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4 Electronics
Eliminating the role of television in one's life is a dominant theme in many recent essays regarding simplicity. Writers of these essays see television both as a waste of time and as an implicit advocate of consumerism. Advertising in particular seems to be regarded as an evil by most of the authors. Some see community radio or pirate radio as a viable alternative without the visual distraction; one can, after all, work while listening, but not while watching.
Computer addiction is also a subject of recent interest. Some see computers as sources of instant knowledge (e.g. as in Wikipedia). Others see them as necessarily distracting from the local immediate people and places, and providing a form of false community called " virtual community" which is all too often distracting from body, family and life as lived within same.
Electronics of all kinds require a complex industrial base and knowledge of physics and materials science, which may be part of a military-industrial complex, and so may defeat some of the purposes of voluntary simplicity movements, or lead in the long run to other forms of domination.
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