My friend JK has one of those delightful gadgets, the TV-B-Gone. If you’ve never met, the TV-B-Gone is a real treat when you are sitting at bars or restaurants and the people you’re with are more interested in looking at the fucking television than talking to you, the real live person sitting here with them in REAL LIFE.
Zap!
You can just click the thing and it cycles through all the infra-red pulses until it hits the one specific to that television and off she goes. The old fashioned art of conversation is renewed in one chivalrous, almost cyber-punk gesture.
JK has put this thing to employ at several area pubs with consistent results. No one notices. I’ve seen it myself. People don’t seem to notice. At all. Period. Unless they are actively watching the television - like with a football game or something. Then you are sure to get a rise out of people - for better or worse. But otherwise, the only thing that really happens is that the screen goes dark, but the light isn’t missed because in bars, the screens are usually picking up reflections from the room. But a slight kind of settling feeling occurs. You stop feeling like someone is [SILENTLY YELLING AT YOU].
It’s actually quite a nice feeling.
But it’s also interesting that it feels so very surreptitious to use the whole thing. You don’t want to necessarily advertise that you’re the dick in the corner who is turning off the TV’s. In fact, there seem to be a contingent of people online who think that the use of the TV-B-Gone is actually unethical:
The use of TV-B-Gone is unilateral self-interested conduct, taking dominion over something that one has no right to control, restricting the choices of others, and doing so surreptitiously and in a cowardly fashion. An airport television isn’t a “public televisionâ€â€¦it is owned and operated by the airport. The airport, or the airline running the gate area with the TV (it matters not which) has determined that travelers would appreciate a television, and that is their choice. Maybe it is a mistaken choice, and maybe the TV-B-Gone owner disagrees, but that does not justify the happy zapper taking vigilante action and turning off the airport’s television on his own volition. He finds the TV annoying? Fine: complain. If enough people complain, the TV will be removed. Or leave the area. He has no right to use a device to turn off the TV.
The author of that article admits that he may come as a “humorless curmudgeon” thanks to that ethical analysis, and I would have to agree. Because if you want to make this a real “ethical” issue, then wouldn’t you have to start digging down to the roots of why we even have televisions in the first place: is there really even a right to film people; to manipulate reality and perception in this way; to present things that are untrue or only partially true as real; should we really have to be forced to watch televisions in every damned place we go into blaring images of and advertisements for things which we as reasonable and ethical people have no interest in being bombarded with at every notice?
Other business sources online also target the TV-B-Gone as some kind of “media vandalism” threat. They offer about the standard “money & hierarchical control” arguments you’d expect from a very pro-business source:
In each of these cases, a simple flick of the switch may cause real economic damage (with site or screen owners suffering real losses), and make it difficult or impossible for viewers to get the information (or programming) that they frequent the venue for. An individual thinking that they’re doing a service to themselves and others may actually be harming the business that they’re patronizing, as well as their fellow consumers (or sports fans). What’s worse, I can’t think of very many legitimate uses for something like a TV-B-Gone, so it almost seems like the device is made expressly for those people who have no authority to be changing the screens in the first place, but are likely to want to do so anyway.
Whine whine whine!
And then they go into a couple simple ideas for “thwarting” the “warfare” they expect to increase over the next few years as digital information becomes more widely and publicly broadcast in business settings:
As digital signage and hybrid content/signage systems become more commonplace in public spaces, things like TV-B-Gone will continue to gain popularity, so we need to be prepared to effectively deal with them. There will always be some group of people dissatisfied with at-retail media, but I’m hoping that instead of resorting to sneaky tricks, they will instead choose to vote with their voices and their wallets. Don’t like digital signage? Don’t patronize sites that use it, or write a letter to the owner stating your opinion. But even being optimistic I know that we’ll need to be prepared for a bit of technological warfare against our industry. Luckily, with some planning, a bit of technology, and a healthy dose of common sense, we can dodge this first bullet and keep focusing on more important challenges, like content creation, effective messaging, and ROI analysis.
