Television Is a Drug: The Argument That Aged Best

“McKenna wrote his television critique in 1992. Every sentence has gotten more accurate.”

When McKenna called television 'the dominator drug par excellence,' he was making a specific pharmacological argument: that passive screen consumption alters brain states in ways that produce compliance, passivity, and consumption rather than consciousness, agency, and production.

He was extrapolating from 1992 technology, three networks plus cable, editorial decisions made by a small number of gatekeepers with limited ability to optimize for individual psychological vulnerabilities.

What has been built since 1992 is a set of technologies that do exactly what McKenna described but with unprecedented precision. The algorithmic feed uses variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, the slot machine mechanism, to maximize engagement. It knows what each individual user responds to emotionally and serves more of it. Sean Parker confirmed in 2017 that Facebook was deliberately designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities.

McKenna's television argument is more accurate about TikTok than it was about NBC. The dominator drug he described has been refined into something much more effective at producing the passivity he warned against.

His prescription was simple: stop consuming images and start producing them. The problem is that the technologies designed to help people produce images have been more successful at making them consume other people's productions.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)