NY Times Top Comment

As Dr. Henry Giroux explains, we have become 24/7 viewers of the very “disimagination machines” that produce the images we would normally imagine for ourselves. Swayed by Amazon.com and Google, where we outsource and surrender our imaginations (individually and collectively), neither the Oxford Junior Dictionary nor the masses can seemingly escape this web of distraction as we “entertain ourselves to death.” And so the vicissitudes of the marketplace gobble-up our senses and sensibilities. Read, write, paint, observe and create your own images; gaze at the two-by-four-inch screens and surrender to the images created.

Tolstoy wrote of Anna Karenina’s ‘picture-making machine going black’ as she falls upon the railroad track. It’s amazing that we allow our own imaginations to ‘go black’ while we’re still conscious, oblivious to others, our surroundings, and both our physical relationship to the world and all living entities. We know not from where we come, for history is now an irrelevant footnote to a future beckoning us onto a magic carpet-ride in search of whatever Pokemon-Go leads us to.

Both Jevon’s Paradox and the paradox of capitalism itself: all development requires destruction of the environment on some level (extraction etc.), should be the first lines in any economics textbook. But who reads and thinks beyond the rectangular devices whose borders obliterate the horizons and stars, not to mention the timescales of slow, evolutionary growth of our ecosystem?