Newspaper brains and television souls
Welcome to the streets of the dead.
I recently came across a Charles Bukowski quote I liked.
I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
—Charles Bukowski
We have all seen this, and we are seeing it more and more. Those newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas are familiar to us. Although they are being reshaped into something different, digital souls with hive minds and dopamine hangovers.
The means of mental detachment may have evolved over the last few decades, but the underlying drives and effect are the same as ever.
Our world is not so different from Bukowski’s.
Assassinated men
I see men assassinated around me every day.
Bukowski looked around and could not escape the assassinated men, killed off by a heartless society. The forgotten and the overlooked. The walking dead.
He had an affinity for the common man, the worker and ordinary people. He embraced life in the raw. He shied away from none of it, including his own shortcomings.
The assassinated were the beaten, the failures. Bukowski knew them well. He drank with them and socialized with them. He knew the system had ground them down. It was the same one he narrowly escaped from.
Many are like this today. They are not being assassinated they are committing suicide. A digital suicide.
They are lost on their devices, in the thrall of ancient dopamine loops designed for a world of scarcity long since gone. They now live in a time of abundance they are unprepared for, drowning in synthetic excitement, saturated with novelty, the endless hits conveniently available on a little rectangle always at the ready.
They are enjoying their suicide, loving every minute in fact.
The walking dead
I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead...
Bukowski saw the living dead every day. Almost killed off by a harsh life, but not quite.
Exhausted men pretending to live. Dragging themselves into work, paying the bills, living for the weekend. Animated husks going through the motions.
It is not so different today. We think we are better off than our grandparents because now we have fancy computers and are always connected. We can watch dance videos while on a bus, simultaneously texting a friend, destroying our ability to concentrate or think, all the while marvelling at our good luck we were born into such advanced times.
People feel privileged thanks to their algorithmically driven feeds reminding them they’ve never had it so good.
Who can warn the damned of their fate when they believe they are the fortunate?
Like Bukowski’s dead men theirs is a pantomime of life, an existence stripped bare of meaning then redecorated with distraction, the obvious gaps filled in with mental foam.
A mild example are the autorecorders, the people attending concerts and museums and events who insist on recording it all, their devices held aloft while life literally unfolds in front of them.
They curate their excitements for the brownie points they can later harvest, oblivious to the role they play in making their lives second hand experiences even to themselves.
How many find their days are now lived through screens with reality itself kept at arm’s length? Work, friendships, family relationships, all managed with only two dimensions instead of the three we are designed for.
But worst of all are the sidetracked parents of younger children. Childminding palmed off to a machine, with crucial human contact absent from the word go. What chance do those kids have when their mothers are lost in antisocial medialand while junior looks on, abandoned and confused.
We have rooms, streets and cities of the dead ourselves, all of whom distract themselves from life, its majestic vitality traded in for a cheaper, tackier facsimile, always available to replay and share unlike our own luminous existence, its once-only deal recast as dull and flat and slow instead of unique and precious.
What is that if not a kind of death?
Empty vessels
Men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions...
Bukowski could spot a conformist from a hundred yards. The standard reactions programmed in.
Fear rules the sheep; fear of not fitting in, of sticking out. No such worries for Bukowski himself.
We see today’s manufactured feelings too. The latest thing downloaded automatically by millions, not an ounce of critical thinking at work. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is a virus, a hate figure or a new war.
Like bacteria on a petri dish the material takes hold and spreads, the fertile ground of the unthinking mind primed and ready.
Much of it is animated by the same drive understood by Bukowski. A predisposition to seek approval from others.
Healthier instincts are smothered to accommodate the demands of polite society so over time only the accommodations remain, making for empty vessels echoing in chambers where fools look to each other for direction, the blind leading the programmed into their reassuring hell.
Most people are other people, as a previous social outcast once reminded us.
Emotional thinking
Men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
Newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Neural patterns, emotions and even memories created by mass media.
Homo sapiens’ singular cognitive brilliance hijacked for passive consumption. No deep thinking, no reflection. Just ingest then regurgitate, like trained monkeys. The powerful, the politicians and the traditional media grinding those organs forever. Garbage in, garbage out.
No time spent gestating anything like a real opinion or an idea of one’s own. The grown-up version of matching shapes to the corresponding holes in the toy, the delight not coming from understanding the pattern but in getting it right so others clap.
It is hardly any different now.
Today’s media organs are evolutions of print media and television; they use all the same tricks.
Everything is about attention. Getting it and holding it, like a war for our minds. Although there is no high ground here worth defending, just an endless battlefield, an informational Somme except this time it is nothing but trenches with even no man’s land long since erased. There can be no room left to think lest those uncomfortable ideas intrude, so we must keep them down in among the mud and the rats where they belong.
If anything high school ideas are a little advanced for today’s rewired nervous systems. Covid taught us they didn’t need facts or reason or even persuasion, they only needed fear.
They had them lining up to be injected with mystery cocktails in parking lots for free donuts because a guy on TV told them to do it. That is pre-high school thinking, the mental immaturity of young children lacking adult capacity to discern or reason. And we all saw it happen.
What a world.
Attention means existence
That world is a cacophony of distraction, temptation and noise designed to capture everyone’s attention. But even attention falls short; it is really targeting our existence.
This only really works if you are a passive recipient questioning very little. If you let people who hate you shotgun nonsense into your mind and teach you to thank them for the overstimulation, the loss of concentration and the hollowed out pseudo-experience it leaves you with as you become a digital mannequin losing the ability to think, reason or question.
Needless to say some of us have already checked out of this asylum. If all they are offering are tailored feeds, the current thing from central command and emotional analysis, many are happy to sit this one out.
Bukowski did too. After the decades of hard liquor and 11pm starts to his day he sobered up and got to it. Towards the end he was free and clear, churning it out, facing it head on.
There is no other way, especially if you are to make any Bukowskian observations of your own.
The Greats look life square in the face and don’t flinch. No mediating screens or comforting platitudes for them. It is warts and all, all the way, all the time, just like Charles Bukowski.
Although today he would perhaps use different labels...
We see digital suicides around us every day. We walk through rooms of the distracted, streets of the distracted, cities of the distracted; people without thoughts, texting through screens; people with downloaded beliefs and this season’s causes; people with social media brains, video clip souls and implanted ideas.
Bukowski died in 1994, but he’d feel right at home today.
Brilliant.
I typically read your articles out loud to my husband (we read from the internet to each other every day, which is a small way to minimize the isolating effects of the medium).
If I could rate this article's worth by the number of times he was so taken with what you'd written that he was compelled to interrupt my reading, this one scored 11 out of 10!
We especially loved the picture of Bukowski on the shoe phone. A few decades back when chunky mobile phones in cars were all the rage, my husband got tired of watching all the "special people" showing off, talking on their phones while they were driving.
So he started carrying a shoe (an old sneaker) in his car, and when he would see someone on their phone he would pick up the shoe and hold it to his ear.
We had no idea what was coming down the pike.
Digital spiritual suicide.
Accurately put though sad.
Have you read Lewis' The Abolition of Man? It feels more prophetic every day.