Monthly Undermining Task, January 2010: The Great TV Turn-Off
“Out-of-Home impact plus the power of television to a captive audience. Reach 5.8 million monthly Atlantans, commanding attention during the entire ride.”
You don’t really notice it, but it’s there, filling your subconscious with a thousand different messages; broadcasting its commercial dominance to an entrapped population. Television is the primary method by which civilized humans are manipulated into carrying out the instructions of the industrial machine; this is no Orwellian fantasy, it is now and it is real, and don’t you feel pissed off that you can’t go anywhere without having your eyes and ears assaulted by this garbage?
The Unsuitablog’s Monthly Undermining Task was instigated in order to remove greenwashing from the world, but because television propagates so much more than just the greenwashing messages of the industrial world, taking down the commercial public television network also removes all sorts of other insidious messages: promises of material fulfillment; political spin; embedded journalism; commercially sponsored “education”. By switching off a television you do nothing less than give people back their ability to think for themselves.
So, are you up for it?
From today, throughout 2010, I would like you to switch off televisions and other electrical hoardings whenever you get the chance. As I explained in the opening article, the risk you take is up to you; you can do this in an almost risk-free environment, or you can take a few chances and do something more permanent. Risk is relative, of course, and the first time you do something like this it always feels a bit dangerous – as though someone is about to walk up behind you and say, “Excuse me, what do you think you are doing?” before escorting you away from the premises.
Not that it really matters if you are asked to leave; but in all my time switching sets off I have never once been escorted away or even caught. The point is: no one expects anyone to switch these damn things off!
Low Risk
You see these everywhere now: plasma or LCD screens littering the walls and ceilings of shops, pubs, railway stations, libraries, schools. So insidious yet so fragile. With a wave of the hand you can switch these off. I’m going to recommend a product to do this; if you don’t want to buy it then you will need to take a little more risk (see later).
TV-B-GONE is the product you need; it is available in kit or ready-made form. The link for the ready-made versions is below:
https://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_buy.tvbg.php
Check it works, attach it to a keyring or just hold it in your hand, and when you see a television that is in a public or commercial place – keeping the LED pointed at the screen – just press the button. It’ll take a while to get used to the order in which televisions are switched off, but in general the most popular models (like Sony, Toshiba and Samsung) go first.
I had great fun sitting on a bench outside a Sony Store, eating a sandwich, while switching off all the televisions within range; I have walked past shops with huge screens inside and knocked them out much to the incredulity of the staff; and I even walked around a music store, “shooting” the TVs off which were situated above the salepeoples’ heads. Great fun and, as I say, I have never been suspected: who would dream of switching televisions off?
Medium Risk
The next level of risk is essentially doing the same as for the Low Risk, but without the remote. Obviously there are fewer opportunities to do this, you being limited to what you can physically reach, but there are a few reasons why this might be a better option: first, you don’t have a remote control; second, the display is a computer monitor or other custom display that doesn’t respond to remote controls (these are often in small stores or office-type areas); third, you might want to just make a point of switching the screen off, as described by a correspondant:
My dentist recently instituted an *enormous* widescreen telly in their previously very lovely Georgian house conversion waiting room. It had some trashy Hollywood comedy playing on it when my partner and I were there last year. In fact, it had finished so it got stuck in the irritating sound loop that DVDs go into when they are in their menu screen.
Anyway, later on, we were both back in the waiting room while our xrays and so forth were being attended to, and there was one other middle-aged woman there too reading a magazine and sitting where she couldn’t see the screen. So I switched the TV off. A while later someone who worked there stormed in and switched it back on. I explained that we’d switched it off because noone wanted to watch it and was told off.
The reason for the telling off, I suspect, was not because anything had been damaged, but because the employee of the dentist had the idea in her head that THE TV MUST STAY ON! Why? Because it must. That’s it. Talk about brain death!
You might simply just say to the people in the room: “Is it ok if I turn the TV off?” Chances are no one will object, even if they were blankly staring at the screen. While we’re on the subject of reaction, the thing I have noticed most is that when an “ambient” (a.k.a. subconsciously brainwashing) television goes off, people don’t react at all; if anything they simply switch back into communication mode, and get on with their lives.
