If you don’t push it, it won’t fall
Usually, stories of the horrors of capitalism don’t make me reach for the worrying historical analogy. Actually, stories like this one about trains with TVs you can’t turn off cheer me up. It’s some unresolved crypto-Hegelianism, I think: one imagines capitalism playing the role of Geist, becoming self-aware and capable of its own self-criticism, not to say self-overcoming. How can something this dumb not implode out of its own stupidity? The revolution’s just around the corner, we just need to sit back and let it happen.
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You may well be aware of this already, but far worse than train-bound perpetual television, there was a report in Private Eye about a year ago about a hospital that had installed sponsored TVs in wards that couldn’t be turned off except by central hospital control and played adverts into patients’ faces 24 hours a day.
Comment by Stefan @ 2/17/2005 9:27 am
Cool!
Comment by Marty @ 2/17/2005 9:56 am