If your formative years were the 1980s and/or your insomnia has you watching movie reruns at 3:00am then you’ve undoubtedly suffered through WarGames. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The movie is like a car accident – so horrifying that while you know you shouldn’t watch you can’t bear to look away.) One of the movie’s iconic moments comes from Joshua who repeatedly asks in one form or another, “Shall we play a game?”

(SPOILER ALERT) The movie culminates in Joshua learning that much like Tic-Tac-Toe a nuclear war can never be won – it’s a game not worth playing.

The parallel is to Big Media. It’s a bunch of shameless self-promoters not worth listening to. In the most honest of moments CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan recently admitted to such during a live broadcast.

The surprise isn’t what Big Media is but that many of us consciously or otherwise give it validity. They buy us with what they sell. They’ll share some nonsensical item of self-promotion under the guise of it being important and focused on our interests – not theirs. What do we do? Rather than tune it out we not only give it credibility but deem it important enough to act upon – and immediately nonetheless!

We’re not picking on CNBC. They’re all guilty.

In following Joshua’s advice it turns out the winning move is not to play the game. In other words tune out the noise. Thankfully it seems that’s just what people are beginning to do.

Surely they won’t go down without a fight. We’ll be treated to ever so many more ‘useful’ programs like Money Wars or a few more beautiful people in tight/revealing clothing mugging for the camera. Anything to distract us from what really matters.

And what does matter? Tuning out the noise and thinking for ourselves. As Timothy Leary said at the Human Be-In in 1967, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”