling on Catholics to give up TV for Lent. Eight years after
its founding, the group reported sister organizations active in more than twenty
countries. Some of these broke from
TV Free’s moderate style. Kalle Lasn’s
The loud hatred of TV was Vancouver-based Adbusters Media
Foundation attacked television with
instinctive and thoughtful,
biting neo-Situationist riffs on social
necessary and healthy. atomization, ecocide and consum-
erism. (The group’s subsequent
devolution into sneaker sales and TV
“subtervising” is another story.) In the UK, a boisterous group called White Dot
organized community TV turnoffs and marketed TV jamming technology and
jewelry allegedly made from the detritus of televisions smashed by the Taliban in
the public squares of Afghanistan. The group’s founder and leader, David Burke,
believed any further theorizing only made the problem worse. “If the ‘off ’ button
is the answer,” read the White Dot manifesto, “then no media studies course will
B
ever help students find it. . . . all media studies can only chase its tail.”
A The movement spawned by TV Free America obviously failed to reduce TV
F
F consumption, or slow the proliferation of screens in homes and public spaces.
L What it did do was reinforce a fragile line of defense against the total normal-
E
R ization of a corporatized, image-based culture unable to see itself clearly, let

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alone formulate alternatives. Kill Your TV was always more than an admonition
to get some air, or a symbol of belonging to this or that subculture. It was an entry
point. Smashing a TV is symbolic of a bigger and never more necessary rejection,
one that suggests the possibility of conversations and politics liberated from the
boundaries of the corporate screen.

Not All There

Labalme and Pawa’s ideas and activism from the not-so-distant past have met
the same treatment from today’s critical consensusphere as Bradbury’s novel did
in the hands of HBO. If that new consensus has a spokesperson, it’s Emily
Nussbaum, the New Yorker TV critic who this year released a book of essays, I
Like to Watch. That Nussbaum sees herself as running a victory lap for television,
a Pulitzer draped around her neck, is clear from the collection’s title, taken from
Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 satirical anti-TV novel, Being There. Long associated with the
book’s simpleton-antihero, Nussbaum has reclaimed “I like to watch” with
something between a wink and a sneer. But the cleverness doesn’t really survive
inspection. Of all the anti-TV tropes Nussbaum might have chosen to smugly flip
in 2019, Kosinski’s prediction of a catch-phrase spitting manchild celebrity
whose TV-roasted brain carries him to the White House is an odd choice.
The title is only the first stumble in Nussbaum’s victory lap. I Like to Watch
opens with a version of the TV wars as a fairy tale about the shifting “status” of
the medium in the cultural pecking order. (And by extension, the status of
writers like Nussbaum.) In Nussbaum’s telling, she once looked down on
television just like everyone else, influenced by the “drunken cultural brawl” 93
over television’s “crappy reputation.” Despite perfunctory mentions of Winn and
Mander, it’s clear she never engaged with the radical core of the anti-TV
position, but stood with arms crossed in the art-versus-entertainment sideshow
tent. Still, she remembers the world before the universal embrace of television
as a fraught place, full of shameful urges, strange ideas, and wonderous if
grotesque creatures. “People still referred to television, with no irony, as ‘the
boob tube,’ and the ‘idiot box’,” she writes of the late 1990s, as if describing a
flying lizard that survived an extinction event. “This was the value system that I
was soaking in, Palmolive-style.”
Nussbaum is proof that you can soak in something without absorbing it. The
acclaimed critic still understands arguments about TV as a matter of determining
what you can say out loud at parties, and not of ideology, commercialism, propa-
ganda, ecology, human health, and, ultimately—as once suggested in a book by
her one-time New Yorker colleague Bill McKibben—the survival of the species. T
Reading Nussbaum’s chronicle of the TV wars—a redemption story about H
E
how “a sparkling multiverse of cable channels” released humanity from the
C
“status anxiety” of liking to watch—it’s easy to envision her as a graduate student U
growing bored with tedious Victorian novels—the PhD track she says she L
T
abandoned after a revelatory episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and starting to U
R
perform mental math calculations to track her favorite shows’ placement, among E
all other competitors for her attention, on some kind of status-compass grid. In
T
2004, she would take this skill public in New York magazine with the creation of R
“The Approval Matrix,” the hot-or-not culture atlas whose trademark four U
S
quadrants neatly explain Nussbaum’s lack of interest in Mander’s four arguments. T

