So, “Inception” is less a Philip K. Dick movie than it is a Douglas Rushkoff movie. The description of the first segment in his Frontline piece is “A look at how corporate marketing ‘culture spies’ track the trend-setting teens.”

Really, the concept of “Inception” is not far-off from what’s already happening. No, we can’t enter people’s dreams to implant information, but information is being implanted regardless via TV and other media. David Sirota has a really excellent post focused on just this: The Deception of Real-World Inception.

The conservative media dreamland, for instance, ensconces its audience in an impregnable bubble—you eat breakfast with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, you drive to the office with right-wing radio, you flit between Breitbart and Drudge at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas bouncing around in this world—say, ideas about the Obama administration allegedly favoring blacks—don’t seem like propaganda to those inside the bubble. With heavily edited videos of screaming pastors and prejudice-sounding Department of Agriculture officials, these ideas are cloaked in the veneer of unchallenged fact, leaving the audience to assume its bigoted conclusions are completely self-directed and incontrovertible.

Same thing for those living in the closed-loop of the “traditional” media. Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times, National Public Radio, WashingtonPost.com and network newscasts, and it’s just another dreamscape promulgating certain synthetic ideas (for instance, militarism and market fundamentalism), excluding other ideas (say, antiwar opinions and critiques of the free market) and bringing audiences to seemingly self-conceived and rational judgments—judgments that are tragically misguided.

Taken together, our society has achieved the goal of “Inception’s” idea-implanting protagonists—only without all the technological subterfuge.

Whole thing’s worth a read.  This isn’t science fiction – the dream world of our imaginations is already being manipulated.  Ideas are being implanted. No one needs to step inside your mind for this to happen.

In keeping with the themes of this blog, here’s a comic about Harvey Pekar and Douglas Rushkoff.  Click the image to keep going.