Re Philip Seymour Hoffman

In light of the tragic death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and all of the attention that drug addiction is getting these days as a result, I thought I’d share some statistics. I don’t mean to trivialize the obvious power of licit and illicit narcotics alike, but let’s be clear on the scope…

There are an estimated 700,000 heroin addicts nationwide (representing a mere two-tenths of 1% of the population).
The average American household has more TV sets (2.93) than people.
The average American household now has 5.7 Internet-connected devices (including smartphones).
More smartphones are sold and activated each day than there are babies born worldwide (about 300,000).
By 2015 the average American will consume 15.5 hours of electronic media per day (approximately 97% of all waking time, calculated at 16 hours per day).

Now consider the sage words of Aldous Huxley…

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Clearly, Huxley’s fear has come to pass. The only surprise is that the pharmacological mind-killer is not delivered in pill form. Rather, it’s delivered in bits and bytes and self-created by the chemistry set of our own brains. It’s called media addiction, and it has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We are, per the prescient title of media ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to Death…