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Here's a Thought... A (no longer) new section, with chunks of ideas that might grow into a bigger essay, but will likely stay as these small islands in this vast cyber-sea.
HERE’S A THOUGHT JULY 2024
All Hail the Algorithm
One of the top comments (by SID-ym3ge) in this video (polite bear waving
hello):
Is asking why the comments in this video (awesome catch by the bear):
Are deactivated.
(Although at the time of the publication of this ‘Here’s a Thought’,
comments were now possible on both)
And that’s mildly amusing, but also a very good example of how we adapt to
the arbitrary rules of the internet.
The way individual citizens engage with the world are limited in the sense
that we are all human beings and as a general rule we act in predictable
ways when put in similar situations. The notion of ‘human nature’ and what
those actions entail changes over time, but the funnelling of familiarity
remains eternal.
If we all use cell phones, we will all adapt to the information delivery
system it provides and while initially cellphones operated strictly as the
portable versions of the landline phones we had in our homes, when the
technology changed in the early 2000s to incorporate what computers were
able to do (including access the internet), it changed everything.
For how much Apple’s resurgence was defined by the iMac in the late
nineties and the iPod the early 2000s, it was the iPhone from 2007 that
became the changing technology that would define the 21st century up to
this point.
YouTube debuted two years earlier, and while message boards were from the
earliest iterations of the World Wide Web, the comment section below the
video became it’s own miniature, temporary communities of support and
shitposting, sometimes within the same thread.
The popularity of technological portability and audiovisual possibility
coming together meant we learned not only the content of streaming sites,
but the form of it as well. And talking to each other in bursts of short
sentences (otherwise risking tl:dr) where days might go before responses
have become the norm. And what you find is based on what you have already
found. More of the same is an eternal feedback loop, in nature and its
digital counterpart.
The Fifth Solvay Conference (1927)
It is almost certainly the greatest meeting of scientific minds in human
history.
These week-long (or so) conferences held
infrequently in
The first was in 1911, and in 1927, the fifth took place at the end of
October, when the stars (and schedules) aligned.
Comparisons for smart people hanging out together would have to go back
hundreds, even thousands of years. The Socrates-Plato-Aristotle hangs outs
don’t hold up historically, and Issac Newton was extremely anti-social, so
there wasn’t much overlap with any other luminaries of his day (although
him arguing with Leibniz via letter writing over who ‘created’ algebra is
amusing to think about).
In the nineteenth century it became easier
(easier, not exactly ‘easy’) to communicate regularly across the European
continent thanks to transportation advances like the steamboats and the
locomotive. Not only sending and sharing letters and documents both
private and public very quickly, but making it much easier to see each
other face to face.
By the 1920s, air travel was in its infancy, but after taking the ships
and trains, cars could quickly get you the rest of the way to a particular
destination.
Which brings us to the Fifth Solvay Conference (1927):
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference)
The
main photo is a who’s-who of the first fifty years of 20th century physics
(it’s not really a Solvay conference without Einstein, Bohr, Plank,
Schrödinger, Curie, or Heisenberg), which built an astonishing
intellectual foundation upon which our society exists today.
For how abstract quantum physics can certainly appear to be at first,
second and several other glances after, the technological discoveries that
have come out its principles has given us important advances in
semiconductors, telecommunications, MRIs, cryptography and - on the
horizon - the aptly titled quantum computing.
This was not a quick process, either. Decades passed between theories
published in scientific journals in the early years of the 20th century
(‘1905’ was Einstein’s all-star year) and their eventual practical
applications to everyday life
Can anything later discovered be credibly sourced back to a conversation
or lecture that occurred at the conference?
Not exactly, but getting together on a personal level in between any
planned activities made it easier to share ideas on a professional level
both there and the years after.
Friendships are not always highlighted when looking back in history, as
they might just become a footnote between two important figures, but
working together on any important endeavour is essential.
With modern technology it is of course easier than ever to immediately
share studies and experiments publicly across the globe, as well as having
personal correspondence via email, text and phone. Even the Nobel Prize
Awards ceremony makes a point of having some of the winners sit around a
table and have a conversation about various topics overseen by a mediator
that tries to tie loose disciplinary threads together.
In the 1920s, it was still published journals delivered by mail that would
inform scientists of the what the rest of them were working on.
Even a picture back then was a big deal, something that was still largely
in the hands of professionals, where getting twenty people together was
something that took time to schedule and set up.
Seeing who had the idea is not nearly as important as the idea itself, but
remembering that there has to be a who for every theory shows the literal
humanity that comes with the sciences.
The Collapse of the Family Unit and the Rise of the Friend Blob
‘Family’ is the collection of individuals
whose connection is based on blood (or to be more scientifically accurate,
DNA), and it was easy to understand, so we’ve stuck with it for as long as
we can remember. And this ‘we’ goes beyond humans, as animals congregate
in similar family units as well.
Even though there are many examples of
families of being absolute disasters as small groups of people, with
individuals able to make life absolute hell for other family members,
sometimes there is little recourse because, ‘hey, they’re family’. You
might live with - or at least support - someone who is an addict, an
abuser, a criminal, or just a lazy asshole who sucks all the joy out of
the room.
Today, the family unit is still dominant
but not as much as before. People are living separate from family members,
which sounds unremarkable, but it was completely normal for millennia that
the family lived in the same house for generations. Or if you did move,
all family members did. For most people, you lived together because you
didn’t have a choice in the matter, socially and economically.
And you left because people died or the
house was destroyed, not because you ‘wanted to have a go at it in a new
state’, since that was akin to abandoning your parents, children, cousins,
aunts, uncles, etc.
Today, friendship is the replacement
social group, with people choosing to socialize with like-minded people,
not with people they happen to share DNA with.
It is easier to make and break these
social bonds, which is beneficial when it comes to relationships that
initially only need to be superficial (share a living space) and short
term (sometimes for a few months or a couple years).
This is an accurate reflection of how
adaptive we have become as the ‘speed of society’ has accelerated. Family
is slow, friends are fast.
All the World’s a Stage…Scalped Tickets Available
(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/opinion/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-antitrust.html)
Ticketmaster is a monopoly, and why do monopolies end up offering
terrible, crooked service?
Because they can.
Whether the politicians/regulators naively believed a few years ago that
the new Ticketmaster/LiveNation corporate blob would actually improve
service/performance in the long run, or didn’t really care in the first
place, the result was the same.
Shitty service and an organization that is (supposedly) too big to fail.
Certainly Ticketmaster/LiveNation will make any forced gov’t break-up be
as painful as possible for the consumer, a final corporate fuck you to the
people that had to depend on them because the corporation bribed
politicians into supporting a merger that clearly wasn’t going to be a
benefit for the public, but the shareholders.
Why spend money on having a site that will always work properly when
you’re the only game in town?
Such behaviour practically guarantees scalping, a practice that is much,
much older than these ticket/venue-controlling behemoths offering sub-par
service with above-par service fees.
But corporations hated the idea that individuals were gaming the system by
selling tickets at inflated prices, and wanted in. But in true corporate
fashion, they wanted it all, completely squeezing out any competition, big
and small.
First was getting rid of paper tickets, since that’s what can be shopped
around the easiest. Now that it’s all digital (and no screen-shots
permitted), Ticketmaster can better track where the ticket is going and
how it’s being used.
Then they decided to beat the scalpers at their own game…by charging
ridiculously high prices for shows right from the start!
The recent cancelling/re-scheduling of tours by the Black Keys, Jennifer
Lopez (and ‘seats still available’ for recent tours by Charli XCX (it’s
still a Brat summer, though) and Porter Robinson) is blamed lately on tix
being too damn expensive.
(https://www.stereogum.com/2267170/arena-tour-ticket-sales-black-keys-jlo/columns/sounding-board/)
Management might have told these artists that if this is how much scalped
tickets were going for on your last tour, we may as well charge a similar
amount for this upcoming one so you’ll make that money instead of the
scalpers.
Which sounds great in theory, but it also complete overlooks the fact that
most people bought tickets on the previous tour did so at pre-scalped
numbers, and that only a fraction of fans were willing to by the scalped
ones.
That greed is at the centre of all of this by all parties involved should
surprise no one.
We are all Lost (literally) without the
internet
Think of the last time you looked at map of
your city or province/state when you weren’t about to go anywhere, when
you just end wanted to get a good idea of the area. Chances are you only
look at maps on your phone when you need directions from where you are
right now to a very specific location. How often would you zoom out from
that image and see the larger region as a whole, to see where the major
expressways and streets intersect to create a mental image in your mind
that you can retain?
Now you never have to know the names of the
streets in a distant neighbourhood (or even your own), only the streets
you need to take at that exact moment.
We’re never lost because we are always shown
the exact way to get to our exact location even taking into consideration
realtime traffic and construction.
This is not a lament for paper maps or the
lost ‘art’ of looking at a map and deciding your own route to your aunt’s
house or a mall or a distant town you’ve never been to before. Physical
maps have obvious drawbacks, like falling apart or tearing, getting lost
under a seat or sofa, becoming woefully out of date extremely quickly, and
not giving now expected information like traffic and construction delays.
It’s a lament that if the internet ever goes
down and society collapses, no one will even know where the hills are to
head for.
Imperial and Metric
One of the reasons it’s been so difficult to have America (and the few
other places) to switch to the much, much more efficient and simpler
metric system of measurement is because people are lazy (and not
specifically Americans, but people in general).
And not just in the sense of people not wanting to do the mental work that
comes with switching 1 inch to 2.5 centimetres (that’s a big one), but the
actual words used to say out loud.
Slang and pronunciation shaving are examples of people trying to get to
their point with the fewest and shortest words as possible.
With friends and co-workers you might be describing ideas and situations
with common references between everyone, using initials and short hand,
all to skip the energy of saying more than you have to.
When it comes to switching from imperial to metric, saying ‘one foot’ now
has to be ‘thirty centimetres’. That’s four additional syllables to
describe the same length.
Inch, foot, yard, mile, they are all one syllable words. When it comes to
speaking and expressing distance, nothing beats them. Even the shortest
metric length - metre - is double the syllables.
At least grams can compete…until there’s milligrams and kilograms…
We choose easiness in terms rather than easiness in what the terms
represent, especially when it is a word/idea that we were used to growing
up with (childhood is described as an ‘impressionable age’ for a reason).
Now people who have never been that familiar with imperial would never
consider the economical pronunciation benefits that come with shorter
words because they’re so used to speaking in metric, but those that are
familiar with imperial (America) would find using excess time and brain
wasting syllables a nuisance at best and an evil plot to destroy the
United States at worse.
The
Glorious 9th
If we had to prove to aliens our worth as an intelligent,
worthwhile species, we’d play them Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It is one of
the highest forms of human achievement, condensed to about an hour. It a
form of math (in the musical arrangement sense) that sits in stark
contrast to, say, quantum physics.
One can put forth the concept of how math (and the science
it explains) will be the universal language between extraterrestrial life,
but we should offer something else that shows our other mad skills.
The 9th Symphony is one of the legendary composer’s last
workers, written as he was going deaf (it’s always nice when there are
some quirky trivia facts regarding one’s masterpiece).
‘Classical’ is the unfairly narrow genre label that applied
to way too much to the music made for centuries, but if you had to use one
piece of music to represent that, the 9th is the ideal for that, too.
The opening movement (Allegro) is dark, harrowing metal, and
the closing movement (Ode to Joy) is the most soaring, beautiful
counterpoint to it.
It is the perfect piece for right now (early 21st century),
because just as the time feels chaotic and overwhelming, so too does much
of the music here. When the tempo and scales rise you feel like its
practically attacking you, but then it eases up and are ensconced the
warmest strings your ears could ever beg for.
The 9th is largely instrumental, except the closing ‘Ode to
Joy’ segment, which is pretty standard in message (why can’t we all just
get along on this lovely planet) but sung in German. You don’t need to
understand a single word to get caught up in the emotions of the singers,
but aliens might want to meet this amazing person they’re singing about,
and then it might lead to a strange discussion regarding theology.
So instead one can focus on how its lyrical sentiment
compliments the music, like waves crashing down and then receding to
reveal a beautiful, pristine beach. An impossible, idealistic conception
of harmony in nature.
Is it good because we keep saying it’s good?
And we are, by the way:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/arts/music/ode-to-joy-beethoven.html)
That it still needs a full orchestra to be performed live is
a reminder of the physicality of art, which sounds obvious but is actually
easily forgotten when absolutely any sort of media is digitally accessible
and practically available for free.
The 9th’s value is valueless, and its sounds are good enough
for the deaf.
The Fish Everyone Wants to Catch
(https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/358022/global-mental-health-happiness-measure-gdp)
The above link is an article that focuses on a global
survey that used an unexpected series of questions to determine people’s
mental health and happiness in various countries (how have people treated
you, your outlook on the future).
How people treat each other is a metric that goes beyond
concrete numbers like salary and cost of living, and instead requires
individuals giving wholly subjective ratings between 1 and 5 (since one
person’s 5 experience might be another person’s 3).
But setting finances aside
completely is a fool’s errand, because so much of what informs a person’s
happiness is their status and
opportunities in their community.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy life saving and
life improving medicines. It can buy shelter, which is a basic human need,
but that can range from a makeshift tent to a shack to an apartment to a
house to a mansion (and that’s not even considering how much more money it
takes to own any sort shelter instead of rent it).
In societies where there is more equality, there is more
likely communication and sociability between more people. Which is why
this survey is dominated by Scandinavian countries (long known for
progressive taxation and a strong social safety net) and Latin countries
where economic stability and security are slowly (re)building after many
years of uncertainty.
Happiness seems to quite absent in G7 nations, a
concerning indicator in countries that are expected to remain stable and
to lead many global concepts and initiatives. And those things are harder
to do when most people aren’t happy.
We’re all nerds now
All the stereotypes attributed to nerds in the past (say
around the seventies and eighties, since that was the general period where
that term entered the cultural lexicon) are now attributed to mass/popular
society in general.
A heavy interest in sci-fi/fantasy pop (and sub) culture,
an interest in owning the latest technology, and a rise in diagnoses of
social awkwardness/anxiety/attention-deficit-disorder, all of which is
perfectly (and horridly) serviced by the technology in our pockets, where
we never have to be more than few taps and swipes from our fellow nerds
who like and loathe the same things as much as we do, absorbing info in
the thought-sized portions that the internet allows.
Oh, and glasses. Wearing glasses went from not cool to cool
to blandly being accepted.
That’s us.
But entertainment companies are not catering to this crowd
out of the goodness of their hearts, but the needs of their bank account.
Because nerds had money, and they had no issue with
spending that disposable income on their interests, where the movies or tv
show or video game was just the beginning. The swag surrounding the
Intellectual Property (IP) was just as important for personal collecting
and public flaunting. Why watch a superhero movie when you can collect all
the figurines, and why collect all the figurines when you can dress up
like superhero at a convention?
Hence, making fun of nerd culture was also done by the
nerds themselves.
Mad Magazine was a huge source of satirical, meme-worthy
entertainment from mid sixties into the mid nineties because it was just
before the internet swooped in (although its highest circulation numbers
were in the 1970s). While they typically published eight new issues per
year in the nineties, the other months would yield ‘super special’
editions, which was essentially the greatest hits (or in mad-speak, the
‘least-yeechiest’) of the sixties, seventies and eighties. You would get a
conflation of political and pop culture references from decades past,
wrapped in a winking, sarcastic tone that meant fans of Star Wars of all
ages loved it when ‘the usual gang of idiots’ made fun of Stars Wars.
It’s hard to imagine now that there was a time when a lack
of Star Wars movies and film was the norm, not the exception. Even comic
book films went through feast and famine periods before the the early 21st
century, which all changed when the Marvel Cinematic Universe watered down
its nerdiness for the masses, constantly trying to satisfy newbies and
diehards at the same time.
Kicking Oil
The dreams of doing this overnight (and obviously not literally) was
always just that: a dream.
Even if cold fusion suddenly yielded exponentially more powerful results,
a more effective solar panel is developed, advanced AI offers up new
maglev tech, or higher-dimensional beings telepathically beam better
designs for super-batteries into our heads, it will be decades before the
last oil well is shut down.
Because oil’s not just for powering our vehicles (and while it’s nice that
our cars are going electric, our planes, trains and ships are
currently…not), but for making oh so much plastic. You know, the stuff
that takes thousands of years to break down fully, and in the meantime is
becoming a substance known as micro plastic, which is rapidly entering the
digestive system of pretty much every ocean creature.
Consequently it gets sick and dies before it can breed (leading to
more animal endangerment) or it gets caught and turned into food so we can
have the plastic transferred into our own bodies when we chow down. And
these micro plastics don’t pass when we head to the toilet, hanging out
inside us and helping cause that pesky thing we call cancer (colorectal
cancer is on the rise for all age groups).
And yet, immediately stopping the usage of plastic across the globe is
only possible with a lot of time and money and change to how we do so many
things, from the furniture we sit on to how we package food to parts for
vehicles that haul plastic around the world. Everything will become a lot
more expensive or a lot less available.
When it comes to changing something that works well because it has some
unwanted side effects, society is a lot like an individual when it comes
to junk food. Even when it’s pointed out how it’s the right thing to do,
it’s so hard to stop and the person can rationalize quite quickly why they
shouldn’t have to do what they really, really should.
Hell, there are still a ton of buildings old and new that have asbestos in
the walls because it’s too much work to switch to a non-killing form of
insulation.
Why?
Money. The boring, obvious answer is always money.
It gets so complicated so quickly because writing off the owners and
investors of these massive industries as greedy capitalists who should pay
their far share of taxes (as individuals and as a company) is the easy
part. Dismantling that structure is another heaping mess for another day,
but what is quickly ignored in initial conversations regarding the
replacement/regeneration of the industry is that there are so many jobs
tied to the secondary and tertiary industries around petroleum that its
much needed dismantling will include some very unwanted unemployment jumps
in regions across the globe that are very much dependent on this source of
energy being used in perpetuity.
Now a responsible and ethical corporation would at least attempt to
cushion the blow for these now jobless workers, just as they would have
been taking care of them with proper safety equipment, sensible working
hours and health care coverage all these years beforehand.
But boy is that naive, idealistic thinking.
The documentary The Corporation characterizes standard company
operating procedures as sociopathic, doing anything it can to grow,
including denial, anger, claims of victimization,
and bankrolling PR firms to talk about anything else except the
massive problems it is causing.
Gaslighting (heh) is not just for personal relationships gone bad, but a
smart marketing move if you know you’re selling something terrible.
Oil became so easy to suck it out of the ground that we didn’t have to do
it efficiently at first.
And while we have made great strides in making safer to extract,
transport, refine, and transport again the oil we need, that we need so
much of it means there’s still many examples of how terrible we are at
doing so:
(https://earther.gizmodo.com/one-of-the-nation-s-largest-pipelines-caused-the-bigges-1846406684)
On the stupid other hand, maybe for how reliant we still are on petroleum
we should be thrilled that there aren’t more spills, breakages and other
disasters (that we know of).
No, this is the much more worrying part:
(https://gizmodo.com/blackouts-usa-power-outages-climate-change-weather-1850404167)
Even if we kick oil, we’ve been addicted to it for so long that those
effects will be felt even though we might be living ‘green’.
Which is so hard to even get started. Airlines are trying to use ‘green
fuel’, but how long it will take to transition is not easily gauged. The
promotional material is willing, but the profits are weak (which is why
their moving at a non airliners’ pace).
The Pandemic Never Ended
That so much of American institutional infrastructure has been sold off to
the private market means it was ill-equipped to handle a situation like
the Coronavirus. While government bureaucracy obviously has its own
drawbacks and problems, that something as important as health care can
largely be left in the hands of those that first and foremost 'need' to
make a profit is wholly irresponsible and dangerous. Especially during a
health crisis.
That the owners of Wal-Mart and Target were giving speeches alongside
President Trump in the spring of 2020 says a lot about where the American
sources of power resides.
There was plenty of wasteful and misallocated spending with the Covid
relief funds, and as much as the blame can be placed on the Trump
administration not giving much of a shit whether it went to a suddenly
unemployed citizen or a massive company already reaping in huge profits,
it is also true that the government doesn’t have the proper infrastructure
to oversees a responsible distribution of this amount of money. And first
building a well-run department that could do so would take so much time
that it would defeat the purpose of trying to get this money out to people
as quickly as possible.
(https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-14/where-did-6-trillion-in-covid-funding-go)
History has shown that supply and demand has no problem with price
gouging. And prices that went up for both essential and non-essential
goods because they were suddenly harder to come by in 2021 or 2021 never
came down. And if that wasn’t bad enough, enter shrink-flation in the
years after that.
Making money is hideously easy in chaotic times (when government-corporate
hybrids are ‘printing’ money in hopes that it will stabilize society). You
just have to lack a conscience and have a complete indifference to the
suffering of your fellow human beings.
Some of the Best ‘Fights’ in Film
Sometimes it’s the actual physical exertion between the two parties, and
sometimes it’s just the narrative stakes surrounding it. Ideally it’s
both. But when two people decide to settle important matters with their
fists or impossible laser swords, it can be some of the best moments in
cinema history.
Jason Bourne vs Desh Bouksani, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Skip the catchphrases and instead attack with a book. Matt Damon and Joey
Ansah put on a masterclass mix of martial arts and brawling in a small
apartment in Tangiers.
The intentionally shaky cinematography adds a level of intensity and
realism that most others films tend to ignore, which makes this one all
the more (literally) breathtaking.
Kusangani vs Spider Tank, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
With animation, it is irresponsibly easy to dismiss any sort of fight
because it’s not actual fighting, it’s just a bunch of animators drawing a
fight, and one that doesn’t have to be even remotely realistic.
But that makes it all the more challenging and impressive when they pull
the scene off, and director Mamoru Oshii and melts your brain as you
witness a futuristic tank with four legs instead of treads trying to
destroy a naked android with cropped black hair whose own weapons hardly
make a dent.
Riggs vs Joshua, Lethal Weapon (1987)
It’s nice to get two famous actors (Mel Gibson, Gary Busey) going up
against each other…on a third famous actor’s lawn (Danny Glover), no less.
With a bunch of cops arriving on the scene and watching it all play out
instead of intervene.
Well it makes sense since so much of Lethal Weapon is ridiculously intense
and over the top. It’s an action flick about stopping drugs dealers even
though it seems everyone making it was also on (non-psychedelic) drugs.
How do you make it rain in
To prepare for this final fight scene, Gibson and Busey trained for weeks
in three different fighting styles (capoeira, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and
jailhouse rock, which is apparently more than a song and movie).
It paid off, because the brawl has great sequences that are certainly a
cut above the 80s fights that had come before that starred A-Listers.
Oh Dae-Su vs lots of guys in a hallway, Old Boy (2003)
One angry man looking for answers, one continuous shot, and one hammer.
It took three days to film, and the tension and exhaustion is real.
Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader, Empire Strikes Back (1980)
While the lacklustre (in hindsight) lightsaber fight between Vader and
Kenobi in A New Hope can be explained away onscreen as Obi-Wan being an
old man and offscreen as a scene they didn’t have any more time or money
to make better, the bigger budget balanced with bigger expectations in the
sequel.
So while the actual swordplay is better, the art design and cinematography
are a step up, and that’s not even getting into how the good guys loses
(!) and is then subject to the biggest plot twist in movie-dom (and on a
similar note, The Return of the Jedi rematch also deserves mention).
Making your villain seem invincible comes with a risk, but it pays off
handsomely here.
The fights in future Star Wars films would rely heavier on CG set pieces,
and while seeing fights that included Yoda or took place on the side of an
exploding volcano, this one work because it was so much more believable
that Luke was getting the shit kicked out of him.
Agent Liu vs The Twins, Kiss of the Dragon (2001)
Two against one isn’t fair, but when the one is Jet Li, it makes it fun.
The Twins (Cyril Raffaelli and Didier Azoulay) aren’t identical
(although share a similar taste in hair colouring).
Destroying the cubicles in a police station means plenty of broken glass,
plenty of chairs as weapons, and plenty of desks as jumping off points
(and weapons). Liu’s subtle glance around him when he’s on his back is
great foreshadowing to revealing that in certain tighter spaces the lil’
twin can’t kick as easily.
Yes, victory for our hero is all but assured, but watching him take the
pain and then give it out is exhilarating.
Disposable Income vs Disposable Employment
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/business/economy/summer-travel-economy.html)
The gap between rich and poor is no more apparent than
when it comes to travelling, because the former can do it, the latter
cannot, and the shrinking economic demographic in between has had to make
decisions between spending and saving. This middle class used to have some
disposable income, but now they save more because of the fear that their
job is disposable.
The contrast is shown within the above article via the
person who works full time at the airport as a cleaner but does not earn
enough to go the airport as a passenger ready to go on vacation.
And even for those who can afford vacations, a gap is
widening between those that can travel luxuriously and those that have to
tighten their belts even if a vacation is a time where you’re more likely
to let it all hang out.
Catering exclusively to the wealthy is not a sensible long
term economic strategy for any company because of how few wealthy there
are. The growth is so limited, especially for a demographic that can be
selective as they want, favouring one location (for travelling) or brand
that is popular for a season or two, and is then discarded for another.
It is a minor bubble economy. While brands like Louis
Vuitton and Gucci are luxury symbols and promoted as catering exclusively
to the rich, they are still coveted and purchased by the masses. For some,
that purse or jewelry purchase counts for a vacation.
And that’s fair in the sense that you can decide what you
want to do with your money, but the less you have, the less options (and
the less freedom) you have.
