“A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future.” Video created by Andrew Huang.

Sometimes things just seem to happen all at the right moment.  Tonight, I finished reading the first chapter of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.  It’s titled New Forms of Control and in it Marcuse lays out his thoughts on the extent to which modern post-industrial society has reconfigured, in part through technological progress, humanity’s priorities by bombarding us with unnecessary things and desires, creating what he calls “false needs,” ultimately resulting in a pervasive “unfreedom” — a repressive existence with the visage of liberation but that is no more than the “free choice between brands and gadgets.”

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. [My emphasis]

But perhaps what is most disturbing are his thoughts on how the imposition of these “false needs,” originating from vested interests in society, are ultimately internalized, or “introjected,” by individuals to the point that they are recognized as one’s own wants and desires.  And thus, through this process, each individual then serves as an agent of reproduction for the society as a whole, all the while believing they are acting purely under their own volition.  According to Marcuse, this process ultimately withers down our capacity for reason by corroding freedom of thought, speech, and conscience as we become increasingly preoccupied with the imposed desires of vested interests who benefit from our endless toil and consumption that only serves to ossify our own alienation in that it pushes us further and further away from true liberation.  It thus creates a one-dimensional worldview.  Shallow, void of deeper meaning. (There’s some more in there concerning his apparent loathing for the positivism of Western science which should help round out this discussion a little more, but you can read that part for yourself.)

And mentioning liberation

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither h it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls. [Spelling mistakes in the original]

However, despite the wool apparently being pulled over our eyes, he doesn’t leave us without hope

All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude…

This sentence has been ringing in my head all evening.  So it seemed serendipitous when I stumbled upon Andrew Haung’s video embedded above.  It gives form to the way Marcuse’s chapter left me feeling inside. A depiction of our own servitude.