Tv Commercials Quotes

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.

But just now, he'd gotten on his knees and proposed marriage, like in a television commercial for a diamond ring. Except of course they had the roll of duct tape instead, which, when you came to think about it, was a far more practical item. Such a bad mistake it would be, to embark on marriage and adult life without a nice supply of duct tape.

Bridget who is crazy said that sometimes she thought about suicide when commercials come on during TV. She was sincere and this puzzled the guidance counselors.

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

He wanted to wake up to her smile every day for the rest of his life, like some stupid coffee commercial on TV.

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.

In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take serious? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed an processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorists stand outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images.

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

Surely it wasn't possible that Vin diPietro was the first assignment. "Hello?" DiPietro waved. "You in there?" Nah, Jim thought. Can't be. That would be above and beyond any call of duty. Over the guy's shoulder, the commercial that was on the TV suddenly showed a price of $49.99-no, $29.99, with a little red arrow that ... considering where Vin was standing, poined right at his head. "Sh*t, no" Jim muttered. This was the guy? On the Tv screen, some woman in a pink bathrobe smiled up at the camera and mouthed, Yes, it is!

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work a) that you need most to do and b) the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement b).

On TV, talking heads wrung their hands over a lack of traditional feminine values and wondered if girls’ sports were to blame. Then they cut to a commercial featuring a sexy college coed vacuuming her dorm room in her underwear.

You'll have to go get laid by a random stranger." Bo pointed to the television. "Can I wait for a commercial or do I have to git-'er-done right now?" "You can wait.

You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.

Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot.

The purpose of TV channels are not to entertain, is to force one to watch commercials

At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage. I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong. I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

The hallmarks of a potentially successful copywriter include: Obsessive curiosity about products, people and advertising. A sense of humor. A habit of hard work. The ability to write interesting prose for printed media, and natural dialogue for television. The ability to think visually. Television commercials depend more on pictures than words. The ambition to write better campaigns than anyone has ever written before.

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

All the black leather she needs is the E-Z boy recliner where her love is parked with one of his hands wrapped around a remote, the other, a bottle of beer. She's right. It's kinky. The way he doesn't look away from the TV, as her head bobs in his lap like a fisherman's float on a nature program, hectic with the pace his breath sets. His crotch swells under her mouth's prowess. He's such a sweetheart he waits until the commercials to come.

It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.

You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Nature's what it's all about, but our people have been brainwashed into thinking that life is a cell phone against your head and the TV on a beer commercial with hot chicks.

Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it.

America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I'd like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we're missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they'd look gawky and gangly on TV.

My eyes are glued to the television, watching intently for my message from Will, and sure enough, right before they go to commercial, he's on the screen. His hair is wet with sweat and plastered to his forehead, face is dirty, and he's breathing hard from exertion, but he grins at the camera and taps his nose with his forefinger, then points to the camera and mouths, "miss you." Well, shit, he's sweet... Without over-thinking it, I pull my phone out and text him. "Miss you,too,football star.

I bet when you hold hands with a girl that cool you wonder if it's possible you're going to levitate like that one of them monks I saw on a TV commercial once, which don't you wish that was real? - Mack

she gradually became aware of how dumb the damn show was she was watching and she stared at it, wondering how in the hell they could put anything so absurdly infantile and intellectually and esthetically insulting on television, and she started asking herself over and over how they could do it, what kind of nonsense this is, and she continued to stare and shake her head, more and more of her mind being absorbed by the absurdity she was watching, suddenly leaning back on the couch as a section of the show ended and a commercial came blaringly on and she stared at them too, wondering what sort of cretins watch this garbage and are influenced by it and actually go out and buy those things, and she shook her head, unbelievable, it is simply unbelievable, how can they manage to make so many obnoxious commercials, one right after the other?

FRUITS AND NUTS Keep jumping around them like monkeys. The clones, Commercialized zombies, And the TV junkies. Keep throwing berries, Twigs, And nuts at them. Until they wake up To see what's up And figure out why We're laughing at 'em.

Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

If heartaches was commercials, we'd all be on TV.

There's a commercial break coming and I'm very excited about it and you know why? Because that's what keeps daddy in suits.

When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages. I would record TV commercials with SoundRecorder.exe on Windows 95 and reverse them to see if I was subliminally influenced to watch Pokémon by Japanese spies

The purpose of TV channels is not to entertain, ls to force one to watch commercials

The boy I used to know as Thomas Merker has been erased--replaced with a personality programmed by television and commercials to act a certain way.

When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.

I fish because I love to. Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly. Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape. Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing what they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion. Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed, or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility, and endless patience. Because I suspect that men are going this way for the last time and I for one don't want to waste the trip. Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters. Because in the woods I can find solitude without loneliness. ... And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun.

Honestly, seriously, you don’t know what to do about food? Here is an idea: Eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid’s cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods whenever your favorite show is not on when you want it on, ease up on the snacking and—don’t act like you don’t know this—eat vegetables and fruits more. Really, how difficult is this? Stop with the whining. Stop with the excuses. Act like an adult and stop eating like a television commercial. Grow up.

We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, “Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine.” So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there’s a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs? The

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought. Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children. As it was, they moved like turtles toward Chona’s room as Moshe’s howl rang out. They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.

Although watching TV is far from being a positive experience—generally people report feeling passive, weak, rather irritable, and sad when doing it—at least the flickering screen brings a certain amount of order to consciousness. The predictable plots, familiar characters, and even the redundant commercials provide a reassuring pattern of stimulation. The screen invites attention to itself as a manageable, restricted aspect of the environment. While interacting with television, the mind is protected from personal worries. The information passing across the screen keeps unpleasant concerns out of the mind.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

Even the suggestion of swimming be stirring. Watch a swimmer pass a building with a pool: the whiff of chlorine produces a wistful smile. Sit with swimmers when a TV commercial shows someone in the water: they actually stop and watch.