The future for the type of employment mentioned in the
above article is dim.
When is cleaning homes, offices and airplanes going to go
from a staff of ten, to a stay of two who oversee cleaning robots in
addition to cleaning the few places the robots can’t get to?
Where there is no job security, there is no economic
security, and that makes people feel disposable.
It’s easy to not look out for others when you’re just
looking at your own bank account. But not realizing how important it is
that everyone has the ability to take a vacation - or equivalent, in terms
of disposable income - is dangerous for the future of communities large
and small.
We cannot succeed alone.
It takes a village.
But those four words lack
the urgency and emphasis that the idea behind the phrase demands. The
phrase should really be:
It takes a fucking
village.
Here’s a Thought February 2024
Burn Baby Burn
In dystopic fiction and film from the middle of the twentieth century,
poor quality air was certainly a factor in depicting how terrible we’ve
treated the planet. And it was usually because of factories and vehicle
exhaust pipes continually belching chemical poison into the air (sometimes
falling as acid rain), even if we all knew better.
And yes, that is absolutely happening and it is a massive threat that
needs to be addressed:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/world/asia/new-delhi-india-pollution.html)
Telling poor
farmers to stop burning excess crops is also a sign of how terrible we are
with wasting food at every level of production and consumption. While it’s
well known how much food grocery stores and restaurants throw out every
day, it’s even worse that the agriculture industry burns crops it doesn’t
need or are paid to pour milk down the drain. This is directly linked to
the monetary value we apply to food, even when there are still millions of
the world who still do not have enough to eat.
Trying to do the right thing by reducing air pollution can cause
catastrophic effects. Limiting the amount of aerosol in the air is
great…but when ships stop emitting it, the less smoke exhaust in the air
means there is more sunlight hitting the ocean surface and warming it up.
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/marine-clouds-climate-change-1.7016498)
And a warming planet is one with changing weather patterns, which means
more extended periods of dry weather, and that’s ingredient number 2 for
forest fires.
Rarely was forest fire smoke used as a reason for why people needed to
wear a mask if you had to go outside in fiction - let alone in real life -
yet here we are.
The amount of forest burned in Northern Canada over the summer of 2023 can
fit several countries (https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/wildfire-season-2023-wrap-1.6999005),
some of which were eventually affected by the disaster, because, the smoke
from this region crossed the Atlantic to lower the air quality in the UK
and Europe. And the smoke that caused so much trouble for
While this summer was clearly the shockingly worst and most widespread,
the frequency of forest fires are increasing as is the amount of area
damaged.
These types of fires are supposed to be ‘once in a century’ sort of
things, but because weather patterns are being upended, if it’s hotter for
a longer period of time or drier for a longer period of time, the chance
for these fires to start and continue to burn just increase.
This will undoubtedly change how people decide where they are going to
live, beyond the idea of affordability. Even if you lucked out this year
and your town, neighbourhood or house was not the one that got lit up, why
stick around with the risk of the fire coming back next summer?
It’s climate migration that is going to put stress (at least initially) on
whatever town or city the fleeing people are going to settle in. And while
certain countries can handle such movements of thousands of people, many
areas around the globe where extreme drought and flood conditions persist
or are increasing cannot, resulting in multifaceted humanitarian crises
that ultimately affect people far from the location of the event.
Unpacking 'I Get It'
It
is a short phrase meant to indicate understanding, using three extremely
short words that are meant to save time and leave little room for
misunderstanding. Can be as exuberant or dismissive as need be.
The
literal declaration might seem to indicate receiving something, but it is
almost always a concept, not a physical item as saying ‘I get it’ when
being handed a key or phone or balloon might give it away that you are an
alien posing as a human.
The
way the phrase is delivered can also change its meaning, because it can be
a reassuring comment or one that it said sarcastically for something that
is supposed to be common sense.
It's a good connector phrase in the middle of an argument to bring in a
similar position, or even a contrary position (placed in the proper
context).
Obama: The Last Inspiring Politician
Today it is about having a leader who can just batten down
the hatches and try to make sure things don’t get any worse.
It could be said that this is what Barack Obama’s
presidency became - and perhaps what many leaders in democratic nations
become - but at its beginning there was absolutely the hope that things
would get better not only in America, but the world over (which once again
shows how influential - for good and ill - the United States is when it
comes to promoting the concept of democracy). A candidate that embraced
largely progressive policies and represented proof of how far the civil
rights movements of the sixties had come, ‘hope’ (the term that his face
was placed beside on posters) gave way to an immediate expectation that he
would solve the 2008 financial crisis that befell the planet just before
his election victory.
While some of the larger concerns were alleviated over the
next few years through a mixture of liberal and conservative financial
policies (both of which could easily disappointed groups who wanted all of
one sort and none of the other), it took ‘too long’ in the eyes of many
citizens, some of whom did not feel the effects of the recovery. Trying to
pitch ‘the economic crisis could have been worse’ is a tough sell for any
politician, but it is especially hard for one who was so closely related
with ‘hope and change’.
Consequently, in the 2010 midterm elections, the democrats
lost control of the House of Representatives, which would remain in
Republican hands for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. This would
result in Conservatives blocking and watering down almost every sort of
bill supported by the president, as doing so apparently made for good
political strategy, even at the expense of the good of the nation.
It is a good thing that power is defused among the many
(or at least, not in the hands of one person) in a democracy, and that a
politician can only wield they power they are given. But in situations
like this, cynicism for the entire system can easily set in, when it
becomes clear to the general public that the leader chosen and expected to
fix this sort of bureaucratic morass is similarly stuck in it.
Obama sensibly maintained that for all the rhetoric (by
him, the public, and the media) surrounding his road to the White House,
it would be up to the citizens to work alongside him to create a more
perfect union. He always knew that there would not be any quick fix for
the problems with
In the nearly eight years since the end of Obama’s
presidency, geopolitical tensions between and within countries have risen,
with living standards flailing and polarization widening. While speeches
given by candidates still contain the same rhetoric, they are falling on
ears much more suspicious or dismissive.
Hope is a tool so powerful that it must be wildly
carefully, because nothing blunts it quicker than political expediency.
A Good Pair of Genes
There is not enough appreciation given
to how much your parents’ genetic code determines who you are. Not just in
terms of blatant physical attributes like height, weight, or hair colour,
but also how well the respiratory, nervous, and digestive systems fare
over the decades, and how susceptible you will be to certain diseases
(from cancers to immunodeficiencies).
Even with the level of nature vs
nurture always up for debate (since it can be wildly different on a case
by case basis), what you started with DNA-wise before you even popped out
from between your mother’s legs is going to largely define who you would
be and what you would be able to accomplish in your life.
Fair?
Oh, the nurturers will inevitably tell
their nurturees in some way that ‘life’s not fair’, but then it’s never
been that simple because via science we don’t let life push us around like
that. Combining the qualities of two things was popular
for breeding animals and plants for millennia, no science degree required,
although it was plenty of trial and error over months, years and decades
to show results. And the farmers weren’t doing this for tenure or research
purchases, but because it means more healthier and bountiful crops to eat.
Now knowing the genetic nuts and bolts
means we are on the cusp of being able to alter our DNA not just to weed
out terrible diseases and afflictions (from hemophilia to blindness), but
making the Olympic credo of ‘longer, stronger, faster’ something to pick
off a menu. Which sounds great until it’s not, and we can leave it to AI
to take us over the finish line…and the cliff. Genetically superior people
is bad enough, but AI manufactured super people?
It sounds like a dystopic sci-fi movie
a lazy studio executive would ask an AI writing program to spit out in
seconds:
Genetic modification becomes extremely
popular extremely quickly because it can start off with the most
immediately practical intentions. It is decided that it is the best way to
combat the effects of climate change (more air pollution, hotter
temperatures, crop damage, fires/floods) instead of actually doing
something about climate change. Modifications include better lung
capacity, more efficient sweat glands, skin that prevents the sun’s rays
from having skin-cancer causing effects. But it is unlikely that these
changes are given out equally (whether on financial, national, cultural or
social grounds), and there quickly becomes a have/have-not society that
becomes a genetic ‘race’ discrimination/war, where the outcome ranges from
all of humanity being wiped out, or just this new version of humanity (if
you can call it) wiping out the old. Roll credits?
Potential and Kinetic Money
How useful is sitting on billions of
dollars, or billions of dollars in stocks?
There is a psychological comfort of just
sitting on it, not doing anything at all, but that always has the risk of
the amount’s worth going up or down due to typical market occurrences and
pressures.
The real problem is that if it’s not
being used for purchasing or investing, it’s not even money, it just has
the potential to be money, to at one point being kinetically exchanged and
transferred constantly through the economy.
Of course even when you ‘buy’ things,
they can be just as abstract. The stock market allows you to buy
hypothetical events. ‘Shorting’ means you buy/make an agreement that
states if a company's stock goes up or down a certain amount at or within
a certain time, you get paid out (or owe) X amount.
The only people who would buy such a
thing are those who have insider knowledge about the prospects of said
company, or are relatively certain their bets will be covered by the
government if the failing of these companies (and bets upon them) might
crater the whole economy (hey, it happened once).
It’s like having rocket filled with fuel
that’s just sitting on the launchpad. Until you actually use it to send a
ship/capsule sitting on top of it into orbit, it’s just taking up space,
doing nothing, wasting everyone else’s time and resources.
If money is power, and power can be
wielded as a weapon (or be a varying characteristic of a weapon), then
money is a weapon, and must be treated as such.
Effects of Streaming on Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal on Music:
The money dictates the music more than ever now. Artists
get paid per song play, if it plays for at least 30 seconds. The result?
Artists are writing/releasing shorter songs, because 5 two minutes songs
will yield more revenue than 2 five minute songs. While brevity can lead
to creativity, putting yourself in this position for primarily financial
reasons is absolutely detrimental to the possibility expressing your
musical ideas in longer pieces. Not that it has to be a fifteen minute
song suite, but even a five minute tune seems to be ‘long’ these days
(sometimes a way around this is an artist will uploaded entire albums on
YouTube with ads (yay) placed in between tracks).
Unfortunately this dovetails perfectly with our current
attention spans, where we have so many choices in front of us that giving
only a few seconds to a song, movie, video game or piece of art is the
norm, because there is the possibility that the next thing you check will
be so much better than what you are currently ‘wasting’ your time on.
Music has an additional hurdle, however, as listening on
your phone means as the album or playlist you might not always be looking
at the screen and see what it is actually playing. You can be doing a host
of other activities, reducing music to background, even more so than in
the past. Plus there is less of a chance that people have purchased a
physical release with the artwork and track listing in their hands,
resulting in people not necessarily knowing the artists or names of the
songs they are listening to (instead becoming fans of a particular
playlist). This information has inadvertently been detached from the sound
itself.
“Denies/Cleared
of
any
Wrongdoing”
The
dangers
of
this
method
of
avoiding
legal
responsibility
by
corporations
is
subtle
and
insidious.
It
is
a
perspective
and
attitude
that
filters
down
to
the
corporate
blob
to
the
individual
executives
and
employees
alike.
‘It’s
not
my
fault’
comes
to
explain/justify
many
of
the
problems
that
surrounded
these
industries.
Handing
off
the
blame
to
others
has
gone
beyond
being
seen
as
any
sort
of
moral
failing.
Now
it’s
a
good
business
decision,
and
you
might
be
faulted
for
having
a
plan
that
does
not
include
such
an
option
if
things go
belly-up.
Corporations
have
created
shell
corporation
temp
agencies
that
hire
part
time,
non-permanent
employees
that
do
not
have
the
same
rights
and
privileges
as
those
of
the
parent
corporation.
Nor
are
they
paid
the
same
or
given
any
sort
of
benefits,
even
if
they
do
very
similar
work
to
full
time
and
permanent
employees.
Best
of
all
(from
management’s
point
of
view),
they
can
be
blamed
for
any
problems
and
quickly
removed
without
much
legal
challenges
(from
the
now
ex-workers).
These
social
divisions
within
a
massive
project
of
different
companies
or
a
corporation
that
relies
heavily
on
its
shells
have
far
reaching
consequences.
Not
only
is
there
physical
and
psychological
alienation
from
the
product
and
service
being
created
and/or
used,
but
it
makes
it
possible
to
see
employees
just
as
replaceable
as
equipment
or
software,
because
human
beings
in
general
aren’t
supposed
to
exist/act
like
this.
These
basic
tenets
of
modern
capitalism
is
what
will
keep
humanity
from
reaching
its
true
potential.
Cultural
theorist
Marshall
McLuhan
said
that,
'art
is
anything
you
can
get
away
with',
but
it
certainly
applies
to
business
as
well.
Whatever
potential
liability
you
can
heap
onto
any
other
individual
or
entity,
the
better
for
your
business,
regardless
of
what
the
greater
cost
might
be
to
the
community.
Amazon
and
many
other
massive
corporations
write
contracts
with
third
party
companies
in
a
way
that
exempt
them
from
responsibility
if
something
goes
wrong.
Smaller delivery companies are on the hook, not the big one pulling the
strings.
Part
of
the
agreements
the
big
banks
signed
when
paying
steep
penalties
for
getting
caught
breaking
the
law
is
that
they
do
not
have
to
admit
any
wrongdoing
in
the
legal
sense.
When
huge
companies
or
very
wealthy
individuals
are
question
about
how
much
more
power
and
influence
they
obviously
have
modern
society,
they
deny and
deflect,
they
point
out
stats
that
there
are
many
other
wealthy
people,
and
minimize
their
own
role
in
this
transference
and
squatting
upon
of
wealth.
All
the
power,
none
of
the
responsibility.
Ben
Parker
would
be
aghast.
In
terms
of
legality
as
opposed
to
morality,
Bezos
and
The
Corporate
World’s
apparent
rationalization
is
that
if
they
can
pay
lobbyists
and
lawyers
to
fundraise/bribe
politicians
into
supporting
corporate
agendas
(low
taxes,
deregulation,
ignore
rights
that
would
benefit
that
average
worker)
without
any
real
consequence,
then
the
public
must
be
okay
with
it.
Which
is
stupid
at
best
and
sociopathic
at
worst.
When
your
greatest
asset
is
a
legal
loophole,
maybe
it’s
not
a
plan
for
all
humanity
going
forward.
But
if
you
subscribe
to
the
capitalist-minded
view
that
in
a
nation
it's
either
sink
or
swim,
that
you
have
the
tools
to
succeed
and
you
use
them
or
you
don't,
you
start
to
believe
society
that
is
made
up
of
a
few
winners
and
many
losers.
This
stark
dichotomy
is
terrible
in
many
ways,
because
you
seem
to
accept
an
overly
simplistic
view
on
how
success
occurs
in
a
post-industrial,
(hyper)digital
era.
There
is
the
erroneous
viewpoint:
"I
succeeded,
therefore
the
system
must
be
working
well."
If
you
see
a
working
society
being
full
of
a
few
winners
and
a
lot
of
losers,
then...you
live
in
a
society
full
of
losers,
and
you
are
foolish
if
you
think
that
situation
can
hold
(or
are
you
cynically
prescient?
Figuring
that
That
companies
can
have
such
an
outsized
influence
on
global
affairs
is
bad
enough,
but
if
a
single
corporation
has
to
have
a
department
which
tackle
worldwide
misinformation
that
can
affect
billions
of
people
because
it
is
occurring
within
a
service
they
provide,
then
it's
too
big
of
a
corporation
to
exist.
(https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-war-room-is-definitely-managing-at-least-one-1829837729)
This
should
be
the
responsibility
of
governments,
not
just
in
preventing
misinformation,
but
making
sure
a
single
non-government
entity
can’t
become
powerful
enough
that
they
might
affect
election
outcomes
across
the
planet.
While
it’s
sad
enough
to
see
union
busting
efforts
in
Western
democratic
nations,
in
countries
where
human
rights
are
much
harder
to
come
by,
forced
labour
is
a
common
occurrence,
even
for
corporations
that
are
headquartered
in
America,
like
Nike
and
Coca-Cola.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/business/economy/nike-coca-cola-xinjiang-forced-labor-bill.html)
That
is
horrifying
mistake/tragedy/clusterfuck
of
capitalism,
where
those
who
run
these
companies
aren’t
supposed
to
see
people
as
people
(beyond
marketing
purposes)
because
that
just
gets
in
the
way
of
the
goal.
But
chances
are
that
if
the
executives
are
ever
questioned
about
this,
they
will
feign
ignorance
and
deny
any
responsibility.
Fred Astaire, Jerry Seinfeld, and
Jay-Z walk into a club…
Fred Astaire was an old school
triple threat (actor, singer, dancer) from nearly a century ago, and he
made dancing look so effortless and easy he accidentally inspired millions
of young men to go out to a dance hall or club and embarrass themselves at
best or break their ankles at worst.
Jerry Seinfeld does the same with
stand up comedy, because while he makes it seem like anyone can get a
laugh talking about breakfast or furniture, if you go and try without hard
work and natural skill, you’ll bomb hard.
Jay-Z’s work on the mic is at once
laid back and in your face, a flow that is both natural and seemingly
planned from top to bottom. But finding out that he rarely writes anything
down before heading into the studio makes you think it really is as easy
as thinking up some basic rhyming words in front of a microphone.
It’s not, and omitting Jay-Z from a
Top 5 MC list is almost like you’re trying to be different at the expense
of good judgment. Jay Z’s one blemish is that there is just too much
fucking material. He’s diluted his impact by being so prolific.
It means that even Reasonable Doubt
- an impressive debut as one could find, regardless of the genre - still
has some weak tracks (Black Album is his strongest top to bottom). But
Can’t Knock the Hustle has everything you need for a big hit (memorable
title, great verses, an iconic Blige performance)…with the hook being the
way Jay confidentially declares the title.
Which is also the perfect phrase to
those resentful failures who tried to be Astaire, Seinfeld or Hova.
Structuralism (and post-structuralism) isn’t dead, that’s
just its dead name.
Globalized society has accepted (sometimes passively,
sometimes actively, sometimes cynically) accept the notion that human and
societal behaviour is shaped by many different ideas and forces, some very
practical (resources, climate, geography) some more abstract (money,
religion, patriarchy). Whether elites, the oil industry, Pokemon, the LGBT
community, Filipino diaspora, Greenpeace, The US Intelligence Agencies,
online gambling, tax-deductible charity organizations, secret lizard
people, these concepts (real or not) and peoples’ relationship to them
shape the world we live in.
Some of them have very irrational qualities, making it
hard to predict how exactly they will shape our world, which is why
critics of structuralism point out that while it might explain how society
works, it concedes how impossible it is to change it any specific way.
Structuralism allows for many different forces/narratives
to overlap each other, making it difficult to pry them apart or explain
how they work interdependently.
It’s not about the content of political discourse, but the
form. Commentators/critics might acknowledge how often a politician lies,
but they will also analyze how successful telling these lies are,
essentially acknowledging that it doesn’t matter if they lie or not, but
just if the end goal of winning support works.
Positions, causes, movements, issues, conflicts, these are
individual identifiers which are becoming so numerous and multifaceted
that they are becoming more and more meaningless in the sense that they
continually have less and less (relevant) power when viewed separately.
Once again, political and economic power is out of reach for most, and the
more people grasp for cultural power, the more diffused it becomes.
At least Post-Structuralism is not as weak a leg to stand
on as post-modernism, but that’s because post-modernism’s leg might
actually be a crutch, an arm, several bananas, or one’s own relationship
with societal pseudo-cliches.
Do Not Block the Planetary Fire Exit
Things are looking bad for the earth in the coming decades, and because
hope is can be just as essential as it is misguided, one of the underlying
ideas humanity will cling to is that at least some of us can rocket off
the planet before it’s too late.
Yes, we’re already having to assume a dystopic time on earth for that to
happen, but it will be even more unfortunate that such a craft will have a
hell of a time just getting out of orbit because of the possibility that
it will be too much of a garbage dump to blast through in the near future.
Space debris is proliferating as we put more satellites and craft up in
low earth orbit. While the area is absolutely massive, the smallest bits
used to build this equipment can come loose (like a bolt or paint chip)
and suddenly become a tiny bullet that is zipping around the planet at a
dangerously high speed.
Space debris damaging or destroying a satellite that briefly knocks out
your internet is one thing, but that satellite’s debris becoming a danger
to many other satellites can create a domino effect that turns low earth
orbit into a deadly zone of constant crossfire that no ship can ever hope
to get through in one piece.
What is particularly maddening is the paradoxical notion that when it is
said that there is too much space debris above us, we can’t help but
imagine it would be like walking/floating through a very clutter garbage
dump, when in reality there is still a lot of…space…between every screw or
bit of fuselage as it floats around. At first it would seem like there
would be no problem at all, that there is still plenty of room for a
rocket to blast through Low Earth Orbit unimpeded.
But rockets and the tiny ships that sit atop them during the trip up are
expensive and in short supply, and would you risk it (let alone the people
on board) when there’s a chance that one tiny screw shoots through it like
a bullet, depressurizing and exploding it in a second?
The solution would to build a device that would suck up the debris, a sort
of space net or vacuum cleaner, but once again, the area it would have to
operate in is absolutely massive, and on top of that, it would have to be
able to somehow avoid getting hit or withstand the damage by the very
debris it is trying to remove.
Of course, having to clean up the mess we’ve made above our heads, says a
lot about humanity in general. Space debris shows how we can be quite lazy
about pollution until it absolutely inconveniences us. It is an example of
how our ambition outpaces our responsibility for exploring, and how even
when trying to solve problems, we prefer fast and cheap possible solutions
over slow and expensive definite ones.
Cop a Fix
Defunding the police will never work with current
socioeconomic conditions. Because crime can occur for overlapping reasons
like poverty, mental health issues and addiction means that there does
need to be some sort of professionally trained service to make sure the
laws are followed.
Now it is easy to acknowledge the sadly human element that
comes with this task, as individuals can easily make terrible decisions
based on their own personal biases and personality type. As tragic
examples of shootings and abuse have shown us, some people who become
police officers should never become police officers.
At the same time community based violence/crime
de-escalation efforts as an alternative to the police do not work nearly
as well as activists would hope:
(https://www.vox.com/22622363/police-violence-interrupters-cure-violence-research-study)
This is because de-escalation in specific situations is not
enough, you need to give individuals (and the community) an alternative to
crime and the potential violence associated with crime. It is an
alternative that provides living wages and basic health services to all,
and just writing that shows just how big of a solution is required if the
goal is to not require police officers.
Currently the police are typically reactive and rarely
proactive, which is why changing the sort of role police officers play in
a society means changing society first.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
While Bruce Springsteen largely sings of lives spiralling
out of control and/or enjoying one last moment of glory before death or
another working day, the music itself is too neat and tidy. Whether he’s
doing the fist-in-the-air arena rock stuff of Born to Run and Born in the
Except for 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.
It is one of the best American albums of all time, and that
is not supposed to be an unusual qualifier. You want to understand what
the
It is an amazing ten song line up from start to finish, even
the two ‘singles’ - Badlands and Promised Land - are better than anything
on Born to Run, his previous and breakthrough album, full of more energy
and desperation in perfect balance.
Streets of Fire swaggers when it starts and burns when the
bombast hits.
Factory is the perfect length for a perfect lament for what
the daily assemble line life could give and take.
Candy’s Room is freaky and weird.
Racing in the Streets is a true heartbreaker, a love story
for both cars and women.
The title track is one of the most fitting ending songs to
an album of all time.
By trying to not-exactly-follow-up ‘Born to Run’ with
another hit album, he slipped between slightly too much and obviously too
little, and landed in perfection.
The
Other Type of Long Covid
This
article -
(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html)
-
explains how pandemic has affected mental health situations big and small,
but also stresses how institutions can affect the discourse to make
large-scale problems seem less of the fault of their own decisions and
more ‘the natural ways of society’ (essentially gaslighting the populace).
That other aspects of modern society have been increasing stress levels
for decades (creating financial challenges, lack of job security,
technological upheaval, growing geopolitical tensions) means adding a
pandemic-forced lockdown is gasoline on an already burning fire.
The
article stresses the difference between mental stress and mental illness
(as well as one can cause the other), and that there is “the well
documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence
and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop a
given diagnosis, from depression to schizophrenia.”
What
can worry you today and can destabilize you tomorrow, especially when
tomorrow never knows (and not in the good Beatles way). And with more and
more people feeling this every day, of course there are attempts to find
solutions, and in our capitalist society, money talks (even if lack of
money is one of the problems).
That
there is an incentive for quick-fix solutions for everything in and out of
government in modern society, it means that treating mental health is
sadly no different. When there needs to be ways to addresses people’s
needs individually, the cheaper and corporate friendly way is to give
everyone a bunch of pills to calm us down:
“Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to
address the underlying cause of population-level increase in mental and
emotional distress. It does, however, work really well if you’re trying to
come up with a solution that everybody in power can agree in on, so that
the people in power can show they’re doing something about the problem.
Unfortunately, the solution that everyone can agree on is not going to
work.”
There
may be no better example of the road to hell being paved with good
intentions. It’s not even a Placebo effect if the placebo doesn’t work.
Businesses that haven’t yet embraced
AI/robotics are doing so because they can’t, not because they don’t want
to. They would love to replace a human because of how expensive one of us
is, but the technology or price for an AI/robot replacement is not yet
ready/still too expensive.
That several large retail stores are
removing the automated check-out lanes is only proof that the technology
is not yet perfected, not that the store owners love their flesh and blood
employees.
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/some-retailers-scaling-back-self-checkouts-1.7034047)
And one of the chief problems is theft,
reinforcing the idea that it is our relationship with technology that
defines it, not the technology itself.
