“THE AGE
OF INFOTOXIN”
Ad-busters, Winter 1995
http://www.adbusters.org/oldwebsite/Articles/ageinfotoxin.html
“Jeff
Phillips has coined the name of a new discipline – information toxicology
– that deals with the pollution of the mental
environment.”
Beneath the polished images of manufactured
"reality," behind the insidious faces of the glitz-glam celebrity-icons, within
the non-stop facade of mindless entertainment, we sense a storm brewing, an
impending vortex of psychological upheaval, a mental maelstrom of unprecedented
magnitude. Something's got to give. We each feel the coming cataclysm in the
depths of our being because each one of us is a living, breathing
being. What we are sensing is an inner battle, the struggle for the
survival of life as we know it, against the forces of entropy, inertia, and
extinction. That this battle is not so much in the external world as it is
taking place within each of our minds makes the situation less abstract and
closer to home. A lot is at stake here on the brink of the unknown, and every
cell in our bodies is pulsing with uncertainty. Literally, we are standing at
the edge of history.
Yet few of us have much of a sense of urgency as we
go about the ordinary routines of our day-to-day lives; but it is literally the
summation of these day-to-day acts over the expanse of hundreds of millions of
people that is generating the profoundly brutal ecological consequences which
are the legacy of existing generations. Indeed, a sense of urgency is difficult
to maintain in the wake of seven hours a day of televised mind-clot; even when
you catch a harsh glimpse of a denuded rain forest, a beached whale, an
oil-covered bird, a blackened middle-eastern sky, a glowing waste dump, Aussie
melanoma, or a starving child, within seconds your mind is emblazoned with
rapid-fire sequences of a new car high on a desert plateau, animated tooth-paste
and toilet-bowl cleaner, affluent-looking yuppies playing volleyball on a beach
drinking caramel-colored sugar water, a "public service" announcement from an
oil company on how they are doing magnificent super-human things to preserve
biodiversity.
We are each a part of Mother Nature, and she is not
happy at all. "Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of the Earth. The
Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. All things are
interconnected like the blood which unites one family. All things are
inter-connected... Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in
it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." All around the world her
myriad species of florae and faunae, her mountains, plains, forests, oceans,
atmosphere, and ecosystems are suffering immense degradation at the hands of
only one of her children: homo sapiens, "man, the wise." How is it that
we have gotten so far out of balance? If we're really so wise, why is our
stupidity so incredibly salient?
Mankind is unique among the kingdoms of terrestrial
life-forms (but in many ways not quite as unique as we like to think!) in that,
because of the expanded neurocomputational capacity of our brains, we have been
able to create a wide spectrum of tools, or external hardware, as well as
very flexible and adaptable systems of communications technology, or symbolic
language. Our ability to perceive, model, and communicate about our world
has enabled us to modify and control many dimensions of our physical
environment; and the evolution of writing, printing, electronic communication,
and the digital computer, as hand-maidens to the scientific and industrial
revolutions, have accelerated our cultural evolution and enabled us to make
giant leaps towards complete dominion of the Earth and her inhabitants. The
reason. and the irony is that our space-age machines and futuristic technologies
are being operated by beings... naked apes .who have been running on the same
"wired-in" instinctual behavioral programs for the last 100,000. Old habits die
hard, and us with them!
We have become masters of information-processing and
model-building. High quality information and clarity, meaning, and relevance in
communication have always been the primary tools we use to navigate our lives,
individually and collectively. What we learn, what we are taught, what we come
to hold as true, what we see, experience, and remember the knowledge we possess
and have access to... form the substrate from which we make every choice, every
decision, at every level and at every instant of our lives. And out entire human
socio-cultural "reality" is created by the sum total of these choices,
decisions, and actions/inactions. Our "reality" is a very dynamic and complex
matrix of interacting processes; and we have enormous access to an incredible
array of educational tools and an almost infinite reservoir of assorted
information. But most of us here in the western world are chronically exposed to
and influenced by the same limited subset of the totality of available knowledge
and information: that delivered to us by the vehicles of global
mass-communication.
Abuse of mass-communication and the concentration of
its control, coupled with the persuasiveness and ubiquity of its technologies,
messages, and implicit value structures, operates in conjunction with
unconscious, instinctive processes within the human mind to generate an overall
psychological condition of unreality, denial, and paralysis. This syndrome prevents us from facing honestly and
directly the profound complexities of life today and from implementing and
acting on the best and most valid knowledge we possess, and compromises our own
mental and physical health as well as exacerbating the already-critical
ecological problems in every corner of the globe.
When communication breaks down, meaning
fails, and quality disappears; when public discourse is reduced to trivial
banter-bites and dogmatic recitation ; when 70% of the news is fabricated by
public relations firms ; when the average American sees approximately 21,000
commercials a year on TV ; when malignancy and violence are continuously shoved
down our throats...because it sells!...we are living in the Age of
Infotoxin!