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,

Advertisement shouldn’t look like information, it should look like a promise.

What I'm saying is, where have all the real people gone? Where are the recognizably-human beings? Of course, it's silly of me to look them on TV commercials, no one watches ads for their true-to-life portrayals. If the ads were full of real people, they wouldn't be able to sell anything. Which is the point of this rambling column. Real people just don't sell.

Well, that's what they do on television. Every fifteen minutes, there are breaks for commercials. That way we get to look forward to what's coming next. That's how it works in real life too.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it.

Every Unwind believes in their heart of hearts that it won’t happen to them—that their parents, no matter how strained things get, will be smart enough not to fall for the net ads, TV commercials, and billboards that say things like “Unwinding: the sensible solution.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Everyone and their TV commercial wants you to believe that the key to a good life is a nicer job, or a more rugged car, or a prettier girlfriend, or a hot tub with an inflatable pool for the kids. The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right kind of selfie stick. Why? My guess: because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.

You can work through the physics of interstellar radio attenuation,1 but the problem is captured pretty well by considering the economics of the situation: If your TV signals are getting to another star, you’re wasting money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren’t buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your power bill. The full picture is more complicated, but the bottom

Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.

Keep telling yourself that.” “I’ve never seen anything like this in the house.” Derek Wilson, a local businessman he recognized from his TV commercials, spoke up. “She have one of those e-reader things?” “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think so.” “It’s full of romance novels. Trust us.

To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.

The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.

It was hard to accept that the doorbell was just a dream, because I could still hear it in my memory, like the last song on the radio or an annoying TV commercial stuck in my head. It wasn’t a faint memory of an innocuous doorbell – it was an exact “ding dong” sound, with a particular pitch, volume and rhythm.

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement’s primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America’s political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movements, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to life us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television’s imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurb.

He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual memory of my mother's departure, something you don't see a lot of in television. Real people don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend.They don't say, "I'm leaving you, Jack," and fade to a paper towel commercial.

The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully, you know, don't buy a lot of stuff and don't get their view of the world from television and are willing to spend four, five hours researching an election rather than commercials. The thing about it is that in America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing and that it involves action and force and looks good. My guess is that any form of rebellion that will change things meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual and probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside...Violence is interesting. Horrible corruption and scandals and rattling sabers and talking about war and demonizing a billion people of a different faith in the world—those are all interesting. Sitting in a chair and really thinking about what this all means and why the fact that what I drive might have something to do with how people in other parts of the world think about me isn't interesting to anybody else.

TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy.

It is extremely difficult to do anything constructive, let alone deep, on daily commercial television, especially on a talk show.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

My advice is to write during commercial breaks, and read while your favorite TV show is on mute.

You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America.

the only reason I got a part in Mrs. Atanabi’s dance show was because I had been in a TV commercial when I was little.

People love black hair, black eyes, black lashes Then why not black skin? If black is beautiful so am I, So is my skin! I hate TV commercials making people believe, Only Fair is Lovely!

We're brought up with a kind of romanticism that's so false it leads us astray. Falling in love and marriage is forever. The movies, then TV told us that, even—especially—the commercials.

So many television marriages - that playing out of lives against a background of the tube. Instead of two lives filing the room, There are their two lives and the eleven o'clock news with Constant commercial interruption. Instead of what you say and what I say. You don't laugh with me; I don't laugh with you. All the wit comes pouring out of the tube. And we laugh at it together. The more we avoid talking the more passive the relationship becomes. Television permits us to walk through life with minor speaking parts. And the more we fail to speak, the more difficult speaking becomes

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.

A statement: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children’s programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?

You mean the one that used to be advertised on late-night television? Where the guy on the commercial uses it to cut through a tin can?” She nodded. “That’s the one.” “Did you get it?” “It’s the knife I’m using now.” He smiled. “I’ve never known anyone who actually admitted to buying one.” “Now you do,” she said.

[A TV commercial] crossed my desk in 1986. It came with a press release boasting about an enormous production budget employed in service of what it termed a communications “breakthrough”. The secret of this particular breakthrough was the science of semiotics — i.e., conveying meaning via powerful symbols imbued with significance far beyond their literal interpretation. It’s the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky write about. Umberto Eco. Dudes like that. Dudes who have no responsibility for marketshare. Whoa,” I said to myself as I eagerly tore the videocassette out of its jacket. “This is gonna suck.

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth.

This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

Sometimes when I’m watching TV and I see a horrible commercial I think, “Only an asshole would buy that.” Then I think, Wait a minute! The advertising agency did research on their client’s target market and which channel and TV shows the ideal demographic watches, right? This would mean a carefully chosen ad campaign to get the product in front of the likely buyers, who in this case, are assholes. And I’m on the chosen channel, which means that I am one of the assholes of interest. Then I get spooked, because how’d they figure out that am asshole? Scary how well they know me.

David turned on the TV and sat on the couch. He could grade the Calc I homework but that always depressed him. It would almost put him in mourning, sitting Shiva, but it had to be done. He would get up early in the morning and do it. He chuckled. The TV had a stupid dog commercial. Cocker Spaniel mix. Same kind of mutt Miriam brought into their marriage. She was a dog person. Named it Lucky. Lucky died of poisoning while David was at home one afternoon. Somehow the dog had gotten into Clorox. Not so lucky. That had been their only fight. David did not want to get another dog. Claimed it would remind him of Lucky. When David was little, about eight or nine years old, he had learned Clorox would kill a dog. Their neighbor had a German shepherd. Sol would throw rocks at it when they walked to school. One day the dog got out and bit Sol, and if the neighbors had not stopped it, the dog may have mauled Sol to death. The dog’s name was Roxx, short for Roxanne. It was found dead a couple of days later. Poisoned. David was not a dog person.

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative...we were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crispier, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse.

I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created—the television commercial—and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.

