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Thus, being subjected to the fire hose of prime-time mental malware (sorry, "advertising") was a genuine shock.
This is actually a great description. I consider advertising to be a kind of psychological warfare. It feels like an aggressive attack. I also blame it for the sharp rise in attention deficit issues over the last several decades.
We gave up cable TV in 2012, mainly because we moved out of a place where we had free cable. Paying money to be subjected to all that advertising was just ludicrous. Now, whenever I'm around a television, I feel like I'm in some kind of distorted reality a la The Twilight Zone. I really noticed it when I was in the hospital recuperating last year.
It's not just the advertising. It's also the "news" media, some of which is itself just a thinly veiled form of promotion. They talk and talk and talk, saying much and conveying little. Both advertising and news seem to be targeting our most primitive and strongest instincts: the instincts to fight, flee, and accumulate. It plays to fear, be it the fear of missing out on the latest product from Apple or the fear of the terrorist.
The sooner we all realize that we are under sustained psychological attack by capitalist forces, the sooner we can get 'round to fixing the mess we're in.