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Neil Postman's ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death' at 40: Truer than ever
Neil Postman's ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death' at 40: Truer than ever

Washington Post

time6 days ago

  • Politics
  • Washington Post

Neil Postman's ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death' at 40: Truer than ever

Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, from which this op-ed was adapted. It's now almost a reflex: An election is held, and someone pushes the big, red Death of Democracy panic button. When Donald Trump won in 2016, liberals saw a gold-plated Adolf Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Joe Biden took over and conservatives warned of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, an America where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch. (They're panicking again with Zohran Mamdani in New York's mayoral race.) Now, we have Trump redux. The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as a looming catastrophe. Neil Postman would know better. 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. 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.' Postman was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but overentertained. He saw 'that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.' Postman was, in fact, observing his own obsolescence. In the near future, books and literacy, serious social criticism, maybe even democracy itself, would become afterthoughts in a world mediated through screens, because those mediums turned everything into triviality. 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. 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. Trump is perfect for this Postmanian moment. He's 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. Although he has authoritarian tendencies, he's ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations to be an effective dictator. If he were to transform into one, many people might be unaware — not because of a censorship clampdown but because they'd be too distracted by other push notifications. 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. 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. Meanwhile, there's a more profound crisis that nobody's marching about: the collapse of faith in anything — not in leaders, not in institutions and barely any faith in friends, family or community. It's the self-flattering effect of our me-first libertarian ideals and the user-centric technology that surrounds us. In America, there are no kings but no subjects, either. We are each kings unto ourselves. To Postman, this transformation had everything to do with media theory. In the 1960s, theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared, 'The medium is the message,' arguing that the dominant form of media of each era alters human perception and social organization. Postman agreed, but with a twist: He thought a better formulation would be 'the medium is the metaphor.' In other words, each dominant medium supplies the underlying metaphors by which a society understands reality. As such, the printing press changed how people thought and democratized knowledge. A print-first culture, the argument goes, created the apex of human civilization, producing citizens capable of participating in rational-critical debate — because the medium itself encourages habits of logic, nuance and focus. Television, by contrast, is a visual medium governed by the logic of spectacle and attention for its own sake. It prioritizes immediacy, novelty and emotional impact. It flattens complexity into sensation. In Postman's view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn't just reshape entertainment, it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and sound bites. The result was a shift in epistemology: A society once anchored in reasoned argument had become entirely unserious and stuck in an all-consuming present tense. Four decades on, Postman's cultural diagnosis feels not just accurate but almost restrained. Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image but the scroll — and the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends. Each social media platform brings with it a new grammar of cognition. The written word still defines X, but in a way that favors brevity and snark. TikTok rewards emotion and mimicry. Instagram curates identity through visual branding. YouTube teaches us to talk quickly and passionately, and AI interfaces such as ChatGPT threaten to flatten language into plausible-sounding filler that imitates thought without demanding it. In Postman's time, one could still imagine a crisis of democracy rooted in shared spectacles — a Walter Cronkite broadcast, a presidential debate, a televised trial. Today, there is no common stage. The media environment is hyper-personalized and designed to flatter every user with the illusion of centrality. This is what Postman warned about when he lamented the loss of 'the epistemology' of the 'typographic mind' — a culture where ideas could be built, revised, tested and transmitted in a coherent, cumulative way. What we have now is a hallucinated collective monologue, where everyone talks and no one listens. But maybe not forever. Unlike in Postman's time, there are signs that a counterrevolution is brewing. Curiously, it is Gen Z — the first generation raised entirely under the internet's Eye of Sauron — that now appears most divided over it. Among them, two distinct tribes are forming. The first are the true children of the algorithm: grown-up iPad kids whose earliest memories involve the 'black mirror' of screens and who now, as young adults, continue to live mediated lives. Their social life is dominated by apps, with their identities shaped by filters, likes and short-form video confessionals. They date less, drink less, drive less and often prefer the cocoon of home to the messy intimacy of in-person relationships. They are also, not coincidentally, the loneliest cohort in modern American history. Their daily lives are saturated with stimuli but starved of substance. Unlike their millennial predecessors, whose optimism was eventually battered into nihilism, many of these young people seem to have skipped straight to resignation. And yet, within the same generational cohort, a surprising rebellion is emerging. A second group of Gen Z, equally fluent in the mechanics of digital life, is choosing to abstain from it — deleting social media, abandoning optimization and seeking instead the solidity of old things. They knit. They golf. They go to church. They lift heavy weights and read heavy books. They abandoned dating apps and swapped TikTok for running or pickleball clubs. Part of it feels like aesthetic irony or a nostalgic affectation, yes, but there are hints of a scattered and half-formed countercultural movement. In New York, members of a high school Luddite Club are now in college and are attracting converts to tech-free living. On TikTok, paradoxically, videos under the #Deinfluencing tag go viral by encouraging people to stop buying things. Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and other faiths strong on ritual are seeing quiet revivals, especially among young men. The average age of the liturgy-heavy church I attend is mid-to-late 20s, and a group of friendly Gen Zers in my neighborhood successfully persuaded me to join an old-style, in-person social club. Some of these tech refugees cite a yearning for moral clarity or traditional values; others cite a desire for structure, beauty and meaning, all of which are notably absent online. Even the secular version of this backlash appears in odd places: in the preference for physical media, the resurgence of film cameras, the rise of 'quiet luxury' over hyper-branding, and the revival of slow, analog hobbies once left for dead. Call it post-irony or post-digital asceticism, but the impulse is the same. This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few encouraging signs in a culture otherwise largely anesthetized by its tools. 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. 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. Post Opinions wants to know: How do you feel about your relationship to screens? If you changed your habits, how did you do it?