Easy
file sharing is great, and when it was easy to share/steal music, we did
it en masse. When we can steal from supermarkets without punishment, a lot
of us did.
But ultimately tech will make it hard to
steal from stores, maybe through airport-like body scanners that you have
to walk through when you exit, and the machine will know exactly what you
have in your bags or coat and charge your mandatory ID/credit card
immediately.
And these advancements that result in
layoffs will not occur all at once, but over many years, making its
devastating effects not seem like the huge issue it actually is, since the
current party line is that for all the jobs AI/robotics take from people,
it will somehow create new ones for us (which are…?).
For now, banks and other services are
stressing in commercials that they still use humans for customer support,
that you won’t be speaking to an AI program with limited options.
But how long until it’s flipped, and
that you’re promised that you won’t have to speak to a person, just a
fully capable AI?
Workers/unions are aware of this, that
there is going to be a change over the next several years because big
companies are looking at what current AI can do right now and are
extrapolating to a future time when AI can do even more, specifically
exactly what that company would like it to do.
Which is why there are a litany of
strikes and threats of strikes right now, because this is the time for
unions of all sorts - from writers and actors on the arts side, to auto
workers on the manufacturing side - to get any sort of contract that might
lessen/buffer the catastrophic effects (namely layoffs) that are indeed
coming.
AI tech that won’t be ready for five
years is upending our lives right now.
July 2023 Here’s
a Thought
Scrumptious Sprout Strategy
There are fewer experiences in video games as rewarding as a good day in
Pikmin.
Everyone should play the games from the
Pikmin series because they are
brain-bendingly unique and full of heart pounding excitement even as they
look all cartoony and fun (and the latest,
Pikmin 4, just dropped a week
ago).
The real-time-strategy genre is definitely not very popular compared to
your First-Person-Shooters or Hack-and-Slash because of the amount of
brainpower and instant reflexes required. Thinking fast is essential, and
even online multiplayer games where pause is unavailable is not quite the
same, as MOBAs slowly narrowed the types of decisions that could be made
to achieve your goal, which was typically killing an enemy before they
kill you.
So Pikmin stands alone as the
game where you control scores of tiny troops that can have a variety of
traits and abilities that make certain ones more adept in certain
environments and fights. You will be scouring the alien (yet familiar)
planet in search of damaged ship parts, resources, and potential valuables
in order to achieve various missions before you are able to leave the
planet and return home. And you can only do these activities during the
day, which is thirteen minutes in real time, so the pressure and
nervousness is immense, especially if you make a foolish move and see
dozens of your troops get killed or drown.
The difference between describing how the game plays and what it looks
like is one of the biggest dissonances in gaming. Its middling success -
compared to other Nintendo franchises - can be credited to its excessively
cute graphics and art style that scares away hardcore gamers, and its
quickly complicated and difficult strategy requirements that scares away
the kids and casual gamers who initially bought the game because it looked
cute.
This difficulty is felt most strongly in Pikmin 1 and 2 (which are both
about 20 years old), because while they still hold up overall, they are
extremely challenging since most games from decades ago typically were
harder than today’s fare, which means if you want the real hard stuff,
there it is.
Meanwhile 3 and the brand new 4 are absolutely awesome and should be
must-plays for noobs and hardcore gamers who are thirsting for more
unusual and wild interactive experiences. Your brain will thank you.
Eventually.
Picket Signs of Things to Come
Because it involves celebrities, striking actors get more
attention than striking writers. Now most of them are not making
celebrity-level money and even fewer writers make celebrity-level money,
but both are assumed to be in cushier positions than many workers both in
and out of the entertainment industry.
The dismissive put-downs of the social media peanut
gallery should not be surprising, as you can find that for any issue at
all, but the current SAG-ACTRA strike can be seen as a shot across the bow
for future labour relations in general.
Firstly, the negotiations involves revenue sharing from
streaming, that thing you do that costs either around $10 per month or
nothing at all if you’re password sharing. How such an entertainment
service would make money when some of the movies and tv series made
exclusively for it cost hundreds of millions of dollars (plus all the
content Netflix ‘rents’, like Seinfeld or older blockbusters like
Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or anything Scorsese) is a head scratcher,
and perhaps that’s why the last year had been a series of declining
profits and layoffs at many streaming service companies.
In 2021, Scarlett Johansson sued Disney for tens of
millions of dollars when Black Widow (which she starred in as the titular
character) went to right streaming in 2020, claiming that by doing so the
company would be making millions from the bump in subscribers who signed
up just to see it, and that nothing in her contract has a proviso for
making a percentage of those profits for such an occurrence (and she would
have gotten a percentage if it went into theatres as originally planned).
Yes, it’s millionaire versus billionaire, but it’s
illustrative of how management will look too screw over the worker any way
they can, even if it’s a worker that never really has to ever work again.
The other issue is - of course - AI, first of which can
come up with scripts in five minutes (sorry, writers) and second can
create digitized versions of real people or composites of them and then
have them act with lines that could have been written with the AI-written
script.
Sorry, humans.
It’s odd that while it was assumed that AI would replace
more mundane blue and white collar jobs that the types that are suddenly
most at risk involve the arts, professions that we all expected to be so
much more…human…than assembly lines and spreadsheets.
Which is why how this strike is resolved will be very
indicative of how other industries will handle their own workers going
forward with new technology (spoiler alert: probably harshly).
Selling Perfection
We have high expectations of our institutions and corporate entities, and
that's partially due to the human condition of expecting things that
worked well in the past to continue working just as well at present and
into the future. It does not take us long to get accustomed to
uninterrupted electricity, a perfect television signal, and Wi-Fi that
doesn’t have connection issues.
We all have this high expectation because information (particularly
advertising and marketing) drills it into our heads that it is acceptable
to constantly have this level of expectation. We are told that we are
great, that we deserve the best, that the best life we could ever live is
only one decision or purchase away. And while believing so in relation to
owning a car, shirt, or all-inclusive vacation might only harm your own
financial situation, believing so in regards to macro issues of society
can become very problematic.
Even if the truth is that complex organizations - whether a health care
system or telecommunications provider - will not operate perfectly most of
the time, and will frustrate or disappoint us, it can be tragic in the
former example (not having access to certain medicines or treatments) and
extremely annoying in the latter (bad internet service, terrible customer
hotline).
It's easy to accuse corporations of focusing on profits over everything
else (because it's true), and it's easy to accuse governments of offering
stilted and subpar service for any program that they oversee (because of a
bureaucratic mess that relies on corporate contracts).
But these two do not cancel each other out in terms of overall social
value.
Corporations focus on profit ultimately means that they'll ultimately
offer subpar service as well, because cost-cutting is the easiest way to
bolster profit, even though it comes at huge cost.
The profit elements ultimately harms not only the functioning of the
organization or institution, but the fabric of society as well, because
profits are rarely shared equally, and most of it goes to a small segment
of the populace, who just accrue more and more power.
And to make matters worse is that we expect perfection quite quickly, and
that we are dismissive of everything when we don't get it that fast, the
‘If I can’t have a complete solution in two weeks I don’t want it at all’.
Amazon Prime’s next day delivery schedule has given us false expectations
for how everything else in society can be run.
Weathering the Weather
So it’s too dry in some places (resulting in wildfires),
too dry in other places (resulting in floods), and too hot in pretty much
every place.
There’s no ‘told you so’ by scientists anymore, just
‘strap in, it’s going to be more of the same and worse’.
Warnings of a warming planet are many decades old, and
because trying to fix the problem would result in a total restructuring of
how humanity lives on earth (not to mention a real kick in the profits for
the titans of industry), all proposals to do something about it was coolly
received.
It doesn’t matter how common sense it sounds, if it gets
in the way of money, there will be enthusiastic deniers. It took the
literal rising of oceans sweeping away beachside towns before some
conservative politicians in the southeastern United States admitted that
yes, the planet is getting hotter.
And now Phoenix, Arizona is going three weeks straight for
days above 110F (43C), it’s so hot in southern Europe that wildfires are
the terrifying normal, and record breaking heat in Beijing means a
record-breaking use of electricity (which in turns makes everything even
hotter).
The more extreme it gets - and
one must remember that a massive ‘side’ effect of all this will be on
agriculture, where unpredictable weather can result in fewer crops,
meaning less food that means more expensive food
- the more extreme the solutions offered
will likely be.
Cloud seeding, ‘liquid nitrogen-ing the ocean’ (to stop
massive hurricanes), and mirrors in space are all going to be in the
running because we just can’t stop…air conditioning, 4x4 off-roading,
crypto-mining, and jetting off to somewhere even a bit cooler because it’s
sweltering everywhere else.
Raising a glass to Cheers, 40 Years Later
“Who are three people that have never been in my kitchen?”
- Cliff Clavin’s answer on Final Jeopardy
Eleven years on the air and leaving at the top of the ratings in 1993,
Cheers became the ultimate
workplace comedy that was superseded into the popular consciousness by a
show that at one point came on right after it:
Seinfeld.
That show is seen as the rule-breaker, the show that threw all the sitcom
conventions out the window. While this might be true in terms of narrative
pacing (sacrificing sensible plot developments to have a lengthy
conversation about life’s annoyances), the cast of the show is practically
sitcom 101: An affable leading man, a put-upon, hard-luck best friend, a
wacky neighbour, a sassy ex-girlfriend.
Such tropes had long dominated sitcoms, as they were meant to be appealing
to the broadest possible audience.
By the early eighties, the workplace comedy was commonplace (Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, WKRP, Barney Miller) with one of the sets
involving a public place to socialize.
Cheers was pitched with that public place in
mind, with the regulars would be the employees and the literal ‘bar
regulars’, having their lives upended however briefly by any character who
could walk in with a new plot for twenty two minutes.
Considering the setting was a place where beer, wine and alcohol would be
served, there was comparably little drunkenness for all the implied
drinking. Despite always having a pint in front of them and the show
revolving around the idea of ordering another and not going back home, the
regulars are constantly lucid and full of quips.
Making the effects of alcoholism come off as funny is not easy, especially
on a scripted program where you don’t want to depict the main characters
of the show as enablers of someone’s drinking problem.
Laughing at a drunk and the mistakes or stumbles they make can seem
mean-spirited so very quickly, so it took an animated spoof of
Cheers on The Simpsons in
the early nineties to show the possible dark side (but, uh, still funny)
of Norm’s alcoholism (and it should be noted that the cast of
Cheers were fine with it, as they all voiced themselves).
Leading
man and bar owner Sam Malone was meant to be a football player, but Ted
Danson didn’t look burly enough, so it was changed to baseball. Rhea Perlman played Carla, and
was the first person cast.
John
Ratzenberger auditioned for the Norm Peterson role, but told producers
that every bar needs a know-it-all, and a character was developed for him
in that vein.
Juxtaposition is at the heart of the broadest forms of comedy, but
certainly it can be mined for deeper and more rewarding laughs if handled
properly.
To contrast the blue collar regulars, Shelley Long played the Boston
University graduate who was ‘abandoned’ by her fiancée in the pilot,
meaning she would start working there as a counterweight to everyone and a
potential love interest for Sam.
And as Diane Chambers became less the upper class foil to those at the bar
and more just a part of the team, Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane stepped
into take that role (even more so when Shelley Long left the show).
And similarly, as he became just another regular, Bebe Neuwirth’s Lilith
Sternin arrives just in time to once again be comically horrified at the
shenanigans in the basement bar (by which time the sweet but stupid Coach
was replaced by the sweet but stupid Woody, played by a guy actually named
Woody).
Ratings-wise Cheers sunk like a
stone in its first season, and there’s no doubt that if it had been
broadcast in the last three decades, it wouldn’t have even made it that
far. But NBC executives saw something in the show (or saw that they didn’t
have anything worthwhile to replace it), and gave it another season. And
then it took off like a jet airliner, becoming
a hit and earning 95 Emmy nominations, winning 20.
Eleven years means a lot of twenty two minute A and B stories (275
episodes to be exact), and recurring characters might only show up twice a
season (Harry the Hat, John Allen Hill as the fussy restaurateur in the
unit above, the rival bar owner Gary, Carla’s family), but being on for
more than a decade meant it was still several hours of these miniature
arcs.
Before Seinfeld’s story arc of
developing a Seinfeld-like
sitcom took up an entire season, Cheers gave its audience a lengthy
romance and corporate-espionage intrigue between Rebecca and her wealthy,
dodgy, English crush Robin Colcord for over a dozen episodes in season 8.
Another foil for Sam, Roger Rees played the man magnificently, someone you
were supposed to hate but was also quite funny.
There is definitely something both amusing and antiquated went going back
to watching an episode of Cheers
today, and it’s not simply because of the fashion or laugh-track, but
because of bizarre the idea is today of going to place where ‘everybody
knows your name’.
The Universe and Knots
The secret to relativity and quantum physics might
be right at your feet.
Think how often you tie your laces without a care
in the world, how often it works absolutely perfectly.
It’s only that odd time when it doesn’t work that
the knot becomes absolutely everything, even for a moment.
It slows you down, it creates stress, it forces
attention, it exerts energy when you bend or sit down to take time to fix
it.
To extrapolate this to everything beyond you being
annoyed for a few moments, a smooth and uniform expansion of the universe
from the moment of the Big Bang can be rudely interrupted early on by
Inflation, a very brief period that was essential for our existence,
because certain elementary particles might not have exploded/cooled into
being without it. Inflation was a bump, and a bump is nothing more than a
knot.
Additionally, the Higgs Boson was nicknamed ‘the
god particle’ even though it was nothing without the Higgs Field, the
‘location’ where the boson can go from mass-less to mass…full.
Slowing something down that doesn’t have mass?
Well nothing slows you down quicker than a knot.
The idea being that affecting the spin of one
particle can immediately affect the other, regardless of the distance
between them. ‘Immediately’ is not underselling it, either, as the
information telling the second particle to change its spin moves faster
than the speed of life.
Perhaps a multi-dimension knot in the fabric of
space-time allows for this seemingly impossible link.
Certainly a theory involving the word string can
also include a concept involving the idea of a ‘knot’: String theory
reduces the tiniest of tiny sub-atomic particles to…strings. Which are
connected at each end so they’re more circles than anything else.
Because the unknown properties are the knots of
particle behaviour, and once you learn how they work together and can
untangle them, then you'll understand the rules of the universe.
The Process of Addressing Wealth Inequality
-support local candidates in your
district that strongly support high taxation on the wealthy and heavily
regulation of corporations and industries, making it clear that these
people and institutions are beholden to the success to the
country/community as a whole, not just profit for investors. Support truly
does mean engaging with people who might not agree with or be aware of
this candidate because they might not be part of a well-known political
party
-running as an independent or creating
one’s own political party is extremely difficult if you are not already a
well known fighter in your community
-which is why an early obstacle is
other, well-known and well-connected political parties, who will try to
stress that this candidate is not suitable because of these views. But if
these views are truly popular with the community, then the political
parties might criticize/attack this candidate for other reasons, or try to
convince that these views on taxes and regulation are extreme or wrong
-if the candidate remains popular
despite this, then the political parties might try to offer an option to
join them if they compromise on some of their views in exchange for
financial support or stepping aside and supporting a/the mainstream
candidate, but sometimes the political parties might renege once their
preferred candidate is ultimately elected, making it look like they
betrayed their voters, or are simply incompetent/ineffective
-the mainstream media will openly
criticize the candidate’s views or discuss them in a way that would
suggest they will not easily win the election(s), or that some of these
ideas are radical or unfeasible
-typical negative campaigning and
pseudo-scandals will be slathered upon the candidate, who has to address
these accusations deftly and without seeming too aggressive and too weak
at the same time
And if everything just happens to work
out precisely as planned, and enough voters keep focused on this/these
issue(s), then congratulations! Hopefully more than a few politicians are
now repping these ideas in the halls of power!
But compared to getting wealth
tax/corporate regulation policy actually passed in the halls of power, all
of the above was the easy part.
Die, All Right! - Scandinavia and the Moving Picture
It’s not just cold during the winters in
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark (to a lesser extent), but
dark as well.
Sure, the flip side is that summer solstice
means you can get the midnight sun if you go far enough north, but these
extremes obviously seep into your routines and perspectives of daily life.
Sometimes it feels like the horrible
blackness will never end, that death is sweet silence from the chattering
nuisance of consciousness (a reminder here that Hamlet himself is Danish,
which might explain the theme of his soliloquies).
Soren Kierkegaard was the Danish
proto-existentialist philosopher who was very polite and matter-of-fact
regarding how we must not completely ignore or forget the haunting spectre
of death that could take us off this mortal coil at any second. So
ideally we infuse every moment with
personal meaning, that we would act as god might, although ‘he’ could
obviously do this effortlessly being omnipotent and all.
But as the twentieth century lumbered on,
and the horrors of war and genocide and the possibility of nuclear
annihilation loomed overhead, any meaning - individual or collective -
ultimately felt meaningless.
Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal (1957) is the
archetypal Scandinavian film, the sort that would be celebrated and
lovingly mocked for decades to come.
Despite the contemporary period being a
fertile ground for misery, Bergman goes back six hundred years to the
Black Plague, slotting in the Crusades to really stress the futility and
destruction of the hazily labelled ‘medieval period’.
While wandering through the land and seeing
people’s hardships, a noble knight is playing chess with the grim reaper
for his life, but since death never loses, it’s only a matter of delay,
delay, delay.
But at least
there is a simple and understandable plot, because compared to Bergman’s
other masterpiece - Persona, a psychological drama of an actress and nurse having
breakdowns in a cabin - The Seventh
Seal is Fast and Furious 6.
Decades later,
Lars Von Trier started in television, before creating a series of
filmmaking rules (Dogme 65) he rarely adhered to. With explorations into
how society breaks down individuals in
Europa, Breaking the Waves and
Dogville, it’s like John
Cassavetes 70s work, but even more depressing.
Even when the
Scandinavians tried to get funny, it wasn’t with airy quips or a comedy of
errors. Songs From the Second Floor is a bonkers series of tableaus in
various locations that is suffering from the bizarre and mysterious
effects of the apocalypse (like stockbrokers whipping themselves in
tandem).
Confront the inner mundane absurdity of
existence with complimenting scenes of outer fantastical absurdity.
History is long, as is the winter night, but neither is as long as death.
When these
perspectives are diluted by outside cultural concepts, you get
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
(infused with Hollywood pulp), while
Midsommar is a mix of American and British influences in both theme
and style (the film follows a group of young Americans visiting a pagan
Scandinavian folk fest, meaning it’s an easy city-meets-pastoral set up,
and it’s a lot like the British horror classic,
The Wicker Man).
Life is a Series of Pills
We take pills to get up, to fall asleep, to calm down, to get amped, to
get hungry, to get hard, to get healthy, to get sick and even to die.
Tiny capsules that almost always are taking orally (with suppositories
coming up the rear…ba-dum-tsch) means it’s easy for the chemicals within
them to get within you.
Too easy, in fact.
After the long fight against the dangers of cigarettes finally seemed to
be won (or at least, acknowledged and understood by the general population
so that fewer people do it), in comes prescription painkillers, which make
people feel really good and want to take more of them, which, from a
capitalist point of view, is the perfect product.
But when it quickly became apparent that people got addicted to them, the
pharmaceutical manufacturers took the same approach as cigarette
manufacturers decades prior: deny the problems, fudge the science, bribe
the politicians and regulators, and undertake a massive
promotional/charity campaign to make it seem like you’re not acting like a
drug cartel.
So now it’s pills only in moderation, of course.
There are so many pills it’s easy to take too many of them. There are
warnings on bottles about what the safe dosage, but heeding those are
obviously optional.
Dependency on pills that have physically addictive chemical properties,
one that that goes beyond the natural world and instead lands not just
upon our intellect, but our working together as a community…to make sure
that factories can churn out pressed powders that can be easily swallowed
by anyone who has the need or want, but also the cash. Even pills that
don’t get you hooked on them can become less effective if you still take
them regularly as your body builds up a tolerance.
Because of the massive imbalance between use and abuse of drugs and how
society treats the former (buy more!) and the latter (throw those
criminals in jail!), it is essentially that we Decriminalize All Drugs.
One huge advantage of this is the simple fact that a person who is
apprehended/confronted due in part to their addiction is that they have a
better chance at getting rid of or managing their habit and lead a more
productive life if they go to a treatment centre, instead of prison.
Prison leads to a much high rate of recidivism not only for taking the
drug, but the criminal behaviour that the person commits to support their
addiction.
On top of that, the drugs that
are illegal are much more likely to be abused by the lower classes which
leads to harsh drug sentences even for possession of small amounts,
meanwhile prescription medicine that apes so many of the effects of the
illegal drugs are abused primarily by the upper and middle classes. And
prescription drug abuse is much more lenient and weakly enforced crime
compared to illicit drug use.
Finally, the effects of the ‘war on drugs’ in Central and South America
has had devastating consequences for the millions of citizens living there
who have nothing to do with the illicit drug trade. Cartels and gangs
kill/bribe anyone who stand in their way, and entire governments are
caught being beholden to how money is spent by local drug kingpins and the
money that comes primarily from the United States to fight them.
While it is loathe to imagine that suddenly Pfizer or Merck industries is
in charge of producing a cocaine or heroin equivalent (although uppers and
opioids are uncomfortably good starts), having it corporatized in this way
is certainly preferable to a literal drug war in distant nations.
Sad Bonus: Over-diagnosis of ADHD...for hideous profit!
(https://www.vox.com/2018/12/17/17263874/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-symptoms-diagnosis)
Who
Watches
the
Digitized
Watchers?
The amount of information available on ‘the internet’ is incredible, but
what needs to be looked at is our relationship with the information.
What do we bring to it? We stare at it, listen, read its words, but what
does it take from us? At first it seems like nothing (unless we make a
comment), but this is not true.
Thanks to ‘cookies’ for webpages and all the things you agree to let your
apps do on/to your phone or tablet, internet companies big and small
record the amount of time we spend on it, whether watching a video,
listening to a podcast, or scrolling through an article. It knows what we
do next, making connections of how absorbing the information has affected
our behaviour.
You are always a target demographic, and it will recommend make-up,
Minecraft, animal fails, or Andrew Tate videos accordingly.
While these are certainly disparate topics, it is nothing but data as far
as computers are concerned, and more and more often it is computers (more
specifically, AI) that are making these sorts of decisions.
One of the complicated problems with banning hate speech is that there is
a strong possibility that it will be used against groups that most people
would not consider hate groups:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/opinion/if-we-silence-hate-speech-will-we-silence-resistance.html)
This problem is exacerbated greatly with the fact that it is corporations
that find themselves the owners and overseers of new digital public
squares, and are not as beholden to the public good as the government is.
A failure to protect free speech or banning what is defined as hate speech
is not a legal or Supreme/High Court issue for them, but part of workflow,
that will assessed as something that could be worked on in the next
financial quarter.
We have too effectively monetized central tenets of human behaviour like
discourse and attention, and a too small group of Silicon Valley owners
and investors get a bit of the money every time these behaviours happen
(and they happened millions of time over, every second of every day).
If Twitter, Facebook and social media in general are the new ‘town
squares’ where people get together and talk, compare it to people going to
an actual square or city park. A place where they are chatting with each
other privately or listening to someone else speak for a planned meeting
or get together, but then someone starts screaming and yelling and
accusing them of being liars, paid actors, or simply ‘piece of shit’. How
is this dealt with in real life? Ignoring or walking away from this angry
person, hoping that a security guard comes up to them and asks them to
leave?
Heckling is comparatively rare when someone speaks in a town square if the
topic is not extremely controversial. Even if it’s a talk about music, if
someone in the crowd disagrees with the speaker, it’s more likely they
will just murmur a comment to their friend beside them, or will raise
their hand to offer their opinion to the main speaker without (ideally)
calling them a ‘fucking idiot’.
But on the internet, every comment can be quickly heard/read by the person
who made the initial post, so they can suddenly be confronted with the
agreements and disagreements of the many people listening/reading.
Formal, real life debates have moderators, and virtual chat rooms have
them as well, meant to enforce a series of rules in the room regarding
decorum, meaning a ‘mod’ might say to you that can’t talk about that
subject here, that your comments have been flagged, and that if you try
anything like that again you will immediately be banned.
By not being face-to-face in real life, you can become uncomfortably close
in the digital realm.
Ironically, as this world of ones and zeroes becomes more developed and
avatars become more common place, being threatened or insulted by another
might suddenly become less threatening than a straightforward text or
comment that does the same, because you can more easily do the physically
familiar act of walking away from that person (even if in the digital
realm it involves pressing a button, tapping a screen, or making a simple
gestures that indicates movement for your avatar).
Most people are aware that our electronic devices with microphones can
record us without our knowing, with governments claiming they do it for
our safety and corporations claiming they do it to improve your online
experience. While both can legitimately say otherwise, lost in the terms
and agreements of simply owning a cellphone and subscribing to a
telecommunications service are the hazy exceptions that can practically be
permanent if deemed valuable.
Companies certainly say that they value your privacy, even when
information you deem private can be quite profitable for them, which is
why it is important to keeping pressing the issue - or at least be aware
of it - that the way we conduct ourselves online is markedly different
than offline.
What Kind of God…
Nobody knows what happens after you die. No
one. So yes, it’s possible that there’s a heaven just like a lot of people
believe. But the idea of ‘after your life, you have another life, in some
other dimension or reality where you get everything you want for ever and
ever’…sounds great, ridiculous, and the very definition of ‘too good too
be true’. If you saw that on sale in a store, you’d assume that it was a
complete scam, covered in asbestos, or is somehow going to steal all your
online passwords.
