C'mon, TB. You have to watch TV. No, it's not for the content (although TV isn't a total waste of time, there are a few civilized planets out on Cablespace), it's for the cultural connection.

TV is the culture now, the source of language, shared values, our new mythology, our ethos. It is the Global Village (how are ya doin', Marshall McLuhan?). People pay a lot of money to put things on TV because a lot of eyeballs are watching. They wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

Ah, but you may argue, the internet is more participative, it's interactive, there is more variety and freedom. All true, but that's precisely why we need to watch TV. That's how we are being programmed, manipulated, molded. And don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about a sinister conspiracy of greedy capitalists or Orwellian Commissars. No one is in charge here, it's simply how the system is evolving, on its own, pretty much outside all human control. Blind social and economic forces creating a world favorable to their own propagation.

That's what makes it so horrible. There are no villains, stuff just happens. We are being ruled by a giant mindless computer, not one of silicon and wire and electrical signals, but of information and messages and multiple billions of human decisions diluted down to meaninglessness, but merged into a blind organism obeying only blind economic imperatives and cryptic social forces neither it, nor we, understand. Kurzweil never imagined the Singularity like this, but it's already here.

Anyway, don't watch the Superbowl for the football, watch it for the commercials.
That's where the real action is.