If I'm Being Perfectly Honest Here

I've decided to scrap my TiVo.

It's not that I'm watching too much tv. It's that I'm not watching enough bad tv. Television is designed to be passively enjoyed -- you sit down, you flip around the dial until something you like comes on, and, yes, you sit through the commercials. This is all part of our shared cultural experience from birth until a few years ago -- the idea that You Are Not In Control; The TV Controls You.

To employ DVR technology is not to give the viewer control but only the similacrum of control; we still live in a world controlled by corporations, in which advertising dollars dictate what programming is available to us. To deny that reality through TiVo is tantamount to denying reality itself, weakening our resolve to overthrow that superstructure. TiVo in effect creates a virtual and invirtuous reality, making us cocooned sleepers stacked in pods no longer cognizant of the extent to which our subservience to the dominant paradigm has been preordained.

The only path to revolution lies in confronting the evil which exists before us, to see every day the banality of unsifted popular culture and recognize that which should lay beyond peradventure: we are not in control, and no $299 device provided by these same corporations can make it so.

TiVo was founded by America Online. Inc. Institutional Venture Partners, NBC Multimedia, Inc., New Enterprise Associates, DIRECTV, Inc., Sony Corporation, Vulcan Ventures, Inc. and TiVo employees. Does that sound like liberation of the consumer or just another form of slavery?

Who's with me?