Neil Postman Was Right – Dammit!
The man who warned us that we’d scroll ourselves stupid—and why we owe him an apology.
Neil Postman didn’t predict TikTok. He didn’t have to.
He saw us coming.
Back in 1985, when mullets roamed the Earth and TV was the dominant time-suck, Postman dropped Amusing Ourselves to Death. It was, basically, a break-up letter to intelligent public discourse. His thesis? That our civilization was sliding into a smiling, shallow, self-inflicted coma. That instead of Orwell’s jackbooted dystopia, we were waltzing into a soft, giggly one – Aldous Huxley’s world—where the truth wouldn’t be censored, just drowned in trivia and jingles.
Sound familiar?
Today, we don’t just amuse ourselves to death; we algorithm ourselves to oblivion.
And Neil Postman, smug ghost that he surely is, would be the first to say: “I told you so.”
Who was Neil Postman, anyway?
Media theorist. Educator. Cultural curmudgeon. A man so suspicious of television he once suggested we go back to oral storytelling.
He wasn’t just worried about content. He was worried about form. About what happens when complex ideas are forced into bite-sized, entertainment-shaped formats. He thought television was turning politics into theatre, news into performance, and education into game shows.
This was years before YouTube, before clickbait, before a sitting US president live-tweeted nuclear diplomacy between commercials for The Apprentice.
Postman didn’t live to see Twitter. But if he had, he might’ve used one word: “Q.E.D.”
The age of ‘Now...this’
One of his most haunting concepts was what he called the "Now...this" transition. That jarring shift in tone used by news anchors:
“In today’s top story, a brutal civil war has left 3,000 dead. Now...this: a squirrel on waterskis.”
By smashing tragedy and fluff together in the same emotional register, Postman argued, we trained ourselves to care about nothing. Everything became content. Everything became equal.
Today, that’s not a punchline. It’s a business model. It’s the ‘feed’.
Why Postman would probably loathe the ‘They Tried to Warn Us’ podcast
Postman believed we were losing our ability to engage in serious thought.
So I brought him back to talk. On a podcast. With music. And jokes. Ironic? Sure. But I’d argue Postman himself used entertainment to smuggle truth. He was witty. He was sharp. He understood that ridicule could be more powerful than rage. In some ways, They Tried to Warn Us is exactly the kind of thing he’d endorse—if only because it sneaks critical thinking in through the back door of satire.
Or maybe he'd just call me a media clown. Who knows.
The warning still matters
Postman’s biggest concern wasn’t entertainment. It was the collapse of context.
He believed serious public discourse required a medium that encouraged coherence, continuity, and depth. Print had done that. TV had not. And the internet? Well, the jury’s in—and they’re watching Instagram Reels.
In Postman’s world, ideas mattered. Nuance mattered.
In ours, if a thought can’t fit in a caption, it probably doesn’t get thought.
Ghosts don’t gloat, but if they did...
If Postman could see us now, doomscrolling under the glow of ten thousand ring lights, he might say:
“I didn’t mean for you to take it this far.”
He didn’t want to be a prophet. He wanted to be wrong.
But he wasn’t.
He tried to warn us.
And here we are.
Want to hear Neil Postman’s voice come back from the grave?
Check out Episode 1 of They Tried to Warn Us, where I ask him about TikTok, the end of attention spans, and whether irony is the only thing that survives the algorithm.
Links:
Neil Postman - From Television to TikTok: How We Really Are Amusing Ourselves to Death (Apple) (Spotify) (YouTube)
Next up: Marshall McLuhan’s messages about the media