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  1. americanpurpose.comAdam Garfinkle2/1/2121 min
    12 reads3 comments
    9.4
    americanpurpose.com
    12 reads
    9.4
    You must read the article before you can comment on it.
    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      1 year ago

      An absolute 10! Extremely well written and engaging. “We may have constructed the scaffolding of our own gullibility.” “Trump’s was the reality-TV presidency from the very start, but it was the presidency that never could have happened had not the culture already been deranged for the purpose.” The paragraph pertaining to Rudy Giuliani is priceless. This is an important article to digest but will certainly give you heartburn!

    • bill
      Top reader of all time
      3 years ago

      So intense!

      This is loud, exuberant writing. And dense. Lots of hard-hitting proof that, yes, life now is, in fact, surreal.

      We see more, and more rapid, scene cuts per minute in commercials than in regular programming because, although they cost marginally more to make, viewers who are made more alert during commercials through the multiplication of scene shifts are more likely to remember and hence to buy the product. So advertisers judge the added expense to be cost-effective. We may think ourselves immune to consumerist sirens, but, statistically at least, we are easily influenced moist robots.

      Many people in advanced-wired technological environments now experience more mediated images than real ones. Data on the average waking hours that Americans spend sitting in front of screens are shocking and still rising. On college campuses, very large percentages of students are neurobiologically addicted to their phones, thereby shaping their brains in ways that appear to be busily undoing the “revolution in the brain”-circuitry created by generations of their deep-literate forebears.

    • jeff3 years ago

      Spectacular article!

      I'm not as pessimistic as the author. I still think we can handle the post-truth, but the analysis is spot on and filled with many interesting observations.

      Since so much of the human environment is man-made by dint, for example, of technological endeavor, we witness a kind of loop of self-actualization driving human history. As Erving Goffman put it in 1974 in Frame Analysis, “Society takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it.”

      Love thinking about cultural loops.