Every so often an eye-opening work of social criticism becomes a surprise bestseller. In 1979, everyone was talking about Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1987, it was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Last year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation raised the alarm, encouraging readers outside the parenting-book world to consider what the teenage mental health crisis might mean for the culture at large. Typically the work of a professor with an aptitude for speaking to a general readership, this sort of book hits just as popular anxiety about a new technology or ideology—smartphones, the self-actualization movement, multiculturalism—is cresting. Ideas that may have been simmering away in academia suddenly burst into the common conversation. However, the very qualities that make these books feel tremendously relevant at a particular historical moment also tend to make them fade into obscurity when that moment passes. The blockbuster cultural criticism book tends to speak to its time—then become a curio as the culture changes around it. But Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has legs. For a book published 40 years ago about a medium—TV—no longer considered the prime driver of politics and culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death sure still turns up in op-eds, in podcasts, and in interviews, its central arguments about the media still startlingly relevant in the internet era. Postman’s most enthusiastic proponent is the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, who called the book “prophetic” in 2022, and wrote of coming around to the concept that the medium is the message—an idea first put forward by Marshall McLuhan, but more lucidly expressed in Amusing Ourselves to Death. In a recent interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes about Hayes’ new book on the attention economy, the two men concur that Amusing Ourselves to Death is “the GOAT” and, in Klein’s estimation, “somewhat predicts Donald Trump in an explicit way.” Klein has also discussed Postman’s book with such guests as Sean Illing, co-author of The Paradox of Democracy, and the novelist Zadie Smith, who pronounced Postman “a prophet and a genius” and reported that she gives copies of Amusing Ourselves to Death to “everybody all the time. It blew my mind.” Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support. Klein is not alone. Jay Caspian Kang, the New Yorker’s commenter on media and politics, titled his first column “Arguing Ourselves to Death” and referred to himself as a “Postmanite.” Gal Beckerman, a staff writer for the Atlantic, selected Amusing Ourselves to Death as the book that changed the way he thinks, writing that he considers its argument every day. Even Katha Pollitt, who admitted in the New Republic that when Postman’s book first came out she dismissed it as a fuddy-duddy’s lament for the good old days, decided to revisit it last year. Despite some quibbles, Pollitt conceded that Postman was “on to something important.” In the past few years, Amusing Ourselves to Death has been recommended by the actor Bradley Whitford and the basketball coach Jason Kidd, turned up in the lede of a story about the purchase of a soccer league, and had an avant-garde performance festival dedicated to it. What is it about this work of social criticism that makes it still feel like news, and urgent news, four decades after it first appeared? The core of Postman’s argument is that every major new medium of communication transforms the culture using it, “by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.” To Postman in 1985, the culture was clearly shifting from being shaped by print communication to being shaped by television. As a result, the collective discourse went from being governed by a “coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas” to being ruled by the imperatives of “show business.” Everything about TV was designed to be entertaining, and even when producers aimed to make programming that was “serious” or substantive, they inevitably ended up obeying those imperatives. Postman, a professor of education at New York University, took particular issue with Sesame Street, for example, because he felt that it taught children to think and learn using a format adapted from TV commercials. A lot of Amusing Ourselves to Death concerns itself with dissecting the influence of TV commercials—which you likely see much fewer of than did the viewers of Postman’s day. Similarly, because the TV of 1985 was still primarily a network product, designed to abide by Federal Communications Commission restrictions and to appeal to the broadest possible audience, it tended to be bland, homogenous, and averse to controversy. TV, Postman argued, is “not congenial to messages of naked hate. For one thing, you never know who is watching, so it is best not to be wildly offensive.” But once the audience became fragmented into dozens of niche cable channels, all that changed, as stars of right-wing radio programs, like Morton Downey Jr., migrated to TV. Postman insisted that “haters with reddened faces and demonic gestures merely look foolish on television,” an observation that isn’t entirely wrong. It’s just that there turned out to be a decent-sized audience for that foolishness. The current edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 2005, with an introduction written by Postman’s son, Andrew. (Neil Postman died in 2003.) Andrew’s introduction marvels over how much the media had changed since 1985, what with everyone “writing emails, returning calls, downloading tunes, playing games (online, PlayStation, Game Boy), checking out websites, sending text messages, IM’ing, Tivoing.” Tivoing! That one now-defunct then-neologism indicates how quaint the 2005 introduction itself has become, written before the widespread use of social media and video streaming services. (“African Americans,” writes Andrew, preparing readers who might be offended by his father’s use of an outdated identity designation, were then “known as blacks.”) Yet, apart from the occasional antediluvian references to people like Shecky Greene and Gary Hart, Andrew reports that the students of 2005 who were assigned to read Amusing Ourselves to Death nevertheless found it highly relevant, just as the pundits of today do. This may be the most salient virtue of Amusing Ourselves to Death: how readily the mental tools the book provides can be applied to media undreamed of when Postman was writing it. TV is very different from social media, but Postman’s argument that each new communications technology transforms the society that adopts it is an extremely useful way of thinking about the social media era. Postman considered the stock news anchor’s phrase “Now … this” to epitomize one of the key qualities of TV news: the disconnection and lack of meaningful context among the stories it reports. Citing a phrase that all his readers heard on a regular basis, Postman clarified how the discontinuous presentation of broadcast news accustoms its audience to the fact that “what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see.” This, he maintained, effected a transformation—begun with the telegraph but completed by TV—of “the news” from actionable, local information pertinent to one’s own life into bulletins for passive consumption, “without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.” Even if you haven’t seen a full-length TV commercial in months and never watch TV news, you can recognize our current information environment in this description. Social media feeds lack coherence and nuance; the medium itself discourages both. As Illing told Klein in their podcast episode, “McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed; look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed; look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” In the 40 years since Amusing Ourselves to Death came out, we’ve learned that the more competition there is for the audience’s attention, the more inflammatory the content vying for it tends to become. Getting angry—or, worse yet, into an argument—on a social media platform can feel like participating in the political process, but it’s really just a form of entertainment engineered to win our engagement, an engagement that furthers the spread of whatever caused the outrage in the first place. Postman did not foresee how virality would work, but you can apply the way he analyzed the operation of network TV to every new medium that comes along, observing how its format determines what can be said. As Kang put it in the New Yorker, “The intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation.” Postman detected early on the replacement of reason and facts with vibes. Trump fans can run around, proclaiming, “Promises made, promises kept,” despite the fact that the president has kept almost none of the many extravagant campaign promises he made. He gets away with it because he excels at creating the impression of action in action’s absence. Despite the many accomplishments of his administration, Joe Biden could not or would not perform the symbolic role of an energetic president, so the impression is that he did nothing. As Postman wrote, keeping in mind Ronald Reagan, the entertainer turned president of his own day, “ ‘Credibility’ here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity.” Critics can exhaust themselves challenging the veracity of a politician’s claims, but the public tends to zone out at dull talk of legislation and gross domestic product. “What is not amusing,” Postman noted, “does not compel their attention.” The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.” But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it. No wonder we’ve never stopped talking about him.