Smart Shit 2: “Both stupid and spectacular”

Much of my energies are devoted to drawing out unintended consequences on human being of practices that inhabit everyday life.  “Normalcy isn’t.”  One of these practices is advertising.  Everyone claims to hate it, but everybody seems to accept it as a necessary evil associated with large, consumer-driven economies.  Starting the moment a child is born to the day that child dies, institutions compete for their attention.  These range from family to Nike.  This is not without consequences on human being, one of which is this: your attention is treated as if it were not your own.  In effect, children are every bit as much “a product” as the products themselves with which they are incessantly encouraged to identify.  Human subjectivity is treated–one child at a time–as if each were a “New World” ripe for commercial colonization.  The flagship of this colonization is “advertising,” and the “ocean” upon which it sails is “modern technologies.”  This commercial and corporate-driven conquest of a human being’s interior space has been normalized to such a degree that you can now pay to keep the colonizers out.  It’s pretty hard not to liken this practice to some form of “protection racket” in which, “If you want us to leave you alone, you have to pay us.”  Why not, as an alternative, create a separate internet exclusively devoted to advertising?  That way, if a consumer wants something, they can go there and examine offers for goods and services at their own discretion; all in one convenient place, much like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages.  As for “free content” on a “free internet,” well–much like dfugly.org–share it if you think it’s important.  That was what the internet was billed to be in the beginning anyway.

In this installment of “Smart Shit,” John Oliver focuses on one small episode in the history of territorialization of human subjectivity: Snack foods and video games.