See, you are freeing people up. Well done!
High Risk
Now we’re getting into voluntary territory: if you want to take the high risk options then you need to follow the basic rules of Sabotage, as explained in this article:
- Carefully weigh up all the pros and cons, and then ask yourself, “Do the benefits far outweigh the costs?” Only act if the answer is “Yes”.
- Plan ahead, and plan well, accounting for every possible eventuality.
- Even if you value the worth of your actions, don’t get caught.
For legal reasons, I have to write that I don’t condone any breaking of the law nor anything that could potentially harm a living being.
Now, in the case of the displays that you can’t switch off remotely or by pressing a button, more drastic action has to be taken. You really have two options that are practical.
In the case of units that are immobile, like in the image above, it’s not generally practical to simply obscure the picture, so you will need to find the power source. I’m not going to go into any details, and it is highly inadvisable to mess around with breakers and wires if you don’t know precisely what you are doing; nevertheless, if there is a plug socket or obvious rocker switch connected to the unit, then you could just disconnect it. Whether you go further is up to you; but if you can disable a very large display, such as those in major railway stations, then you are a bit of a hero in my eyes.
For display units on public transport, like the really creepy one in the image above, you will need to be more up-front. Don’t mess around with the power unless there is a switch on the back – you won’t find the source anyway because it has to be hidden well away – I would suggest covering the screen up, perhaps using a professional “Out Of Order” sign or something like this one:
(click for large version)
If you have a high visibility jacket or smart suit then you can probably get away without anyone saying anything. You may raise a smile from some of the people who didn’t even realised their eyes were glued to the set. You might even give someone the motivation to do something similar themselves.
And speaking of which; make sure you pass this article to your own networks, Facebook friends, Twitter feeds and put it on your blogs – here’s the link:
I have a funny feeling we will be seeing fewer usable televisions in 2010…
[Originally published on The Unsuitablog]
Year In Review 2008
So in what is now the third (previous 06 and 07) year we have come to the 2008 year in review. Every year around this time I like to review the year, and make prediction in my crystal ball about the future.
So lets look back to last year and what I predicted. (this is the part where the picture goes wavy and the “going back in time” music plays).
My predictions were:
- Look for 2008 to be the year that world governments start to pass serious carbon laws. Look for cap and trade, carbon taxation, and global treaties dealing with emissions reduction.
- A Democrat will win the presidency.
- Feedback loops and continued warming will make 2008 the worst year for arctic and antarctic melting on record.
- Continued droughts and water shortages will bring dramatic lifestyle changes to people in the south west and south east.
- At least one major car company will produce an electric or plug-in hybrid model.
- Look for oil to top 120 dollars a barrel at least once in 2008.
- 2008 will be the year of the green consumer, look for a flood of eco-friendly products and services to take over the market. The second part of this prediction is that we will see massive greenwashing campaigns by companies hoping to cash in on this trend without really doing much in the way of making their products greener.
- I am going to once again predict that renewable energy will explode in 2008, look for 30-50% growth in the solar and wind industry world wide.
- Cape Wind will be approved and perhaps even start construction in 2008.
So how did I do?
1. I am sad to say but I got this one pretty wrong. The world government’s saw the economy fall apart and basically threw climate change under the bus. There is however some hope that these sort of carbon reduction treaties will get passed once the biggest road block to them (the stupid American president and his short sighted administration) are out of office.
2. Got this one 100% right! Hurray for my mad predictive skillz!
3. Sadly I got this one right as well. The arctic and antarctic got hammered this year. With dire predictions for the year to come. (see here here here here and here)
4. Sadly this turned out to be true as well this year, as the strange climate changed the south east and southwest of America suffered some serious drought this year. Luckily near the end of this year they got a little rain, but not nearly enough to make up for the severe lack. This is what global warming looks like. (see here and here)
5. Well for all the talk of the Chevy Volt, and the “new” Prius, I got this one pretty wrong. There was a couple of electric cars made this year, but they didn’t get rolled out the way I had hopped. I am going to go with 30% right on this one…which is another way of saying I got it wrong.