It the sort of thing a parent would promise
to their eight year old they’ll stop throwing a tantrum in a grocery
store.
The whole idea of ‘there’s a powerful man in
a white beard who knows everything you do and whether you were good or bad
and will reward or punish based on that’? It’s Santa Claus. It’s not even
‘the grown up version of Santa Claus’, it’s the exact same thing, it’s a
scale of 1 to 1, and instead of the North Pole it is in a place where you
can never be called out for it being total crap.
On the reverse, Satan is even more comical, a
bogeymen that you can blame your own behaviour on. The idea of entering a
bargain with him is good story fodder and nothing else, since your soul is
a concept of self, and you can never sell that or give it away.
Because isn't it
convenient that what you want/like is the will of god, and what you don't
like is the will of satan/evil/not of god?
The personal relationship between an
individual and a spiritual/theological conception of reality can be of
great benefit to them and their community. It can be a tool for personal
growth and a way to create an ethos for being kind and loving people.
But organized religion typically turns that
tool into a weapon.
Being organized is meant to be a compliment,
but with the term ‘religion’ tacked on, it suggests strict hierarchy,
inflexible beliefs, and plenty of power relations and all the abuse that
can come with that.
We seem to be the most human when we are
trying to understand the divine.
Not that divinity is needed for this sort of
activity.
Noted French philosopher and atheist
Jean-Paul Sartre started as an existentialist (see up above, the
Scandinavian film bit), but the experience of the Second World War changed
him, saying that,
“to be free is not to do what one wants, but
want to do what one can”, which is adding a level of morality to an amoral
world and a slight bit of inspiration to contrast the natural bleakness
that can come with embracing existentialist philosophy.
Here’s a Thought Jan 2023
The Maiming of the Author
Rumours of their death are greatly
exaggerated, but that’s to be expected in the fancy-ish business of
word-working.
The relationship between writer and
reader has of course gotten more complicated as it’s now so easy to
communicate with one another, and if the writer isn’t interested in doing
this, well, even that action shrieks volumes.
The audience can be more upset than ever
- either as a collective or a very passionate individual - that the story
or the symbolism of the story does not match their expectations.
They may disagree with a review or
assessment by a critic, but they also might disagree with the creator of
the work itself.
If the author’s opinion or personal
information is absent, its lack will become part of the analysis of the
work.
Their role is not exactly removed or
reduced, but melted and bent into the shape that the reader/critic/scholar
wants it to take.
Future History: Learning the Wrong Lessons
What will be the big problem with the early twenty first
century according to people looking at it (hopefully there will be people
to look at it) from the early twenty second century Rampant free market
capitalism and its inevitable associated practice of consumerism that
inevitably leads to wealth and power disparities when there is a lack of
regulation? Not addressing climate change in any meaningful way for oh so
many years when it became more and more obvious it was a huge problem?
Standard fights over resources that led to small and large military
conflicts? Inability for humanity to adopt to rapidly changing technology
that fragments them into individuals and cliques making it harder to work
together and solve big issues like the ones mentioned in the first three
questions?
As part of the last question, there is the unfortunate
possibility that in the future any form of ‘individualism’ that stresses
the importance of the individual over the community will be seen as the
problem (especially if civilization really does hit the skids), and as
such future governments (whether democratic or authoritarian) might
attempt to limit how people can speak or act in order to ‘protect
society’.
The concern with this conclusion is that Individualism is
not at all the problem, but that it cannot simply occur in any society in
a vacuum. It must exist within a reasonably successful environment for a
majority of citizens to live unencumbered with their basic needs being
consistently met.
Which is the right lesson to always remember.
What is the Press Now?
Is Julian Assange a journalist?
It’s an easy question to forget years later, even as he is still
languishing in a UK prison, awaiting possible extradition to the US for
running Wikileaks when it leaked oodles of classified material. And maybe
saying ‘leaked’ is already showing a bit of bias. What if the word was
‘reported’? Would that make it seem like Assange worked for The Guardian
or the Washington Post?
To paraphrase, ‘he may be a bastard, but he’s not the New York Times’
bastard’.
Corporate consolidation for airlines, soda companies, and video games are
bad enough, but when it comes to essential services like financial
institutions, health insurance providers, and the news media, the results
are inevitably so, so much worse.
Information is the bedrock for a free society that makes decisions as a
collective, and we have to quickly add the word ‘accurate’ in front of
‘information’ because without that combo, you’ve got worse than nothing,
you have a society making decisions that will go wrong right from the
start. On top of that, there is also the necessity for relevant
information, as it is too easy to find the for-profit news media providing
stories and coverage based on what people want to hear (the tail wagging
the dog), rather than what needs to be heard. Case in point: It's
depressing that the Panama/Paradise paper leak barely made a splash for
more than a three day news cycle.
The Internet isn't built for such an in depth and reflective analysis of a
448 page report.
The daily drips and tweets of the most juicy details, yes, but providing
an overarching narrative to show the wealthy hide their billions through
yawn inducing shell corporations and tax loopholes, not in the least.
McLuhan was right: The medium is the message. And the Internet offers
immediacy and constant novelty, and nothing more.
This is what the news has become.
This is not excusing the actions and viewpoints of the public for their
indifference. Many factors including the format at which these receive
information are to blame. Decades of cynicism toward the political process
is understandable.
However, the public can never fully escape culpability. Democracy and
freedom requires constant vigilance, regardless off the supposed morass of
the current situation. To throw your hands up in disgust and turn away
just hastens democracy's demise.
This isn’t that new, of course, as Chris Hedges noted back in 2015 on Bill
C-51:
http://rabble.ca/news/2015/03/chris-hedges-on-c-51-they-have-won-and-it-to-us
The Idea of a Nation
While the symbols of a country will likely tell you very
little about the nation itself (bald eagle! Apple pie!), the qualities
given to the people of the nation can be just as meaningless. In fact,
because they focus on almost exclusively positive qualities, they read a
bit like horoscopes. Countries are filled with proud, hardworking polite
people, because who’s going to say their country is filled with miserable,
lazy, rude people? Especially because you’re going to find people of both
kinds in every country.
And ‘proud’ is positive spin on what (and who) could be
considered a ‘major asshole’.
The laws and policies of a country (both proclaimed and
actual) say so much more about the country than the food, clothing, or
celebratory animals that happen to live within its borders.
What’s in a Name?
A rose by any other name blah, blah, blah. But just for the record, it
would be really confusing if we all disagreed on what ‘rose’ meant.
Agreeing on definitions is something built so deeply into species
sociability that of course we take it for granted. Part of the early
difficulty of creating a language (and it’s certainly not something groups
of people in the Stone Age sat around and agreed to do via grunting) is
deciding that this series of noises matched this symbol etched on a cave
wall.
Today the names of objects, events and ideas can change more rapidly than
ever (yeah, yeah, thank you internet), and while most of it unsurprisingly
involves slang and colloquialisms in certain subcultures that can
occasionally burst into the mainstream, there are some bizarre behemoths
that involve political movements and ideologies.
Conservatives support neoliberalism, regulatory bodies that chiefly
de-regulate, a debt ceiling that always gets raised so it’s not much of a
ceiling, and socialism is so nebulously defined by the mainstream
political discourse that the term is rarely mentioned by left leaning
politicians who support socialist policies and is akin to communism or
fascism by the right wing.
Even the more basic terms are on shaky foundations, as apparently ‘The
Swedish Democrats’ are a far-right hate group.
Sussing this out is beyond simple annoyance. An overabundance of misnomers
(and therefore misinformation) leads to miscommunication which increases
the chances of society’s ability to function adequately. It is perfectly
Orwellian, as in 1984 the
Ministry of Peace deals with all things war.
Will technology save us? What is to be lost (and gained) by having less
ambiguous terms for complex ideas might become moot when translator
programs become as dependable and effortless as texting autocorrect.
And while we can mock some of the mistakes that show up with said
autocorrect, we forget how on point it almost always is.
Tom Brady is not flashy. His play-style
is mid, except for the tendency to throw fast. His efficiency and
longevity are his hallmarks in a sport where neither are commonplace
outside the position of kicker.
Credit certainly goes to his ability to
analyze the field in real time to get the ball out of his hands quickly,
which reduces the likelihood of being sacked or the need to scramble to
extend the play. By avoiding those two occurrences, Brady avoided serious
injury for most of his career, which is why he is/was able to play for so
long.
And of course all this was possible in
conjunction with Bill Belichick’s coaching brilliance on the defensive
side of the ball (meaning Brady rarely had to mount comebacks, and if he
did they would likely only be down by one score, not several), and his
managerial brilliance of finding compatible receivers for Brady’s play
style and trusting offensive coordinators to maximize said play style.
The History of the word ‘Warp’
Etymology is the study of words, and the Oxford English Dictionary
(sometimes shortened to OED) is not so much a dictionary that tells you a
word’s definition, but a historical account of the first time it was ever
used and what information it conveyed, along with the various ways it has
been used ever since (a quick, simple example: ‘Access’ was something you
did, now it’s also something you can have).
The word ‘warp’ was originally a term in sewing when using looms,
describing an arrangement of parallel lengths of yarn with a crossing
string. While intentional, this crossing string looking askew (or going
against the norm) in comparison to the other ordered strings is how ‘warp’
would be used going forward.
Soon it took to mean objects bending in completely unexpected and
sometimes unwanted ways, going from a description of a mundane event to a
description for something typically negative.
Now it was bad to be ‘warped’…which meant that for those who were eager to
stand in contrast to mainstream cultural definitions, being warped was at
the same time a rebellious badge of honour. It was bending or changing
something that was straight and familiar.
Science is legendary for coming up with lousy names for extremely unusual
phenomena. The Big Bang is a great example, especially when you consider
that it was named sarcastically by a theoretical physicist who thought
that the evidence presented at the time for a near-instantaneous event
that started everything in the known universe was shoddy. Upon further
research, it was decided by the community at large that The Big Bang was
correct, but no one bothered to change the term (although Calvin suggested
that it be renamed to the ‘horrendous space kablooie’).
The names of the six types of quarks are like the seven dwarves, but with
even less personality or indication of what they do: Up, Down, Charm,
Strange, Top and Bottom. It’s barely better than naming them the first six
letters of the alphabet (or last six).
Going back to warp, discoveries in 20th century physics showed that the
fabric of the universe - spacetime - could truly stretch and bend along
with the light that travels through it, so using the word ‘warp’ to
describe the possibility of travelling at ridiculously fast speed wasn’t
half bad.
Pop culture did the rest.
Now ‘warp’ is primarily known as a measurement in Star Trek lore. And hey,
you didn’t have to be an astrophysicist to know that warp 7 was faster
than warp 4. But even in fake magical science, it’s not easy.
See, Warp 1 was in fact the speed of light, which is just under 300,000
kilometres per second. Which is dang fast, but since there was a vague
attempt at scientific accuracy and consistency within the Star Trek
universe (even though, y’know, Klingons and tribbles and such), and
considering that galaxies are
so damn big, higher levels of warp were exponentially faster than the one
before it. This gets to the point where Warp 9.9 has been quoted as being
‘4 billion miles per second’ (nearly 6.5 billion km).
Which is gibberish-level fast.
That’s going from the sun to Pluto in less than a second. It makes the
size of our solar system a quick cough.
Are People Getting Stupider?
The accusation of a community/region/country/world getting dumber and
dumber is popular, and has been for a long time.
Whatever period we look back at and think is the ‘smarter one’ is usually
a time when the people then were looking further back in time and thinking
the same way.
Which time in history would it be? When the most amount of people can
read, write and reach a vaguely agreed-upon idea of a particular education
level?
Because that would be right now.
Despite complaints about the quality of education kids today are receiving
and how well they are (or aren’t) doing on standardized test scores,
there’s more educated people on the planet now than ever before, and
that’s because of huge numbers of youth in developed countries receiving
an education who would not have gotten one in years prior.
Universal education is an extremely fresh concept when compared to how
long human civilization has been around, yet the quality of this education
is a whole other kettle of textbooks, and can differ for both complicated
and simple reasons.
But is going to school the same thing as not being stupid?
How are we measuring smart (and therefore stupid)?
By IQ tests? By standardized tests in school for children and youth at
certain ages?
What if the questions being asked are less applicable to most of the
people taking them?
What if the questions were designed for people who weren’t raised with the
entire content of the world in their back pocket? Why even bother
memorizing tons of bullet points of vary subjects when you’ll always have
access to it via phone, tablet or computer? How much does rote
memorization have to do with being/becoming smart?
So not only does technology play a huge role in trying to answer this
question, but consider that differing social financial situations throw
the entire testing system off kilter.
Older generations especially would love to embrace the notion that they
were the smart ones and that this new batch of young adults and kids are
navel-gazing lazy-bones who spend too much time with the latest
technology.
And if you want to believe that, well, you can cherry pick all the
evidence you want, although beware of the dangerous Power of Anecdotal
Evidence. It feels so good, it’s plain as day, it’s pulling the emotional
heartstrings, has been a way of deciding things for millennia… and always
has the potential to be completely wrong. Which might prove people aren’t
getting any smarter than years prior, but that they’re not getting any
dumber, either.
The Horrific Thing About Hitler is the
‘Gap’ of Horror
We view Hitler as a monster to distance
himself from us, because while he was a human being we - as other human
beings - don’t like having any sort of connection to him. We don’t want to
think of anyone being capable of doing the same thing, so we call him a
‘monster’, just as we do to serial killers.
But outside of his time as a soldier in
World War I, Hitler never killed anyone himself. Instead he helped create
and oversaw a massive war machine and a genocidal plan to rid
Germany/Europe/the world of people he and his supporters found
undesirable.
‘The banality of evil’ was the description
given to surviving Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials after World War
II.
It is the uncomfortable idea that these men
came to power by legitimate means, twisted the law to their own advantage
and in twelve short years had soldiers and citizens commit some of the
most heinous acts in world history.
Hitler railed against the Jewish people
with his bigoted words, but was never seen mocking rabbis on the street or
pointing a gun at the head of a concentration camp prisoner.
There is a gap of action but not of
responsibility. It is the idea that convincing other people - in some
cases, many other people - to carry out the horrific idea you have is
worse that doing it yourself.
That a person has the power to convince
other people to do evil is terrifying because it is admitting the
possibility that maybe you might one day be subject to such convincing.
If Hitler tried to kill as many Jewish
people as he could all by himself with a machine gun in Munich synagogue
on a random day in the early 1920s before he ever entered politics, it
would still be a horrific event (which would likely end in his immediate
death or arrest, trial and sentencing to death), but unlikely to be in any
history textbooks beyond perhaps a sentence.
But because Hitler strived to and succeeded
at becoming the leader of a country, he was able to expand his desire to
exterminate the Jewish people (and communists, and anyone who opposed him)
on a massive scale, with enough ardent supporters to carry out these
heinous acts.
Exponentially growing evil, with one man at
its root. The matter of giving orders versus carrying out orders.
There is despicable agency and intent, but
also distance.
Meanwhile, heinous serial killers might
brutally tortured their victims, and it was because of their own agency
and their own hands doing them.
Similar to Hitler although on a much
smaller scale, Charles Manson was able to convince people to do foul,
violent acts on his behalf.
The horror of Hitler is our own fear that
we could be convinced/manipulated into doing great evil based on another’s
ideas, suggestions or demands. And the sad proof that we as a species are
susceptible to this is that despite humanity’s efforts to make sure any
form of genocide would never happen again…they certainly have, with
depressing regularity across the globe, from Cambodia to Rwanda to the
Rohingya.
Age-ism-ism
Denigrating or ignoring someone (or some people) simply
based on how old they are is certainly ageism.
On and individual level it says more about the parties
involved and their own biases (‘kids these days’, ‘ok boomer’) than
anything else, but looking down upon an entire generation because of how
many collective institutional mistakes they made during their ‘watch’ is,
quite simply, how history is written.
That one ‘becomes’ an adult at eighteen in the sense that
they are wholly responsible for their own actions in a legal sense and can
participate in elections is based on a loose, community agreement that
this is a good average age for such activities, when puberty has finally
ended and the hormones aren’t so much in flux. At the same time, of course
there are responsible, level-headed fourteen year olds who can be much
more reliable for all sorts of activities than some people decades older
than them. But such cases are the exception, not the rule.
At the other end of the scale, associating age with wisdom
is something older people stress just so people will still listen to their
outdated ideas that have little bearing on what’s actually happening in
the world around them. Just because you managed to live to eighty doesn’t
necessarily mean what you say is helpful. Plenty of life experience does
not equal useful information for others.
Chasing the Algorithm
Creators and streamers are paid based on their popularity, in the basic
sense that with more eyeballs on your page or channel the more that you
will receive in ad revenue and sponsorships and get a small cut of sales,
and the more likely that people will buy merch or donate to support you.
And while this sounds like a matter of raw numbers, it's not exactly, as
getting seen on the most popular sites (so let’s just say YouTube,
Instagram, TikTok and Twitch), involves a lot of random chance.
All
these sites and apps benefit financially when you spend more time on them,
so the owners are incentivized to give you more of the same based on what
you are choosing to watch. If you just watched a video of a cat slipping
on ice, maybe you’ll want to then watch a video of a dog jumping in a pool
and knocking some kid off an inner tube (or sports highlights or cover
songs of a particular artist). The computer code that decides what to
recommend to you next is loosely nicknamed ‘The Algorithm’, and creators
are acutely aware that their livelihood can depend on someone clicking on
a video it recommends.
The
sites themselves don’t care much what you do or watch, so long as you’re
there. But the channels on them are desperate to make sure you spend time
on their channel, which is why you’re asked to subscribe for updates, like
the video, and make comments on them, as all those actions slightly alter
the algorithm to favour that video slightly more often as a recommended
one. This system is not at all perfect, as sometimes alerts don't work,
sometimes you don't appear in recommended lists that you would have been
previously, and the changing winds of what’s popular at this hour might
pass a creator/streamer right by.
Some
ads are for other content creators, spending money to get around the
Algorithm if they feel they’ve fallen out of favour with it, which is
attributing a very human quality to a bunch of ones and zeroes, and is
something we might be doing more and more of in the future.
Art-less
"Please don't put your life in the hands, of a
rock and roll band, we'll throw it all away."
- Oasis
With public figures, institutions and the political process letting us
down more and more in this unfortunate century, we have turned to the
creators of art and culture as our guides through the darkest timelines,
as the sensible ones in a world full of nonsense. This is foolish and will
almost certainly disappoint. Inflatable and impossible expectation can
ruin many a relationship with a book, film, or album, let alone the person
who made it. Not only are the creators as fallible as yourself, but the
process of creating these works are just as fallible, and full of steps
where it's akin to making a sausage, as you probably don't want to know
how. Not necessarily because it's horrifying, but because it can be kind
of bland and reductionist. The artist will forget how they came up with
your favourite song, they may have left a mystery in a story because they
were to lazy to explain it, etc.
Feeling that a work of art speaks to you is wonderful, but don’t mistake
it think that it is the artist speaking to you. Becoming too attached to
anything - whether a person or whatever they create - can lead to problems
down the road.
Considering how much cultural material involves sex, violence, revenge,
and going through absolute hell to finally persevere (and not always with
that happy ending), one could say that if an artist's work was actually
indicative of their behaviour or attitudes, then most artists would be in
jail. Thinking an artist definitely 'means' a story/song/joke/performance
literally is like thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger is not an
Austrian-American actor but rather a killer cyborg from the future
Political Compromises...
Do you hold out and wait for enough political and
social support for a big left-leaning cause/bill/agenda in one single
vote, or do you compromise by making incremental centre-left-leaning
policies that over time (likely years) might equal the same amount of
change as the initial 'do it all in go' agenda?
What scenario is more likely to succeed?
And we've barely broached the issue of the amount
of hostility towards these ideas from corporations and the right.
The sad complexity of how and why politicians vote
for certain bills - as well as the amount of money dumped upon the issue
via lobbyists - means there will as most certainly be a ton of imperfect
(and demanding allies) to get something like an infrastructure or climate
change bill passed.
So is this an advocacy for compromise? Is this an
admission that having enough political votes and/or will to pass something
even mildly contentious like 'the green new deal' is probably impossible
in the foreseeable future?
How will those committed to this plan feel when a
more watered-down version of the bill passes?
Betrayed? Disappointed? Cynical at the entire political process
going forward?
These considerations become all the more pressing
when one acknowledges how important it is to do something about climate
change, inequality, and 'money out of politics' right now. These three
issues right there are already hopelessly interconnected and affect each
other's outcomes.
People were disappointed with the limits of
Obamacare, and he had to point out that it was just an initial step, that
over time, it would be improved upon. Unfortunately, this meant Obamacare
supporters would have to hold onto the presidency and congress past
2016...which didn't happen.
Which is a terrifying reminder of how fragile so
many policies can be.
Political divisions meant a
conservative-controlled congress meant Obama had to pass executive orders
to help bolster climate change and inequality policies. Some of which
could simply be reversed (and were) when his predecessor arrived in
January 2017.
There are so many considerations when one thinks
about supporting candidates that completely reflect their own opinions,
and supporting candidates that reflect the opinion that would most likely
garner the most votes in a national election. That's a frustrating
compromise.
Especially because issues like economic inequality
and climate change can't wait for the 'next election cycle'. Things are
getting terrible right now, we can't cross our fingers and hope that a
more open-minded and progressive electorate is four or eight or whatever
years away.
It's hoping for the absolute best result versus
acknowledging the possibility of the worst possible outcome. Youthful
idealism versus middled-aged pragmatism.
It's not a new line in the sand by any means, this
has been a challenge for democracies since the get go.
So what do you do?
You talk to as many people as possible and find
out what the voters think and convince them that you’re the best person to
deliver on these issues. And if there’s a lot of different opinions on
them…looks like you’ll have to compromise right away!
Knowing About WW2
History inevitably has
a long reach, especially big, beefy events like a war that spanned the
globe and even had countries that weren’t battlefields completely changing
how they lived during it.
Like
The Empire Strikes Back, WW2 was much more complex and nuanced than
its predecessor (and by extrapolation, WW3 will spend the first third of
it settling one outstanding issue from WW2, before becoming a re-hash of
WW1 with some familial complications behind the scenes…
like Return of the Jedi).
World War 2 can be as
complicated in the details as the experts want it to be, and as simplistic
as tik-tok video summarizing everything, and both can be both shocking and
fascinating at the same.
It was also a time of
technological advancement in terms of documentation of the conflict
itself. Footage of battles and their aftermath meant that people were
aware of the goings on beyond the newspaper articles. You could go to the
cinema and watch newsreels of soldiers actually fighting, of tanks and
planes firing on enemy targets (as military censors probably would edit
out something like their own side getting blown up).
Of course, technology
in its infancy meant some mistakes and accidents, like how all the footage
of American soldiers landing on Juno beach on D-day was damaged beyond
repair.
That the war took
place in many different locations and conditions meant that entire
sub-disciplines could focus on the battles in North Africa, or the South
Pacific, or the top secret Allied missions to disrupt the Germans’ own
attempt to develop nuclear weapons. Films and TV series have delved deep
into these experiences, and some were even made while the war was going
on. While Casablanca might be
Bogart’s best known film set during the war, he also starred in
Sahara, where he played a tank
commander holding off a German battalion all by themselves.
As the war went on,
new countries joined (
That the Cold War
began as soon as WW2 just reinforces the idea that its effect had an
extremely long reach, since that conflict didn’t end until the collapse of
Soviet Union in 1991, which meant that history itself ended.
Heh.
Who watches the watchmen?
The police as a powerful institution being so often free from
accountability inevitably leads to brazen abuse. While it is essential
that unions are a big part of a functioning democracy because workers
definitely need that tool when it comes to dealing with management, strong
unions can certainly protect terrible employees. While working in a
unionized manufacturing job you'll find that bad employees can be inept,
lazy or frustrating to deal with, bad teachers and especially bad police
officers can have much more terrible impact upon
society in general.
Police unions in the US have made it hard for bad cops to ever be fired,
let alone charged with a crime, and change is still coming slow. Internal
Affairs - the law enforcement within law enforcement - may be well
meaning, but it is hard to shake the notion that any officer that
cooperates with this department will be seen as a snitch or a rat.
Since the police have so, so much more power than a constantly
marginalized minority, they are the ones who must be responsible for
wielding it properly. If an individual officer can't accept that, they
should quit. There is a long list of cops who gun down black people
because they think their life is in danger, but it turns out (thanks in
part to bystander camera footage or body cameras) that the person they
shot wasn't even armed. Once again, it seems to be that public must play
the role of judge and jury, as law enforcement can’t seem to do it
themselves.
Here’s a Thought
- July 2022 Edition
Context is Almost Everything
(and
even that requires Context)
Who’s advocating that policy? Who’s making
that joke?
You even have to consider who’s saying
every word you hear, writing each sentence you read (this one - as is
everything on this site - is written by a straight, white male), because
that context will properly inform you as how to properly read all the
intents and accidents of the literal and symbolic that can be packed into
the content of the material.
If it’s wrong, the creator was
misinformed. If it was offensive, it was just a joke. It if was an
offensive joke, they’re sorry to anyone who is offended and will learn
more about the person/people/culture you mocked.
Sometimes it’s the bad luck of the context
of the compliant, where people are looking for what an attempted statement
of support was inadvertently lacking. To understand as much of an online
argument as possible you have to not only read the entire thread, but
delve into the perspectives of the two or more voices of users.
Or you don’t.
