In Memory of the Remote Control

Is the television remote control, or the “zappa ''as it was often called in my house the greatest invention of all time? Probably not. But it is more culturally significant than most people acknowledge. Let me explain.

The remote control, allowed people to change the television channels they were watching without disturbing their zazen. Now obviously people could change television channels as much as they pleased before the invention of the remote control. Doing so required more effort though. One may argue that while it was slightly more effort to change the channel without a remote it required so little extra effort to be meaningless. How lazy can people be after all? But that's the wrong question. We should not ask ourselves how lazy people can be, but how lazy people can be while they are in a hypnotic state.

People pretty much watch television for the same reason they do heroin. To check out. To relieve themselves of the burden of consciousness.

Watching television sends our nervous system into low alpha wave patterns similar to if we just ingested narcotics. In this state, our nervous system can take in information but can not concentrate on anything. Apparently, we are deficient in this brain wave pattern and will waste our lives ingesting chemical and electronic drugs to get our fix. Regardless of how we get that fix,

it makes no sense to get up to change the channel as we are not capable of paying attention to anything anyway. We are just bathing in radiation and distraction.

What the remote control did was make it possible to change the channel without disturbing our electronically induced stupor. This changed the default way people watched television. One could now mindlessly scan through the roster of channels without disturbing their high. A generation of people became "channel surfers". By changing the default way people partook in this one habit our culture was drastically altered.

From the 50s well into the early 00s television was the way most people received information about the world. It provided role models on whom we based social norms. It directed our ambitions. It highlighted the stuff we needed to know about. It's impossible to fully comprehend how much television shaped this period in culture. Even those who reigned over the airways really had no way of fully understanding the extent of their power.

Television stations each have their own flavor. Nothing too noticeable, but each channel did have their demographics they were perpetually courting. There would be subtle differences in these groups, that these giant companies had the means and reasons to exploit. P{eople would naturally mirror back these curated differences. This meant if one person received most of their information from one channel they would be a bit off when talking to someone else who received most of their information from another. Of course, people would still be able to communicate with each other, but there it would be a bit less smooth.

The remote control rectified this situation. Once the default normal became to scan all the channels, people were ejected people from these subtle echo chambers. I believe this is the reason why people fondly look back at the 80s and 90s as a time of social harmony. It was the era of the remote control. While we all became ADD we also were able to talk to people with different worldviews. This seems more than a fair trade.

No one watches Television anymore. Now our worldview is shaped by the internet. The differences in narratives are no longer subtle. We no longer just have different ways of expressing more or less the same ideas. We no longer share foundation ideas as to the nature of reality. For instance, is America the best country ever or the worst, without which the world would be a utopia? What's the shape of the earth? Are we headed for famine and war, or climate change? It’s weird that we don’t have a near-universal consensus on such issues since they do seem like they have obvious answers.

We once again live in pre-remote control times. It is no longer default to surf between narratives. Everyone is in algorithmic bondage. This is despite it never being easier to acquire information of any persuasion. Instead, we see people who subscribe to different narratives as we do as are being controlled. All the same time it becomes increasingly more difficult to see how we are influenced by our narratives.

The power of these narratives is so pronounced that people are starting to assign a supernatural mystic to the force that shapes these narratives. Some people choose to see these forces as demonic entities trying to enslave humanity. Others see them as tricker-type entities that are trying to force humanity to expand its consciousness. Others still see it as an emergent force of nature no different than the gravity that forms around planets. While this last one isn't supernatural it likewise removes the agency of people creating them.

However, we describe this phenomenon though we have to figure out a way to deal with it. And the best way to do that is to explore each of these differing realities. Some will argue against this saying we need to stick to one tradition. They will point to the mess of post-modernism that purees all our information into baby food. But there is a huge gap between the latest strain of academic madness and falling into the fundamentalism of believing our perspectives are the only true perspective that is perfect in its present form. That we can't learn from other narratives. That there are no mistakes in our narratives.

Not trying to find a way to surf between narratives also ignores the time we live in. For most of human history, people lived confined within whatever narratives they were raised in. They did not do this out of a need to stay pure. They did this

because they did not have access to information that was outside their own culture. They didn't have a remote control that magically changed what information they had access to. By denying this newfound ability we are denying the era we are living in. We are free of course to not use technology that makes such information easily available. We are not, however free to live in a world other than the one that such technology influences.

In such a time it makes no sense to be merely, Republican, Democrat, Christian, Atheist, Buddhist, Rationalist, Mystic, Anarchist, Monarchist, Communist, or whatever. We once again are burdened and blessed to be individuals who use the wisdom and ignorance of these traditions. But we can surf between this reality no differently than we can change the channel on a television.

In many ways, the remote control was misnamed. It did not control anything remotely. It gave us a choice we could hold it in our hands. What is being done now through algorithms is remote control though. Narratives get forced fed to us from god knows where. Social engineers work hard to make sure we stay trapped in our section of the inter(net). Once again we need a tool of some kind to make something we are already capable of doing so easy that we actually will do it.