When I was a little boy I was hooked on television. I was that most helpless of all creatures, a physically inept nerd who was lousy at science and math. Lacking friends and confidence and overwhelmed by my insecurities, I used television like a narcotic, or, more to the point, like a hallucinogen. My generation was one of the first to know this addiction to electronic media, an addiction that has now become the norm in the Global North and much of the Global South. This widespread dependency has troubling implications for the future of our species.

A scene from David Lynch’s surreal 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me helps to illustrate my point. An agent who’s been missing for nearly two years suddenly re-appears at FBI Headquarters, imparts some very cryptic messages to his bewildered colleagues, and then vanishes before their eyes. In anguish he declares, “We live inside a dream!” The movie subtly implies that this dream has been created by the effects of electronic media on the human mind. The agent disappears into a mindscape taken over by the demonic forces inhabiting this media, forces that can possess, corrupt, and ultimately destroy us.

Lynch was onto something. As many cultural theorists have argued, the electronic media are changing us by immersing us in a constant flow of hyper-real imagery. The depth of our immersion is difficult to fully fathom, but we can begin to appreciate it by considering how recently humanity acquired these technologies.

10,000 generations have passed since fully human beings appeared on the Earth. Television was invented in 1928, about four generations ago. 1971, less than two generations ago, saw the appearance of the first commercially-sold video game. Computer generated 3-D imagery was first used in a movie in 1976. The internet came into being only in 1983, and was available for commercial use in 1988, exactly one generation ago. These technologies have allowed us to become producers and consumers of incredibly sophisticated and compelling illusions. Thanks largely to the electronic media, we live in an utterly different sensory universe than the one inhabited by the 9,996 generations of humanity before ours.

Today, electronic imagery is everywhere, bypassing our critical faculties en route to the subliminal reaches of our minds. This process is facilitated by the radiant light emitted by television and computer screens. In The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos (Stoddart, 2001), Frank Zingrone argues that whereas the reflected light that we use to read books engages the linguistic parts of our brains, radiant light engages neural structures that process nonverbal, intuitive information. The more exposed we are to images created by radiant light, the more stimulated those regions of the brain become and the harder it is for them to do their job effectively. Our minds can easily be saturated with overpowering imagery, undermining our ability to make verbal sense of our world: electronic stimulation thereby disintegrates meaning. The effect is profoundly addictive. Our sensory lives, and to an even greater degree our children’s sensory lives, are now dominated by layers of disjointed electronic imagery so compelling as to seem more real than the real.

The painful effects of this perceptual shift were first noticed in North America in the 1950s. In The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (W. W. Norton, 1993), David Skal writes that an “extremely interesting facet of fifties monster films is the repeated image of bulging eyes and—especially—bulging brains. Together, they present an image of intense and unbearable visual-mental overload, a description that may have more relevance to the unprecedented media bombardment, (mainly by television) in the fifties, than to any possible physiology of extraterrestrial beings. Never before had the public been asked to witness so much, or absorb so many messages or quantities of information. . . . In a way that early movie monstrosities reflected a horror of physical fragmentation, these new creatures anticipated not the violent rending of the body but its withering and atrophy. The future was about watching images and processing information: the eyes and brain were the only useful parts of the human form left.”

In the 1960s, media theorist Marshall McLuhan proposed that because electronic media radically expanded our perceptions and our ability to communicate, they were actually extensions of our central nervous systems. He implied that we were, in a very important sense, being assimilated into an interconnected electronic nervous system. David Cronenberg’s 1983 movie Videodrome puts it this way: “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.”

Many of McLuhan’s intellectual heirs have warned that our inner worlds are becoming nodes in this world-spanning system of electronic cognition, compromising our ability to reason and act with any degree of independence or authenticity. As Jean Baudrillard says in The Ecstasy of Communication (Mit Press, 1988), we no longer live as actors or playwrights, but rather as terminals of multiple networks.

In his 1990 essay, Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle, Scott Bukatman agrees with this analysis, but takes it one step further by asking, “whose nervous system is this, anyway?” The answer is obvious. The imagery dominating our sensory lives is produced and governed by complicated and cyclopean networks of economic power. Those systems repress certain images while allowing others to proliferate at a viral pace. In this way, the often irrational and contradictory forces of the global economy are colonizing our imaginations. We’re being integrated into the collective imagination, or perhaps the collective unconscious, of global capitalism.

That’s a really bad thing, because capitalism depends on ever-rising levels of consumption, and that demands the unending inflammation of human desire and the willingness and ability of most people to ignore capitalism’s negative consequences. Those consequences include things like global warming and cascading ecosystem collapse, the genocide of indigenous people and the economic enslavement of billions, and wars waged with the weapons of the gods against civilian populations. Imagine the kind of consciousness that would be suited to such a system: that’s the consciousness the capitalist cybersphere inevitably creates.

Video games, the crack cocaine of the electronic media, provide a useful case study. Around the world, treatment programs are being designed to deal with the growing incidence of video game addiction, while innumerable “shooter” games recreate the techniques military forces use to desensitize soldiers to killing. The US Army has taken advantage of this trend by producing a cutting-edge game called “America’s Army” as a recruitment and training tool. There have been over 20 upgraded versions of the game since 2002, all of them distributed free of charge.

Why are we such easy prey for the demonic denizens of the electronic media? Speaking for myself, I think it has something to do with my relationship with my body. In elementary school I realized that my body didn’t have the strength, agility, or beauty that the people in my patriarchal hometown admired. My mathematical and scientific ineptitude barred me from the kind of academic achievements that would have made my physical ineptitude bearable, and so I began to loathe my body and ignore its sensations and feelings. My shame alienated me from my flesh and drove me into my imagination. Betraying my body made it difficult to relate to the bodies around me, something I never had much of a talent for anyway. I lost the ability to read other peoples’ emotions, and my own seemed indecipherable. Moreover, I became estranged from the biosphere. It was as though a wall of clouded glass obstructed my view of the natural world, a world that was, after all, as much an extension of my body as my body was an extension of it. I clung to television because by over-stimulating my imagination it distracted me from my body. I suspect that many people have experienced the same general process: the humiliation, grief, and fear produced by our intensely hierarchical social order tempt us away from the body and its vulnerabilities and into the fantasies of the electronic otherworld.

Our capacity to comprehend and care for our communities and our ecosystems depends on our connections to each other and to nature, but these, in turn, depend on our awareness of our bodies. To numb that awareness creates a kind of self-destructive psychosis, a psychosis our civilization seems hell-bent on inducing in all of us.

If we’re psychotic, is there a way back to sanity? Of course we need to transform all of our economic power structures, but even in the best-case scenario that will take a long time to accomplish. In the meantime, while we can certainly limit our use of electronic media, I don’t think we can completely free ourselves from it any more than the morbidly obese can completely free themselves from food and the food industry. It’s too much a part of our world, too much a part of us.

Perhaps the solution, if it can be called a solution, is the development of a kind of techgnosis, a deep mindfulness of our bodies and our imaginations, and of the electronic media’s transforming effects upon both. As with any addiction, it’s only as we become aware of our genuine needs and of the consequences of our habit that we can begin to control it. That’s a difficult proposition, but in the short term I think it’s our only option.