If you want authorial context, there it
is. If you want to ignore it, you can do that, too.
The internet has made anonymity easier (at
least for a certain level of popularity, because once something goes
viral, discovering identities becomes an industry in itself).
You can take all sorts of guesses as to
the identity of a writer or creator who wishes to remain anonymous, and
sometimes your personal biases might seep into these conclusions.
If you like what they’ve created, you
might hope they are somewhat like yourself. If you hate it, maybe you’re
hoping they’re all the way different.
Or maybe you don’t care, that the work itself is so good that it
effortlessly stands on its own, letting the experiencer give the work
meaning, absent of the creator’s viewpoint or intent.
And maybe then the creator can complain
about context.
For rock at its most celebratory transgressive, it’s
Brown Sugar through and through. Famously described by Christgau as
‘so compelling it discourages exegesis’, it has recently come under
criticism for its lyrics regarding sadism, slavery, substances and
sideshow queens.
If it were a somber ballad it might be seen a thought-provoking commentary
on these issues, but it is a party rock song par-excellence.
(This is not the only time the Stones ‘got away’ with this,
Start Me Up has such an easy, feel good groove the whole way through
that radio stations still play the ‘you make a dead man cum’ lyric in the
outro)
Even with Sugar’s riff-tastic
opening sounding archetypal Keith Richards, Mick Jagger wrote the song
practically in its entirety.
It was recorded in late 1969 just before the disastrous Altamont Festival
gig. In fact, they played it there, and it already sounds great.
The staccato start gets your head turning, and the band comes in with full
force a few seconds later, so by the time Jagger is singing with full
throttle everyone’s enjoying
themselves when they shouldn’t. The slaver is doin’ all right as he abuses
his property, the tent show queen has underage lovers, and the protagonist
just wants to know why brown sugar tastes so good (here’s where we’ll
mention this initial title was Black
Pussy).
Right after Bobby Keys’ solo (although he bests himself a few songs later
on the Sticky Fingers album with
Can’t You Hear Me Knocking),
Mick can’t wait getting back to it, giving a beautiful, ridiculous,
‘aaahhhhh’ on the way into the third verse.
The energy is absolutely overpowering. There is a joy in pushing the
boundaries and going wild, asking this rhetorical questions just to show
you how he really fucking feels.
By the time the ‘yeahs’ and ‘woos’ you’re so in a thrall that you don’t
care what the barely-considered words are, it may as well be Dylan’s best
couplets, the way you’re sucked into the overall excitement and
groove-tastic rhythms.
The band has stated that they will not be performing the song these days
because times have changed, and that’s exactly why Brown Sugar still
represents the dichotomy that rock has in its bones. Outlaw aesthetics for
the mass market. Shocking words on the dance floor. Made for the youth,
still played by senior citizens. Almost excessive saxophones.
Whoo!
Why Do Things Exist?
We don’t know, which is great, because then we get to
choose.
We know that our bodies (and everything in the
universe) are made of atoms, which are made up of tinier particles that
are mostly empty space and electrical charges. We don’t get to choose that
answer.
Well technically you can choose not to believe it, but
it flies in the face of scientific progress that has yielded a bounty of
practical inventions that have defined contemporary civilization, so
accepting the fact that your smart phone is constantly in communication
with satellites that are flying above the earth means accepting the
scientific theories that helped develop these inventions.
How do the subatomic particles on transistors work?
There are plenty of textbooks and five minute ‘for dummies’ videos to
answer that.
Why do they work?
Shrug emoji.
We can choose between options already popular or
completely unique and personal when it comes to why things exist.
There can be one or more gods, one or more alien
species, one or more flying spaghetti monsters, and the ‘why’ for our own
creation comes down to these creatures’ own, unknowable whims. We always
look to the stars, to the beyond, when asking questions that are beyond
us.
A continually tweak-able
standard model is what we hold up as how
our universe works the way it does, but we might have to send a probe (or
a spaceship?) through a black hole to answer
why.
When you
have a system that can barely bend, it won’t take much to break.
Among the
myriad of challenges Covid continues to present is that while its effects
on an individual is most likely a brief, more-series-than-average-flu (for
both vaxxed and un-vaxxed, but the latter’s risk of ‘even more serious’ is
obviously higher), the effect on our functioning,
just-in-time-and-just-enough, supply chain dependent, capitalist society
is catastrophic.
We run
businesses where it is expected x amount of employees are always working
on the supply chain to keep shelves and orders filled (from the mines to
the factories to the warehouses to the stores, with trucks, ships and
planes moving the product from place to place). We have this many doctors
and nurses to provide this amount of medical services for a community on
average. And covid threw this out of whack completely.
There were
already problems with these systems function being able to properly, and
covid made it so much worse.
Even trying
to be responsible in these times can blow up in the system’s face.
The airline
industry thought it would take five years for tourism to bounce back, and
in the early days of the pandemic it sold planes and equipment, furloughed
employees and pushed company veterans into early retirement, all to save
money so they could weather the half-decade of expected economic loss.
Instead,
people are angling to travel again just two years in, and there aren’t
enough planes, pilots, flight attendants and grounds crew to make it
happen. But did the airline’s sensibly only schedule as many flights as
their employees could handle? Nope, they went overboard, which meant
random ones would be cancelled or delayed.
Everyone has everyone’s children
This isn’t hippie shit. This is the sobering realization
that no matter how digital we get, we are all in this together, and how
the responsibility of raising all the children properly (and ‘properly’ is
certainly a very subjective viewpoint) is necessary for the future
survival of the species.
The pervasive thought towards child rearing of the last
half century is pouring as much positive attention and resources and
carefully-given advice into your child’s own development as possible,
typically at the expense of the state of the wider society in general.
If you were going to try to lower your carbon footprint,
campaign for political candidates that support a strong social safety net
and green energy, or any sort of ‘responsible citizen thinking about the
future’ activity, you will have to put it aside because that energy is now
focused on a raising your own offspring.
And while it makes sense that you would focus on your
children because that is something you can affect more directly and
positively that much more than the wider world (with its massive
complexity), the wider world is where these kids are going to have to
live, and keeping your eyes off that prize can be devastating for
everyone.
You can’t just try to give your child the best chance to
thrive in the world, you have to try and give that chance to thrive to as
many children as possible.
The Incomprehension of the Now
The passage from child to adult is a
common trope in literature (symbolizing the move from ignorance to
knowledge, weakness to strength), but it can also be applied to earlier
stages of life.
The helplessness of infant requires being
waited on hand and foot. It wants everything, even if it doesn’t
understand what it wants or what it needs.
This is the indomitable will of a six
month old infant crying, not really able to grasp why its hungry, why it
shits its pants, why there’s all these noises and colour around it that
barely seem to have any pattern, and why it suddenly feels tired. It just
wants.
Over weeks and months the concept of self
grows, the ability to communicate becomes essential, and the limitations
of all sorts come flooding in, a lack of understanding how one’s own body
works, a lack of mobility in the most basic sense before learning how to
walk and even then the true limits of that when the world itself is
sensibly sectioned off by caregivers.
Children learn that they cannot have
everything they want immediately. They learn that they are not the centre
of the world, that things are denied to them for their own good, and their
initial response to this is the (attempted) destruction period known as
the terrible twos.
There will always be a tendency to compare what is happening now with what
happened in the past. We do this with similar events (wars, lead up to
wars, economic booms and busts, pandemics, extreme weather, artistic
movements, etc.). We are especially prone to doing this when we know more
and more about the past, and thanks to many technological innovations, we
know so much more about the last one hundred years of human civilizations
than the centuries and millennia before (it is also, obviously, much more
recent than the further past, with firsthand experience still available
and affecting those who lived through these events).
It is easy to compare how we handle crises in the past with how we handle
them today, and there are certainly lessons to be learned, but the
technology that allows us to remember so easily and vividly (with video
and audio recordings, as well as a wealth of written material) also
affects:
How (and How Long) Will We Remember the
Nineteen Sixties?
The baby boomers (born between 1946 and
1964) now range from fifty eight to seventy six. Despite plenty of
advances in medical technology over the last several decades, death will
reach out its not-so-groovy hand towards this generation. The ones that
were born into a strong social safety net that began to come undone in the
nineteen eighties, just as they fully came into positions of economic and
political power.
Middle class wealth had them from the
cradle. This does not mean they were all rich, but even those that found
‘only’ middle class success meant they could buy houses, receive good
health insurance coverage, and even save money for the future.
At the same time, the years that they
reached adulthood was filled with social change, much of it led by those
of the era of what is called the greatest generation (because they were in
power in the fifties and sixties).
Most of the baby boomers didn’t hit their
twenties until the seventies, and that was the ‘Me Decade’, as it didn’t
take long after Woodstock that this hippie stuff really wasn’t going to
work out once you came down from the acid.
While it still makes sense to market
products to the 18-35 demographic, the concentrated wealth among the baby
boomers from the nineteen-seventies, eighties and right up to today meant
the cultural industry kept trying to appeal to them and their wallets.
Why did it seem like they never shut up
about The Beatles? (Other than the fact The Beatles wrote a shit-ton of
amazing songs)
Because they kept buying Beatles albums
and merch. When CD arrived in the eighties, you re-bought Abbey Road, when
mp3s arrived in the 2000s, you bought its digital download, and then vinyl
became popular again you can buy it a fourth or fifth time.
Regarding the sixties itself, the social
movements of the decade meant the cultural material being created had
changed in leaps and bound when looking at both content and style.
This means that looking back today at the
music and movies and art of that time seems much less archaic than what
came from the nineteen fifties and before.
Technological advancements in the sixties
meant it was easy to record everything and anything, and it only got
easier as the twentieth century went on.
Easy-to-use cameras were finally
affordable and prevalent.
Photos weren’t few and far between and absolutely cherished possessions
but now things you can fill up album after album with (and hey, if some of
the were blurry or had the spook-filled ‘red eye’, you could get rid of
them and just take more).
As the middle class grew, so did
disposable income, and so did the opportunity to collect and accumulate
things that you could say interested or defined ‘you’.
The youth of the sixties were the first
demographic where goods and services were specifically advertised to them
via television, and its never stopped, nostalgia never ending as products
and events celebrated their twenty fifth, fortieth and fiftieth
anniversaries so you can buy a lava lamp again.
How are we remembering the sixties? With
product placement regularity.
Today, the 18-35 demographic can stream
their life to the entire world (or show off an entirely virtual one
online) which can be saved in hard drives as long as the electricity holds
out, which begs the question…
Did people used to remember more events
in their lives?
That because we live at a time where
there is a sensory overload thanks to the internet offering always new
information - coupled with the comparatively easy access to travel - that
we don’t spend time thinking about our past (childhood, early adulthood,
or whatever period depending on how old you are). We are always ‘onto
something new’, leaving our past in the proverbial dust. And when we want
to remember, there’s less (or less detail) in our memory banks and more in
hard drives.
On the other hand, while it makes sense
that the older you get, the earlier memories begin to fade, but some of
those can be recollected/jogged with the proper photo or cultural
artifact. Maybe because we’ve documented our present so often (thanks
again to modern technology) we can quickly remember easier than before.
But do we do this? How often do people look back at photos they’ve taken
years ago? You can take so many with your phone and store them
effortlessly, but it’s this simplicity that makes it less a valuable act.
People used to have to dig for photo albums and flip through pages and
pages of slightly blurred pictures to remember their high school years.
There was effort to reminisce. Now it’s
just another easy choice to shrug away.
James Brown
Since the Beatles are, at the end of the day, four individuals, it can be
said that James Brown is the most important singular person in the history
of 20th century music. No one figure wrote and performed music at his
level, while also having a massive influence on at least five genres of
music: R&B, soul, pop, funk and hip-hop.
Certainly Bob Dylan bringing a level of literary prowess to protest and
pop music casts a long shadow, but how many splits was he able to do
onstage?
Brown’s live shows are stuff of legend, and while it’s a treasure trove of
excellent footage from sixties, it’s amazing to think he would perform
regularly for forty more years, playing his last concerts only months
before his sudden death in 2006.
His sixties hits were paradoxically tightly arranged and performed while
more explosive and out there than anything else in the Top 40. It was
harder than R&B, heavier than soul, and more dance-able than rock.
He was a genre of one, so of course funk and hip-hop took that ur-rhythms
and ran with it.
James Brown was the only one actually partying inside your radio, proving
there’s nothing wrong with being 95% style and 87% substance if you’re
giving 110% in both (James Brown defies math).
"Kids these days" is a very boring phrase.
Kids
are overprotected, overstressed, have fewer respectable job prospects than
previous generations, and escape this depressing reality and bleak future
through any available digital screen.
And
anyone middle-aged and above can’t wait to say disappointed they are in
them, that there is the fear by the elders that the society they preside
over is going to be inherited by a generation of youth who are becoming
soft, over reliant, asexuals who can't cook or change a tire.
To
reassure this older generation:
Don't worry, your decisions regarding economic, environmental and resource
management will have much, much more catastrophic effects on humanity than
people texting too much and being pronoun sensitive.
So,
thanks for nothing baby-boomers and gen-x-ers. You took your lucky break
and broke it in two (ta, Sir Paul, who is pre-boomer).
In
the sixties the middle-aged and above clucked their tongues at the music,
the drugs, the premarital sex, and even just men having hair longer than a
buzz cut.
All
of this continued unabated through the seventies and eighties, with ‘just
say no’, ‘this is your brain on drugs’, and…
It
worked?
Today, youth are having less unsafe sex and taking fewer drugs than
generations past, so old people have to really reach and find something
else to complain about it.
And
they can’t put it all on ‘kids and their phones’, because today they’re on
it nearly as much.
So
what have they come up with?
LGTBQ issues apparently, especially the ‘T’, with the transgendered
community having to defend itself yet again from bigoted policies both
subtle and overt. But it looks like them having to fight for basic rights
both in the eyes of the law and general society is a good way for the
boomers to deflect just how much they’ve screwed up the environment,
rigged the economy, neutered democracy, etc.
Nietzsche is just Schopenhauer for chumps
The further back in
history you go, the more gossip and petty squabbles of human interaction
are lost to the sands of time.
In the history of
philosophy this is particularly true, as it makes sense that the thoughts
and writings of these people are almost wholly the focus as opposed to the
lives they lived.
That Immanuel Kant was so
punctual that his neighbours could set their watches and clocks by when he
left his house in the morning is probably a matter of not letting truth
get in the way of a good anecdote, especially one that can actually shed
light on what the man might be like as a person. Wow! Punctual!
As far as other German
philosophers go, the hyper organized and structural Hegel taught classes
at University of Berlin, and Schopenhauer (who looked and thought like a
maniac) purposely scheduled his own classes at the same time, because he
hated Hegel and wanted to try and steal his thunder. This wasn’t
a friendly rivalry, either, with Schopenhauer using words like
‘loathsome’,
‘repulsive’
and
‘ignorant
charlatan’ to describe his
co-worker.
Despite this, Hegel’s
classes were much more popular, as he was the better known academic at the
time.
Schopenhauer would get
the last laugh, because by keeping his doctrine (relatively) simple, he
arguably inspired more philosophers and thinkers in many other fields of
discipline since then.
To him, the indomitable
and irrational will is what drives humanity, including our attempts to
create a rational, structured world. We force our will upon chaos, and
then later we will force our will on order. Morals aren’t some higher
ideal, they are ways to dominate one another, so that each individual can
attain their goals.
And what is our goal?
More.
Just more.
Power, money, dessert.
It doesn’t actually
matter, because it can be different for everyone.
And Schopenhauer said it
first, but no one wanted to listen.
Not until Nietzsche stole
his hair and ideas.
David Bowie's Seventies Run
Between 1970 and 1979, David Bowie released ten albums, and all of them
were at least good with seven of them absolutely amazing. The closest
comparison of longstanding commercial and critical success is the sixties
run of The Beatles, and there were two and a half great songwriters there.
Bowie's output at the time ran the entire gamut of the popular music
spectrum during this time, meaning he was both influenced by the sounds
around him, as well as influencing them as well.
[You could say it started even earlier, with Bowie's novelty folk rock hit
of 1969 - 'Space Oddity' - being the culmination of that genre, born out
of electrifying Dylan's sound]
The hard-rock push of 1970's The Man
Who Sold the World has shades of an introspective Cream, a dreamy
Zeppelin, or a sunny Sabbath.
Hunky Dory is a Velvet-Underground mesh of art rock and baroque pop
that give nods to the Kinks and permission to Queen.
His commercial breakthrough – The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust - takes everything that works from
Dory and turns it into pop
concept album masterpiece, probably the best one since
Sgt Pepper.
Aladdin Insane is the quick follow-up with a Stardust character
(immortalized with the album cover), and some of the individual songs on
there (title track, Time, Jean Genie) are better than what was on the
previous record.
Diamond Dogs is a grimy, flip-side of Ziggy that was a hell of
a lot weirder and inpisred by Orwell’s
1984. Even his weakest 70s
record still has one of his best songs (Rebel, Rebel).
Young Americans is a soul-funk celebration filtered through a
toothpick-thin Englishman with a heavenly voice.
Station to Station
is a chilly coke freak-out, still danceable for plenty of it, but you can
feel
And he embraced the continent completely between 1977 and 1979 with the
rightfully acclaimed and influential trio of albums (Low,
Heroes, Lodger) now called, The Berlin Trilogy, because it’s a better
name than 'Outside of Paris then mostly in Berlin Trilogy' (although the
'Bowie-Eno trilogy' may suffice, because the latter is all over them).
These three albums involved sonic explorations that had a huge influence
on New Wave and therefore the sound of the eighties in general.
As
a bonus, there are two live albums spaced out far enough from each other (David
Live from 1974 and Stage
from 1978) that there is little song overlap and involve completely
different aesthetics and sounds. You can appreciate the fact that Bowie
didn’t just want to be a studio artist, and made sure he had a tight band
when bringing his music to the masses onstage.
“Seek and Ye Shall Find?”
When looking for an explanation for physical phenomena, the common sense
approach is to experiment and observe repeatedly and make conclusions
based on common and uncommon occurrences.
But at the same time, when exploring and ruminating in fields becoming
more and more familiar, some ideas and theories might come out of a
scientist’s brain before they set up an experiment. Now they might be
looking for a particular conclusion that would confirm what they
hypothesized.
Consider the following two quotes:
“One
can interpret Planck’s
1900 paper to mean only that the quantum hypothesis is used as a
mathematical convenience introduced in order to calculate a statistical
distribution, not as a new physical assumption, write science historians Gerald Holton and Steven
Brush.
Einstein, on the other hand, consider the light quantum to be a feature of
reality: a perplexing, pesky, mysterious and sometimes maddening quirk of
the cosmos.”
(Isaacson, pg.99)
Issacson, Walter.
Einstein: His Life and Universe. Toronto: Simon &
Schuster, 2007.
“After all, if the wave function of an electron can be
split and the result is two half-electrons, then it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the wave function is the electron. It isn’t a mere mathematical convenience, as physicists have
believed for nearly eighty years. It is the ultimate reality that lies
beneath the surface of the world.” (Chown, pg.43)
Chown, Marcus. The Universe Next Door.
2001.
What was supposed to exist only in theoretical comes out to exist in the
real.
While the familiar saying involves a hammer and prospective nail, one can
also observe that when you have math, everything looks like a number.
Einstein always made a point of saying how he tried to visualize the
problem, or to find allusions and comparisons to the natural world (he
uses dropping items out of train windows over bridges to describe
relativity).
Imagining a star bigger than the sun is easy because this star would still
have similar properties to the example we are familiar with, and even
someone with a passing knowledge of the solar system thanks to illustrated
comparisons in elementary school has internalized the idea that the sun is
very, very big but doesn’t look it because it is also very, very far away.
But on the sub-atomic size scale, how particles interact with each other
are wholly alien to our understanding and experience (even if we are made
up of billions upon billions of these particles).
The speed that these particles move and change energy states are
nonsensical by our standards, even when we use them for familiar
measurement because of their exactness. The scientific definition of one
second is the duration of 9 192 6310 770 (so 9 billion) periods of
transition between the hyperfine levels of the ground of state of a
Caesium-133 atom.
(cough)
To help us (both scientists and non-scientists alike), we have developed
computers to make all of this easier, and we can now use computer
modelling to create alternate conditions for the beginning of the universe
inside a hard drive, just to give us the results we want.
Never Promote Your Documentary
It
is a losing proposition, because while you want a lot of people to know
this piece of art exists, a sizeable, well-written article can negate the
entire point of watching it.
Chuck Klosterman noted that there was such a
media blitz around Metallica’s 2004 doc,
Some Kind of Monster (which
followed the band during the hardship of recording their 2003 album,
St Anger), that many people -
including Metallica fans - saw little reason to watch it, since interviews
and articles quickly went through the highlights.
If
you - either the subject or the director - are talking about the
documentary, it kind of explains how the movie ‘ends’, which is usually
about the experience of making the movie itself.
In
fictional films, an article or review wouldn’t give away too much plot or
a twist or ending (unless it has the words ‘spoiler alert’ plastered
around it), but describing what actually happened from beginning to end in
a documentary - y’know, real life - is almost expected in a piece about
it.
While it’s true that the all movie trailers these days spill too many
beans regarding the plots of fictional and non-fictional films, if someone
can get even a decent chunk of understanding concerning the ninety minute
documentary feature by watching said trailer or reading a ten minute
article on it, there’s a good chance they might not follow up and watch
the whole movie. But maybe they’ll watch a reaction video of someone else
watching it for the first time so they can see what this person thinks!
Here’s a Thought - January 2022
The
Matrix and Such
Using
pop culture references to further one’s political argument is easy, so
everyone does like it.
The
Matrix is a great touchstone because it was super-successful cool movie
with plenty of philosophical/political overtones. Think Orwell’s 1984 with
bullet-time action sequences.
‘Taking
the Red Pill’ is the not-very-shorthand for ‘wake up, sheeple’, and can be
applied to whatever fake, lie-filled system you think the world is being
manipulated by.
(https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/12/21/22847157/the-matrix-red-pill-legacy)
It may
start with the underdog going up against the big bully that controls
everything (whether rogue AI or Silicon Valley), but as the ideas get more
popular, everyone starts using these memes.
Suddenly the people you think would be setting up the Matrix itself are
the ones imploring you to take the red pill.
Those
that support a techno-fascist future (but are smart enough not to call it
that) do so because they see rampant individualism/liberalism as the
problem:
“I support a restriction on the exchange of free
ideas and opinions…except my own. Mine should be spread around and
adapted.”
It
should come as little coincidence that people who push for such policies
are the ones that are going to (or hope to) benefit from their adaptation.
Responsibility and freedom can sometimes smash into each other in
tough-to-resolve ways.
The
rights and freedoms we have under democratic laws need to be protected
with the utmost importance. It grants us the ability to make autonomous
decisions based on our own ideas and experiences.
Even
decisions that might inevitably unravel and walk back these democratic
laws.
Responsibility means behaving in a way that if everyone did the same
thing, it would be a net positive for the community (Kant’s categorical
imperative, in other words).
There
are ways to inadvertently harm society that are not against the law, and
considering that includes free speech, it’s important that they remain
that way.
But
that means a social responsibility comes into play.
You
have to decide to do the right thing.
And you
have every right to decide that everyone else is wrong regarding what you
should do. But you have to accept the responsibility that comes with this,
especially when things start to go bad.
Because
there is no natural system of check and balances, it has to be assiduously
and carefully maintained. Even the way we view nature is subjective to our
human limitations, both as individuals and a collective (how humans
experience/define nature is wholly different from how every other organism
experiences nature).
We have
to choose a system and do our best to uphold the best components of it.
As the
Wachowskis’ later said/clarified in the Matrix: Reloaded:
‘The
Problem is Choice.’
Weather or Not
One of the earliest attempts to understand and explain nature was using
deities and their whims in regards to weather patterns, particularly
devastating storms or sudden natural disasters, but also the lack of rain
when dependable agricultural success was a matter of life and death.
Shamans
and priests were tasked with bringing or taking away the water that fell
from the sky, because it must be a gift or curse from the gods. While
dances and music-focused rituals seem amusing now, finding social
scapegoats that could be ostracized or killed seem less so. In even in
more mundane ways, sailors’ rhyming couplets regarding ‘red skies
at night’ show an early attempt at weather forecasting.
Looking to the sky desperate for rain (or desperate for rain to end) is
just the start, as how we see the stars have always been reflective of the
culture of the time.
It was called 'the heavens' because it was the place of gods. We saw
spirits, symbols, myths. Rudimentary forms of astronomy had a sliver of
science and big heap of entertainment pulled out of the then-expert’s ass
(also known as astrology).
As technology advanced, we looked at it through a more scientific lens.
When it comes to things in the sky, aliens - alternative civilizations on
habitual planets similar to earth - replaced angels as the entities that
we could possibly meet if we went even further and further past the
clouds.
But as far as we have to come to know for certain about high and low
pressure weather systems, how they are going to act hour by hour over a
relatively small area of the globe is not so exact.
Much like how the rules that dictate how matter, energy and space-time act
- which scientists know in great detail - break down when they get to a
very small and particular scale. Certainties become probabilities.
Chances of rain are exactly that. Chances. And when the estimates are
eighty or ninety percent, many people naturally boot that number to one
hundred percent in their heads, and are then annoyed when that ten or
twenty percent difference comes through.
All the psychological biases come tumbling out, and you forget the times
the meteorologist was right, and only remember when they were wrong.