Pepper woke up thinking of butts. And nothing else. Ladies' butts. Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman's back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts -- the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman's thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts. In other words, Pepper woke up horny.

Our fix-it-itis is not a simple social gaffe but the evidence of a deep blind spot born with the help of the market. We are educated about illness by television commercials... A puzzle like me that cannot be solved is a point of discomfort, a disjuncture, a black hole... My body is a discomfort, a burr in the hide of the marketplace itself, a reminder that not all pain can be treated with a purchase.

Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

Dear Jeff, I happened to see the Channel 7 TV program "Hooray for Hollywood" tonight with the segment on Blade Runner. (Well, to be honest, I didn't happen to see it; someone tipped me off that Blade Runner was going to be a part of the show, and to be sure to watch.) Jeff, after looking—and especially after listening to Harrison Ford discuss the film—I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people—and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. Since I have been writing and selling science fiction works for thirty years, this is a matter of some importance to me. In all candor I must say that our field has gradually and steadily been deteriorating for the last few years. Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches Blade Runner. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day "reality" pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, Blade Runner is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be. Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the Blade Runner project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner. Thank you...and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible. Cordially, Philip K. Dick

A television set in Florida refused to let itself be turned off; until its owners took an axe to it, it continued, on or off, presenting inferior music and stale movies and endless, maddening advertising, and even under the axe, with its last sigh, it died with the praises of a hair tonic on its lips.

Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.' My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer. -Guest blog - what diversity means to me

At the same time I grew increasingly dissatisfied and irritable with what we are prone to call normal life. Except for wine, music, and books, I disliked shopping. Television grated on my nerves, the commercials in particular, so I got rid of the television. I found it harder and harder to rouse any interest in sports, celebrities, electronic gadgets, the chatter of the culture, the latest this or that. Nor did I have any desire to own a house, or get rich, or start a family. I wanted to keep traveling and see the world, live an eventful, unpredictable life with as much personal freedom as possible, and have a few adventures along the way.

If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.

How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?" "It makes him want to change the way he lives." "In what way?" I said. "It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

The message is constantly displayed on television commercials, where the motive of keeping up with (rather than cooperating with) the Jonses is treated as an unquestioned value.

The vision teller tells the vision to unguarded minds' of prey. The programmed.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital.

Should we trust the scientists and the so called experts that created the endless parade of pharmaceutical concoctions that we see advertised on TV? ads that are soon discontinued as they're followed up by an avalanche of commercials from legal firms inviting people who are permanently damaged or worse from last week's big pharma witch's Brew to sue for damages...

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

As she hung up on her end, she actually fanned herself with her hand, something she’d assumed people only did in TV commercials and bad sitcoms. And then she couldn’t hold it in. Bursting up from her workstation, she ran around her house like a crazy person, making a bizarre kind of eeeee noise as she completed the circuit back to her desk. At which point there might have been some pirouetting.

And she figures it’s your fault that things have changed.” “That’s just idiotic!” Ximena said. “I know!” I said. “It’s like Savanna being mad at me for having been in a TV commercial once. It makes no sense.” “How do you know all this?” asked Ximena. “Did she tell you?” “No!” I said. “Did you know about the note beforehand?” “No!” I said. Summer rescued me. “So what did Ellie say when she read Maya’s note?” she asked Ximena. “Oh, she was so mad,” answered Ximena. “She and Savanna want to go all out on Maya, post something super-mean about her on Facebook or whatever. Then Miles drew this cartoon. They want to post it on Instagram.” She nodded for Summer to hand me a folded-up piece of loose-leaf paper, which I opened. On it was a crude drawing of a girl (who was obviously Maya) kissing a boy (who was obviously Auggie Pullman).

Consider how many times you’ve seen either a crashed plane or a crashed car. It’s entirely possible you’ve seen roughly as many of each—yet many of those cars were on the road next to you, whereas the planes were probably on another continent, transmitted to you via the Internet or television. In the United States, for instance, the total number of people who have lost their lives in commercial plane crashes since the year 2000 would not be enough to fill Carnegie Hall even half full. In contrast, the number of people in the United States killed in car accidents over that same time is greater than the entire population of Wyoming. Simply

When not through external events, spirit communicates “internally” via symbols and signs. Symbolic language, like music, is universal and crosses beyond the limitations of verbal and written languages. It is a divine communication. Essentially, the Spirit is using All means necessary to inspire us and to get our attention – not an easy task in the material world of sights, sounds, online messages, TV and movies - and commercialism!

Notice anything different?” She tucked her pinstriped hair behind her ear and squinted at the screen. “I’m using the wrong font?” “Notice anything different about my boobs?” That got her attention. She whirled around in her chair and peered at my chest. “You changed your boobs?” “I’m showing my boobs,” I said proudly, moving my palm in front of them like presenting them on a TV commercial. All this can be yours! Or, rather, your son’s.

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein—hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings—is etched indelibly on our minds. “A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all,” writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years.

Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever she spotted the big sign from the expressway or the commercials came on TV. Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites—not all whites, but enough whites—that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that “Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, I want you to know that you are as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town.

he had had an offer for me to do television commercials for an organization that sold margarine. “I know this isn’t the kind of thing you had in mind,” he pointed out, “but if a conservative firm feels that you can sell their

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, skip out for beer during commercials, because the revolution will not be televised.

The Great Western Disease is “I’ll be happy when…” This is our belief that happiness is a static and finite goal, within our grasp when we get that promotion, or buy that house, or find that mate, or whatever. It’s inculcated in us by the most popular story line in contemporary life: there is a person; the person spends money on a product or service; the person is eternally happy. This is called a TV commercial. The average American spends 140,000 hours watching TV commercials.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

Over the years, Raul remembered many events like if they were TV shows, especially at night, like when he and Alberto cruised around town. The open windows, the wide space of the desert, allowed room for his thoughts to emerge. Some memories played over and over again, like the re-runs he watched during the summer. And depending on the events, he didn’t mind having to sit through them. At least his memories weren’t interrupted with commercials. Click . . . Click . . . Click . . .

