If you haven’t seen the movie Network you need to leave right now and go get it. I was thinking that it was going to be something similar to the 80’s film Broadcast News, but Network, directed by the late Sydney Lumet, is something entirely different. It’s a movie about television but only to show the larger role that television plays as a vehicle for propaganda. And not only propaganda, but how television separates people from the reality around them and destroys their humanity. How it takes culture out of the hands of people who would normally produce it. The way that it separates human beings from one another and reduces them to consuming, obedient ‘humanoids’. One of the most chilling parts of the movie is in a darkened corporate boardroom where Mr. Petersen (played by Ned Beatty) gives a speech about how democracy is an illusion, national governments are an illusion, freedom is an illusion, there is only the unalterable, immutable, natural law of global capital. Although released in 1975 this movie is just as relevant today.