In 1997, the alt-rock band Harvey Danger had a minor hit with the song “Flagpole Sitta.” One of the lines from the song was, “And I don’t even own a TV,” which was a phrase a certain kind of person used to say a lot during this era. It was a sign of pretension, but also code for brainpower and maturity—a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time. Though accepted as true by virtually every knee-jerk intellectual of the time, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why TV was
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