How Soon Is Panama? - Comparing The Smiths and Van Halen
-hugely influential bands of the eighties in terms of
musical style and overall presentation
-charismatic frontmen who wanted to do more poppy songs and
left to starts solo careers that started hot but soon led to diminishing
returns
-unique, iconoclastic guitar players whose sound inspired an
entire genre after them
-always trying to fire part of the rhythm section -a production style and musical sound that is
credited to both the band and a celebrated producer
-in terms of the actual ‘mood’ of the music, however, they
are exact opposites, as Van Halen can’t wait to party, and The Smiths
can’t wait to brood at home because parties just remind them that you’ll
ultimately end up alone
Can You
Knock the Hustle?
It’s
tough make money these days, and plenty of people have taken plenty of
jobs that might do more damage to society (in subtle and overt ways) than
help it.
Obviously illegal activities are the easiest ones to point out, but you
turn to theft or drug dealing because there might not be other jobs
available to you, your situation or your skill-set.
Now
there have been many jobs in the last century (particularly in the gas and
chemical industries) were it wasn’t exactly clear if (and how much) the
work was affecting the health of people and/or the planet, but now we know
how terrible they are.
And many of variations of
these jobs still exist…because we still need plastic and heat/electricity.
In this we are all guilty of looking the other way for the sake
convenience and comfort.
Then
there are many jobs that are in the grey area, such as many online jobs
that create data for the sake of data (in order to maybe sell a product
someone might eventually by), or create purposely misleading content that
will still garner clicks.
Speaking of promotion, while we might be used to seeing celebrities shill
cars, watches or perfume, having them promoting products and services that
might have slow developing but devastating effects to society at large
(like gambling, crypto or credit cards) is simply disappointing. In part
because these stars are already quite wealthy.
The
hustle itself revolves around our concept of money and how important it
for us to have. We can’t really deny that it is tied to a form of freedom
that we are constantly told is the most important in modern society:
Economic freedom, debt free, ‘fuck you money’, do whatever it takes to
make that bread.
Civilization’s
Tombstone:
We
Couldn’t
Keep
Up
“Building
such
a
complicated
socioeconomic
system
that
was
expected
to
be
manageable
and
malleable
in
the
face
of
rapid
technological
change
is
not
easy.”
-
a
hypothetical
textbook
from
one
thousand
years
in
the
future
about
the
Industrial
and
Digital
Revolutions
In the last two centuries technology
moved
faster
than
we
ever
could.
It
complicated
many
socioeconomic
policies
and
community beliefs and therefore quickly
alienated
or
made
powerless
great
swaths
of
people
in
both
democratic
and
non-democratic
states.
It
radically
altered
forms
of
communication
that
had
either
stayed
roughly
the
same
for
centuries
or
changed
at
a
much
slower,
comfortably
adaptable
pace.
It
made
the
exchange
of
information
and
capital
much
quicker,
which
meant
that
the
already
wealthy
could
easily
accumulate
more
with
any
sort
of
government
regulation
lagging
sorely
behind.
That
it
coincides
with
a
period
where
the
climate/atmospheric
effects
of
fossil
fuel
burning
are
being
felt
to
great
detriment
(and
no
quick
way
to
stop
or
reverse
said
effects),
is
perhaps
little
surprise.
Rapid
technological
development is
an
extremely
complex
process
with
glorious
pluses
and
devastating
minuses.
We
have
a
hard
time
arranging
and
assessing
an
overload
of
information
that
might
contain
a
kernel
or
truth
ensconced
in
layer
of
misinformation
and
corporate-political
spin.
Handing
certain
jobs
over
to
AI
may
solve
some
problems,
but
also
create
many
unforeseen ones until it is too late.
The
solution
for
a
scenario
spiralling
out
of
control
is
probably
not
handing it all over to an ‘inhuman problem solving device’
we
even
know
less
about.
Paul Thomas Anderson and the
Atmosphere Flick
You can start with Malick and
Cassavetes’ seventies work. A stylistic depiction of adventure and expanse
from the first, and a much more nuanced and intimate look at human
interaction from the second.
But in both cases the story felt
secondary, and that was absolutely fine. No need to breathing hard in
anticipation as to how our heroes (or anti-heroes) were going to resolve
the situation. Just being around them and seeing their foibles was
entertaining enough. Even happy endings were not necessary. Just have a
satisfying one.
But if you’re going to make
depressing art, at least make it weird and interesting depressing art.
1993’s Sonatine brought mood and
ennui to a group of Yakuza that are lying low in a small beach town and
getting into some (occasionally deadly) misadventures, and is an excellent
preview for the next three decades of the atmosphere flick.
PT Anderson certainly became the
best example of this, as Boogie Nights was ‘about’ the people in adult
film industry in the seventies and eighties. No one particular character
had a compelling story arc involving any sort of complicated development.
Certainly there were highs and lows, but the main antagonist was the
passage of time. The enjoyment came from relating and becoming invested in
the characters, and Anderson, the cast, the and crew combine to do an
excellent job of feeling like you’re involved in the adult film industry
in the late seventies.
While Magnolia had oodles of
interconnecting-mini-narratives, Anderson perfected the non-story story
with There Will Be Blood and The Phantom Thread. The first was about an
asshole oil businessman and the second was about a slightly lesser asshole
fashion designer.
Taking cues from Kubrick (who
doesn’t?) and letting the camera and conversation linger upon the
characters into possible awkwardness for the audience, Anderson furnishes
the rest of the world (whether the American west in the early 1900s or
post WWII England) so perfectly that you are captivated by being…there.
The critical success and
influence of Anderson’s work can be seen right up to today, from Cuaron’s
Roma to Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Both are filmed beautifully
and have incredible performances by the entire cast, but it is the
atmosphere that makes the difference.
24 Hours of News?
Fox News and MSNBC is pretty explicit about their agendas
(appealing to the stark opposites of the political coin), whereas CNN is
like a chicken with its head cut off scrambling for ratings/views. What do
people want to see and hear? Additionally, how do they want to see and
hear it? In thirty second sound-bites on their phone?
Comparing the coverage of news and sports has become much
more de-rigueur in recent years, so it should come as little surprise that
both are looking a lot like the other. There is no longer an off-season,
and ‘breaking news’ can occur any time if you follow a professional sport
assiduously. Meanwhile news is bulking up on polls and stats that might
not mean anything forty-eight hours later.
It says a lot about our society and where its power truly
lies when our political candidates are forced to act like salesmen and TV
talking heads and sports coaches are taking tough questions in post-game
press conferences.
And the fact that the much of public largely sees through
this and tries to find a political figure that sounds different (in hopes
that they would act different) speaks volumes as to how people view their
government institutions. Even though this difference is likely to also be
a familiar TV/movie archetype: The brash straight-shooter, the scrappy
underdog, the scheming rich villain.
Sometimes there is not enough news to fill the day, and you
have to start cribbing from the rest of popular culture.
How Deadly Is Misinformation and
Disinformation?
How can you measure the way these
activities not only put people’s lives in peril, but also the health of a
functioning and free democracy?
(https://www.vox.com/22774745/death-threats-election-workers-public-health-school)
Trust is something that is too
easily taken for granted.
How many people have to think
that every government official is involved in a giant conspiracy before
the government doesn’t work anymore?
A smaller number than we would
hope.
Suspicion and disenchantment with
long-standing institutions can happen relatively quickly, especially
compared to how long it might have taken to build up trust with these
systems.
If a profit can be made from
telling lies without recourse, it should come as no surprise that this has
really taken off in the digital age.
A sea of ever expanding data that
you can get lost in very quickly and not even think you’re lost because
you are being catered to by algorithmic search results that give you
exactly what you want.
It gets to the point where doing
nothing is actually helping. Not spreading misinformation is something
wear like a badge of honour, because it makes the job of getting accurate
information out there much easier.
But would you cheat and lie to
keep your democracy in tact, or would you be upright and honest and watch
it slip into fascism?
Is it inevitable that if you lie
and cheat that you will inevitably start to use such means for your own
benefit? That lying and cheating is already negative actions associated
more with fascism than democracy in the first place does not bode well to
the argument that you can constantly use such tools so that your
questionable tactics will actually benefit of the most amount of people in
your nation.
Getting Decent Marx
The
Marxist concept of alienation was borne out of the industrial revolution
and was focused on the conveyor belt-like creation of goods in massive
factories and warehouses. People become so far removed from the creation
of the products they use that they don't see the workers a fellow
citizens, but just cogs in a greater machine.
Obviously this process accelerated throughout the twentieth century as it
became cheaper to make good in low-wage developing countries and ship them
across the world than to make them close to where people will ultimately
by the product. The manufacturing industry was an important pillar for
middle class employment in the western world, and it cracked and fell over
in the last few decades of the last century.
With
the digital revolution, this is now happening in the service industry. You
interact with retailers less and less for several reasons. Tech advances
make it easier to automate more aspects of buying products and services.
So much so that employees are becoming more and more the most expensive
part of running a retail store or restaurant, so the less of them there
are, the more money the owner can make.
Delivery persons - whether long and short haul truck drivers with many
packages or a bag of chicken wings on the back of someone’s e-bike - is
the backbone of the gig economy, and don’t need to interact with people
when they reach their destination.
You
don’t have to think about any of the work that was involved in getting
your pad-thai onto your kitchen table because you never saw a single face
related to it.
And
more vehicular automaton might mean even delivery persons are next on the
chopping block.
What
are we to do with this ever growing pool of unemployed/underemployed?
The
world needs a New Deal, Roosevelt style. One country enacting policies
(even one as big as China or America) won't cut it. Countries are so
interdependent with complex but essential trade and exchange rules that
you can't effectively make reforms by going one nation at a time.
The
New Deal was essentially the largest and most successful redistribution of
power from the few and very wealthy to the many and little wealth. Not
surprisingly, the rich people back then really hated it, and called
Roosevelt a communist, a socialist, etc. So it's no surprise that the same
arguments are being levied against similar economic reforms that are
deemed essential for the continuation of the middle class, and a truly
representative democracy. Make no mistake, the changes that must be made
now are the same that were made in the 1930s: Taking power away from the
rich and giving it to the poor.
Norm
(There aren’t many famous people named Norm, so it’s easy to
know who you’re talking about with these four letters. The only other
person with that name recognition in the last few decades is the fictional
character played by George Wendt on the show Cheers. In fact, this is how
Dennis Miller once introduced Norm on his talk show…’George Wendt’)
No one played the dumb guy as clever as Norm Macdonald did.
He came off as your slightly slow, slightly oddball friend who came up
with the wildest comedy ideas. He could get away with the most offensive
comments and material because he made it seem to come from a place of
naive innocence, not snide superiority. Pointing out the obvious was
hilarious when Norm did it because he made it seem like he was realizing
the thought just as he was saying it.
It really felt like he didn’t know he was making jokes (it
was as if he was just reading the teleprompter on Weekend Update, having
no idea what word might come next)…except when he was absolutely overtly
making jokes (his later appearances on Conan when he retells the old
classics, even doing the hack routine of making show sidekick (and
Swedish-German) Andy Richter the ‘star’ of them).
Norm was simultaneously the butt of the joke and in on the
joke, so even if it backfired…that was funny for some people, including
(and most importantly) Norm himself.
It was not exactly the anti-humour of Neil Hamburger, but it
was close.
Sometimes it’s hard to watch Norm’s standup for more than
five minutes because of its intentional stiltedness. In fact, some of the
best Norm moments came when interacting with other people, funny or non.
His recent ‘shows’ (focusing more on interviews and less on
monologue-like jokes, and sensibly titled ‘The Norm MacDonald Show’ and
‘Norm MacDonald has a Show’) were the best vehicles to flex his comedy
chops, showing a very quick mind behind an intentionally slow delivery.
Dismissing Right Wing Extremists Doesn't Make Them Go Away
When progressives celebrate any sort of achievement, and then hear that
the right is not going to be happy about it, the response is something
along the lines of 'screw 'em'.
But that doesn't stop the right from reacting. And this reaction might
just be complaining ad infinitum on right wing talk shows, but it also
might spur an active voting block and political movement to reverse said
achievement, or it might inspire a militia to try to kidnap a democratic
governor, or might make a guy snap so they shoot up a predominantly black
church.
All of this is why 'screw 'em' is a useless rejoinder when discussing how
to deal with political opponents, especially at a time when politics is
getting more polarized.
The key is to lessen to extreme reactions, and doing that is much, much
harder.
RWE’s didn’t appear overnight, and they won’t disappear that quickly,
either.
It is a good time as ever to acknowledge that everyone can quickly fall
into a very comfortable opinion-bubble/echo chamber, but if your tv and
radio ‘newspinion’ stations are telling you how shitty the government is
as you think about how shops and factories are closing in your town,
you’ll link those two ideas together.
Only when reality doesn’t match the message will extremism lessen, and
that means there needs to be a regeneration of towns and small cities.
Which means more money needs to be pumped into them, which means more
progressive spending policies, which means voting for left-leaning,
progressive politicians-
Nuts.
The Lessons of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’
They are universal and timeless.
Unfortunately.
Arthur Miller was already big time when The Crucible was
first performed in 1953, thanks to Death of a Salesman, which arrived four
years earlier.
Miller transposed the Red Scare of the early fifties to
17th century Salem, Massachusetts, explicitly comparing the grilling of
citizens by the government as to whether they were part of the communist
party to the infamous Witch Trials centuries earlier.
In an example of life imitating art, three years after the
play’s debut, the playwright was forced to appear in front of the House of
Un-American Activities to explain his political viewpoints and actions, as
well as name names of fellow artists who accompanied him. When he refused,
he was blacklisted and held in contempt of congress.
If Death of a Salesman can now be seen as the current state
of Western Democracy (past its prime but still trying to find its way
despite the inability to accept the harsh reality of the situation), then
The Crucible can be seen as our collective identity’s reaction to such a
state. It is full of anger, paranoia, baseless accusations,
quick-to-judge, hypocrisy, and the wealthy taking advantage of it all.
The Crucible takes place in a community that has not yet
become familiar with its new surroundings, since it’s an environment (cold
winters in the
‘New
World’
in the 1600s) they
doesn’t know how to control. Not much different than the virtual/digital
world we are tumbling headfirst into as the twenty-first century lurches
forward.
The Slow Sadness of Today’s Death
Hobbes suggested that for most people in 17th
century life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (more so than the notions of
the social contract he espouses in his opus, Leviathan, he is known for
those four words).
For more and more people in this overwhelming
21st century, this is no longer the case. Living longer and longer has
seemingly become a given for each generation (covid being the first time
it’s waffled), and no longer just in the Western
world.
Access to basic health care has greatly
improved, not only at life’s beginnings (since for a lot of human history,
childbirth and infancy was a risky period for mother and child alike), but
at its end as well.
Which comes with unforeseen quandaries.
Dying is no longer a relative quick process
for many, but can take weeks, months or even years with plenty of complex
medical care required.
It is a wonder of science that people can
live with ailments, but it allows for the uncomfortable question of ‘what
kind of quality of life?’
The body might break down slower, but it
inevitably does, and so too does the mind (and having the latter go before
the former can be a tragedy all by itself, with exhaustion, confusion, and
despondency being just as cruel as cancer).
Keeping people alive who can no longer
adequately care for themselves is now asking too much of family members.
Death is guided and funnelled into certain
rooms and building away from the bustling modern world.
In the West, with many of the baby boomers
reaching their autumn years, nursing homes are having difficulty offering
the necessary services, especially at a cost most families can afford.
Respect and quality of life are
near-impossible to put a price tag on…but the more money you have the
better options and comfort will be available to you.
Until you die just like everyone else, just
lying in a bed weak and uncertain for a few more years.
It’s a damn shame that so much of humanity
(and human history) has to hold up death as the next step of understanding
to how the world/universe/human existence works. The answer to the big
questions like ‘why are we here?’ has to be ‘I don’t know, but maybe…’,
and so is overlapped with the question ‘what happens after we die?’, since
it has similar answers. It is explained that after we die…there will be an
explanation. That there is more. More of something. More life, more
consciousness, more awareness, just more. Because we are afraid of
conceiving of anything…less.
Ta, Schopenhauer.
Where do you see poor people on television?
First disregard scripted fiction shows, as whoever depicts an impoverished
individual are well-paid actors, and their barely realistic takes on what
it's like to experience poverty within the traditional storytelling
formats (sometimes with ads) cannot be taken that seriously.
Poor people are talked about on news programs, but are rarely featured.
Even on shows that are about regular people trying to win money (whether
game or reality-focused), whatever economic situation the contestants
might actually be in are quickly glossed over because hey, everyone wants
to make money, right?
The poor have always been shunted aside because a lot of the culture we
want to imbibe involves quickly conquering that ‘inconvenience’ (even if
it’s a damning part of many people’s lives).
If we turn away
from the poverty-stricken on the street, it’s no surprise we do the same
on our entertainment screens,
even if the
images of employment are wrapped (and warped) around the ideal.
When we think of a career involving working with your hands, it’s always
fixing up old motorcycles or making ornate arts and crafts, it’s not
stocking shelves in a dollar store.
In movies and tv series ,edical professionals are helping people who look
comfortable and are very appreciative, so you don’t see nurses turning
helpless, disoriented elderly people on their sides so they can clean
bedsores and wipe their ass.
Office meetings are bright and smiling and full of enthusiastic
suggestions instead of bored people trying to stay awake or desperate to
get back to their desk (unless played for laughs or drama).
Popular culture shows a very skewered mirror to reality, based a lot more
on what we want as individuals and as a society than what we have.
HERE'S A THOUGHT - SUMMER 2021
Talkin' 'Bout Religious Speech
Forcing the religion out of you in going to have the same sort of problems
as forcing the religion into you:
(https://www.vox.com/21523506/france-teacher-attack-terrorism-free-speech-muslims)
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-quebec-court-ruling-1.5993431)
Dogmatic secularism and dogmatic sectarianism are both extreme reactions.
Free speech has always been a brain melter, especially when religion gets
involved. While France literally holds up cartoon depiction of the prophet
Muhammad as an example of free speech, there are also rules in the country
about discussing holocaust denial (seen as anti-Semitic). The difference
between anti-religious speech and any sort of controversial art might be
made by the state, but that doesn’t mean citizens are going to agree with
said difference.
And
bringing both of those topics in one sentence can't help but be an alarm
bell, dog whistle, what have you, with people looking for agendas and
angles of what is being said loudly or quietly (Is the position
pro-Muslim? Anti-Israel? Infused with bonkers conspiracy theories?).
How
do you get everyone to...relax? Admittedly that is a very naive and
reductionist way of putting it, but right now there is a fierce
nationalism/nativism streak running through western nations, and it is
easy to divide people based on what god they worship and how they worship
it.
Divisions based on how people live their lives is bad enough, but ones
based on what happens after life ends can be much more catastrophic.
History is full of terrible, unlearned lessons about that, but pointing
out just how damaging religion has been (especially when it has plenty of
political/economic/militaristic power) is bound to upset somebody.
Spolitics
When politics is covered, analyzed and discussed like a sport, and
vice-versa, we have un-defined success.
The
reaction to the planned European Super League (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/european-super-league-football-inside-story-65033gpsj)
by almost every football fan in Europe was inspiring, and, even more
surprising, successful.
It
mirrors a corporation trying to do something greedy, with
workers/customers making such a PR stink on social media (and maybe even
protesting) that the corporation has to back down.
It
is viewed as a win for the little people, the working stiffs, the salt of
the earth. They’re setting aside their differences to achieve a common
goal. That the already super wealthy association football teams of Europe
backed down and decided to not pursue an extra elite tournament shows that
yes, sometimes the masses do have a bit of power to stand up for what they
collectively believe in.
Too
bad it happened just for fun and games.
Meanwhile this doesn't happen nearly as much in politics because it seems
like once a proposal is put it out, no matter how odious or harmful it
might be most citizens (and only benefit the very few), there is rarely
enough of a public outcry (and unity) to derail the proposal.
It's like many people have given up on political change, and are focused
more on protesting sports and culture, because at least in these areas it
seems like change is possible (even though it is much less impactful on
everyone’s lives) than politics. In fact, that's why change is 'allowed'
(by the powerful) here to some degree, because it doesn't make as much of
a difference as in politics and consequently the wealthy people’s bottom
line.
MAR$?
While great technological and exploratory strides have been made when it
comes to the red planet, we aren't going have a colony on Mars until we
have a radical re-think of society and money on earth.
It has been decided that space exploration costs so much because we can't
get it out of the global socioeconomic system. It is built out of
materials and resources that are part of the common market, and for all
the potential that vertical integration can have on saving money, there is
still the manpower and time that is required for the amount of precision
and exactness to make sure there isn’t a rapid and unscheduled disassembly
(aka, boom).
Since the Apollo missions, NASA hasn’t got a lot of (safe) bangs for their
bucks, as the Space Shuttle Program and space telescopes like Hubble and
James Webb were/are money pits that went wildly over budget.
But it was government funds, and was less beholden to making money off the
project when it was successfully completed. The idea that private
companies can do everything better than public ones comes with a massive
caveat: it is expected to turn a profit, and there is no profit in going
to Mars for a long, long time. It's nice that billionaires see this as a
bit of side project, but that's not going to get us there.
Space has barely made any money. Yes the satellites that orbit earth are
immensely important profitable, but right above earth isn't really
'space'. In fact, it's called 'low earth orbit', and you’re not even out
the planet’s gravity pull.
The only time
The relationship between SpaceX and NASA is intrinsically linked, although
in actuality the former works for the latter via contracts. Of course
SpaceX is branching out and making money ‘on the side’ via creating their
own internet service provider (Starlink) and even creating the concept of
space billboards.
Virgin Galactic is already offering seats on their ‘sure why not let’s
call it low earth orbit’ voyages, and Bezos isn’t far behind.
It obviously naive to say something like ‘space should be free’, but we’re
only going to go so far if early trip access to the cosmos remains
expensive.
To put it in perspective, space-for-profit will work as well as
health-care-for-profit.
Star Trek's Lore
(Not to be confused with the character 'Lore'. Thanks, Star Trek!)
Because it was initially conceived as a tv series on a budget that kept
getting cut, Star Trek's visual style and presentation rarely reached its
loftier story-telling aspirations.
Even after transitioning to commercially successful films in the late
seventies and early eighties (thanks, other Star-something!), The Next
Generation still had to come up with creative ways to make the future look
impressive. With a whopping twenty six episodes per season (using Q and
the Borg sparingly was a key to those characters' longevity), 'monster of
the week' shows were inevitable, and many of them were wholly forgettable.
Not to mention being chained to 'seven minutes then a commercial break'
storytelling format.
TNG was so successful it spawned it's own string of feature films, and for
much of the nineties there was usually two Star Trek shows on at the same
time (plus older series’ re-runs).
So why are recent series just...good?
Obviously nostalgia is very fucking fickle, and Picard is/was all about
bringing the old gang back again, but any big story about humanity's
future is always an attractive notion for show producers and fans.
If you take away that one thing which almost everyone thinks of when they
think Star Trek (one ship travelling through space), you'll find that the
bigger story of humanity's exploration of the Galaxy is just as
interesting.
In fact, what happens in the 21st century according to Star Trek Lore
feels like an example of life imitating art imitating life.
Guess what, in the Star Trek Universe most of the first half of this
current century is crap, with technology run amok, increased environmental
devastation and disaster, and greater instability between nations.
It culminates in a devastating world war in the 2050s, but since war is
typically a time of technological innovation (even if it's to just destroy
the enemy more effectively), it is out of this period that warp drive
travel is discovered. And a test flight its inventor undertakes is noticed
by aliens who happened to be passing by (in this case, Vulcans, who are
thankfully peaceful) . The rest is, as they say, a very profitable sci-fi
universe.
The TNG movie First Contact does a good job at depicting all this, even as
it once again has to lean heavy on time travel to get the 23rd century
gang back to the big moment two hundred years earlier. The post WWIII
civilization is in tatters, but because Star Trek is an American media
franchise, that's where it conveniently takes place.
When one of the people from the 21st century find themselves on the
Enterprise, in addition to being overwhelmed, they ask how much it could
possibly cost to build, and Picard explains that they don't have 'money'
anymore, that all of humanity has set aside competing for personal gain or
interest, and instead work together for common, aspirational goals of
spreading across the galaxy.
What a ridiculous, silly sci-fi show!
If this is what people are stealing...
(https://www.npr.org/2021/05/08/994656425/theres-big-money-in-stolen-catalytic-converters)
(Going underneath cars to unplug and remove a small device and then flip
it on the back/grey market)
...then society is truly getting to a breaking point.
It is a regression, an acknowledgement of the limitations of the
supposedly limitless virtual world being built every second of the day.
There is a physicality to our lives that is not being addressed as it once
was.
The
barely acknowledged concern is that because of continued economic
hardship, petty crime and robbery/assault rates might rise (after being
quite low for a long time, because online fraud becoming more frequent and
having replaced it). Which might result is calls for making stronger
sentencing laws, which will expand the prison population (or people living
under house arrest/perpetual probation), which will make economic hardship
that much worse for already hard-hit, low-income communities. These are areas
that have been completely ignored by the corporations and institutions
that see the virtual/digital realm as the future. And they ignore it at
everyone’s peril.
South Park
Like
The Simpsons, South Park started to make a swerve in its third and fourth
seasons that offered something much deeper, interesting and funnier than
'just' the gross-out comedy that sparked its initial fad in 1997-1999,
which led to a movie that surprised everyone in terms of critical and
commercial success. Most film critics were not expecting ‘Bigger, Longer
and Uncut’ to be a well-written musical with heavy political overtures
where the song are actually amazing. But that's what Matt Parker and Trey
Stone were doing before South Park: musicals. Obscene, ridiculous
musicals.
