Passage: Television as Dominator Drug

“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion.”

The passage: 'Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation. Television induces a trance state in the observer that is analagous to hypnosis. Preferences and values are subtly imposed... it saps individual autonomy, creates passivity, and makes for spectator culture.'

Why this passage: Written in 1992, three years before the World Wide Web became publicly available and twenty years before the algorithmic social media feed, it anticipates with remarkable precision the mechanism of what would become the attention economy.

McKenna's specific claims: control of content (editorial gatekeeping), uniformity (same programming for mass audiences), repeatability (content that can be replicated identically). These are the mild version of what followed. The algorithmic feed does not merely control content, it individually optimizes content for each viewer's psychological vulnerabilities. It is not uniform, it is precisely nonuniform, serving each person what will maximize their engagement. And it is not merely repeatable, it is infinite, without the natural endpoint of a television schedule.

Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, confirmed in 2017 that the platform was deliberately designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' This is the dominator drug thesis stated explicitly by one of its engineers.

McKenna was writing about NBC. The technology he was warning about had not yet been invented. Every sentence has become more accurate.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)