6. Ohh man when I predicted that oil would top $120 in 2007 I though that I was talking crazy…Little did I know it would eventually almost hit $150! The resulting global freak out that ensued was, how to put it mildly, not good. This lead to a massive reduction in miles driven, a huge resurgence in biking, and overall a lot more talk about renewable energy, that is until the economy fell apart, the world oil market crashed and the price of oil dropped like a stone. All of this in the long run indicated we are in a post peak oil scenario that will be characterized by massive volatility and a nightmare for long term planners. (see here here here here and here)
7. Green products, and green washing were the rage in 2008. I would say humbly that I got this one so right it hurts. You can hardly throw a rock now without hitting some locally grown, bamboo, free trade, shade grown, solar powered, carbon neutral, BPA free, biodegradable this or that. No one has chronicled the rise of green washing better than Keith over at The Unsitablog.
8. The renewable energy industry didn’t let me down this year. They once again had amazing growth in the ranges I specified. Hurray for renewable energy. The sad fact is however the Oil companies also had bumper years making more profit in a single year than any companies in all of HUMAN HISTORY. (see here here, here, and here)
9. Oh Cape Wind, how silly is your story. I was so close to getting this right. The Minerals Management people, the ones in charge of giving the thumbs up to Cape Wind, nearly did so this year. But then a bunch of dumb ass NIMBY politicians (I am pointing the finger at you Ted Kennedy!) decided the view from their beach front mansion was more important than fighting global warming.
So there you have it, 6 out of 9, not really that bad. I should start charging for this service.
So what are my predictions for next year?
1. Cape Wind will get approved. Seriously 2009 is the year. They are so damn close I can taste it.
2. The horrible economy will affect the growth of the renewable energy market. Look for a slowdown in wind and solar.
3. The price of oil will rocket right back up in the summer of 09, look for it to once again top $150 dollars a barrel.
4. The pace of global warming will began to accelerate as feedback loops intensify. The arctic will be ice free this summer, or damn close. The northwest passage should once again open next summer.
5. Obama will (hopefully) make renewable energy and efficiency infrastructure projects a major component of his stimulus package.
6. Troops will start to come home from Iraq in large numbers before the end of 2009.
7. The financial turmoil will continue leading to millions of people loosing their jobs, massive downturns in global production, deaths, famines, and increased problems world wide. I predict 2009 to be a very not happy year for a large number of people.
8. Look for major legal action to be taken against prominent Bush administration people. If we are really lucky, Bush or Cheney might even be included in the mess.
9. Look for major breakthroughs in efficiency technology when it comes to lighting and solar panels. Specifically solar panels that produce energy cheaper than coal, oil, or wind. Look for LED technology to slowly start replacing CFL technology.
10. I build my first bicycle.
So there you have it, my hat is in the future prediction arena. I hope all you have a wonderful 08 and that 09 is even better for you. Sadly a lot of my predictions for the future are bad ones. Take good care of your family and friends, and just between you and me, start planning to revamp your life to get ready for some hard times. I am not suggesting you go live in a bunker, but you know, get your financial house in order, start using less energy, ride your bike, get ready for some lean times.
We are all going to have to live on a smaller scale in 09 (and the foreseeable future). This is not a bad thing! Humanity has been living outside it’s means for a long time, and faster we switch over to a 0% growth system the happier and healthier we will all be.
Happy new year everyone!
A Very Important Video
This man sums up in a simple and inescapable way exactly what is wrong with our economy (it assumes continued growth for ever) and our usage of non-renewable resources.
Watch it till at least the 3rd video it will really open your eyes.
simple math…it’s time to make a change people.
Eden Lost
- Please note that some of the links in this article will take you to my personal Blog over at www.samadhisoft.com.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
Eden Lost is the phrase I use to refer to all that we are on the brink of losing as the Perfect Storm of problems in our future approaches.
