200 Channels and Nothing But Cats
Words: Bernard S. Hobson
Art: Bernard S. Hobson
Have you ever just gone through Netflix, unable to find anything to watch?
Paralysed as you find yourself, yet again scrolling as entertainment, rather than for entertainment?
I’m not attacking you, it’s okay. We’ve all been there.
But why? Why not simply pick something out?
What is this?
In the days before streaming, one would simply pick a channel on their television and just suck it up.
Why can’t we just suck it up?
If I scroll Netflix, I willingly and knowingly pass up many things I will happily watch and enjoy.
With so much choice, why can’t we find what we’re looking for?
Why do we keep getting trapped, doom-scrolling to oblivion?
Well. If you’re reading this magazine, I’m assuming you’ve probably heard of Sigmund Freud.
Now again, that’s not meant to be an attack, just simply an assumption.
People don’t like Freud much, he tries to get personal without getting pally, he gets pooey without getting consent, topping the cup up with accusations of incest that nobody wants at the best of times. Frankly he makes us uncomfortable- understandably so. But much like faeces- he is very real, and at some point or other, we have to talk about him.
So, you might ask, what does pooey-old Siggy Freud have to do with why you can’t find anything to watch on Netflix anymore?
It’s a little thing I like to call, “how the Twentieth Century ruined the world”.
If you’re anything like me, you grew up in a country without ever setting foot in it. A make-believe, fantasy world, called America.
America was invented in the 20th century by a man named Edward Bernays. Who, much like Siggy and his half full/half empty glass of poo, he was also very real; and its well about time we talked about him too.
Bernays invented America from a very real place. He invented it from the place we all know and understand geographically as America- turning all the tangible, touchable, rational reality of the thing into something different. Something else. Something obtuse and impractical and not wholly real. But still made up of real things. A place that sits on the tip of your tongue and shadows your memories with songs you just can’t get out of your head. He did all this because it was decided, people were too practical, sensible and god-fearing. Bernays needed them to be frivolous, stupid and misinformed- which is almost the same as god-fearing, but shot with a wider lens.
This was because two world wars had given America the manufacturing capabilities of most of the rest of the planet. And it was decided these capabilities wouldn’t go to waste. So let it be damned if you had enough shirts or shoes, because Ol’ Eddie was about to convince you it was never enough. And he was right, you know. Because here we are now, having this little talk.
What do you call a garage? Moe Syzlak calls it a ‘car-hole’ and many people did put cars in them. That was until Eddie B. convinced the world to take the car out and fill their car-holes with stupid shit they never use. How’d he do this?
He got us to say, “just in case.”
And we did.
I mean, fuck man… I still have the box for my whipper snipper in my car-hole.
“Just in case.”
Edward Bernays did all this by reading his Uncle’s book. His Uncle was Sigmund Freud. Bernays found that between all the poo and incest, Freud had found something, something that was always there, hidden deep within humanity.
What Freud had found was that there were deep underlying fears and anxieties that lay beneath everyday people. He found that many of these fears and anxieties governed the societies these very people created. And Bernays knew just what to do with them.
Bernays was going to unleash them, letting them loose upon a world that was deeply conservative. Bernays let loose the idea that behind the sensible, practical, god-fearing veneer was a deeply flawed, troubled and anxious thing.
This he backed up with the incredible news that his Uncle, the famous psychoanalyst from Austria had discovered that every god-fearing, son of a gun was in fact a poo obsessed little child just inches from living out some dirty, dirty Greek myth. That we were all inches from such a precipice was a difficult thing to swallow… take that how you will.
Needless to say, it all caused quite a stir. And a lot of Americans bought Freud’s book.
Freud was furious about this.
He maintained that there was more to all this malarky than simple old-fashioned family poo and incest. But Bernay’s, the magician had worked his magic. And still to this day, bringing up Freud in polite conversation is often answered with smirks and knowing looks. He’s permanently been labelled ‘the poo and incest guy’. So, people avoid talking about him, you know…
“Just in case.”
See, to Bernays, he was just using the power of the book, the lessons that it taught him. Outrage, he found could be harnessed in incredible displays of mass-manipulation. It was through this mass manipulation that he would erode the emerging spirit of the individuals that was blossoming in America.