It
was such an innocent time, twenty years ago, when 'giant douche versus a
turd sandwich' was meant to characterize Bush versus Gore, and summarized
how disenchanted the public was with modern politics (oh, how things have
changed). 'South Park Republican' was a thing for awhile, and the creators
showed their apolitical by nature by stating that they hated liberals, but
really hated conservatives.
Not
all episodes had to deal with such topical events. 'Scott Tenorman Must
Die' is a revenge story with hints of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (and
pubic hair). ‘Fish Sticks’ puts a humourous spin on the terrifying way
sociopaths can view the world in a much different way than everyone else
(courtesy of Cartman ‘remembering’ how a joke was created). ‘Simpsons
Already Did It’ makes light of the challenge of coming up with new story
ideas over time, because...see the episode title.
It’s
cardboard cutout style of animations (even though they are made with CG
that can do amazing stuff) gives it a chance to be as offensive and
bizarre as it likes, because unrealistic art more easily permits
unrealistic and uncouth scenarios (like seeing the same eight year old
child die horribly over and over in many, many episodes).
A
year and a half after South Park's arrival, Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy
debuted, and it has also become a veritable institution, having run for a
total of nineteen seasons so far.
But
it never pivoted out of the shadow of being a Simpsons clone. While the
joke ratio might be the same as The Simpsons, Family Guy leaned so heavily
into that instead of character development that it’s fair to view it more
like a skit show with recurring characters than a sitcom. In fact, the
show tripled down on this formula, with McFarlane also co-creating and
overseeing American Dad and The Cleveland Show, which lift its visually
storytelling and joke style from Family Guy.
South Park’s commitment to ‘less is more’ (both in terms of visual style
and 13 episodes per season) has allowed it to make the wildest comic ideas
(Wal-Mart as the blob, earth as an alien tv series, everyone chipping in
to build a ladder to heaven) become biting satire that says more about
modern society than any newspaper or magazine article. Oh, and it’s just
hilarious on top of it all.
It's the roaring (nineteen) twenties all over
again:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/technology/crypto-art-NFTs-trading-cards-investment-manias.html)
When experts start describing the market as 'stupid', it's time to ask
just what is 'the market'?
AI and computer model predictors are having a larger and larger hand in
the shaping of the market, but they are still serving the interests of
banks that developed them. What if they worked for the public good
instead?
Speculation has been a business investment option for far too long. In
every other definition of the word, speculation is fraught with danger and
is not advised, there is in an inherent risk to it. And while it is true
there is a financial risk when investing in anything, it is not the same
sort of risk that affects societies and communities when basic resources
and necessities for survival (from water to petroleum to wheat) are priced
thousands of miles away inside a computer modelling program.
The term 'lemming-like behaviour' always seems to minimize the fact that
it usually leads to a bunch of them going off a cliff and dying. If the
point of this behaviour is to get out at the right time with the money
while everyone else loses, it means you are living in a world where there
is suddenly a lot more losers. And that has huge effects for individuals
and governments, two concepts that you might not care as much about
anymore now that you’ve struck it rich by ‘earning’ a ton of money from
them.
For every GameStop-like example of the masses taking back Wall Street or
disrupting it, there is the acknowledgement that it is business as usual
for a very small group of investors making risky financial decisions that
have massive reverberations far beyond their portfolio or quarterly profit
earnings.
When this unspeakably shaky economy craters, and the 'experts' ask what
went wrong, what possible explanation can there be except that the very
rich people didn't want to share?
There could be a system where the wealthy is more evenly distributed in a
society (not absolutely evenly distributed, just more evenly than the
massive inequality there is now), but the people who have an inordinate
amount of power seem to have no interest creating that.
The problems that come out of this sort of society are already becoming
apparent.
The ever widening pool of poor will suffer. The wealthy will just be
inconvenienced.
We're at a politicization point where being contrary is more effective for
retaining power than being useful
So goddamn stupid:
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-delegates-reject-climate-change-is-real-1.5957739)
Because in modern politics you can't risk supporting a popular policy that
your opposition is better known for (otherwise there's less of a
difference between you, and then the voters will just stick with your
opposition), the Canadian Conservative Party has decided to deny climate
change. Apparently it's better to be stupid and different than smart and
the same.
Conservatives worldwide are over a barrel because their basic economic
policy has been the dominant one for several decades, which has made a
small group of people very rich and made most of their citizens poorer.
They can't run on fixing it, because they don't think it should be fixed,
even though it's destroying the middle class, the backbone of democracy
itself.
What remains is boogeyman social and cultural issues and appealing to the
far right fringe of the party who see conspiracies in everything. These
are straw-man, semantic ‘whattabout’ moments, because there seems to be
the solipsistic notion that winning an argument is equal to making the
world a better place. Boy is it not.
Conservatives have to hold idiotic policy positions, because if they hold
the same blandly centre-left policies as the liberal parties (which will
at least start to address the huge economic and social inequality), then
there would be no reason to vote conservative.
From the perspective of maintaining one's own political identity, it makes
sense clinging to bonehead ideas. From the perspective of trying to
address society's ills, it's stupid, embarrassing and dangerous.
Meta-riffic: Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water
A song with such a blatantly prehistoric cave-man guitar riff, where it's
nickname is 'Duhn-Duhn-Dun', and even the band considered it a filler
track that was kicking around when they were making their sixth album.
It's a ballad in the traditional sense, where the lyrics tell a story. In
this case...it's the story of
writing Smoke on the Water. While the chorus is 'smoke on water, fire in
the sky', the verses are about the band Deep Purple going to record an
album in Switzerland. While there, they go to a Frank Zappa concert, where
the venue - on the shores of Lake Geneva - catches fire and burns down.
The band are worried that they will run out of time to finish recording
their album, but no worries, they did (thanks to the Rolling Stones mobile
recording studio truck, which is oddly described in the verses as ‘the
rolling truck stones thing just outside’).
Lyrically, it is both dense and ridiculously simple at the same time.
Self-aware and the equivalent of an eighth-grader giving a report on what
they did for their summer vacation.
The Chauvin Sentencing Is Just a Start
That how low the low bar is for what to celebrate in terms of improving
race relations is in America. Wanting the police to stop killing unarmed
black men is too much to ask for apparently, so finally just holding one
accountable in the court of law is held up as a
win.
There is certainly
some measure of relief for George Floyd's family as well as the African
American community as a whole with this result, but my god, it is the
thinnest silver lining when it comes to addressing the many systemic and
sadly still blatant examples of racism that minorities must face.
The marginalization and ostracization of minorities in America never ended
after the civil rights act. It just morphed from outright racism to
systemic, which meant re-routing social assistance funds from
predominantly black urban communities (by claiming there was plenty of
fraud) to white suburban/rural ones. It meant that for decades the
'viewpoint' in conservative circles was that Black people were lazy and
liars first (not true, as welfare abuse was bullshit) and violent
criminals second (citing rising crime in these impoverished communities as
proof).
This was done primarily for votes and power (that the politicians pushing
this narrative having racist views was practically incidental), and it
worked so well that many rural and suburban whites became both resentful
towards and scared of black people.
It was a horrible system that worked...until politicians and corporations
got too greedy (shock, horror) and started sucking the money out of white
communities as well, plunging them into poverty. And what happened there?
Rising crime rates and drug addiction.
What needs to be done is blandly clear: A transfer of power (meaning
wealth) from the small group of people who have an abundance of it to the
massive amount of people who have so much less power.
A holiday commemorating Juneteenth is a
wonderful symbolic gesture, and there is certainly value in highlighting
the horrors of the past and still very present challenges of today
(both in classrooms and general discourse), but it is mere window dressing
to the one thing that will make the true difference, the way to really
rehabilitate a community:
Money.
Whether this means reparations (and calling them such) for individual
citizens, or large investments in infrastructure and jobs programs in
minority communities, money is what will make the difference in the years
to come.
For marginalized groups that have higher rates of poverty thrust upon them
thanks to systemic racism, giving them power is what needs to be done, or
further tragedies like George Floyd’s death will sadly continue.
Why Didn't the Segway Catch On?
If laziness is the mother of invention, if humanity (and the laws of
physics) seem to always take the path of least resistance, why have we not
embraced the device that saves you from walking?
IT allows you to either stand completely still, or (if that's too onerous
for you) lean/grab onto a handle a waist height and move around with only
slight gestures and movements with your body.
Is walking still too easy when you factor in storage, security and
maintenance?
Is it the price?
There have been knockoff versions that are sort of like a kid's
Skateboard-ish version of the device. Even a slightly augmented electric
scooter has been better received.
One big factor: You just can't look cool on a Segway.
It didn’t help that its big early customer was the US Postal Service,
which never had the reputation as the hippest and pioneering company.
'Arrested Development' gave one to Will Arnett's character, with the
knowledge that it would perfectly with his blowhard, hapless personality,
further cementing the product as something nobody cool would bother with
(plus the footage of president bush falling off it, and even Usain Bolt
had a mishap).
When no one could tell if the Segway was for business or pleasure, you
realize that some products are beyond the help of PR.
Legal/Illegal Drugs
-there is obviously a wealth gap (with the racial and cultural divides
that come with that as well) when it comes to drugs. Stimulants and
opioids are regularly pushed by giant massive pharmaceutical companies,
but illicit drugs that fall into similar categories and have the exact
same effects are highly illegal and carry massive punishments for people
caught with it.
-only after pills completely destroyed communities outside larger cities
(and led to a huge rise is heroin addiction because pill poppers wanted
another fix) was a link truly acknowledged by gov't/pharma.
-And what was the response? Barely a fine to the companies in comparison
to how much they made off this drug dealing (because that’s what it was),
and stiff punishments for people who were in possession of these pills
when what they truly needed was proper treatment
-another example of solving a problem from the wrong end, because this
'right' end shields the already powerful from any serious prosecution
-if it is agreed that pharmaceutical companies acted like drug cartels in
pushing this product and bribing the law/regulators to look the other way,
then punish them like drug dealers
Humanity is bad with making sacrifices, large and small. Being told that
you must make them, even for a valid reasons like preserving resources for
the close and distant future, can make people defensive, angry, resentful.
It is framed as an infringement on one’s freedom.
But the thing to remember is that you are in the position where you can
choose to make the sacrifices. And choosing not to make a sacrifice might
mean that down the road, you might not have a choice at all when it come
to giving up things your comfortable with.
What you have been used to since birth and have come to expect all your
life is embedded into you like an inalienable right, and when it is taken
from you right away or bit by bit, there are the same feelings of anger,
desperation, failure, and resentfulness.
The combined ideas of unending progress and of
self-congratulatory/loathing marketing in 20th/21st
century western democracy means that people expect things to get better
(or at least remain the same) throughout their life, and that they deserve
it simply by the virtue of having a heartbeat.
But in the West this is becoming less and less true, and suddenly it is
not a matter of sacrifice, as there isn't a choice to have less. Now less
is being thrust upon you.
Trust Never
Sleeps Dr Faucci's emails
from Spring 2020 between him and Chinese health officials are a perfect
examples of the news of the news. If you want it to look like a
responsible exchange of information and opinion between two professionals
and their respect governments, it's that. If you want to see it as proof
that America is afraid to confront China, it's that. If you want to say
it's proof that this whole thing is a big conspiracy of a massive,
one-world government using a lab-made disease to infect and then
'vaccinate' much of the world and put them under Bill Gates’ control, it's
that. One thing is for
certain: It is going to continue to eat away whatever crumbs of trust many
citizens (American or otherwise) have towards their government. And that
feeling has very real consequences. It makes solving so
many other massive domestic, foreign and global challenges that much more
difficult. Political willpower can easily be branded into a series of
special (and corporate) interests, but the reasons ‘the masses’ isn’t one
is because so much of ‘the masses’ have given up on politics in general In Kurt Vonnegut’s
novel Jailbird, a fictionalized whistleblower from the Watergate scandal
is chastised by an elder statesman, who says that while there is certainly
the overwhelming feeling to root out and stop corruption and abuse of
power, the unintended consequences by showing the people how bad the
government has behaved is creating a society where none of the citizens
trust the government. Obviously ‘looking
the other way’ to such malfeasance and crimes is no answer, but with each
depressing bit of news about government dysfunction there has to be a
redoubling of the public effort to fix it, and that is so difficult to do. 'Sunlight is the
best disinfectant' is how the saying goes, and while that’s an integral
part to the clean-up, the point is to make sure another mess doesn’t
happen.
What is the most influential piece of art 'on' world history?
Of all the paintings, poems, sculptures, plays, films, and installations,
which has actually changed the course of human history the most? Because
we see certainly see how art can inspire more art, and individuals can say
how a certain picture or song changed their lives for the better. But
actually changing the world is a different matter entirely. Dylan said it
was foolish to think you could change the world with a song. Mick Jagger
scoffed when asked about how Street Fighting Man might influence people,
saying he wished it could work so easily.
Maybe it's good that art doesn't have that impact, as it might cause more
harm than good.
Plenty of art has been commissioned by powerful rulers throughout history,
but that once again is more of a rosy reflection of the past or present
that the king, emperor or president themselves wanted to see.
The most popular and best known works of art (your Mona Lisa, statue of
David, 9th Symphony, Starry Night, Guernica, Here Comes the Sun) are
tempting choices because ‘influential’ is typically tied to what most
people know and are familiar with (proven in part by not having to mention
the artist’s name in the above examples). But what have these examples
really done for human history? It’s great that ‘Guernica’ has a strong
anti-war sentiment...but a pretty big one happened not long after it is
was finished. Of course, calling any religious book a work of art will make the answer easy...
Here's a Thought - February 2021
The role of the artist is to make a mess, but ideally a
society/community/state is functioning in a neat and tidy way when this
happens. If the society/community/state is slipping into dysfunctionality,
then the role of the artist inevitably gets more complicated.
There is internal and external pressure for the artist to be a responsible
citizen, which in some instances might be suppressing the artistic notions
and ideas they have. This is not referring to censorship directly, as the
situation might simply be having to take another job in the community that
has nothing to do with aesthetic creation because of personal finances. Or
it might involve being pressured to avoiding create art that in good times
might just be 'unique' and 'thought-provoking', but is now seen as
'problematic' or controversial'. But this is a hard ask for certain
artists. Some will accept this 'give-take', knowing it is the right thing
to do as a citizen, to improve society to a point where maybe they can
once again make wild, unrestrained creative outbursts. Others will reject
it outright, and continue producing giant inflatable Santas holding dildos
(McCarthy), crucifixes in jars of urine (Serrano), and Naked Lunch
(Burroughs).
Google is so good it should be a public
utility When Google
'became' Alphabet, it officially chucked out 'do no evil'. Granted, you're
slinking into the darkness as soon as you go public and the amount of
investors expecting you to bring home the bacon with regularity surges. Google acts just
like every other successful corporation, and thinks one thing: More. There is no let up.
Capitalism does not allow for 'taking your foot off the gas'. Not out of
any Schopenhauer-like drive of humanity's insatiable, passionate will, but
out of cold, clinical design. When the name of
your company becomes a verb, a process known as denominalization (for more
information, just google it), you have become ‘too big to exist’. When your company
become so successful it re-writes the rules just by doing business as
usual, you have become ‘too big to exist’. Just as how
Wal-Mart decimated the Main Street in towns and small cities by being so
successful at dictating prices to its suppliers, Google is able to
guarantee that it is by far the primary way that people 'look' through the
entire internet. Journalism,
entertainment, advertising, retail shopping, communication, and anything
else that could be digitized was inadvertently sucked into the abyss and
whatever came out was not the same. Of course it can be
called ‘the cost of doing business’, but who is doing the numbers to
decide that cost, since it affects an investor and a laid-off retail
worker very differently? Former Google CEO
Eric Schmidt calls finding 'creative' ways to pay the least amount of tax
an example of capitalism working properly. It has to stop not
because we should pity the poor big companies who have to compete against
massive ones, but because we should pity the citizens who are pawns in
this very serious and ‘not at all a game’ situation between the
responsibilities of the state and private enterprise. Don’t fear the
nationalization of companies, fear the corporatization of governments.
Trans People Have Been Dealt a Raw Hand
Consider what they have to go through to be something most of us for
granted: Being ourselves. Being content.
Who considers being content a luxury?
Because transgender people are fighting to reach that feeling every day of
their lives, and they have an ignorant at best, hostile at worst world
bearing down on them.
They are born out of sorts, and spend their entire life trying to feel
okay, to feel relaxed, to feel content.
Imagine the
feelings of uncertainty, confusion and frustration of going through
puberty
(the time when everyone around you is questioning
the changes that are happening to their own bodies, their own beliefs,
their own social circles of family and friends), but that it continues
right into adulthood. ‘No one understands’ is a typically teenager
complaint, but it is a heartfelt lament for so many in the transgender
community.
We've written
elsewhere about how achieving equality for women and
minorities/marginalized groups is so sadly difficult, and with rough only 0.5-1% of the population identifying
as transgender, it is much harder to find another person who you can
confide in and empathize with.
That 99% can only sympathize (and sadly, plenty do not) instead of truly
understand is not at all fair. It's shit luck that the genetic wires got
crossed and you're being forced to live in a body that feels somehow
wrong, with overwhelming feelings of insecurity, doubt, and confusion.
And then they have to 'be' a normal person on top of that. You know,
dealing all the regular day-to-day existence stuff that everyone else
thinks is just a pain the ass.
Is it a surprise that they are more likely to have mental health issues,
or self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, the same way that others turn to
it when they go through difficult times? Of course not.
That they preserve through all this is admirable, incredible, a true
testament to the human spirit, and should give anyone hope for the future.
This is not saying they deserve our pity. They deserve our help and
respect. And that the rest of the world is so slow to give them these
things is a sad mark of how far we have to go to be as open-minded and
big-hearted as we too often think we are.
The Digitized Human Mind
The complexity of the brain means that we keep running into current tech
limitations when it comes to the possibility of creating a mannequin-like
copy.
We take it for granted that the brain is always 'on', that even during
sleep it is keeping the body alive, in addition to feeding the
subconscious part of our mind.
Part of the challenge of being able to upload a human mind to a computer
is doing the reverse. Stimulating our brains with a fake experience.
Shaking someone's hand is just a series of electrical signals in the
brain. If it is possible to send the exact signals to the brain, can it
tell the difference between it and an actual handshake?
You are defined by what you do, so what are you if you can do anything in
a simulated environment? Would the awareness of it not being real ruin the
experience? Will you forget? Can you ‘choose’ to forget?
Once you are in a simulated environment, there is no activity that you
would get tired of (whether it's eating, video games, sex, drugs) because
there is no such thing as 'tired' for you anymore. That requires a
physiological relationship to a body that you don't have to concern
yourself with. There is never a decrease of serotonin because there is no
serotonin, it's just ones and zeroes.
We are simply (or really, ‘in a very complicated way’) rearranging the
universe into the flickering electrons it is, but to our own whims.
This flickering is called (in its most basic quantum form) ‘information’
and persists to the point where it is the object/event which is used as
the example of how black holes work, and how all matter in the universe
relates to the phenomenon that destroys matter.
That there is numerical data at the basis of these seemingly more abstract
and bizarre relationships of what we (and everything else) is made of is
astonishing, because it doesn’t seem scientific. It is science the human
mind has a hard time conceiving of.
For some
these non-physical forms of ever-changing awareness can be how we consider
the divine in technological terms.
Information is spirit. Spirit is information.
The perception of loss can almost be as damaging as an actual loss.
Expected outcomes can change how one feels about the true outcome.
Barely winning a game in which you were expected to effortlessly defeat
your opponents will make you reconsider your own abilities, and certainly
spectators will second guess all that they thought of you as well (and the
opponents will be seen as practically victors).
When it comes to politics - that is, actual changes in how a society
governs and addresses the needs of its citizens - the stakes can quickly
be much higher.
The creation or curtailing of certain social programs or grants or tax
breaks can put citizens at ease or into a financial tailspin. That is what
matters, but the perception of these policies – and the political win and
loss if they are passed or struck down – has taken over the discourse.
Where losing an argument will have you thinking that you can lose
everything.
We are moving towards a world where words are more weaponized than ever,
because on digital platforms there are no fists to pummel opponents with.
While it's great that there are fewer opportunities for physical violence
because most of these interactions are done via screen, it amplifies
perception and strengthens whatever message that is repeated and wants to
be heard in the first place. If everyone in a rapidly expanding online
community believes that a loss has occurred, how do you convince them
otherwise?
Amazing article on the concept of social status and its politicization:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html)
First we communicated (unilaterally) with the future via cave paintings,
then the oral tradition, then the written word, then audiovisual
recording, and now through interactive digital experiences. Each becomes a
more complex way to express ourselves.
At the moment the last one is best known as video games, but that will
soon change.
You
won't learn about history 'just' by reading past letters or watching black
and white film. You will be able to experience important moments by
navigating it in a realistic three-dimensional space.
Right
now it is possible to peer into developing events around the world thanks
to every phone in a pocket being a video camera that is connected to
everyone. The next step is going to be experiencing this through all the
senses of the people living through it, whether through virtual reality or
even something involving shared neural links.
The problem which remains, of course, is all the time that history is made
when there are none of these technologies present, and we’re
suddenly back to relying on oral tradition (in other words, someone just
telling us what they saw).
We
live in a dull cyberpunk world
The issue with good stories is that they have to be interesting. Few can
deny that we live in a technocratic dystopia where a small group of very
powerful corporations and the people that own them have a huge impact on
how the rest of the world lives (and dies). It is a fertile ground for
storytelling at first glance, but 'rages against the machine' in fiction
cut out the dull bits, and streamline character motivation and growth. It
romanticizes criminals and embraces ‘just in the nick of time’
coincidences.
Great!
But
in today’s real world people hack into a bank accounts and pull identity
scams, and there’s no exciting back story or twist to be revealed. The
surveillance state that should spook us is created in part by us willingly
giving oodles of information that we share (whether typed or filmed) with
as many people as possible because we want to. We have effortlessly
communication machines that can connect us and help build a utopia, but
all we do is argue.
Even worse, most of the drugs that are being
taken are depressants that
don't do anything wild like in Phillip K Dick novels.
We cry out for change, for improvement, for a better life, which is how so
many cyberpunk stories start.
But no dice. No
heroes, not even anti-heroes.
The stage is set, and we've all forgotten our lines.
The human experience demands we attempt to reflect and assess ourselves
(as individuals and as a group) and the way we define, mark and categorize
our lives takes the shape of a story. Event A is followed by Event B is
followed by Event C, and we inevitably try to link these events together.
That's why the line is 'the story of my life'.
And while we like to think we are being factual and objective as we
re-tell our lives - whether just in our own head, to friends and family,
or a in a publicly consumed (auto)biography - we are certainly forgetting
specific facts, misremembering reactions (by ourselves and others) and
being generally biased.
The consequence of this that we turn our non-fiction lives into fiction by
looking back and thinking about it.
God and the Market, Market and the God
'GameStop'. What a perfect name for the new stock market…scandal?
Occurrence? Blowback? Because
for some hedge funds, it really is those two words: Game. Stop. The fun of
just pressing buttons and racking up high scores has come to a crashing
halt.
What do the people who work at GameStop stores think? What do companies
that sell their products at GameStop think? What do the people who (still)
shop at GameStop think?
It doesn't matter. They are just NPCs in this level.
Alienation has been
so thoroughly baked into the overclass Wall Street capitalism of the 21st
century that 'people' are either assets (customers) or liabilities
(employees) to the bottom line. For more and more people in the West, they
are so, so far removed from the manufacturing of the products they consume
and use (since they are primarily made on the other side of the world)
that they think little of the conditions in which these workers do their
jobs (whether directly in the factory or indirectly through the particular
nation’s government). All of them can lose their jobs because of a dumb
advertising campaign far away that causes slow sales of the product and
shutters the factory.
Everything is connected in the worst possible way, and the stock market is
a drunken, greedy doctor trying to keep the patient alive so they can sell
it more medicine. Betting against companies (shorting) is making money off
cancer. And if you can make money off cancer, expect to see a lot more
cancer.
Why do stocks go up
and down? What are market
forces?
How much does a genuine quarterly earnings report make
a difference?
You gotta have faith. Of course this stock will go up, down, loop within
its own loop and land perfectly on the tarmac. The market believes
everything will go up. But in case you have it on good authority that it
won't, it now believes some things will go down. You want proof? What is
this, a congressional hearing?
You gotta have faith. That God will take your soul after death and deem it
worthy to chill with him for all eternity. You want proof? What is this, a
massive particle collider underneath France and Switzerland?
"Play Your Old Jokes!"
There is a
difference between musical acts going out and playing new songs to
applause and playing older songs to wild screaming, and how almost all
comedians retire material after a set amount of time. At the very least, a
comedian doesn’t get wild screams from the audience when they launch into
a five minute bit about dating that their fans will recognize and love to
hear word for word again.
Is it because of
the presentation format? Do we appreciate the artistry in the replication
of a song over the replication of a four minutes comedic monologue because
we believe the former is more difficult to do? Do
we attach more emotional memories to music? It is much more likely for you
to headbang in rockitude or weep with sadness over a song than a piece of
comedy.
Is it the laugh? Maybe laughter elicits a different
emotional response than excitement/sadness, one that is based a lot more
on the freshness of hearing a joke for the first time, which means there
is diminishing returns on hearing it again and again.
Maybe because jokes involve more a cerebral analysis than music
there is less emotional attachment to whatever was happening in your life
when you first heard Chappelle’s ‘three AM in ghetto’ story than when you
first heard ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.