We seldom realize it, but we are living in something very similar to the Garden of Eden referred to in the Bible. An environment that we are perfectly adapted to. An environment which is both extremely rare and extremely precious in the endless vacuum and hard radiation of space. And an environment which, like the Biblical Garden of Eden, once forfeited, will never be returned to us again as it was.
Our world is filled with plants and animals born of four billion years of evolution and woven into incomprehensibly beautiful and complex patterns of interdependency. The elephants, the glaciers, the rain forests and the reefs with their long beaches of white sand. The annual migrations and the nests built with such care, the new cubs at play in their first year, the green mountains covered with ancient and dark conifers and the frogs that sing life’s song of longing to us from the ponds of our springs and summers.
It is a palette of life, this world – our birthplace. It is filled with millions of overlaid brush stokes and each of these is a chain tens of thousands of generations long that we call a species. And, in this small place, safe from the pitiless and vast nothingness beyond our sky, a vibrant and magical complexity has been building and feeding into itself for eons – self-replicating – driven and warmed by the bounty of the sun’s glow and spilling forth ever more beautiful forms keen of eye and glorious of leaf – a small and fragile garden in a universe of desert.
Sit outside on a warm day with a soft breeze blowing and the leaves singing. Before you, a small child, or a puppy or a kitten playing in the grass feeling the joy of life welling new and ask yourself what it is all worth – this natural world of ours.
If you have the freedom and ease to be able to do these things and feel what I’m talking about, then you are still among the lucky ones in this world. Many, even as the sun blesses our thoughts, cry for water and for food. Cry from disease and cold, from fouled water and repressive governments and brutality. The world is becoming a narrow and hard place. A world of haves and have nots, of wealth and poverty, of lives of beautiful indulgences and of grinding misery.
Some would say there have always been rich and poor and there’s always been disease and misery. Yes, but in recent centuries, things were getting better. Despots were giving way to governments for their people, Health care and sanitation were reaching further each year into the lives of the marginalized. Education was more freely available. Mankind was on a steady ascension towards the light of a fair and equitable world.
But, all of this, the summer sun, the joy of nature’s bounty and the steady rise towards social enlightenment are all now sliding towards an unimaginable edge beyond which they will simply be memories of what once was and what once could have been.
A world changing storm is gathering. As E. O. Wilson, the biologist, says, humanity is approaching a bottleneck in history. And unless we manifest an unprecedented exhibition of intentional transcendence and move beyond blindly acting out our Biological Imperatives, we and our dreams of better lives and the biological world, as we know it, will not survive the passage.
So, what are these coming changes which threaten to destroy our Eden? You can find them discussed here under the permanent topic, The Perfect Storm.
I’ll discuss some of the consequences, below.
Global Warming will induce Global Climate Changes and, in most places, temperatures will rise. As temperatures rise, species will want to move to pursue their optimum climates. Some birds and animals will succeed but many plants will fail and large scale extinctions will result.
The web of life is interdependent and as species disappear, it will have a domino effect on the viability of other species and critical food chains may well be broken causing the damage to spread exponentially.
As the world warms, global weather events will become more severe. The ice covering Greenland and the Antarctic continent will speed their melting and ocean levels will rise. Mountain snow packs will decrease and the current melting of the world’s glaciers will accelerate. Low-lying coastal areas will be inundated and millions and millions of environmental refugees will result and major urban areas will be destroyed at huge economic costs to the countries involved and these impacts will radiate back into the global economic matrix negatively.
Mankind has already expanded to fill the world nearly to its limits. Fresh water supplies are becoming critical in many places and aquifers are falling rapidly towards depletion in several of the world’s critical food growing regions such as the central US and northern China. Man’s ability to grow sufficient food for our populations is nearing a limit and demise of a critical aquifer or the cessation of summer runoff from winter snow packs due to global warming, will lower our ability to produce sufficient food far below what is required and mass social unrest will follow in the areas affected. Current problems with deforestation, erosion, desertification, ocean dead-zones and failing fisheries will continue to accelerate these problems.