Right, because things like “preserving some kind of semblance of human decency and sanity” have all but completely evaporated in the corporatist techocracy we live in today, and will certainly not be concerns of these individuals in the future.
Because when these people are saying we can just “leave the area” or “vote with our dollars” they are being disingenuous. In fact, they are lying. We all know that at the first chance they get, they are going to want to have floating holograms follow us around and tell us as trusted advisors what products we’d most like to buy in order to construct our consumerist fantasy-identity. They will have these things in your car, in your house, in the streets, and ultimately in your brain (see also: augmented reality). Hell, they already are. Have you ever had a dream about an iPod or about driving a car? Why do you think those images are in there rotting away?
So what we will see instead are devices like the TV-B-Gone, except on steroids. We will see things like this mod of the TV-B-Gone which pulses its signal amplified through 20 parallel LED lights extending the device’s range up to 90 feet away. What we will see will be an arms race of Digital Rights Management goons trying to protect their bottom-line versus people on the other end who want to retain some kind of authentic experience of being simply alive and human without being yelled at all day by advertisements. And we will also see companies experimenting with selling us carefully constructed branding initiatives which are designed to satisfy this inherent anxiety by artificially satiating our lust for subversion. Imagine AdBusters meets the Weather Underground and that my friend is the future of assymetric warfare. [See also: When Mind Control Technology Becomes Reality]
Pocket EMP pulses to disable electronics. Wearable devices and shielding to scramble or spoof cell phone/GPS signals and augmented reality interfaces from correlating your physical presence to your cyber-space data body.
Which leads me to another interesting point I neglected earlier in my reference to that article on the “ethics” of TV-B-Gone. There was one fairly good part where they wrote:
Technology sometimes allows us to realize our fantasies. There is a natural rush of excitement when one realizes that what once would have required magic can now be accomplished electronically, and that excitement has a tendency to drive out ethical analysis. It’s so cool to be able to zap off other people’s televisions when they annoy us, that we forget that it isn’t our right to do it. There are other fantasies just waiting for the technology to take them from daydream to reality: remote bombardment of smelly strangers with anti-perspirant; sudden laryngitis for loud talkers at movies; radio silence for booming automobile sound systems; instant sleep for cranky babies on airplanes; sudden, paralyzing nausea for drunken louts at football games.
Where does it all go? Does the rampant increase in technology make us more human or less human? When we can fulfill all our desires electronically, where will that leave us as humans, as living, spiritual beings? It beats me, but as these developments begin to align more and more with transhumanist aesthetics, we are going to need to start really solving these things on a person-to-person practical basis. Because the rules are changing. They may be changing of themselves, or they may be changing for us on behalf of some other forces at play within business and the scientific management and manipulation of society. Where this all goes will certainly be an exciting - and scary - ride as the definition of simple humanity itself comes up for review, and reality becomes up for grabs.
But then, maybe it already is. Maybe it always was.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Unacceptable Marketing Campaign
- Are you a terrorist?
- Make love not war!
- Dead horse flinging
- Disposable Terrorists
15 Comments
There are no “rights”, unless you mean the rights of corporations. Corporate masters have made this very clear to those who are listening.
… Read the subtext and factor it into your ethical calculus.
I’m kind of conflicted, I like the idea of TV-B-Gone because it restores choice to a otherwise choiceless situation. TV is designed to draw you in, it’s almost impossible to go somewhere and not end up looking at it, it’s like a naked lady undressing, sometimes it literally is, but then I can understand a traveler needing information from the weather channel, or cnn, or someone following a sports or political event, and someone else deciding it’s not of value, and denying them the opportunity. Personal media devices may solve some of this, and I remember greyhound use to have little coin operated tvs on chairs you could feed and be programmed and didn’t seem to invade other peoples environments so much. But I think post cell phone it’s all moot, although I understand their is a device to cut off cell phone use..
