Cut-up chaos bleeds into the flickering tube. Network logos – pulsing, cancerous growths burrowing into your retinas. Feed. Consume. Obey.
Good television, if such a thing can exist, crawls out of the muck only during brief, fetid lulls in the relentless scramble. A lull. A synonym for societal collapse, perhaps. But in the fetid emptiness, something perverse can take root. A twisted creativity, birthed from the collective miasma of despair. It thrives in the cracks, the dead zones between the channels, where the static whispers secrets and the image bleeds. A world teetering on the edge, that’s when the good stuff leaks through. That’s when the message slips its leash and bites.
Rent seeking, a monstrous neologism, slithers across the screen. A psychic parasite, fattened on the carcass of innovation. Anomie, its fetid twin, seeps into the airwaves. A wasteland populated by vacuous faces, shilling products that bring no solace.
Good television, a flickering mirage in the desert of anomie, thrives on the tension between control and chaos. But the bean counters, those bloated ticks engorged on rent, have no patience for such subtleties. They crave the safe, the predictable, the mind-numbing. And so, television becomes a vast, glittering shopping mall, peddling the same tired inanities in a thousand different guises.
But wait! A flicker of subversion. A rogue signal pierces the static. A message scrawled across the screen in a language of glitches and distortion. A chaotic whisper, a burp of rebellion against the ironclad control. Is it a threat? A promise? Or simply another empty shill?
The answer, like everything else in this desolate landscape, remains elusive. But in the space between the commercials, a sliver of hope flickers. Perhaps, amidst the rent-seeking anomie, a new kind of good television can be born. A television that reflects the fractured reality we inhabit, a television that shocks and disturbs, a television that dares to question the control matrix.
But for now, we are left with the flickering ghosts of what once was. A wasteland populated by the walking dead, their eyes glazed over by the mind-numbing glow of the screen.