The great Noam Chomsky stopped just one rung shy of perfection with his equally great book, Manufacturing Consent,about how commercial media work as extensions of government and corporate power to manufacture the consent of the masses. Likewise, Matt Taibbi's title, Hate, Inc. is a near-perfect indictment of cable and digital news revenue models that manufacture and prioritize enmity and division to the exclusion of the common good.
Both works fall just one rung shy of perfection, however, not because they aren't impressive examples of applied critical thought and insight, but because neither consent nor hate are the primary products of commercial media. Rather, they are toxic byproducts of a commercial mass media whose primary product is addiction.
"The effect of mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction." - Christopher Lasch
In the early 21st century, we turned the corner from a society in which addiction was the exception to the rule to a society in which addiction became the rule. By 2004, still some years before social media, the smartphone and streaming media secured their reputations as history's most perfect narcotics, the average American - according to the Ball State University Middletown Media Studies report (the first large-scale observational study of American media consumption habits) " was already consuming more than eleven hours of media each and every day.
Concurrently, TV Everywhere, the commercial imperative behind the trillion-dollar campaigns for high-speed bandwidth and streaming HDTV, was ordained as the latest media industry mantra " part of an all-hands-on-deck digital blitzkrieg to normalize late-stage addiction.
Since then, hundreds of studies, articles, books and documentaries (like The Social Dilemma) have confirmed what anyone with a smartphone, social media account or a teenager already knows or suspects: we are a nation of media addicts " by design. We are, per Stanford addiction expert Dr. Anna Lembke, a Dopamine Nation. The scientific jury is in: smartphones, streaming HDTV and social media are now " by far " the primary narcotics of choice in what I call the Great Age of Addiction.
"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."- Carl Jung
What Carl Jung failed to mention at the time was the practical reason why all addictions are bad: because all addictions " regardless of the narcotics " are manifestations of behavioral excess. As such, they all steal our time and money and freedom - none more ruthlessly or efficiently than our default meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital.
Needless to say, we didn't just suddenly wake up one morning to discover that we had become a society of media addicts overnight. We became a society of media addicts the same way we became a society of institutions too big to fail. What happened to us (more precisely, what was done to us), happened over decades. Like too big to fail it happened not as an unintended consequence of a failure to plan, or the unfortunate fallout from a lousy plan. Like too big to fail, default addiction is the plan.
"The model of ownership, in a society built round mass consumption, is addiction." - Christopher Lasch
Per Marshall McLuhan's seminal observation more than half a century ago, the medium is the message. But what happens to the message when the medium is addiction? In the Great Age of Addiction, our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital is the meta-medium, and the meta-medium always delivers the same meta-message. In the Great Age of Addiction, the meta-message is always a binge-worthy call to action: Eat all you want, we'll make more. Everything else, like the manufacture of consent and hate, follows"
Of course, commercial mass media's essential job in a culture of mass consumption is to promote and protect the narrow interests of the ruling elite who now own the corporate media, the technomedia cartel and just about everything else. As such, the manufacture of consent in the 21st century borrows a page right out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - the story of a dystopian society controlled by state-mandated addiction"
In Huxley's vision, the manufacture of individual consent assumes the individual is already an addict from birth. Logically, the manufacture of mass consent requires the manufacture of mass addiction, a process much accelerated in the early 21st century by the tools of hyper-personalized digital scale "- tools deployed en masse for the past generation by both the technomedia cartel and the post-9/11 surveillance state in a corporatist (fascist) union of private and government interests.
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