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 Big Brother is You, Watching
It’s hard to imagine now, but the rise of on-demand and mobile platforms for TV
content did cause a panic among those with stakes in the old television order.
Beginning in 2010, viewing time in U.S. households started to dip for the first time
since Nielsen began keeping track. It seemed possible that the “fourth screen” in
our pockets—with its expanding universe of apps and streaming services—might
weaken television’s long deathlike grip on our national attention, if only by
replacing a mother source of commercial distraction with a million little ones. 5
Alas, the panic was short-lived. Corporations quickly learned to control this
new world and accomplish even deeper levels of “brand penetration” on a
terminally distracted, screen-addled public. In 2013, a team at Innerscope
Research, a marketing firm, published an article announcing the good news in the
Journal of Advertising Research. The piece had a lurid Huxleyan title that no doubt
would have caused Neil Postman, who died in 2003, to break out into a knowing
grin: “Leveraging Synergy and Emotion In a Multi-Platform World: A
Neuroscience-Informed Model of Engagement.” The researchers explained that,
rather than threatening the power of television, a “flexible media environment”
can actually facilitate “activation of brand associations from previous exposure
across platforms.” The Clockwork Orange–style pupillometrics experiments of the
1960s look downright Socratic next to the fMRI tube experiments being
conducted by Nielsen’s screening-room laboratories across the country, where
brain scientists on the bleeding edge of the new TV-internet paradigm target
precise coordinates in our lateral prefrontal cortex to facilitate brand memory
encoding. (Nussbaum does not have much to say about any of this in her
94
celebrated TV book. In a chapter on the rise of “integrated sponsorship” that puts
brands and products at the center of scripts and story lines, she boldly concludes,
“If Tina Fey thinks it’s okay, who am I to disagree?”)
In 2015, Nielsen, a $6 billion company, purchased Innerscope Research and
installed its founder and CEO, Dr. Carl D. Marci, as the parent company’s Chief
Neuroscientist. A fixture on the TV-internet branding circuit, Marci is celebrated
as a visionary at events like South by Southwest and the TV of Tomorrow confer-
ence, where the future is an ever-growing constellation of screens.
It’s not surprising that Marci and his peers in the fields of social and consumer
neuroscience are received as heroes in this world. What should be surprising, and
deeply depressing, is the disappearance of the world where guys like Marci are
seen as villains who sometimes end up on the wrong end of a flamethrower. Our
imaginations can no longer absorb a narrative in which Guy Montag is the hero,
television the enemy, and his wife the tragic warning. The portals to this world
were never on center stage, but they existed, in newsstands and zine racks, in
books, in leaflets, in the boomboxes of high school parking lots. HBO, which has
done more than most to make this world vanish, did nothing brave with its
production of Fahrenheit 451. By scrubbing TV from Bradbury’s story, it papered
over its own pixelated reflection and ours, sparing us from reckoning with the fact
that we are all Mildred Montag now.
B
A
F 5. The mobile internet wasn’t the first threat to televi- shape of a gun, to “shoot out” the ads—was heralded
F sion as a top-down, one-way advertising and as an empowering, even liberating technology that
L consciousness-colonizing medium. As Tim Wu recounts would end television as we knew it. But commercial
E in The Attention Merchants, Eugene Polley’s invention TV survived and flourished, just as it has survived the
R of the remote control in 1955—first produced in the internet, TiVo, social media, and streaming.

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