Meanwhile, first-world consumption will continue and increase as it always has increasing the pressure on water, food and oil supplies. As we begin to move into peak-oil territory, the cost of oil products will begin a slow but inexorable rise and thousands of ‘downstream’ oil-dependent products will also rise in cost and scarcity as well. Especially significant here will be the cost of fertilizers which directly relate to our ability to grow food at prices people in poorer nations can afford.
As the water, food, economic and social pressures rise, marginal governments will fall into chaos such as currently exists in Somalia. These stresses will be met by ever more militant forms of fundamentalism as people struggle to understand what’s wrong with their world and adopt ever more decisive and simplistic explanations and responses. Increased fundamentalism will increase the marginalization of women and their rights and as women lose their human, economic and reproductive self-determination rights, the inevitable result will be increasing birthrates in areas with the worse problems which will, in turn, further drive radical fundamentalism.
By the time that things are so bad that our greenhouse gas emissions have dropped to reasonable levels as a result of the destruction of our civilization’s infrastructures, Global Warming will be well on its way into uncharted territories, huge numbers of species will be extinct, much of the world will be subject to anarchy and chaos and billions will have died.
This is just one story of how Eden may be lost. There are many possible stories depending on the order in which the coming problems manifest themselves.
The bottom line behind all of these stories is, however, that we, mankind, cannot simply continue as we are going:
- forever expanding our populations
- forever increasing our usage of the earth’s resources both renewable and non-renewable
- forever pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere
- forever inventing and disbursing new chemicals into the biosphere with little idea of their consequence
- forever allowing the gap between rich and poor to build into greater despair and fundamentalism
- forever ignoring our deep and utter dependence on the natural world from which we sprang
But, beneath all of these things lies the deep driver behind all of them; our inborn Biological Imperatives. Hardwired into the very fabric of our biological beings, these imperatives inform and drive our actions just as they inform and drive the actions of every biological form which has evolved on this earth over the last four billion years.
The deep urge to live, to propagate our genes forward in time, to create a space within which our progeny can grow to reproductive age safely so that they may continue the chain unbroken.
It’s a strategy which had its roots very near the beginning of evolution with the first self-replicating entities. These early forms underwent natural selection in which those that tended to pursue such imperatives survived and those that did not, died. And thus, the imperatives were conserved and enshrined at the center of our motivations as our deepest and most fundamental drives and have existed as a behavioral cornerstone ever since in all biological forms.
As a strategy, it has always served biological forms well up until evolution tried a new experiment with generalized intelligence and a species evolved which was so much more powerful than those which had gone before that it was able to effectively free itself of all of the checks and balances of the natural world and expand unopposed.
And that brings us to now, because we are that species and our acting out our Biological Imperatives unopposed has brought ourselves and the biosphere around us to the edge of ruin.
Other than continuing forward onto ruin, there is only one pathway open to us and its difficulty is immense. We must, as a species, and as individuals, intentionally transcend our Biological Imperatives and adopt a new conscious imperative if we wish to survive.
We must choose to get into a steady-state balance with the biosphere. We must lower and control our population and our resource needs to the point where we can exist here indefinitely without exceeding the ability of the resources we are using to replenish themselves.
If we can do this, we can exist here indefinitely on this planet while allowing the natural world around us to continue evolving unimpaired. If, instead of constantly striving to grow and expand, we turn our attentions to improving our lives and our comforts within a constant foot print on this planet, we can continue to advance materially and in wisdom and we will give ourselves the time and space to ask, “What the purpose is of biological forms such as ourselves after they’ve survived the bottleneck of their adolescent coming out?”
Change – The Only Constant
A friend’s family is going through some big changes. And when she and I talked about it the other day, she was feeling mixed about it all. She was wanting , on one hand, to embrace the changes and she was mourning a bit, perhaps, on the other hand, for the things they were going to leave behind.
I told her that I don’t think change can be avoided. In fact, when we try to avoid change, change will end up stalking us.
All life, all existence, is change. And existing behind the changes are patterns we call cycles. We assimilate and then we act. We design and then we build. We save and then we spend. We learn a way of life and then we transcend it. We are born, we live and we die.
