An opinion article in the Washington Post admitted that society is “choking on screens” and being poisoned by entertainment, but lays blame on President Donald Trump for being part of the problem.
“Neil Postman would know better,” Ryan Zickgraf, a columnist for UnHerd, whose op-ed was adapted for the Post, wrote in the recent piece entitled, “The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold.”
The piece highlights the 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” by Neil Postman, which talks about the consequences Postman saw when politics and the media became entertainment.
“Forty years ago, the cultural critic wrote ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death,’ a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of algorithm-driven political hysteria,” Zickgraf wrote.
“Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn’t trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World,’’ Zickgraf said. “Postman was right. Democracy was in danger of being not overthrown but overentertained.”
The columnist for UnHerd argued that social media and the like have become what Huxley referred to in his book as the fictional, recreational drug “soma,” or the “opiate of the masses,” which takes the place of things like alcohol and religion.
“If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our version of Huxley’s addictive Soma drug comes in the virtual variety: TikTok’s infinite scroll, cryptocurrency speculation and content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state,” Zickgraf wrote. “Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage or reward. Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but we killed God and began worshiping the murder weapon instead.”
But Zickgraf laid a sizeable amount of blame on Trump, calling him “a one-person digital diversion who doesn’t even try to conceal anything: He haphazardly posts to social media war threats and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory.”
The 47th president, however, according to Zickgraf, doesn’t fully have what it takes to be an “effective dictator” because “he’s ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations.”
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If Trump were to decide to become a dictator, Zickgraf speculated, people might not even notice because they would be too distracted by their phones.
“To be fair, there’s plenty of dissent in the streets, but it’s the paper-thin kind that’s designed to be shareable online,” Zickgraf said. “These protests don’t hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The great majority of Jan. 6 protesters weren’t trying to stage a coup: Once they breached the U.S. Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in ‘No Kings’ marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else.”
Zickgraf says that a sign of hope that he sees are some members of Gen Z who are choosing to “abstain” from the media deluge.
He even highlights that some, especially young men, are choosing faiths like Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity for their “ritual.”
“This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few encouraging signs in a culture otherwise largely anesthetized by its tools,” he wrote.
“Unlike the millennial generation — which largely absorbed technology as destiny, first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments — these Gen Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They’re walking away from it,” Zickgraf added. “That’s why the ‘No Kings’ rallies often look like the world’s largest retiree convention. This new group’s politics, to the extent that it has any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it might lie with them. We can only hope.”