General Discussion

My wife and I usually subscribe to two or three no-advertising streaming services and we have a large library of DVDs. We don't have cable, satellite, or broadcast television. Our current television has never been set up to receive any "channels" and it's not connected to the internet or an antenna. It simply plays whatever devices are plugged into it; usually the DVD player, some streaming dongle, or a laptop. The oldest streaming devices we had didn't fill the screen with "free" advertising supported crap, but those were declared obsolete and the streaming services stopped supporting them. Now it's a question of which streaming devices and services you want spying on you. Pick your poisons or play a DVD you bought for cash in a thrift store.

My parents met while working in Hollywood. They were artists with day jobs and were most certainly "Hollywood Liberals." Their friends were eccentric. Many were gay and comfortable enough in my parents home to be openly so, public displays of affection, stories of broken romances, and such.

I worked in Hollywood for five days as a little kid and that was the end of my Hollywood career. My mom says I'd stare at important people as if they were interesting insects, which would make them very uncomfortable. They would not call back. My grandma and her sister loved Hollywood, knew people, and wanted to share that joy with us. My mom counterbalanced that with a certain cynicism about the industry and told us explicitly how to avoid predators, maybe too explicitly, but it didn't stop her from working for your "Octopus."

My sister has made brief appearances on television over the years, usually small parts. If you know where to look, which episode of a television series she was in, you can still find her on television. Some of these shows were quite popular. It was not a career for her, but she likes having a union card.

I don't think Hollywood is some kind of sinister PsyOp. It's more a reflection of a culture that is already a mess. I was raised in such a rich interactive environment that it's almost impossible for me to be bored. I'm very capable of making my own trouble in any situation, for better or for worse. Many people are not so fortunate. Television, and now the advertising driven internet, fills some kind of void. (I don't see advertising on the internet. DU is my only "social media" and I pay for a star membership here to make the ads go away.)

Yes, there are people exploiting that void, but they'd have much less success if we paid more attention to early childhood development and rejected the anti-intellectualism that is so prevalent in our society. Children are naturally born scientists and artists, endlessly curious. Many U.S. American sub-cultures, mostly religious, beat this innate curiosity out of their children, or neglect their intellectual development, which leaves a void to be filled with crap religions, crap politics, crap television, crap consumerism, crap advertising, crap AI, crap porn, and so on.

It's not a bad thing to call out the crap, the psychological manipulations, it's a better thing to show people alternatives. I'm not very good at that other than to say I'm living a very fine life without traditional television, without Microsoft or Apple or Android, without streaming or radio music, without advertising that moves or makes noise, without social media... and I still find plenty of interesting things to do, which includes writing posts like this on DU.