Throughout this entire election and transition I've been wondering if Neil Postman's son is going to remind people of his father's warning in "Amusing Ourselves

Throughout this entire election and transition I've been wondering if Neil Postman's son is going to remind people of his father's warning in "Amusing Ourselves to Death". It's truly surreal that this detailed prediction I read years ago, written two years before I was born, has been playing out in such a spectacularly... real way. There's this feeling you get when you understand what we're in the grips of yet you also observe and experience just how overwhelmingly impossible it is for everyone to confront the same realizations in order for us to course-correct and avoid what increasingly feels like an inevitable disaster. Neil Postman was both somewhat deterministic in his beliefs about our future and then reluctantly optimistic when pushed. In an interview he jokingly qualified his optimistic statement with "but remember I'm an American which means I'm eternally optimistic". I think he was also very struck with this feeling, that it is all so clear what is happening yet the dance continues and to warn people, to educate, to improve things in a systemic way that'd be sufficient enough in capacity to combat these omnipresent machinations is so overwhelmingly difficult and complex that one feels a bit hopeless. In that same interview he said "..to the extent that there would be a serious conversation among Americans about these issues I think we could pull through." (Link to end of interview: https://youtu.be/FRabb6_Gr2Y?t=27m https://youtu.be/FRabb6_Gr2Y?t=27m) Because this problem is so complex and deeply-entrenched in so many facets of our existence whatever course-correction can be made will have to be the result of a phenomenon which I'd describe as very much "emergent". And that phenomenon will be an amalgamation of shifts in thought and behavior spanning all facets of culture and society. You could say "organic movement" but I am not even so hopeful as to think one or a few "organic" movements would suffice. I believe the shift would have to be systemic but also cultural, only a shift in our beliefs- in what our culture deems valuable would provide enough motivation to re-center ourselves around a new definition of civic duty. Ever since I wanted to be a web developer my dream was to start a successful startup that would allow me to then fund the development of a web technology, likely a platform of some sort, that would help solve some of these bewilderingly complex problems primarily rooted in education. I am always trying to think of how a web technology could fit into the puzzle. However, if a the American people do not start a discussion about this problem (not one facet of the problem like "fake news" but an acknowledgement of it's deeply-entrenched, multi-faceted nature) than we cannot give it a name and fight it. We cannot begin to plan solutions if we do not first have most people on board which the fact that the problem exists in the first place. If you've read this far maybe you too are interested in this problem and maybe a couple web developers slowly ideating and iterating over time could be a valuable contribution? Feel free to hit me up: james.checks.his.email at gmail dot com. *edited to add link to interview.