We're cleaning cat ears. Rhonda doesn't require us to come in on Sundays, but somebody has to feed the animals. Yesterday Alex and I helped five cats and two dogs find homes...We agreed we probably could have placed a couple more cats if their ears were nice and pink inside like in the wet-food commercials. We told Rhonda to take a much-deserved break today and we'd come in, feed everybody, and make our cats a little more like the ones on TV. So I skipped church to clean cat ears.

Valenti argues this myth is as present in religious sexual shaming as it is in secular sexual exploitation: Abstinence-only education during the day and Girls Gone Wild commercials at night! Whether its delivered through a virginity pledge or by a barely dressed tween pop singer writhing across the television screen, the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability—or her refusal—to be sexual. And we’re teaching American girls that, one way or another, their bodies and their sexuality are what make them valuable.1

This decline of literacy is accompanied by a rise in philistinism in America: a preference for the skillfully marketed and packaged product for the consumption of the mass man—the Top Ten on TV, NFL telecasts with the quite well-done Miller Lite and Mean Joe Green commercials—plus a few big commercial novels, whether the Harold Robbins novel in which sex figures second only to money, the Barbara Cartland novel in which sex becomes something called romance, or the Judy Blume novel in which teenagers are introduced to sex like Tarzan and Jane.

In 2001 New York came under attack, and thousands of people simply evaporated, leaving behind only dust and bits of gold Rolex watches. We were told that we had nothing to worry about, that we should go shopping. I was eager to please my country, for shopping had long been an answer for me, but what I couldn't pay for, I stole. I started to accumulate stuff I felt would make me feel whole: I surrounded myself with symbols of status. I believed the TV commercials with all my heart. I felt that those material things I was being sold defined me.

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

For many of us, the companies we work for are an important cultural force in our lives. For instance, growing up, my dad liked to refer to himself as a DuPonter. All the pencils in our house were company-issued, embossed with phrases like Safety First, and my dad would light up every time a DuPont commercial came on television, sometimes even chiming in with the voice-over: “Better things for better living.” I think my dad only met the CEO of DuPont a handful of times, but he’d tell stories of his good judgment the way you might speak of a family war hero.

But we’ve got to have an enemy. Rock? Drugs? We’re so miserable, what’s the enemy? Got it. Pornography, that’s it. Yeeeeah, tremor through the room. Uh . . . the problem with pornography, basically, is this. No one knows what it is. Other than that, we’ve got a real good grasp on the situation. We know it’s bad, we just can’t figure out what the fuck it is. The Supreme Court says pornography is any act that has no artistic merit and causes sexual thoughts. That’s their definition. No artistic merit. Causes sexual thoughts. Hmmmmm. Sounds like almost every commercial on TV to me.

Aoyama was no stranger to auditions, having supervised a number of them for TV commercials and PR videos. Sitting in a studio, sizing up a row of fifteen or twenty swimsuit-clad hopefuls, he'd always found words like 'slave trade' and 'auction block' popping into his mind. Of course they weren't slaves, but there was no denying that the women lined up on that little platform, posing in their bikinis, were trying to sell themselves. Buying and selling was the basis of all social intercourse, and the commodity an actor or model offered for sale was nothing less than her own being.

American culture has regressed because of contemporary society’s glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous.

Rather than look back on childhood, I always looked sideways on childhood. If to look back is tinted with a honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with a sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend’s family or watched the parade of commercials and T.V. shows that made it clear what a child looked like and what kind of family they should grow up in. The scholar Kathyrn Bond Stockton writes, "The queer child grew up sideways, because queer life often defied the linear chronology of marriage and children". Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways since their youth is likewise outside the model of an enshrined white child. But for myself it is more accurate to say that i looked sideways at childhood… to look sideways has another connotation - giving side eyes telegraphs doubt, suspicion, and even contempt.

Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case. In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case. His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film. (...) In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock. That is what this book is all about.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need at least to investigate carefully our favourite sources of information – be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network or a person. In Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information – pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: ‘I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange, you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.’ Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: ‘You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has got many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think that the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.

we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.

At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx. Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching How My Child Died Violently. Min's my sister. Jade's our cousin. How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who's always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they've been sainted by pain. Today's show features a ten-year-old who killed a five-year-old for refusing to join his gang. The ten-year-old strangled the five-year-old with a jump rope, filled his mouth with baseball cards, then locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out until his parents agreed to take him to FunTimeZone, where he confessed, then dove screaming into a mesh cage full of plastic balls. The audience is shrieking threats at the parents of the killer while the parents of the victim urge restraint and forgiveness to such an extent that finally the audience starts shrieking threats at them too. Then it's a commercial.

But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, our language has be come so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, the the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials - the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can hear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can't influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.

I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don't know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us. But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, "Oh, I used to have such a crush on him." When she does this, our memory will be waiting. Yes, yes, yes. It is love that we feel here. This is the purpose of memory.

Since Liz’s adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations—picture frames, magnets, oven mitts—she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

Everything on television announced a new and better India for women. Her favorite Tamil soap opera was about an educated single girl who worked in an office. In her favorite commercials, a South Indian movie siren named Asin was recommending, along with Mirinda orange soda, more fun, a little wildness. This new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn’t a place Meena knew how to get to.

Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of garlic-flavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas.

