Kill Your TV read the sticker my mother had affixed to the bumper of our Volvo station wagon. It was the early 1990s in the Bay Area, before Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates awkwardly danced on stage to celebrate the launch of Windows 95, before anyone had ever heard of something called the Y Combinator (which sounds like a rare genetic disorder). I was growing up in the tech industry’s fertile crescent, where the asphalt of Highways 101 and 280 stood in for the Nile and Euphrates, but technology as we know it today—spectacular, distracting, obliterating—hadn’t come for us yet. And it wouldn’t, if my mother had her way.
Television. The thin edge of the wedge she said. My mother was the first person I heard use the term Luddite with affection. Ted Kaczynski was still at large.
To be clear, despite my mother’s public performance, we did own a TV. It was fourteen inches, lived in a cupboard, and had to be carried to an electrical outlet for use. Its only capability was playing VHS tapes. Later, when I was fifteen, we would finally get a normal sized television and an abnormally sized satellite dish. She only relented, I think, because by then the television was no longer the only thing jeopardizing our attention spans. Dial up internet had arrived. Netscape was ascendant. Pets.com hadn’t imploded. My mother had other worries.
I’m not trying to give my mother a hard time. It turned out she was right. Being denied a technology that ended up the portmanteau for an entire generation—remember the MTV Generation?— was a formative experience, both good and bad. First, the bad: I became a deeply anti-social child. Not because I was unable to make friends, but rather, because upon arriving at a friend’s house the only thing I wanted to do was worship at the altar of cable. Playing outside? I did that all the time. I needed to know what was happening at Bayside and Lawndale Highs (Saved By The Bell and Daria, respectively). But then, the good: I became a compulsive and voracious reader. Sure, it was out of self-defense, but reading became my refuge, my entertainment, my distraction. Not once in my childhood did my mother suggest I do assigned homework instead of read. Reading was always acceptable.
These days, technology is so all-encompassing, it’s nearly impossible to imagine television in the same category as social media or push notifications or urgent campaign fundraising text messages. Even the smartest of TVs feel like the dumbest of tech appendages. And yet, what I think my mother meant when she insisted that passing motorists Kill Their TV, was that they should be aware of the role spectacle can play in our contemporary world, the way it can distract, absorb, and distort. And yes, alas, I am, in the completely obnoxious way of the ex-academic, talking about the spectacle as envisioned by writers like Guy de Bord and Jonathan Crary. It was San Francisco in the early 90s. Even if my mother didn’t know it, hers was a Marxist theory of culture (sorry, Mom).
Having grown up without easy access to “the idiot box,” as my mother liked to call it, has, as an adult, made me acutely aware of the impact of my screen habits. That’s not to say that I’m above getting sucked into a reddit rabbit hole or an all-day Bravo binge or even an impassive Instagram reel-a-thon, but rather that the way things unspool on screens often leaves me feeling drugged and almost tipsy with vertigo. Contemporary visual stimuli seem to move too quickly (although that also might be the migraines) and I often find myself overwhelmed by the chaotic number of twists that are packed into streaming story arcs. I am wired, I notice with increasing frequency, for things that develop more slowly, more deliberately. Is this why I prefer my novels to lumber rather than race? Why I can never get my fill of atmosphere? Because I want time? I want to be in the world? I want the one thing we aren’t allowed anymore—the opportunity to linger? More than once in the last year, I have seen something on Instagram that I wanted to remember, but just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. Even when I thought I had hit the save button. Everything, technology teaches us, must evanesce.
Like most elder millennials, I remember a time before email, before cell phones. I still have the muscle memory of someone who spent heart-pounding seconds listening to the phone ring, praying my friend’s mother wouldn’t answer because then I would have to hear the tone of disappointment in her voice when she called out: “Cindy. It’s Katy. But only five minutes.” And for five minutes, Cindy and I would whisper furtively in corners of our respective kitchens because our parents were still too cheap to buy cordless phones. Let me tell you, reader: that was living.
The difference, today—something you don’t need to grow up without TV to know instinctively—is that the boundaries between us and the spectacle are harder to delineate. For my mother, it was easy: don’t get cable, leave the television set in the cupboard, ensure it’s too heavy for your children to lift. Now, the spectacle is in my hand, it’s two key strokes away from where I type this. It is increasingly difficult to understand where we (discrete, fleshy beings) stop and the spectacle, the performance of us (for us) begins. Authenticity is a word most often used to define a “good” social media presence, but I remain deeply skeptical that anything mediated by Meta or ByteDance or Twitter can be “authentic.” The authentic thing, I might argue, is the thing that takes labor, takes imagination. The authentic thing, these days, might actually be TV? Perhaps the bumper sticker now, should read: Kill Your Smart Phone or Unsubscribe or Cancel Your Gmail.
Stories, of course, have always been told across all manner of media. And when they are good, they have left us disoriented, ensorcelled, drunk. I would never argue against stories, but then I think there is a difference between the story and the spectacle. It’s just that the difference is harder than ever to parse. But then again, maybe I’m just biased because of my Luddite childhood. My parents also never owned a microwave. But then, I think that’s another essay entirely.
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