Fans of the outstanding 1997 Sci-fi movie, Contact, will recall what triggered the global contagion theme in this Carl Sagan novel made-for-Hollywood, was originally an alien radio-telescope message containing more hidden data. That data was subsequently revealed in layers, beginning with the regurgitation of an early TV broadcast of Adolph Hitler, opening the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The implication being the Nazis had invented & perfected television. But that’s not exactly true.
Broadcast television was first invented & demonstrated in Washington DC in the summer of 1928. The 2 main inventor/developer/protagonists, Philo Farnsworth and Vlad Zworykin, then remained in a contested legal dispute for years afterwards. Meanwhile, bright guys like Claude Shannon began to develop “information theory” starting in the Great Depression, and through the war years, or just how do we resolve uncertainty, in the use of electronics for conveying ideas? and ….still more information in even more exotic forms.
After the war, many were seriously worried that America would slip back into a depression, but Wall Street and Madison Avenue had a plan. The new communications technology of television would be used to engender a society based on mass consumption, sending out relevant ideas, not written as words or frozen pictures in books & newspapers, but as moving images, filled with all kinds of subtle innuendo like new cars, fine furniture, appliances, new homes, new food choices, fashions, vacation travel, etc. ad nausea.
Hey, it worked; mass communications spawned a new age of consumption, debt creation, and wretched excess. Along the way, it won the Cold War, gave us the computer age, the Internet, uber-smart cellphones, porn, social media, and today’s compendium of mass psychosis.
But its darker penultimate attainment has been the last 30-35 years of the Piscean Era, complete with aberrant behaviors of Woke, Cancel Culture, Antifa, Defund-the-Police, gender confusion, radical feminism, i.e. the whole twisted, confused, angry, and genuinely unhappy dog’s breakfast of one’s personal psychic dystopia.
It deliberately exacerbated our differences, spawning vast family, marital, parenting, and community suffering. And without going deeper into Charlie Kirk’s philosophy of Americans trying to honestly and openly discuss those differences, suffice it to say his murderous assassination by a tragically brainwashed young man, has opened the eyes of millions. Those who silently long wondered, “WTF is happening to us, and who has been promoting all this dystopia?” Kirk tried to flush-out their reasoning in a peaceful, respectful way, but they were having none of it.
Unfortunately, the end of our current Piscean Era isn’t finished with us yet, and you might recall from what I wrote in April 2024, and just referenced above, includes more incoming ‘bitch slaps’ of change. Kirk’s death here was just the beginning, so steel yourselves for more.
I suspect one of our next jarring encounters with an abrupt “revelation of truth” may come, not from the American backyard & noxious weed garden, but from a long, long distance away.
Sellers is a Southpark, Roosevelt-Republican (TR) living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization.
Iran is far away. Allah will tell them to paint “Made in Iran” on the sides of Chinese and Russian nukes. Then send them our way to show we did not destroy their nuclear ambitions. They have nothing to lose and will each get 72 virgins.