We Are the Borg

I'm in no way a proponent of conspiracy theories- as far as I'm concerned, that's just a reaction to the complexity and degeneration of the so-called 'civilisation' we find ourselves in. We need for someone to know what's going on, even if they are evil.

Therefore, I read Television and the Hive Mind with a large Siberian salt mine before me.

However, some valid and interesting points are made.

Television viewers have their left brains lulled to sleep, while their right brain accepts what it is being shown. In other words, we're suspending our critical faculties before a grisly array of violence, depravity and horror in the name of entertainment.
Gods, that's stupid.

I have previously advocated killing your various handy-dandy convenience devices. I stand by that.

The number of ways that it is possible to influence vast masses of people through this medium is frightening indeed. But I still don't think there's some nebulous, shadowy them responsible for this phenomenon. It's a product of all our minds and what we get is what we have created.

I do have a television set, and sometimes even turn it on, as I did last night for a little while. I caught part of an episode of Heroes, a series which has attracted rave comments from many of my acquaintances.

Ye Gods and Little Fishes- when was this amount of graphic violence acceptable for an evening's entertainment?

Which made me think of a conversation I'd been having earlier that same day- one of my colleagues was describing the series Dexter to my absolutely horrified audience.

I cannot imagine why anyone would voluntarily watch such a concentration of evil while relaxing after a hard day at the office. I remember when I was younger, and Star Trek in all its monochrome glory, was the epitome of adrenaline-laced excitement. William Shatner tussling hand to hand across the sand of some locale in California with an extra in a lizard suit.

Hello, human race? What have we come to?

And what will become of our children, who are growing up to accept all this as fairly normal?

Perhaps we should accede defeat. Pack it in. Then maybe in a couple of millennia we, or some other precociously big brained life form can have another go.

Until it's Game Over, Please Insert Coin for them, too.