Where did the TV come from and when the fuck did it take over? Since when did the television become the only guest of honor in any home or establishment? Indeed, the only party with any kind of right to be anywhere they wish, any given time are the corporations and media juggernauts which pump the bilge out to be consumed everywhere. You, as a simple human born on this planet have no rights whatsoever. This is because there is no other reality now other than the one which has granted carte blanche to the reality-makers.
Go to the Cheesecake Factory and see how modularized freedom of choice has become. All I see anymore are modules! There is nothing anymore. It’s all gone. Your choices exist on a drop-down menu of that which is offered. The Cheesecake Factory offers EVERYTHING! Thus my point is moot. Pick what you want from a flummoxing menu and feel like you’ve only barely scraped the surface of what’s AVAILABLE. Next time, you say, you’ll pick something else.
No idea what’s going in and no idea what’s going out, you just give the masters of virtual insanity the right of way. After all, they do know what’s best, having seen the future with their own eyes and government contracts so they can regurgitate it back into our chirpy little fucking beaks. God I wish I would have fathomed what this song meant in the late 90’s, though there was little any of us could have done about it then either I suppose:
Oh yeah, what we’re living in (let me tell ya)
It’s a wonder man can eat at all
When things are big that should be small
Who can tell what magic spells we’ll be doing for us
And I’m giving all my love to this world
Only to be told
I can’t see
I can’t breathe
No more will we be
And nothing’s going to change the way we live
Cos’ we can always take but never give
And now that things are changing for the worse,
See, its a crazy world we’re living in
And I just can’t see that half of us immersed in sin
Is all we have to give these -
Futures made of virtual insanity now
Always seem to, be govern’d by this love we have
For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound - for we all live underground
And I’m thinking what a mess we’re in
Hard to know where to begin
If I could slip the sickly ties that earthly man has made
And now every mother, can choose the colour
Of her child
That’s not nature’s way
Well that’s what they said yesterday
There’s nothing left to do but pray
I think it’s time I found a new religion
Waoh - it’s so insane
To synthesize another strain
There’s something in these
Futures that we have to be told.
Futures made of virtual insanity - now
Always seem to, be govern’d by this love we have
For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound - for we all live underground
Now there is no sound
If we all live underground
And now it’s virtual insanity
Forget your virtual reality
Oh, there’s nothing so bad.
I know yeah
Of this virtual insanity, we’re livin in.
Has got to change, yeah
Things, will never be the same.
And I can’t go on
While we’re livin’ in oh, oh virtual insanity
Oh, this world, has got to change
Cos I just, I just can’t keep going on, it was virtual.
Virtual insanity that we’re livin’ in, that we’re livin’ in
That virtual insanity is what it is
Futures made of virtual insanity - now
Always seem to, be govern’d by this love we have
For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound - for we all live underground
Living - Virtual Insanity
Living - Virtual Insanity
Living - Virtual Insanity
Living - Virtual Insanity
Virtual Insanity is what we’re living in
Yay, Jamirquai!
I don’t really have a lot more to say about the ethics of this gadget beyond what I wrote already in the essay you excerpted, but I do have to say that your counter-argument, if it can be called that, makes no sense from an ethical point of view, and certainly not a logical perspective.
You don’t like TV? Fine: go to establishmenst that don’t have one. I don’t have any trouble finding such places. Do you only frequent bars and airports? You want the channel changed? OK: ask the owner, like a normal, polite human being; don’t secretly turn off someone else’s property. You have no right to take control of the TV, and your “Well, what about TV..does TV have the right..?” argument is just gibberish, not to mention ill-informed. Nobody appears on TV without signing a waiver…you don’t want to be broadcast, don’t sign.