The individual was a Twentieth Century invention. It was in the beginning of this century that Communism was firmly on the world stage. Revolution had shaken the world up and as the working classes of Europe were melted in the fires of places like Tannenberg and the Somme, they stirred and looked to the East. To the promises of a utopia Communism offered, a new-horizon free from the oppression, madness and slaughter that had driven them into these fires. And while they looked East with hope, management was fucking terrified. Terrified with stories of royalty executed, manors stripped and fortunes sucked up by the angry, iron, grubby hands of the masses.
Because while the utopian dream of Communism told one story, the works that made that dream real where machines built on corpses- though how many corpses is apparently a matter of hot debate. There was no pretty way it seemed, of looking at revolution. And if anybody had doubted that before, then Nazi Germany’s revolution was the confirmation the world needed. For in the end, it became the camps and ovens, not the poo and incest that made the world rightly shudder.
Fear was driving something. But not simply a fear that the old order was going to be replaced by Communists of all things. An idea that is practically absurd today. But a fear of change, a fear that change had to happen, but that it couldn’t be allowed to happen as it did in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Because it might reproduce the same horrors as it did before- the camps and ovens had us all afraid. Just as the poo and incest did before.
So, we put all our dreams away and we forgot about them.
“Just in case.”
Lessons hard learned and two world wars can do strange things to the lads upstairs. And management made concessions. Workers rights, welfare states, we got a bloody good deal all round… at least, our parents did- assuming they were white. But apart from creating a worker’s paradise, they did something to ensure that the workers wouldn’t get too political again. And with counterculture around the corner, they would begin the process to eliminate the need for politics at all.
You know, “just in case.”
Isaiah Berlin was a Russian immigrant to Britian, who at the age of 6, witnessed firsthand the revolution on the streets of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). His family, wealthy timber merchants fled the chaos and revolution for the safety of Britain, where Isaiah went to Oxford and eventually, after the second world war published many lectures on the subject of liberty.
Berlin suggested that there were in fact two sides to liberty. Positive and Negative.
Positive Liberty was the idea that people were ultimately responsible for their actions and that given enough power would try to shape the world for the better through actions such as direct democracy or revolution. However, it was more likely that, rather than shaping the world for the better, the freedom such revolutions and direct action brought- which he had witnessed firsthand, often gave birth to terrible acts of violence and cruelty.
Negative Liberty was the idea that people were ultimately too irresponsible for their actions and that they had to be given the illusion of power. Negative liberty kept real freedom and power contained in small manageable state structures such as governments and ruling classes. A veneer, to satisfy and distract the people, whilst still giving them some semblance and token actions that have some value as freedom.
Berlin was sure to point out that both had dangers as well as advantages. And seemed to suggest some amount of haggling was ideal for a healthy society. ‘The freedom of the Pike, means death to the Minnow’, or to use more American language, ‘the freedom of the Shark means death to the Seal.’ So how do you create a world without politics?
You make the individual.
The individual was a panicked reaction to the horrors of revolution. As counterculture swept across the Western World, whether they realised it not, grim memories of burning manors and camps and ovens lit a mute fire under the men upstairs.
A deal was made. The deal was, you needn’t worry about anything anymore, except for yourself.
You can’t change the world.
You can’t stop the violence.
You can’t change anything.
But you can change yourself.
Bernays you see, had already created individuals. He alienated people from common sense- shared imagination, and preyed on their insecurities, creating artificial needs. The whole process used to be called propaganda, however two world wars had kind of darkened that word’s image. So, he called it “Public Relations.” In 1922 Walter Lippman wrote about this in his book, ‘Public Opinion’, in which he laid out the process, referring to it as “Manufacturing Consent”. Even going as far to suggest it as an essential piece of modern democracy.
Lippmann went on to refer to a “Specialised Class” emerging to deal with the complex unseen variables that the elites stumble over. They would collect and analyse data, presenting their conclusions to the society’s decision makers, or ruling classes. Who, in their turn, use the “art of persuasion” to inform the public about the decisions and circumstances affecting them.
This “Specialised Class”, he is referring to has become the hidden elite of the world.
Technocrats.
Indefinable, middle-class specialists who rule the world through weight of numbers. The lads upstairs. The Manager’s floor. The Experts and Technocrats. And now, thanks to them, everything that came before, would come together at last.
Public Relations used Negative Liberty to recreate the needs, hopes and dreams of an international, make-believe nation and chop them up into an endless parade of pointless, meaningless problems. And to fix these problems, an endless production of pointless, meaningless products began filling every home. A kind of vague, oppressive and indefinable, global paradigm.
