The Dominator Screen: McKenna's Media Critique in the Algorithm Age

“McKenna wrote his television critique in 1992. He did not live to see TikTok. Every sentence has gotten more accurate.”

In Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna devoted a chapter to television as a drug, arguing not metaphorically but pharmacologically that passive screen consumption alters brain states in ways that serve the dominator culture's interests. His specific claims: that television is by nature a tool of coercion because it controls content, enforces content uniformity, and makes content repeatable; that it produces passivity rather than agency; and that it replaces direct experience with mediated representation.

He wrote this in 1992. The internet was a research network. The World Wide Web had just been opened to the public. Smartphones did not exist. TikTok did not exist. The algorithmic feed did not exist.

By 2024, what McKenna described as television's dominator properties had been implemented at incomparably greater precision and scale. Variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, the mechanism that makes slot machines compulsive, were engineered into social media feeds. Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, acknowledged in a 2017 interview that the platform had been deliberately designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities for engagement. Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation documented the epidemiological consequences: dramatic increases in depression, anxiety, and self-harm among adolescents correlating with the adoption of smartphone-mediated social media from 2012 onward.

McKenna's critique of television was correct and insufficient. He diagnosed the mechanism, control of content, uniformity, passivity, but the 2024 version of the problem is worse on every dimension. The algorithmic feed does not merely offer passive content; it actively optimizes content selection for maximum emotional engagement, which in practice means maximum emotional provocation. The uniformity is statistical rather than explicit, not a single channel but an individually tailored stream that nonetheless converges people toward content that increases cortisol and outrage. The passivity is not the passivity of watching; it is the pseudo-activity of scrolling, liking, and sharing, actions that feel like agency but are responses to an optimization system.

McKenna's proposed corrective was also correct but insufficient: 'Stop consuming images and start producing them.' The argument for active creation over passive consumption, for direct experience over mediated representation, for psychedelic attention over screen-induced dissociation, was right. But in 1992, the tools for passive consumption were limited to television schedules and video rental. The tools available in 2024 are incomparably more effective at producing exactly what he warned against.

What connects the television critique to the larger argument of Food of the Gods is the claim that the dominator culture systematically prefers intoxicants that produce compliance over intoxicants that produce questioning. Alcohol sedates; television sedates; social media, in its effect on attention and critical thinking, sedates. Psilocybin disrupts sedation. The drug war, in McKenna's framework, is a war against a specific kind of consciousness: the kind that notices what's wrong with the system.

The current psychedelic renaissance exists partly in tension with this critique. The therapeutic framing of psychedelic research, psilocybin as antidepressant, MDMA as PTSD treatment, is entirely compatible with the existing healthcare system and represents no threat to the attention economy. A drug that makes you a better compliant consumer of the social order is not the drug McKenna was describing.

Huxley drew the same distinction: soma versus moksha. The dominator drug produces happiness without liberation. The liberation drug produces questioning without comfort. What McKenna diagnosed as the television problem, the systematic substitution of sedating spectacle for consciousness-expanding experience, has not been addressed by the psychedelic renaissance. It has gotten worse while the renaissance proceeded.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)
• Parker, Sean. Interview, Axios (2017)
• Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (2024)
• Various psychedelic ecology literature [Source not found; under review]