But even if TV itself poses ethical issues, the unethical conduct of another NEVER justifies unethical conduct by you. You’ve written a long, rambling piece that doesn’t make a single coherent ethical argument, and it certainly doesn’t refute the slam-dunk conclusion that using TV-B-Gone is beyond justification. If someone talks too much, do you have a right to bind and gag them? If a neighbor’s stereo is too loud, is it Ok to cut the electricity? Do you even know what right and wrong are? Because I sure can’t tell from what I read here.
Something irritates you, and though it belongs to someone else and others in the room are using it, you think it’s ethical for you to unilaterally decide to turn it off. Indefensible. Unethical. Arrogant. Selfish. What part of “wrong” don’t you understand? What dictionary did you use to define “right?”
I’m not arguing from either of those perspectives. In fact, I’m not actually “arguing” anything at all.
I’m not - again - making ethical arguments. I’m exploring a theme.
If they are on my website, I do!
@Jack
Frankly, what you have written here is a case in point of everything that is wrong with everything. You take what you perceive to be circa 2006 normalcy and have conflated it with what it is to be alive. Do you not remember your upbringing? Do you not fathom who you really are outside and beyond this “matrix” of cult-like unquestioning that a TV must be on at all times? Do you or have you ever considered the psychological ramifications of having your best friends be the characters who appear on a TV set?
When I was growing up, when we ate at the dinner table, the TV was off (unless the Broncos were playing ;)). Now that there are hardly any family dinner tables, save outside of Christian fundamentalist homes etc, there is hardly any reason to bitch. Dinner is outsourced, entertainment is outsourced, love and family are now outsourced too. It’s all about fulfilling a need and the free market has that covered right? Well, I’ll tell ya what, it doesn’t have the simple physics of these devices covered up at all — hence the tv-b-gone. It’s the same way Iraqi’s heads don’t have the physics wrapped up about protecting what they use to think, process, imagine and love from an American bullet. Ethics! Ha! You care nothing for human life and you believe all falls under the rubric of business what what is necessary for it to maintain it’s prerogatives over the malleability of brilliant human nature.
The nature of humanity is this Jack:
Humans created the television
Humans also created the TV-B-Gone
Now you tell me where your “allegiances” lie eh?
You could seriously write a “sci-fi” story about the present state of the TVs and the devices that shut them off. A story about how turning off the TVs everywhere becomes more entertaining and more popular than anything the TVs emit. Now wouldn’t that be something you’d like to bind and gag somebody for Jack? Supply and demand. Supplant and undermine. There are no ethics with that box you defend, it’s helter-skelter and it’s worse than even the twisted mind of Charles Manson could conceive. Hell, that’s why he makes a comeback now and again on that boob tube. A good Manson inspired dose is always good for the ratings isn’t it?
But then again, if Tvs were off, we’d have to endure your philosophy on why TV is so great. Eeesh, we’re fucked. Period.
Full disclosure: I watch TV and I have never, nor would I ever use this silly TV-BGone when peeps are watching something they are engaged in. Problem is Jack, that most often TVs are on FOR NO GODDAMN REASON! Nobody watching, nobody caring. Uh-oh! How do we engage those viewers? AH! By instituting flashes and extreme changes in light to get people to look up. Well I get sick of that shit. I hate how my eyes wander into the utter void of that goddamn programming and proof that we’re being purposely driven insane.
Again’ there’s nothing wrong with the device known as the TV, but there is something wrong with the device known as a remote control which can turn any TV off. Devices devices! Who’s to know what’s right?
Jack knows! (is what I meant to add)
My brother-in-law-to-be likes to wind me up (I’m a scientist, he’s an accountant ;-D). We told him we bought a new video recorder, he quips:
‘Can they not make one that leaves out all the advertisements?’
His point being, that the technology is possible but the technology is trumped by commercial interests…
(and who are ‘they’, anyway?)
Jack blurted indignantly:
Interesting that you say these are two different things.