The tool of this in the beginning was television. But now it is far more sophisticated. Because not only are we still buying the meaningless products, but as we have moved online, so have they. Targeting us at every second of every minute of every day. Turning us, as consumers, kind of paradoxically into meaningless products. The entire online network that we connect ourselves to not only tracks and records everything we do, but it actively manipulates and influences us. Hardly a news flash, I know, but bear with me.
Just like Bernays did with Freud’s book, websites began using ‘high-arousal’ content to trigger strong emotional outrage and anger among users. This in effect left users in a subtle, but vulnerable state. Vulnerable people, as Bernays proved time and time again, were more likely to make irrational decisions such as buying stupid shit to fill their car-hole. Outraged people, would be more likely to interact with a website’s content, outraging more people. The whole thing takes a life of it’s own, spiralling and maximising exposure and contact to that website’s advertisements.
While you may argue this is simply a more sophisticated variation of so called ‘tabloid journalism’ or ‘Clickbait’ as I guess it is now. It’s important to understand its effects. These things mine us for every last, lost, fleeting anxiety. Endlessly shattering us with fears, doubts and insecurities, bombarding us with targeted triggers. All the while, constantly inventing new ones to keep us in perpetual shock and awe.
It is draining.
It is exhausting.
It is everywhere.
It is endless.
And then, to cope with it we’re given entertainment, just like with television, as a break from the ads.
But just like television, it exists for this advertising, for this high-arousal content.
Prying on these very same insecurities, anxieties and fears it is supposed to be a break from!
The entire process is exhausting.
Everything put in a screen exists to suck the life out of you and you want to know why you keep scrolling?
You’re trying to get away.
You want to go somewhere else. It’s a normal, rational and perfectly reasonable reaction to something that is harming you. You want to leave but the screen won’t let you. You can’t find anything to watch because you need to be doing something else. But your very existence is trapped in this loop of ‘high-arousal’ content.
Our perception has been so skewed that we are trapped in our bedrooms and living rooms, turned into fodder, ground into feed for the endless farms of neural nets and algorithms…
Maybe The Matrix wasn’t too far off, eh?
A deal became…
You can’t change the world.
You can’t stop the violence.
You can’t change anything.
And now you can’t even change yourself.
They say the greatest power of Capitalism is that we can’t imagine another world without it- that isn’t destroyed. I don’t know if that’s exactly true. But I know that other world exists, even if I can’t imagine it yet.
So how do we imagine it? How does change begin? Without Bernays, Isaiah and without Freud and the rest of it. We have to begin undoing these things. At first on our own and alone, which we all are already, and hold on until you find someone or something…
As Margaret Atwood said once…
“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum”
We’d be taking the good and the bad, whatever comes forth and surrendering ourselves to it. Surrendering to the violence, camps, ovens, poo or incest and whatever else comes forth. But just like when that powerful dream of the future swept up Russia in revolution over a hundred years ago, amongst all the horror and violence, there was so much beauty too. There was emancipation, dignity and freedom. The same high-arousal emotions that turn us into prey now, once swept up and shook the world.
The art alone, born from that time, fundamentally redefined image as we understood it. It broke down and rebuilt the world a thousand times without a single bullet or bomb. Reflecting it back at us, the strangest mirror that ever was, was ‘how the Twentieth Century ruined the world’. Where the greatest wonders and darkest horrors of a million dreams and nightmares that each new world bore, grew silently on canvas and paper. Yet never made it back to the minds that made them real again.
Change is scary, because you have to give up what you have. You have to clean out your car-hole, chop up and take that damn, useless, whipper-snipper box to the recycling.
It forces you to ask yourself:
“Do I really want to possibly lose everything and see great change, or do I just want the lads upstairs to be a bit more useful and nicer to me?”
Because when we say revolution, do we really mean it, or do we actually just want a little change?
It’s hard you know, because the reality is that we could lose a lot. It’s corny, but it is true that change is what you make it to be. Theres a quote from an old revolutionary, Regis Debray, on Latin American revolution that has stuck with me:
“The forcible awakening was as terrible as the dreams were beautiful.”
Would I rather live, dreaming of a better world, than die building an ugly one? And if I lose pieces of myself in the process, what should I care? That was the person I was made into anyway. The world can have it back, it’s their thoughts and I’ll replace them with my own. It’s all words here, anyway. Nice, safe, risk-free words.
And they say:
I think I’ll stop scrolling the past, today.
And think about what I’d like tomorrow, to be.
Dreaming a dream, of something I can grow.
You know, “just in case.”
Just in case it actually comes true, you know?
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