Of course: that’s another quote from Edward Bernays’ “Propaganda” (p. 135).
Apparently even 100 years ago, there was nothing easier than to accuse the mass of men with leading lives of lacking motivation. It seems that throughout time the slogan “Just Do Something” would also have been less popular than to “Just Do Nothing”.
Yet I think there is nonetheless (at least) one characteristic which distinguishes humanity from beings fully and completely devoted to slothery. I have a hunch that this characteristic is quite closely related to a sort of Narcissistic attitude. It can be expressed simply as:
No-one wants to pay, but everyone wants to get paid.
moi
More and more content is freely shared. Any somewhat aware reader of Esther Dyson’s writings could have predicted this decades ago. Heck, if you were even just slightly prone to thinking outside of the box, you could have had an inkling that this was certainly on some distant horizon upon reading George Orwell’s seminal work “1984”. All we are experiencing today is the mass production of content via so-called algorithmic machinery … i.e., Artificially Sentient Slop (ASS). This crap is being turned out at a rate that people all over consider to be “too cheap to meter”. Why read it — why pay attention at all?
Except, of course, for the very exceptional case: you should pay attention to me. 😉
[1] ““get paid to …”” [ https://squ.data.blog/2026/10/17/get-paid-to ] see also “The Whole World is Sleeping“