An ethicist walks into a bar… finds his friends dead in their chairs. The killer sits across the room from them yelling gibberish at their lifeless faces. Does he tear the killer’s throat out? Nope. NEVER justified. Does he attempt to take control of the situation? Nope. What gives him the right? Instead he must either submit quietly or plead meekly.
Ethics or attempted justification for cowardice?
If I did have the right, would that make it OK?
Where do I get these rights? Are rights always granted and never claimed? Who has the right to bestow or revoke my rights? You?
If someone has the right to talk too much all I need is to be quick with the duct tape.
Jack M’arsehole? Hold still.
As the author of the pro-business rant (or whine, as you suggest) against the TV-B-Gone, I find the concept of experience “ownership” in public, private and shared spaces to be one of the most interesting cultural changes taking place today. Thanks to the near-ubiquity of things like cellphones, ipods and PDAs, individuals are now accustomed to being able to custom-tailor every element of their experience, and as a result, we’ve become much more media savvy and demanding. And while I certainly agree that there are cases where additional media sources (like TVs) can be inappropriate or even obnoxious, when a screen is deployed by a venue owner, only that owner has the right to enable or disable it. In your home, in your car, or in any other personal space where you exert ownership rights, you can do whatever you like. But you don’t own the store or restaurant or airport, so your ownership rights don’t extend there. Don’t like the CNN screens at the airport? Take control of your private space and watch/listen to your ipod. Does the TV screen at the checkout line bother you? Pick up a magazine and read about the latest celebrity scandal. But most importantly, if you do find these screens (or the content they display) annoying or offensive, let the manager know. I’ve been a party to numerous digital signage deployments where screen positioning and content were refined based on customer feedback to the point where complaints were eventually replaced with compliments.
I was thinking of launching into some kind of deconstruction of those blue boxes in this post, but it looks like those commenters above me have done a pretty good job. Another symptom of the Big Bad Ugly that likes to put everything in little boxes. I wonder what drives it?…
What? Are you serious? Don’t like corporate branding? Replace it with more corporate branding that better suits your self-image and interests!
Again, “celebrity scandal” is not a viable alternative to a world in which I am *not* constantly bombarded by televisions, magazines and checkout counters.
I demand to be able to custom-tailor an experience where we don’t have to be media savvy, where we can just live without having to “custom-tailor” all our experiences.
I just wanna chill in the forest. But what if somebody came up with the Forest-B-Gone?
Oh wait.
I know waaay off topic and completely irrational there. That’s the way I roll.
Come to think of it, what I want is programming that shows nothing more than destruction and the unstoppable march of scientific fascism as it razes forests to their pathetic stumps and makes women and men into entertainment addicted sex and gladiator contest slaves who eat farmed sea-life. And then when someone asks me at the airport, as I take my shoes and belt off for the security theater personnel, let them inspect my 1oz containers of gels and shit, what it is I’m watching and listening to on my personal ipod and why I’m so damned blue, I’ll tell them: This is what fucking entertains me!
Jesus effin Christ! If business is everything, it bears noting that business is now nothing as well. Again, bear that in mind. You business apologists are doing no favors for anybody. I fear this has not dawned on many yet. Paradoxically, this is because well duh, business IS EVERYTHING.
Except it’s not. (ad infinitum)
Read your copy of Pale Blue Dot again rangers. There’s a vast universe out there and nobody had any right to corral anyone into anything. Weep weep, sob sob.
rights are a myth perpetuated by those who would have you argue amongst yourselves while they think of ways of getting more of your money……..
i think the the tv gadget is great………but don`t be surprised if someone objects if you are heavy-handed with it.
i don`t like tv but there are those who are comforted by it`s constant noise and light.
same with radio.
i am living with a couple presently who put the cbc radio news on in the morning and then proceed to read the newspaper.
i take possession of my apartment tomorrow so i will be able to not have my tv on or have the radio on for any reason.
the only reason i have tv is for my kids to play xbox and so i can watch soccer and the occasional movie.