If the early English and LA punk bands shared a common sound, the New York bands just shared the same clubs. As such, while the English scene never became known as the '100 Club' sound, CBGBs was the solitary common component in the New York bands' development, transcended once they had outgrown the need to play the club. Even their supposed musical heritage was not exactly common -- the Ramones preferring the Dolls/Stooges to Television's Velvets/Coltrane to Blondie's Stones/Brit-Rock. Though the scene had been built up as a single movement, when commercial implications began to sink in, the differences that separated the bands became far more important than the similarities which had previously bound them together. In the two years following the summer 1975 festival, CBGBs had become something of an ideological battleground, if not between the bands then between their critical proponents. The divisions between a dozen bands, all playing the same club, all suffering the same hardships, all sharing the same love of certain central bands in the history of rock & roll, should not have been that great. But the small scene very quickly partitioned into art-rockers and exponents of a pure let's-rock aesthetic.

Pathways toward a New Shabbat Do 1. Stay at home. Spend quality time with family and real friends. 2. Celebrate with others: at the table, in the synagogue, with friends or community. 3. Study or read something that will edify, challenge, or make you grow. 4. Be alone. Take some time for yourself. Check in with yourself. Review your week. Ask yourself where you are in your life. 5. Mark the beginning and end of this sacred time by lighting candles and making kiddush on Friday night and saying havdalah on Saturday night. Don’t 6. Don’t do anything you have to do for your work life. This includes obligatory reading, homework for kids (even without writing!), unwanted social obligations, and preparing for work as well as doing your job itself. 7. Don’t spend money. Separate completely from the commercial culture that surrounds us so much. This includes doing business of all sorts. No calls to the broker, no following up on ads, no paying of bills. It can all wait. 8. Don’t use the computer. Turn off the iPhone or smartphone or whatever device has replaced it by the time you read this. Live and breathe for a day without checking messages. Declare your freedom from this new master of our minds and our time. Find the time for face-to-face conversations with people around you, without Facebook. 9. Don’t travel. Avoid especially commercial travel and places like airports, hotel check-ins, and similar depersonalizing encounters. Stay free of situations in which people are likely to tell you to “have a nice day” (Shabbat already is a nice day, thank you). 10. Don’t rely on commercial or canned video entertainment, including the TV as well as the computer screen. Discover what there is to do in life when you are not being entertained.

From the earliest years we have been conditioned to believe that a benign fate would provide for us. After all, everybody seemed to agree that we had the great fortune of living in the richest country that ever was, in the most scientifically advanced period of human history, surrounded by the most efficient technology, protected by the wisest Constitution. Therefore, it made sense to expect that we would have a richer, more meaningful life than any earlier members of the human race. If our grandparents, living in that ridiculously primitive past, could be content, just imagine how happy we would be! Scientists told us this was so, it was preached from the pulpits of churches, and it was confirmed by thousands of TV commercials celebrating the good life. Yet despite all these assurances, sooner or later we wake up alone, sensing that there is no way this affluent, scientific, and sophisticated world is going to provide us with happiness.

I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television. It’s only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don’t want to see informed citizens making rational choices. The

Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I’m going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

I nowadays have the feeling that not only are most bookmen are eccentrics, but even the act they support--reading--is itself an eccentricity now, if a mild one. Interrupted narrative has become a natural thing. One could argue that Dickens and the other popular, serially published nineteenth-century novelists started this, and the television commercial made interruption come to seem normal. But the silicon chip has accelerated the process of interruption beyond all reckoning: iPods, Blackberries, laptops all break narrative into shorter and shorter sequences.

In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more… well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it.

An alarm clock wakes us up at 7 a.m., we heat our frozen bagel for exactly fifty seconds in the microwave, brush our teeth for three minutes until the electric toothbrush beeps, catch the 07:40 train to work, run on the treadmill at the gym until the beeper announces that half an hour is over, sit down in front of the TV at 7 p.m. to watch our favourite show, get interrupted at preordained moments by commercials that cost $1,000 per second, and eventually unload all our angst on a therapist who restricts our prattle to the now standard fifty-minute therapy hour.

Until I was ten, I had a very clear image of God; ravaged with age and draped in white scarves, God had the featureless guise of a highly respectable woman. Although She resembled a human being, She had more in common with the phantoms that populated my dreams: not at all like someone I might run into on the street. Because when She appeared before my eyes, She was upside down and turned slightly to one side. The phantoms of my imaginary world faded bashfully into the background as soon as I noticed them, but then so did She; after the sort of elegant rolling shot of the surrounding world that you see in some films and television commercials, Her image would sharpen and She would begin to ascend, fading as She rose to Her rightful place in the clouds. The folds of Her white head scarf were as sharp and elaborate as the ones I’d seen on statues and in the illustrations in history books, and they covered Her body entirely; I couldn’t even see Her arms or legs. Whenever this specter appeared before me, I felt a powerful, sublime, and exalted presence but surprisingly little fear. I don’t remember ever asking for Her help or guidance. I was only too aware that She was not interested in people like me: She cared only for the poor.

Without question, the Picturephones were diverting. In several obvious respects, the device was less a radical innovation than an elegant melding of the established technologies of television and telephone. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Picturephone actually solved a problem. Some Bell Labs engineers worried about this. As far back as the mid-1950s, John Pierce was exchanging memos with colleagues wondering about the utility of the new device: “The need for acceptability of such a service,” Pierce wrote of the Picturephone, “has not been adequately evaluated, and the [phones] themselves were not at the point at which they could be put into commercial use.

However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet "come from the same source," the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer a the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense--at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home's drinking water and raises an ancient fear--a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company's many fine products.

