This video is only a tiny bit more absurd than the current moral outrage over "screens". At the center of both beliefs in "brainwashing" is the idea that multimedia on screens is somehow special like drugs are special in bypassing human senses and acting on the functions of the brain directly. Conflating the two can lead to treating humans like they don't have volition and need to be controlled. Or protected from that control by force.
But they're just screens. Brainwashing doesn't exist. I look forwards to the people of the future laughing at us in our contemporary forms of "Screen Addiction '25". I hope it has as nice of musical score as '72 does. I enjoyed it up to the smoking/cancer/surgery gore stuff started.
Literacy rates have been declining in lock-step with the increase in social media usage. We are now at the point that 54% of Americans read below the sixth grade level. 1 in 5 are functionally illiterate. Those numbers will be worse next year, and probably in every subsequent year.
The average person now spends more than 4 hours per day looking at their phone, but only about 60% know that social media companies make their money via advertising. Around 48% know what a privacy policy is.
These massively uninformed, heavily manipulated citizens make up the majority of voters now and democracy may die because of it. Worse, anti-science madness in the form of anti-elitism and populist zero-sum economic lunacy have begun to prevail above reason.
Screens may still spell the end of personal liberty and an abrupt end to the forward march of human progress. It's just taken a bit longer than parents predicated when they tried to ban Beavis and Butthead.
I don't know that most people think that phone addiction is akin to brainwashing. Rather, endless scrolling robs people of time to pursue potentially more noble or productive pursuits, and tends to shorten attention spans.
It's like a 2D version of Brainstorm https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_ZtqsFP1Uc
Good news: I am not smoking.
This video is only a tiny bit more absurd than the current moral outrage over "screens". At the center of both beliefs in "brainwashing" is the idea that multimedia on screens is somehow special like drugs are special in bypassing human senses and acting on the functions of the brain directly. Conflating the two can lead to treating humans like they don't have volition and need to be controlled. Or protected from that control by force.
But they're just screens. Brainwashing doesn't exist. I look forwards to the people of the future laughing at us in our contemporary forms of "Screen Addiction '25". I hope it has as nice of musical score as '72 does. I enjoyed it up to the smoking/cancer/surgery gore stuff started.
Literacy rates have been declining in lock-step with the increase in social media usage. We are now at the point that 54% of Americans read below the sixth grade level. 1 in 5 are functionally illiterate. Those numbers will be worse next year, and probably in every subsequent year.
The average person now spends more than 4 hours per day looking at their phone, but only about 60% know that social media companies make their money via advertising. Around 48% know what a privacy policy is.
These massively uninformed, heavily manipulated citizens make up the majority of voters now and democracy may die because of it. Worse, anti-science madness in the form of anti-elitism and populist zero-sum economic lunacy have begun to prevail above reason.
Screens may still spell the end of personal liberty and an abrupt end to the forward march of human progress. It's just taken a bit longer than parents predicated when they tried to ban Beavis and Butthead.
I don't know that most people think that phone addiction is akin to brainwashing. Rather, endless scrolling robs people of time to pursue potentially more noble or productive pursuits, and tends to shorten attention spans.