Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

But TV has tech-bred problems of its own. The advent of cable, often with packages of over forty channels, threatens networks and local affiliates alike. This is particularly true when the viewer is armed with a remote-control gizmo: Joe B. is still getting his six total hours of daily TV, but the amount of his retinal time devoted to any one option shrinks as he remote-scans a much wider band. Worse, the VCR, with its dreaded fast-forward and ZAP functions, threatens the very viability of commercials. Television advertisers’ sensible solution? Make the ads as appealing as the shows. Or at any rate try to keep Joe from disliking the commercials enough so that he’s willing to move his thumb to check out two and a half minutes of Hazel on the Superstation while NBC sells lip balm. Make the ads prettier, livelier, full of enough rapidly juxtaposed visual quanta that Joe’s attention just doesn’t get to wander, even if he remote-kills the volume. As one ad executive underputs it, “Commercials are becoming more like entertaining films.”[^18]