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

While I ate a peanut butter sandwich later, I switched on the news. A microphone was shoved in Hank's face and I blinked at him in shock. He was angry—extremely so—and not just with the reporter—I could tell by his words. "Yes, my assistant manager didn't show up for work last night. I called the police because John is always on time and never misses a shift. I am only discovering now, through you, that his body was found near the wharf an hour ago." "The police didn't call you?" The reporter—a young woman—feigned surprise. "No. I assume they notified John's family first. How did you learn of the murder?" "Through ah, well, the usual channels," she stuttered. I figured she'd gotten information through a source or listened in on police communications. "You probably shouldn't mess with Hank right now," I spoke to the television screen. Too bad the reporter couldn't hear me. "Are you involved in your assistant manager's disappearance?" Her question proved (to me, at least) that she had very little common sense. "My whereabouts have already been disclosed to the police, who are in charge of this investigation, no matter how much you'd prefer to believe otherwise," Hank growled. "Where were you when my assistant manager disappeared?" "What?" she squeaked. "I can account for my time last night. Can you?" I almost laughed as she turned a bright pink. Yes, I dropped my shield and read her. She'd been in bed with her (married) producer. The station quickly cut to commercial while I snickered.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Contrast that with the Budweiser beer “Wassup?” campaign. Two guys are talking on the phone while drinking Budweiser and watching a basketball game on television. A third friend arrives. He yells, “Wassup?” One of the first two guys yells “Wassup?” back. This kicks off an endless cycle of wassups between a growing number of Budweiser-drinking buddies. No, it wasn’t the cleverest of commercials. But it became a global phenomenon. And at least part of its success was due to triggers. Budweiser considered the context. “Wassup” was a popular greeting among young men at the time. Just greeting friends triggered thoughts of Budweiser in Budweiser’s prime demographic. The more the desired behavior happens after a delay, the more important being triggered becomes. Market research often focuses on consumers’ immediate

The History of Social Anxiety The fact that some people are shyer than others has been observed since ancient times. However, the medical community didn’t become interested in this condition until the 1970s, when Philip Zimbardo founded the Stanford Shyness Clinic. At the time, many professionals believed that shyness was a natural state that children eventually outgrew. Zimbardo showed that shyness actually is a widespread psychological problem that has deep and lasting effects on those who suffer from it. This new awareness led to a great deal of research into the causes and treatment of social anxiety. Today, the condition is in the spotlight. Ads in magazines and commercials on television tell about social anxiety and advertise medications to treat it. People are becoming more open about discussing when they feel anxious and feel less ashamed about asking for help. The time has never been better for you to try to overcome your social anxiety.

We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made. We have had to sacrifice the billions of small, detailed, multispectral experiences—emotional, physical, instinctive, sensual, intuitive and mental—that were appropriate and necessary for humans interacting with natural environments. Like the Micronesian islander in Chapter Four trapped between two modes of experience, we have found that functioning on an earlier multidimensional level has become not only useless but counterproductive. If we remained so attuned to the varieties of snowflakes that we could find fifty-six varieties as the Eskimo can; or to dreams so that we could find hundreds of distinct patterns as the Senoi Indians can; or to the minute altitude strata, inch by inch above the ground, occupied by entirely different species of flying insects as the California Indians once could; all this sensitivity would cripple any attempt to get along in the modern world. None of it would get us jobs, which gets us money, which in turn gets us food, housing, transportation, products, or entertainment, which are the fulfillments presently available in our new world. We have had to re-create ourselves to fit. We have had to reshape our very personalities to be competitive, aggressive, mentally fast, charming and manipulative. These qualities succeed in today’s world and offer survival and some measure of satisfaction within the cycle of work-consume, work-consume, work-consume. As for any dormant anxieties or unreconstructed internal wilderness, these may be smoothed over by compulsive working, compulsive eating, compulsive buying, compulsive sex, and then our brands of soma: alcohol, Librium, Valium, Thorazine, marijuana and television.

You know why angry protesters target stores and banks? You know why protesters in Seattle and New York shut down major roadways last night? Because white America does not care if a police officer murders a young man in broad daylight, but white America howls with outrage if you interfere with the lifeblood of commerce. It’s the only way to get a response out of the mainstream media, and it’s the only way to get the suburbs to even notice that something is wrong. (Notice the media in Seattle really only started paying serious attention when Macklemore, the most commercial artist this city has produced in a couple decades, showed up at the protests. Same idea.) When you’re hurt, you want someone to notice, to help. Experience tells protesters that candlelight vigils disappear into the void. Speeches go unheard. But if you break the windows of a convenience store? Those TV news vans will show up in a split-second, their enormous antennas flying high in the sky. People—powerful people, rich people—will pay attention.

Back in Russia, where they’re still getting acclimated to the whole capitalism thing, most TV advertising took a straightforward approach to persuasion. Thus, even though I don’t speak Russian, I had no trouble understanding Russian ads. They were all along the lines o: “Oh, no, there’s a stain on the tablecloth! What will Mom do? Thank goodness for this effective detergent!” Not so in Japan, where sophisticated consumers have grown bored with simple persuasion, forcing advertisers to get wildly inventive. Japanese TV ads have at this point evolved into an abstract mishmash of symbols and sounds. Your average thirty-second Japanese commercial is something like: Here’s a man holding a giraffe. Now the giraffe morphs into a rainbow. The rainbow is friends with a talking pencil, and they live together on a spaceship. A few seconds of laughter! A snippet of loud reggae music! Fad out. At least half the time, I have no idea what the product being advertised is or what it does. And yet I very much enjoy the ads. They’re like short-acting hallucinogens.

Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned...I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Wal-Mart. There is nothing I like more than to consign a mindless afternoon to those aisles, suspending thought, judgment. It’s like television. But to a documentarian of American culture, Wal-Mart is a nightmare. When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end, all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture: Ye Olde Curiosities ‘n’ Copie Shoppe, Deadeye Dick’s Saloon and Karaoke Bar—ingenious hybrids and strange global grafts that are the local businessperson’s only chance of survival in economies of scale.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

Owen stepped into the saddle and reached a hand down as he took his foot out of the stirrup, so Bay could mount behind him. Once she was settled, he said, “Hang on. And don’t be wiggling around. We can’t afford any more accidents.” Bay glowered at him. She clamped her hands on either side of his waist at his beltline, but his Colt .45 was holstered on one side, which kept her from getting a comfortable hold. She put her right hand above the gun, but that meant it was practically under his armpit. Then she moved it below the gun, but that put her hand low on hips close to his crotch. “Sonofabitch.” He grabbed her hands and pulled them around his midriff. “Now hang on.” Bay kept her breasts rigidly distanced from Owen’s back, but her nipples puckered anyway. It was that damned washboard of male abdominal muscle under her hands. The man could do commercials for those workout machines they advertised on TV. The horseflies were a surprise. Where had they come from? She let go with one hand and swatted at one that seemed determined to bite her on the nose. And knocked Owen’s hat askew. “That does it. Off.” “It wasn’t my fault,” Bay said. “I was getting bitten.” “Off.” He grabbed her arm and levered her out from behind him and onto the ground.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

Go away.” I stick my elbow in his ribs and force him to step back. “Sit on the couch and keep your hands to yourself,” I instruct, then follow him to the sofa and grab my Dating and Sex for Dummies books off the coffee table and shove them into my sock drawer while he laughs. “You’re making me miss my show,” I gripe as I toss things into the suitcase. “Your show? You sound like you’re eighty.” He glances at the TV behind me then back to me. “Murder on Mason Lane,” he says. “It was the neighbor. She was committing Medicare fraud using the victim’s deceased wife’s information. He caught on so she killed him.” I gasp. “You spoiler! You spoiling spoiler who spoils!” Then I shrug. “This is a new episode. You don’t even know that. It’s the daughter. She killed him. I’ve had her pegged since the first commercial break.” “You’re cute.” “Just you wait,” I tell him, very satisfied with myself. I’m really good at guessing whodunnit. “Sorry, you murder nerd, I worked on this case two years ago. It’s the neighbor.” “Really?” I drop my makeup bag into the suitcase and check to see if he’s teasing me. “I swear. I’ll tell you all the good shit the show left out once we’re on the plane.” I survey Boyd with interest. I do have a lot of questions. “I thought you were in cyber crimes, not murder.” “Murder isn’t a department,” he replies, shaking his head at me. “You know what I mean.” “Most crimes have a cyber component to them these days. There’s always a cyber trail.” Shit, that’s hot.

A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house 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. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact spot where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs thirty-five cents apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tuna, electrical appliances and CocaCola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products hadn’t existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable.

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

To the degree that advertising reaches us, occupying our time and thought, it keeps us vibrating within strict limits. If forty million people see a commercial for a car, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at that moment, all those people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all. Of course, advertising people will argue against the notion that the purpose and result of their activities is to unify and homogenize people and culture. They are forever speaking of the dazzling array of choices our market system provides and how advertising provides the information we need to make choices. It is an ominous sign that so many people can accept this argument, which confuses diversity of product choice with diversity of life-style or thoughts. It ought to be self-evident that if I choose a Ford and you choose a Volvo, we are not expressing diversity, we are expressing unity. Moreover, if you and I at any one moment are both occupied with mental images and feelings related to products—any products— rather than some experience which is not connected to purchasing, then in terms of the commodity system, the gross national product, and the world of advertising, we are indistinguishable; we have merged as “market.” While it might matter to Upjohn or Cutter Laboratories which drug a consumer buys, both are in agreement that they benefit whenever people seek any drug rather than a nondrug solution to a problem. Advertising, then, serves to further the movement of humans into artificial environments by narrowing the conception of diversity to fit the framework of commodities while unifying people within this conception. 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.

Once the process of accounting for every available square inch of terrain and every raw material has begun, it is necessary to convince people to want the converted products. On the environmental end of the equation, the goal is to turn raw materials in the ground, or the ground itself, into a commodity. On the personal end of the equation, the goal is to convert the uncharted internal human wilderness into a form that desires to accumulate the commodities. The conversion process within the human is directed at experience, feeling, perception, behavior and desire. These must be catalogued, defined and reshaped. The idea is to get both ends of the equation in synchrony, like standard-gauge railways. The human becomes the terminus of the conversion of plants, animals and minerals into objects. The conversion of natural into artificial, inherent in our economic system, takes place as much inside human feeling and experience as it does in the landscape. The more you smooth out the flow, the better the system functions and, in particular, the more the people who activate the processes benefit. In the end, the human, like the environment, is redesigned into a form that fits the needs of the commercial format. People who take more pleasure in talking with friends than in machines, commodities and spectacles are outrageous to the system. People joining with their neighbors to share housing or cars or appliances are less “productive” than those who live in isolation from each other, obtaining their very own of every object. Any collective act, from sharing washing machines to car-pooling to riding buses, is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units and private homes. Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience, from sexuality to breast feeding to cycles of mood, are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied, who seek vaginal sprays, chemical and artificial milk, drugs to smooth out emotional ups and downs, and commodities to substitute for experience.

Yossi Sarid, a leader of the left, wrote that I would soon discover that Israel is not America and that I would be a brief and passing phenomenon. Sarid made common cause with my opponents from Likud, explaining that I was “shallow,” a “sound-bite man,” “all show—no substance,” “soon to evaporate.”1 They relied on the overwhelming concentration of left-leaning journalists in Israel’s press, still largely unchanged today after thirty years, to drive this message home to the public. In Israel’s first decades, the country’s press was fairly balanced. Although the ruling Labor Party controlled the monopolistic state radio (it is said that Prime Minister Ben Gurion actually dictated news headlines), the three major dailies represented a broad spectrum of news and opinion from right to left. This began to change with the introduction of the single-channel state television in 1966. Television gradually overtook the newspapers as the main source of information and entertainment for the public. State TV was largely a closed shop dominated by the left. It was a main breeding ground for media personnel who would percolate into the two state-regulated commercial channels that were later launched. Legislation made it exceptionally difficult to introduce any additional broadcasters and effectively impossible to launch competing news channels. While it is common that the mainstream media is dominated by the left in most Western democracies, these countries also have alternative media, such as cable news and talk radio, that reach large segments of the population. Israel has none of that. Most Israelis get their news from just two left-leaning nightly news channels. This monopolistic stranglehold on information and opinion has only recently begun to loosen with the spread of social media that enables other voices to be heard. Though there have always been a sprinkling of right-leaning journalists, most of the newscasters, editors and program producers hail from the left. Especially since the historic election of 1977, when Likud elevated Begin to prime minister, the dominant media oligarchy has sought to maintain their power through legislative barriers to entry into television and radio. They see it as their mission to pull public opinion to the left.

