Entertaining ourselves to death

/* There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. */

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance" // http://www.celinecondorelli.eu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v2.pdf

/* We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? */

-- Ray Bradbury

/* Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever in a threat to the world. */

-- Chuck Palahniuk

/* From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. */

-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"

/* We will arrive at a moment of sufficient self-alienation where we can contemplate our own destruction [as a species] as in a static spectacle. */

-- Walter Benjamin

/* As we acclimate to a ubiquitous matrix of lies, words mean less and less to us, and we don't believe anything any more. As well we shouldn't! We are facing a crisis of language that underlies and mirrors all the other converging crises of the modern age. Just as a growing profusion of material and social technology has failed to bring about the promised Utopia of leisure, health, and justice, so also has the profusion of words and media failed to bring about better communication. Instead, the opposite has happened. */

[..]

/* Choices arise from perceptions, perceptions arise from interpretations or stories, and stories are build of words. Today, words have lost their power and our society's stories have seemingly taken on a life of their own, propelling us toward an end that no sane person would choose and that we seem helpless to resist. */

-- Charles Eisenstein, // https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-lies/