Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.

Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin

My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories

During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years

I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung, channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time

Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,

Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top

This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation.

Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.

[0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...

This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical

Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”

People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.

I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.

Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.

From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".

Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:

1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,

2. television promotes capitalism,

3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and

4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.

https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...