In The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben writes that "As much as [TV] loves choice, . . . it doesn't actually believe in choosing. It urges us to choose everything--this and this and this as well" (185). The question is, how can "TV"--an inanimate object or process--"believe" in anything? Does a river "believe" in the choice people have to look at it, or swim in it, or drown in it? The fact is that TV has a life of its own, just as the river does, and just as capitalistic society does in the theory of Karl Marx. TV, in that sense, does not "believe" in human beings' free choice any more than history believes in human beings' free choice. In both cases, human beings are dealing with forces beyond their control. And just as capitalism ultimately steals the soul of the worker (and the soul of the capitalist, too, of course), so does TV steal the soul of the viewer, leaving him with nothing but the desire to watch more of the same TV which stole his soul in the first place. What is the "soul" TV steals? To this observer, it is the freedom of choice to not do something which is self-destructive. TV is self-destructive, as Mckibben points out, because it tranquilizes, dulls the senses, alienates on every level, turns the viewer into a couch potato ignorant of nature and fixated on consuming, etc., etc., etc. But just as the drug addict cannot stop himself from using drugs, though they are destroying him, so the TV viewer cannot stop watching the TV that is destroying him.
Also in both cases (that is, in TV and in the march of historical materialism) there is the intended result--the advancement of capitalism--and the unintended result--the complete alienation of the individual human beings who make up the capitalist system. McKibben quotes Erazim Kohak on Marx: "The consumer society is here realizing the nightmarish vision of Karl Marx, for whom the human is the being who confronts the world and encounters in it only the product o...