If we are here for anything, we are here to experience, learn and grow. As life happens to us, we are offered choices. We can choose to try to hang onto what we have and to consolidate our gains but sooner or later, the cycle will turn and we will be called upon to strike out again and grow and learn and accumulate more experience. Those who resist are denying that change is a deep law of existence and they will come into conflict with it inevitably. Those who listen to the gentle urgings calling them out to transcendence are honoring how existence works. Those who try to stand still in the river of time, will feel the gathering press of the rising river of change.
Look around. You will see the evidence of this everywhere. People trying to hang on to their youth while time moves past them. People trying to hang onto their job, just as it is, while the corporation and its requirements evolve around them. People of a conservative bent, trying to keep their lives and their societies just as they were in an earlier day – and over the long run losing the battle as the historical dialectic unavoidably derives the present from the past and the future from the present.
See the middle-aged men who, when they were younger in their twenties, dominated the young women they were with because those ingénues were still trying to work out their places and their roles in a male dominated culture deeply infused with the iconic deceptions of the suggestive sexual role advertising blitz we all live under. Now older, these women have found their feet and their centers and they know much better who they are and what’s important. The balance of power between the sexes shifts as we age and the macho men who thrived on compliant women now find themselves playing to an unappreciative audience. A deep reevaluation or a fall into the bottle are often the only two choices faced by men who’ve never developed the art of introspection and a willingness to change and grow.
Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?
You been out ridin’ fences for so long now.
Oh you’re a hard one, I know that you got your reasons,
These things that are pleasin’ you can hurt you somehow.Don’t you draw the queen of diamonds, boy,
she’ll beat you if she’s able,
you know the queen of hearts is always your best bet.
Now it seems to me some fine things
have been laid upon your table
but you only want the ones that you can’t get.Desperado, oh you ain’t gettin’ no younger,
Your pain and your hunger they’re drivin’ you home.
And freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’,
Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.Don’t your feet get cold in the wintertime?
The sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine,
it’s hard to tell the night time from the day.
You’re losin’ all your highs and lows,
ain’t it funny how the feelin’ goes away?- Desperado by The Eagles
I remember my mother and the sad habits she fell into towards the end of her life. Rather than embracing life and walking into it as one might walk into a warm caressing wind, she decided to draw lines in the shifting sand and then fought to hold them. She was an alcoholic and her life settled into a repeating cycle. When she’d just emerged from a binge and she was gathering up the pieces, she would decide that if everything in her house was as neat as a pin, if she had the right job, if her finances were organized just so and if the place she lived in was quiet so that the neighbors didn’t stress her, then everything would be alright. She would fight to make it all just as she wanted it – and she would achieve it.
But, always, something was missing. Politics would arise at work, the apartment, which was so quiet when she moved in, would seem to get noisier the longer she stayed. The finances she worked out so nicely would be upset when her car needed a repair. In short, the perfect world she tried to create always faltered against the chaos of reality. Today’s quiet apartment, which was so much better than the last place she’d lived, would slowly become the new status quo – and the noise levels would ’seem’ to increase. And the only answer was to move to a quieter place again – but the problem would repeat. Further and further she painted herself into corners of her own making – resisting and denying and refusing to accept life and existence as it was and trying to make it fit her plan. And then one day, she’d have a drink, slip over the edge, lose her job, blow her finances, make her neighbors crazy, and a week later call me to come over and save her from the spiders on the wall. She’d be deep into delirium tremens and I’d spend hours assuring her she was sane and that it would all pass. Then, we would begin again.
Change is good. It’s what’s on the menu here. Enjoy what you have and remember that it all may, and probably will, change at some point. Your children grow, the face you look at in the mirror ages, the people you are competing with get smarter, everyone dies. It’s the plan, it’s the way and we can grok and embrace it and make the very best of it and ride the waves of change to maximize our growth and experience before we’re called away – or we can resist the impossible and waste the time that’s given to us.
- for Katy -
RSS XML Feed