Glen Powell Hits His Stride In Edgar Wright's 'The Running Man' Trailer
Glen Powell Hits His Stride In Edgar Wright's 'The Running Man' Trailer

Geek Culture

time02-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Geek Culture

Glen Powell Hits His Stride In Edgar Wright's 'The Running Man' Trailer

Glen Powell is running for his life in the debut trailer for Edgar Wright's The Running Man , a film that already looks to have more fidelity to the 1982 Stephen King novel than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger-led adaptation. The Running Man takes place in a near-future dystopian society, where The Running Man is a top-rated game show in which contestants, called Runners, have to survive 30 days while being hunted by professional hitmen to earn a cash reward. An unemployed Ben Richards (Glen Powell, Hit Man ), blacklisted from employment and desperately in need of money for his daughter's treatment, is enticed by the show's producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, Avengers: Endgame ), to participate in the show. As the entire nation watches his every move and his life is threatened every step of the way, Richards desperately attempts to survive long enough for a shot at the enormous cash prize that awaits. The fast-paced and electrifying trailer reflects the same kinetic signature style that Wright exhibited in 2010's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and 2017's Baby Driver, and audiences can likely look forward to him bringing the same rhythm to The Running Man . Glen Powell also displays a combination of grit, guts and manic defiant energy in a series of scenes that only add to the dynamism of the trailer. The trailer also features Colman Domingo ( Euphoria ) as game show host, Bobby Thompson, Lee Pace ( The Battle of the Five Armies ) as lead Hunter Evan McCone, and Michael Cera ( Superbad ), reported by Entertainment Weekly to be playing Elton Parrakis, a shy but inventive man who aids Richards. Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987) In a blink-and-you-will-miss-it shot, Wright's The Running Man trailer manages to pay homage to the original Schwarzenegger classic, featuring a young Schwarzenegger on a stack of 100-dollar American banknotes. Despite that, this iteration of The Running Man bears little resemblance to its 1987 namesake. In The Running Man (1987), Schwarzenegger plays Captain Ben Richards, a framed and incarcerated cop recruited by the game show The Running Man, where criminals earn their freedom by surviving as Runners against Stalkers who would hunt them down. Whether you enjoyed the 1987 iteration or prefer something more faithful to the source material, like Wright's new adaptation has been promised to be, The Running Man (2025) is set to draw both new and returning fans when it hits the ground running in theatres on 7 November 2025. Conversation with Ting Wei is like chatting with a weird AI bot programmed only with One Piece lore and theories, sitcom quotes and other miscellaneous pop culture references. When he's not sleeping, he's highly likely reading manga. In fact, the only thing he reads more than manga is the Bible, and it's honestly pretty close. Arnold Schwarzenegger edgar wright Glen Powell Stephen King The Running Man

