Written by a student of the Deep Green Bush-School. The DGBS is a participatory, technology-free, evolutionary and revolutionary school located in Aotearoa (colonized name New Zealand) for ages 5-18 designed to raise intelligent, healthy, mature, responsible young adults who can think for themselves, meet their needs, live a meaningful life and challenge the current system in order to bring about a healthy world. We are raising the dreamers, healers, rebels and the revolutionaries this world needs.
Not many people know how terrible screens and video games are. I used to game for at least five hours a day. If I wasn’t gaming I was watching videos about gaming. I didn’t go outside because I would get bored so quickly and all I could think about was me being bored and how I wanted to go back on my Xbox and “kill” more people. My brother also gamed and we would fight about who was better at gaming . I realised that the more you kill people in games the more normal it becomes. It’s the same with movies; the more you watch people getting killed the more normal it seems. Video games and movies numb you to violence. And just think, there are more than two billion gamers in the world today.
Gaming and all screens also have a big effect on attention span. When you play video games, or when you use any kind of screen, there is always something going on. It’s always fast-paced and makes you go even faster. When I would stop gaming and try to do anything else I would quickly get bored and expect it all to happen at the same speed. Or I would wait for someone to tell me what to do. The more we use screens, the less we are able to concentrate on real life.
One of the reason gaming is so addicting is because when you kill someone, or do something you’re supposed to, you’re rewarded. You get points, or some music plays, or something like that. Video game designers hire psychologists to help design the games to keep people hooked. There are millions and millions of dollars spent on keeping people addicted, not just to games, but to all screens. It’s not just video games that are bad: TV, cellphones and any screens all have similar negative effects on us. So many people can’t even go a few minutes without checking their phones.
If you look around everyone’s either looking at a phone, listening to music, or just holding their phone. No one can do anything without a phone or a screen. We are completely dependent on technology.
Even in schools, every student and teacher has some kind of screen to stare at all day. Schools do not try to prevent students from becoming addicted. They do the opposite! Now you’re required to have a screen. As much as I would love to start bad-mouthing the junk they teach in schools, the way they force screens on everyone says enough.
With screens you can change whatever you’re doing, whenever you want. Nothing requires physical effort. Everything is changed to suit you. If you don’t like something, one swipe and it’s gone. Don’t want to talk to someone anymore? Just click away. These might seem like good things, but in the actual world you can’t just run away in the middle of a conversation with someone. On screens there’s no one to question if you’re right or not, so your opinion does not change. Instead, it just seems to you that you’re always right. But if you don’t question your own opinions, then you lose the ability to think. Most of the world is using screens, and most of the world can’t think. If people stopped going on screens maybe they would realise what’s going on in the world and realise that we need to stop being sheep, and we need to fight back.
For a more detailed exploration of this topic, we recommend the documentary film Stare Into The Lights My Pretties, which includes interviews with Deep Green Resistance co-founder Derrick Jensen.
If one reads McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global village this is old news about the screen. Not so much addicts but a mass neurological programming from the mechanistic technology of thinking since Gutenberg to the screen, the new electric technology of our new times in images, non- literary, a non reading linear programming and consumption of information.
Not only are screens addictive. They’re also the primary cause of severe macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness beyond middle age. Recommended countermeasure: 10 mg of lutein per day.
Good read… thank-you Nova.
In the 1970s a band called DEVO, which stands for de-evolution, said that humans were devolving into a race of robots. As technology advances and increases in use and pervasiveness, this gets even more true.
On a personal level, the best times of my life by far are when I didn’t have a TV, and this was before people had personal computers or cell phones, so of course I didn’t have those either. But on the far more important big-picture level, “screen addiction” does things like making the real & natural world seem irrelevant (even more than modern humans had already thought and felt so), greatly reduces attention span so that people cannot think critically because they can’t hold thoughts or focus long enough, and makes people totally impatient because they expect everything to happen in the next nano second.
The more advanced technology is, the more harmful it gets, and it’s getting far more pervasive also. With their incessant cell phone use and attention, humans have become the race of robots that DEVO warned about, or the Borg that Star Trek warned about, however you want to look at it.
Kids under 18 should be prohibited from using or having cell phones, video games, or computers and their TV time should be limited to an hour per day at most (none would be best). Instead of this garbage, kids should be encouraged to go outside and play. Parents are mainly responsible for this problem by allowing kids to have these things, and when those kids become adults they will be totally not only addicted but also locked into the system.