So Dad was a tedious, well-connected workaholic. But the other thing you need to understand is that Mom was a living wet dream. A former Guess model and Miller Lite girl, she was tall, curvy and gorgeous. At thirty-eight, she had somehow managed to remain ageless and maintained her killer body. She’s five-foot-nine with never-ending legs, generous breasts and full hips that scoop dramatically into her slim waist. People who say Barbie’s proportions are unrealistic obviously never met my stepmother. Her face is pretty too, with long eyelashes, sculpted cheekbones and big, blue eyes that tease and smile at the same time. Her long brown hair rests on her shoulders in thick, tousled layers like in one of those Pantene Pro-V commercials. One memory seared in to my brain from my early teenage years is of Mom parading around the house one evening in nothing but her heels and underwear. I was sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV when a flurry of long limbs and blow-dried hair burst in front of the screen. “Teddy-bear. Do you know where Silvia left the dry cleaning? I’m running late for dinner with the Blackwells and I can’t find my red cocktail dress.” Mom stood before me in matching off-white, La Perla bra and panties and Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Some subtle gold hoop earrings hung from her ears and a tiny bit of mascara on her eye lashes highlighted her sparkling, blue eyes. Aside from the missing dress, she was otherwise ready to go. “I think she left them hanging on the chair next to the other sofa,” I said, trying my best not to gape at Mom’s perfect body. Mom trotted across the room, her heels tocking on the hard wood floor. I watched her slim, sexy back as she lifted the dry cleaning onto the sofa and then bent over to sort through the garments. My eyes followed her long mane of brown hair down to her heart-shaped ass. Her panties stretched tightly across each cheek as she bent further down. “Found it!” She cried, springing back upright, causing her 35Cs to bounce up and down from the sudden motion. They were thrusting proudly off her ribcage and bulging out over the fabric of the balconette bra like two titanic eggs. Her supple skin pushed out over the silk edges. And then she was gone as quickly as she had arrived, her long legs striding back down the hallway.

What is your name?” she said crossing her legs. “I am Raj Singhania, owner of Singhania group of Industries and I am on my way to sign a 1000 crore deal.” “Oh my God, Oh my God!” she said laughing and looked at Bobby from top to bottom. “What’s with this OMG thing and girls, stop saying that. I am not going to propose you anytime soon. But it’s OK. I can understand how girls feel when they meet famous dudes like me,” Bobby said smiling. “What kind of an idiot are you?” she said laughing. “Indeed, a very rare one. The one that you find after searching for millions of years,” Bobby said. “Do you always talk like this?” she said laughing. “Only to strangers on bus or whenever I get bored,” Bobby said. “OK, tell me your real name,” she said. “My name is Mogaliputta Tissa and I am here to save the world.” “Oh no not again!” she said squeezing her head with both her hands. “I know you are dying inside to kiss me,” Bobby said flashing a smile. “Why would I kiss you?” she said with a pretended sternness. “Because, you are impressed with my intelligence level and the hotness quotient, I can see that in your eyes.” “You think you are hot! Oh no! You look like that cartoon guy in 7 up commercial,” she said laughing. “Thank you. He was the coolest guy I saw on TV,” Bobby said. “OK fine, let’s calm down. Tell me your real name,” she said calmly. “I don’t remember my name,” Bobby said calmly. “What kind of idiot forgets his name?” she said staring into Bobby’s eyes. “I am suffering from multiple personality disorder and I forgot my present personality’s name. Can you help me out?” Bobby said with an innocent look on his face. “I will kill you with my hair clip. Leave me alone,” she said and closed her eyes. “You look like a Pomeranian puppy,” Bobby said looking at her hair. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “You look very beautiful,” Bobby said. “Nice try but I am not going to open my eyes,” she said. “Your ear rings are very nice. But I think that girl in the last seat has better rings,” Bobby said. “She is not wearing any ear rings. I know because I saw her when I was getting inside. It takes just 5 seconds for a girl to know what other girls around her are wearing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Hey, look. They are selling porn CDs at a roadside shop,” Bobby said. “I have loads of porn in my personal computer. I don’t need them,” she said. “OMG, that girl looks hotter than you,” Bobby said. “I will not open my eyes no matter what. Even if an earthquake hits the road, I will not open my eyes,” she said crossing her arms over her chest. Bobby turned back and waved his hand to the kid who was poking his mom’s ear. The kid came running and halted at Bobby’s seat. “This aunty wants to give you a chocolate if you tell her your name,” Bobby whispered to the kid and the kid perked up smiling. “Hello Aunty! Wake up, my name is Bintu. Give me my chocolate, Aunty, please!” the kid said yanking at the girl’s hand. All of a sudden, she opened her eyes and glared at the kid. “Don’t call me aunty. What would everyone think? I am a teenage girl. Go away. I don’t have anything to give you,” she said and the kid went back to his seat. “This is what happens when you mess with an intelligent person like me,” Bobby said laughing. “Shut up,” she said. “OK dude.” “I am not a dude. Stop it.” “OK sexy. Oops! OK Saxena,” “I will scream.” “OK. Where do you study?” “Why should I tell you?” “Are you suffering from split personality disorder like me?” Bobby said staring into her eyes. “Shut up. Don’t talk to me,” she said with a pout. “What the hell! I have enlightened your mind with my thoughts, told you my name and now you are acting like you don’t know me. Girls are mad.