4 days ago
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?