Drummer Chris Adler Opens Up on What Led to Firing from Lamb of God
Drummer Chris Adler Opens Up on What Led to Firing from Lamb of God

Yahoo

time08-05-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Yahoo

Drummer Chris Adler Opens Up on What Led to Firing from Lamb of God

The post Drummer Chris Adler Opens Up on What Led to Firing from Lamb of God appeared first on Consequence. Chris Adler is considered one of the premier drummers of modern metal, so his firing from Lamb of God in 2019 came as a surprise to longtime fans. Six years later, Adler has finally opened up about what led to his ousting from the band that he co-founded in 1994. In the year leading up to his ouster, Adler had been sitting out shows after a motorcycle accident that shattered his collarbone and right shoulder. Art Cruz was called in to fill in on Lamb of God's tour dates, and eventually was named Lamb of God's permanent drummer upon Adler's firing from the band in July 2019. As it turns out, Adler was suffering from a condition musician's dystonia, which hampered his ability to play drums, even before the motorcycle accident. Around that same time, he had also joined Megadeth for their Grammy-winning 2016 album Dystopia, a few years after he had contributed to Protest the Hero's 2013 LP 'Volition.' The drummer feels that his limited physical ability and the collaborations with other bands led to tension between him and his bandmates, noting in the new interview with Loaded Radio that he was unceremoniously fired by e-mail. 'Dystonia is basically a neurological condition where the nerve that controls the movement of any particular body part basically deteriorates to the point where that motion becomes impossible,' explained Adler (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). 'So people that repeat the same repetitive motion for decades at a time, this happens to them. It happens a lot to golfers, quarterbacks, first-chair violinists, people that just practice the hell out of what they're doing. And this happened to me with my right foot. So I would be playing a song, and my foot, when I intended it to depress the pedal, would shoot off to the side or shoot back. And that was at the point where I was coming off stage just so depressed with my performance.' He continued, 'I think the band was very frustrated with my performance. I did give them the medical paperwork: 'Here's what it is. Here's what we can do. There's just a couple songs that are really aggravating this. The rest I can get through, if you're willing to change 'em.' I think at the time I had also joined Megadeth, so tensions were really high. And we were never like the most functional group of people traveling around the world, if you know anything about the band. So, whoever was not in the room was basically getting picked on.' Adler further noted, 'I think the combination of things got to the point where they didn't wanna deal with it and I wasn't happy with my performances, so that kind of stopped the train. It was one of those e-mails, 'service is no longer required' kind of thing, and that was devastating, 'cause I felt like it was my baby, it was my project and I put my life into it.' After a couple years of intense physical therapy, Adler was back playing the drums again, and he has since formed the band Firstborne with guitarist Myrone and vocalist Girish. The band will release its debut album, Lucky, on July 18th (pre-order here). See Chris Adler's full interview with Loaded Radio and watch the video for Firstborne's recent single 'Wake Up' below. Popular Posts Beyoncé Hit with Cease and Desist Letter Over Video of Her Picking Up Sphere Ghost Become First Hard Rock Act to Go No. 1 on Billboard in Four Years Lady Gaga Plays Biggest Show of Career for 2 Million People at Copacabana Beach Stephen King's The Long Walk Movie Gets Long-Awaited Trailer: Watch The Rehearsal's Latest Episode Had Us Literally Screaming at the Screen Trump Signs Executive Order to End Federal Funding of NPR, PBS Subscribe to Consequence's email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.

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