Informant38

Psychological circumcision. The constant reinforcement of incompleteness. The steady reminders of inferiority. The way commercials, which are the atmospheric presence of our lives now, the glimpses of fashion and how other people live successfully, which is not a marginal thing, it's a central feedback mechanism, it's how we adjust, and what we are is an adjusting creature, adaptation is the primary human skill, and how we adapt socially is by watching each other, and how we watch each other now is bottlenecked in the tube, commercials are what we sound like, what we look like to each other, it's another illusion that commercials are just trivial things in between the stories on TV, the stories exist to bring us to the feet of the commercial messages, the real gods of this moment being the merchandizing agencies, the lie of it being the inverse weight of everything, like that stories are entertainment, like music is entertainment, the two main bonding strategies of human connection trivialized and commodified, and most importantly, owned.