Metaground

Kirn is getting credit for a brand new idea:

In @palladiummag, a fascinating idea from @walterkirn that the spectacle of news, social media, changing mores, etc. is designed to prevent memory formation.

Not new at all. This was the POINT of 1984. Room 101 was not about lies and propaganda, it was explicitly and obviously about memory destruction. More broadly, it was about BASELINE destruction. Modern media rips us away from cultural and genetic GROUND. For some reason this POINT is always missed.

In the 70s, Neil Postman and Jerry Mander wrote about the specific technical methods used by TV to break our memory and baseline. Postman and Mander are well known and often discussed. Unlike Orwell, their points are not missed.

The people who are crediting Kirn with a brand new idea have lost their memories and baseline.

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Footnote: In my 2019 piece on groundbreaking linked above, I focused on Russia as an example of unbroken baseline. I didn’t know or foresee that Putin would fall in line with WEF just a year later, embracing the Ballgag Brigade and following our orders in Ukraine. Was he a sleeper agent, or did he receive an Offer He Couldn’t Refuse? I’m inclined toward the latter, but can’t exclude the former. Africa remains the shining light of real culture. So far!