Why Tattoos?
We are living a more and more transitory existence. People accumulate less
physical things and use digital forms of collection to display and express
who they are. If you 'can't take it with you via your phone', it's
baggage. And while in some ways 'the Internet is forever', in other ways
it is very easy to tear your identity up and start again (or leave it on
the side of the road and drive away) and join another online community
under a different handle.
The exception is the tattoo, which can be the biggest commitment you can
make to what you believe in and what is important to you because it is
meant to be permanent. It can't be lost or stolen (it just might run or
fade after several years if you don't touch it up,) and the only way you
can get rid of it completely is by ponying up quite a bit of cash.
Middle Class Problem: Shrinkage
(https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22166381/hollow-middle-class-american-dream)
Money isn't everything but holy hell is it something.
Jeff Bezos' ex-wife gave over $4 billion to charity. Great, but it's the
exception not the rule, so we must re-write the rules.
We
overpay the people who make us smile (athletes, entertainers) and underpay
the people who keep us alive (doctors, infrastructure support staff, law
enforcement).
Right now, you're lucky if you are born into a wealthy family, and after
that you have to rely on the luck that somehow some of the donated money
from a wealthy family ends up helping you. Not necessarily them directly
putting it in your pocket, but through foundations and funds that might be
given to your workplace or job, or through grants.
Some of these foundations might remain mysterious to those that are
receiving its benefits.
We
are living at a time where, like in Great Expectations, you might not know
who your wealthy benefactor is, and maybe a rich man saying he 'has given
back enough' (whether through taxes or donation) is not the best
measurement as to whether he has.
If
working and middle class citizens are against a tax increase on the
wealthy because they aim to be rich one day and don't want to pay that
higher rate at that time, then it is that combination of selfishness and
delusion that can destroy a nation from the inside.
No one wins if there is hundred of
millions or billions of dollars that a handful of very wealthy people just
sit upon or swap amongst themselves in stocks and investments.
The
more people that touch the dollar as it moves around the community, the
healthier that community is.
The Responsibility for Being Wrong
It seems that people in power are less and less culpable for making
mistakes. CEOs and business leaders pay a fine and get to be cleared of
any wrongdoing. If politicians have to resign because of scandal or are
voted out (and with retention rates being so high, that's rare), they
typically parachute into a job on a corporate board, lobbying firm, or if
they're telegenic, a media company.
It creates a climate of indifference and alienation towards your actions,
especially since there should be the concept of public good when making
important decisions. Obviously within government, but corporations should
definitely have to alter their reason for being, which for too long has
been making money for their investors.
What if there were fire-able conditions that the entire community can
acknowledge and enforce? We are at a point where the lack of
responsibility is having so many millions of citizens assume the worst
when it comes to companies and government institutions doing…anything. We
expect it to go wrong in some way, because it has been for years now.
Obviously it is more important that people who have more power are held to
greater levels of account. A CEO is paid plenty more than employees far
down the org chart, and a bad year or a terribly irresponsible and
dangerous decision needs to be reflected in their pay. If the buck truly
stops at their desk, it shouldn’t be able to easily make that last leap
into their pocket.
Who
Cometh for the Right Will Cometh For the Left
Would it be great if holocaust denial was dismissed as bigoted idiocy
right away? Of course! But if it isn’t, and these terrible fabrications
take root in many people's minds as truth no matter what sort of evidence
you present to them to say, 'of course the holocaust happened', then what?
Should these inaccurate claims have been censored, because of the danger
that might come with people believing them?
Obviously restricting certain forms of speech is going to cause problems
in society, not only with individuals yelling at each other on the
Internet, but plaintiffs and defendants in the courts of law. Questions
regarding intent and context can bog down easy answers, because it’s not
always clear when someone is joking and when they are truly giving their
position and beliefs on an issue (and good luck telling the difference
when it is a post on social media).
Banning an orange dumpster fire that was recently the most powerful man on
earth (for four years…still boggles the mind) from social media platforms
is good...right?
It
makes sense that supporters of Trump will decry this as censorship and
that plenty of people on the left will breathe a sigh of relief,
considering that the former president told (at one fact-checked estimate)
30,000 lies.
A
society can't crumble under a ton of bullshit like that, but add it to
bureaucratic dysfunction, skyrocketing inequality, and ‘surprises’ like
pandemics and natural disasters, and crackdown on speech to protect truth
is going to be a hideous mess that everyone is going to come regret.
The
notion that social media corporations will only crack down on conservative
content it finds distasteful or bullshit-prone is extremely naive and
shortsighted.
It's
great when QAnon is on the hot seat, but bad when it’s Black Lives Matter,
and if it seems like ‘it can’t happen here’ for BLM, it already has (in
the wake of the protests last year, several social media groups were
banned or locked).
That
Google, Facebook or Twitter are the arbiters is problematic enough.
If
you can't make these decisions properly - or build a computer code to do
it properly - then you shouldn't be making these decisions
Is
it a targeted cull? An algorithm that is helped along by a small team?
If you say your social media platform is 'too big to monitor', and that
‘erring on the side of reason’ results in silencing people – not just
deleting a specific post that violates the rules – no one should rest
easy.
Media
Cynicism Is Its Own Bubble
News wonks expect the general public to acknowledge that left-leaning
outlets like MSNBC use the same overhype/under-report tactics as
right-leaning Fox News, and to perform the mental legwork of sussing it
all out by reading from several different sources and ultimately making an
informed decision and act or vote upon the issue in question. When reading
plenty is just something you do because it is your routine or your job
(along with talking to sources, vetting sources, and presenting a
cohesive, well-researched argument that goes through an
editor/fact-check), it's easy to forget that most people don't do much
beyond eyeballing headlines as they scroll through their social media
pages.
Journalist Matt Taibbi is regularly having to defend himself for
criticizing democrats/left-leaning media (or whatever the left-leaning
media is currently championing). Leftists ask 'what happened to you,
man?', as if the person who has written books like Insane Clown President
(Trump-bashing), Griftopia (wall street bashing), and I Can’t Breathe (law
enforcement overreach bashing) has somehow turned conservative.
There are
accusations from leftists who only want to hear good news about their side
(and bad news about opponents),
or strategically pragmatic leftists saying 'I know we're not perfect, but if you
keep covering issues like this, moderates are going to think we're as bad
as Trump/conservatives are, give up on caring at all, and our opponents
will win thanks to political apathy'.
Taibbi's push for free speech gets criticized by those who say that
tolerating intolerant attitudes will ultimately lead to people in power
who will crush free speech in general. Hence, these critics say, some free
speech that promotes intolerance (nazism, for example) must be censored.
Perhaps Taibbi would respond that there are many other ways for a
society/community/government to counter these 'intolerant groups' other
than censorship, because choosing that method creates more problems than
it solves.
Here's A
Thought Summer 2020
Seriously, How Did We Lose the OK Gesture?
When
a bunch of racists start using a universally recognized symbol for good
job as a subtle way of expressing camaraderie...did we just let them?
Perhaps it's a hard thing to stop when the only antidote is to ignore the
racists completely and keep using 'OK' as it is intended, but this is that
strange situation where you have to assume that the person you are
gesturing is either ignorant to the attempt of re-signification or knows
you well enough personally to be sure that you aren't going to suddenly
flash a white-supremacy gesture.
Since you cannot be sure of the first situation, we naturally have to
retreat from using 'OK' casually, but that just means it is going to be
used 'only' in the case of racist signalling.
What
does this say about the transmission of information in the digital age?
Calling attention to this issue propagates the idea that this now a racist
gesture, but not calling attention to it means non-racists may use it
inadvertently and be labelled something they certainly don't want to be
labelled as.
How
do you 'not' get a message out? How does the Internet walk this line? How
do we all ignore this attempt by goons to 'steal' a simple symbol of
approval? How can we make sure this doesn't keep happening, since if
emboldened white supremacists might try to see what gestures and words can
be absorbed into the racist rolodex?
There is Free-Will Because We Don't Have a Choice
If free will is defined as being able to act without following a
pre-deterministic sequence, then we will never know for sure because there
is no way to know if we are following a pre-determined sequence. We are
trapped in the present space-time and our own individual world lines (ask
your astrophysicist), preventing us from every being able to compare what
the alternatives could have been (or to know for sure where there are any
alternatives).
In this sense, we have both Free-will and Determinism. We do not know if
the choice we made is directed by any force other than our own. But once
we make a decision to cross the street, scratch our nose, or throw that
egg at your friend, that choice is 'locked in' and is following a certain
path with limited outcomes (this is a perhaps a philosophical notion of
wave-function collapse). As I bring my finger up to scratch my nose, I can
certainly stop. But is that proof that I have free will, because I am
consciously avoiding what would be the common sense thing to do, or was I
always pre-destined to think this and not scratch my nose? Since I can
never answer this accurately in the space-time world line I exist, I
cannot know for sure what 'made' me do this.
Even using the term ‘made’ suggests an overarching plan, while determinism
may be nothing more than quantum particles following a sequence of ‘most
likely’ probabilities. There is always a chance that all the atoms that
make up your body will suddenly reconfigure themselves across the cosmos,
but it is very, very low. But this is randomness, since we commonly
associate 'free will' with sentient decision making, and that is based on
many, many factors of how all the particles of our body respond to
external stimulation, and we're not remotely close to figuring out (let
alone predicting) how people will always react to situations.
If we can't be absolutely certain of a deterministic trajectory (and based
on our limitations of existing within the 4D timespace in which this
(possibly) deterministic trajectory operates, we can't be), then there is
free will, if only because we can never know the difference.
CHAT is the future 'human'
The so-called purity test that can afflict the left or the right (or
really any group of people when there are several issues being debated) is
putting people into echo chambers, or intellectual reinforcement networks.
If you don't agree completely with the laundry list of positions that the
group adheres to, then you are booted out. But this is a positive feedback
loop, in the sense that it just gets more dogmatic and strict over time.
People are becoming networks, a lessening of tolerance for diverse thought
means a lessening of individuality in these groups, and the technology we
have makes this an easier process than ever.
which brings us to...CHAT.
The blob of individuals talking almost all at once, typified during a live
event that everyone can coalesce around.
In the world of video games, 'CHAT' is the casual name to the steady
stream of comment(or)s that happen in real time as the streamer plays.
Even if you don't show your face while you stream a game, you are inviting
the public into your personal space, because you are sharing yourself with
them (even if the focus is trying to beat a level). There is a passive
sort of emotional exchange and friendship connection between you and the
people watching, especially as you begin to interact in chat. Even as you
interact with individuals as you respond to their comments, you begin to
see 'Chat' as a singular form of communication.
'Twitch Plays Pokemon' is an example of a community achieving a common
goal haphazardly. Similar to how cells slowly learned to interact with
each other and create complex life.
Corporatism and the Environment
We
may have to accept the fact that saving the environment will almost
certainly require a huge amount of work to be done by corporations (from
research and development to full implementation and oversight of the
projects). This is will likely only entrench their power even further and
make citizens (and governments) be more reliant on their operation (which
chooses profit over social benefit) more than ever.
While
we should decry this, there might not be much of an alternative.
Government-led projects are becoming less and less common due to budget
constraints, and corporations which receive contracts and grants to do
work that was previous done by a government programs are reaping financial
benefits.
But
fighting climate change and corporatism at the same time is yielding
meagre to little results. If we stick with trying to fix both, we might
end up with neither, and then we're really screwed. We might have to
settle with one, and that has to be the environment, obviously. Even
saying that by fixing corporatism we can then move on to properly fixing
the environment, we might not even have time for that...
Bonus Semi-Related Thought:
Total Trash
(also a great Sonic Youth song)
While we are half-assing it on fighting climate change (see above), we are
practically no-assing it reducing waste. While the two are invariably
connected since it deals with how we are using the resources of our
planet, the steps in reducing the amount of waste we produce and
reusing/recycling when we can are very, very baby. It's always nice to
hear of a small start-up company or retail store using eco-friendly goods
or packaging, but the more people are living what can be tentatively
labelled as 'a traditional western middle class lifestyle', the more trash
that will come with it. It's sad enough that we are cutting down forests
and fields to build space for homes and urban developments, but it's even
worse when we clear them just so we can toss junk there.
And when we 'run out of land' (and that just means that it is too
expensive to dump the trash on land), it goes in the ocean. Which is
another huge challenge because it's not all neatly grouped together in one
wet pile, but spread out over a massive regions in the world's largest
bodies of water, guaranteeing that it will be a danger to all marine
wildlife as well as being very difficult to remove.
Asking people to consume less and to buy local (since doing so requires
much less packaging and waste in the entire transportive endeavour) has
its own challenges, as some will call it an assault on their liberty, or
just too expensive. We have created a profit-driven socioeconomic system
that champions disposability and therefore champions constant spending on
more goods as well.
Which just means more trash.
Comedy Sequels
Making a commercially and critically successful
comedy film is hard. Making another one with the same ingredients is damn
near impossible.
[Monty Python might be the exception in terms of
three comedy films of incredible quality (albeit unrelated to one another
from a narrative perspective), but they are certainly more on a 'cult
classic' level of success, and the sizes of their productions are much
smaller that their insular creation process can afford]
There will always be pressure in Hollywood to make
more of the same, and whether or not the product is good is only a side
conversation. A better reviewed movie typically makes more money, but not
always.
Comedy films of the mundane snapshots of life
(There's Something About Mary, The Wedding Singer, Step Brothers) don't
typically get sequels since there is usually a dollop of romance in them,
and that might mean a happily ever after which can't really begat a
sequel.
Action-comedies, on the other hand, are very much
bread and butter of the industry, to the point where Marvel films can
almost be seen as three parts action and one part comedy.
And before they overwhelmed global box offices and
re-defined what you could expect in your theatre seat, there were big name
precursors like Ghostbusters, Rush Hour, Austin Powers, Home Alone, Back
to the Future, and,,, The OceansTrilogy, which is the best trilogy at
making fun of movies while celebrating them, and being cool the whole damn
time.
Based on the serious 1960s Frank Sinatra caper,
Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney gave audiences fast paced
storytelling, cool cuts, clever quips, and the perfect dollop of emotion
at just the right moment in just the right way. A great raising of stakes
throughout, as our heroes don't break too much of a sweat as each new
obstacle is placed before them. The satire is so smooth and silky you
don't even notice, you just get taken along for the ride. And just like
Empire Strikes Back, while Oceans Twelve was criticized at first, it is
definitely a great piece of meta, 'bet you thought you knew where this is
going'-type throw-down for the audience that Iron Man could never get away
with.
And hey, like a lot another, another go-arounds,
Oceans Thirteen is the prime example of diminishing returns, but is still
fun. The subtle Godfather references, Matt Damon walking briskly through a
vaguely European city on the phone being filmed in a handheld, jerky
no-cut style is a glaring homage to his Bourne identity, and even how they
explained away the absence of certain characters (namely, the love
interests played by Julia Robert and Catherine Zeta-Jones) worked with
just a simple line: 'It's not their fight'.
It was the blueprint from the MCU, and nobody knew
it, least of all Steven Soderbergh.
The problem that comes with a superhero-dominated
box-office is the same problem that is affecting film in general, not just
comedy. You are making chunks of art/culture that is meant to be as
broadly appealing as possible, because while it's great in one sense that
we can share everything so much easier, big studios are trying to make as
much cash as possible by doing so, and comedies just aren’t sure-fire
anymore.
This is also a fight against anything else that
might steal eyeballs and dollars. From an onslaught of TV streaming
options (including popular and critically acclaimed series that capture
the public's imagination, but also being able to binge three hours of
reality tv and skip going out for movie night) to video games
to...pandemics, the cinema experience is on the ropes.
And while adventure and action typically requires
a bigger budget for a good visual spectacle, comedy can actually be done
pretty cheap, and that means, why even make a comedy ‘film’? Whether a
viral video of pet acting silly, YouTube creators who make skits, video
game streamers cracking jokes as they win or lose, or even sharing memes
24/7, ninety minutes of one story seems…old.
The
Normalcy of Universe
The
universe has existed for billions of years before a collection of cells
joined together to create the self aware entity known as yourself, and it
will exist for billions of years after the cells that were you slowly
dissipate back into other forms of matter of energy. The astoundingly
brief period of time that you were around is by far the exception of the
rule of the universe, which is: 'you are not here'. Normalcy for the
universe is when you were never alive and always dead. A second after you
take your final breath, you can't blame the universe for going, 'ah, back
to normal'.
Art
And Culture Now
We
care so much about Art and Culture because it feels like we can do
something about it, that we can engage with it in ways never done before.
We can discuss it with people across the world instantaneously, we can
make elaborate videos praising or decrying it, we can attend massive
conventions that celebrate it.
A&C
has replaced politics for many people who think politics is either too
toxic or too bloated and irreparable.
People do want to care about something, and if politics and the wider
human society seems like it doesn't care about you, then you won't care
about it, and move your attention elsewhere. To the detriment of the
future of humanity.
Fan
service in your favourite pop culture institutions have replaced social
services in your local government institutions.
Metaphysical Crisis Level Infinity
When your civilization crashes and burns - whether due to foreign invasion
(of all sorts, from military to financial) or internal dissent - what can
you possibly think of your God, if you have one?
That God is punishing you and the many who also believe? That God doesn't
care, no matter how hard you tried to do right? That there is no God at
all?
It is a crushing blow the collective ego, and one that many people will
try to avoid confronting and run away from for as long as possible.
Not only is civilization collapsing and it is simple dangerous, but
everything you've believed in and worked for ultimately added up to
nothing. And maybe you own up to the fact that you and the rest of
society's behaviour might have had something to do with the collapse.
This is a massive devastating blow to any individual, and some will deny
it to their final breath.
Humanity: The Failure of Complex Systems
How people engage with and reflect upon society can be broken into
qualitative and quantitative properties. The former involve personal
preference (since 'quality' can be subjective), and the latter involves
statistical information (as quantitative is wholly numerical). By
cautiously reducing these two properties to opinion for the first and
money for the second, this can show how important the two factors can rely
and interact with each other.
The most important quantitative properties to explain the current crisis
in Western democracy is the massive difference between how much wages have
increased and the cost of living has increased over the last four decades.
Too many people don't have enough money. And it's not that people are
working less or are being lazy, it's that the jobs that pay well are too
few, meaning so many people of all generations - but yes, especially the
millennials - have to settle for higher debt, little savings, and all that
comes with that: no home ownership, higher level of stress and worry, and
a disillusionment with society in general.
A factory line job in the fifties (and on through the eighties) might not
have been the sort of career that you would dream about when you were ten,
but during those decades you could still buy a house with a bit of
responsible saving (and a house is still the biggest asset that most
people own...if they can afford it).
The Internet has changed everything, as it is often said, because it is a
mix of how it affects jobs by rendering oh so many of them obsolete
(certainly more than it creates), how it changes how we interact with each
other, and how it is allowed for financial power to be much more
concentrated in the hands and pockets of the few.
We cannot disengage, we can only reinvent and alter our relationship with
this technology.
The libertarian, don't-tread-on-me dream is wholly incompatible with a
globalized corporate-driven society dependant on digital
interconnectedness. You can't have both. If you hate the 'power of
government', then ditch your phone and don't ever shop online or at
Wal-Mart, because they are just profit driven authoritarian institutions
that are replacing governments.
The
human experience demands we attempt to reflect and assess ourselves (as
individuals and as a group), and the way we define, mark and categorize
our lives takes the shape of a story.
That's why the line is 'the story of my life'.
And
while we like to think we are being factual and objective as we re-tell
our lives - whether just in our own head, to friends and family, or in a
publicly consumed (auto)biography - we are certainly forgetting certain
facts, misremembering reactions, and being generally biased. The latter is
due to us wanting to look better even to ourselves when we reflect on the
past.
We make our non-fiction lives fiction by looking back and thinking about
it.
We cannot live another person's life.
Biography is, by nature, the reduction of one person's life to familiar
tropes and experiences for the people trying to understand/learn about
someone else. It's not misrepresentation, it is the narrowing that is inherent in storytelling, which is an essential component of humanity and how we interact with one another. At present, there is no other way to experience another's life.
The
Internet has affected our concept of time and space. The Internet not only
makes so much about what is happening at the current moment so knowable on
a collectivized level (not only in terms of 'the news', but how we can get
immediate, first-hand experience of what is occurring, no matter where it
is across the globe). Concurrently, the Internet can keep the experience
of the past saved forever in a frozen sort of state through archives and
archives of material. You can experience what was written or created
thirty or hundreds of years ago with no lag or challenge. This is not just
reading a book about the past, this is getting collective experience of
the moment instantaneously. Time has collapsed.
In
terms of space, tangible items can go from existing in a store or
warehouse across the world to your doorstep in a day or two. Food from
anywhere in your city can be on your table in under an hour. At the same
time, virtual spaces can be as large as the creator wants it to be, and we
were now able to interact in these spaces with increasing complexity and
familiarity to the goings-on in real life. While advances in
transportation technology shrunk the 'size' of the world throughout the
twentieth century, what has happened in the first two decades of the
twenty-first has been even more remarkable.
While the division between labour and management are still at the heart of
the class struggle, the role of 'investment' has superseded management in
its impact and importance. Management will still exploit labour, but there
is some relation still to the work being created, in the sense that
management in this case is responsible for the company and makes key
decisions in its day-to-day operations. Investment, meanwhile, can be
wholly alienated from whatever work is being produced, and simply collect
a portion of the profits because of the money they initially (or latently)
funded the company with.
That you now by stocks in a hedge fund or invest venture capitalist firm
and have even less of a relationship with the product or service being
created is only furthering the exploitation and impoverishment that comes
in the unregulated capitalist system. Companies that are already drowning
debt have been bought up by these firms and exist as 'zombie
corporations', which are never expected to turn a profit ever again, and
are slowly trudging towards ultimate bankruptcy and paying out whatever
money they happen to make to these firms, with none of it going to
rehabilitation.
(Some of the) Happiest Songs of All Time
It's tough going out there (hell, this is even a pretty low-feeling
'Here's a Thought') so here's some cheery tunes to feel a bit better. Some
left field choices and some familiar home-runs. No order, feel free to
randomize.
Ce matin-la - AIR
(That horn tho)
Tightrope - Janelle Monae
(featuring Big Boi) (definitely the most underrated and amazing R&B singer
from this decade, and this is top shelf proof)
Rhapsody in Blue - George Gershwin
(A seventeen minute epic from one hundred years ago that has one foot in
classical and the other in this new-fangled thing called jazz? Yes please)
Sugar Magnolia - Grateful Dead
(tons of different live versions, but yeah, go with Europe '72)
Fire Eye'd Boy - Broken Social Scene
(hazy indie rock at its best, cheering you on)
B.O.B. - Outkast
(with its effortless changes in melody and beat, it's the 'Bohemian
Rhapsody' of hip-hop, and a whole lot more positive)
Lust for Life - Iggy Pop
(that kick drum tho)
You Can Make It If You Try - Sly and
the Family Stone
(a
funky positive refrain)
Pulo, Pulo - Jorge Ben
(if this doesn't make you jump six feet up, you are probably six feet
under)
Good Day Sunshine - The Beatles
(of course the Fab Four nail it. Plus there's that other George Harrison
song about the sun that's so popular)
Jamming - Bob Marley
(well, yeah...)
Got a Thing on My Mind - Sharon
Jones & The Dap Kings
(doing old school the new school way)
Tragic Soliloquy to the president about lessening the US military
footprint:
-Mr/Madame President, look, I know you talked a lot about how we need to
reduced military spending, but too much of our economy is based on
building all sorts of death machines. Cutting construction and R&D
contracts will cause huge job losses in several key battleground states,
and you will have key allies in your party turn against you if thousands
of people are suddenly unemployed in their district.
With how tightly fought some of the seats in Congress, suddenly being
labelled against the troops and good-paying American jobs will devastating
(even if the label is not fair). You will lose in the midterms, and your
political opponents (there will be the expected opposition party as well
as members from your own party) will stonewall your policies and force you
to return military spending to what it once was.
As far trying to spin this as a positive, any sort of money-saving from
making these cuts will not be turned into a job replacement programs until
years after the fact, and you've already campaigned on helping people find
better playing jobs now. Doing this will go in the opposite direction very
quickly.
There are so many tertiary industries involved with the US military that
there is the genuine possibility of starting a recession if you
drastically cut defense spending.
Beyond this, exiting from costly overseas wars and long-held military
bases will leave our allies in the lurch and embolden the countries we
have less-than-rosy relationships with as well as terrorist groups that
intend to do us harm.
Our status and role as a nation that tries to promote freedom and
democracy and partnerships will immediately be diminished, and that will
make it more difficult to have positive economic relations with many
nations.
Appealing to our nation's sense of honour, freedom and peace is good, but
that won't put food on the table of the millions of Americans who are now
unemployed, having lost well-paying and stable jobs.
The truth is that America cannot afford to
not be a military power
right now, even if dismantling parts of this massive apparatus is the
morally responsible thing to do.
Ok Computer - it remains captivating for its dark and twisted middle.
Just past the halfway point, OKC gets weird.
It opens with with a towering, sunny rift monster (Airbag), goes into one
of the weirdest hit singles of the 90s
(Paranoid Android), the third song you kind of forget because it's
third until you realize it's not-so-secretly amazing (Subterranean
Homesick Alien), followed by the lonely, dark Romeo-and-Juliette ballad
(Exit Music), the secretly best song on the album (Let Down), the catchy
second single (Karma Police), and then...
Robotic laundry list, eerie piano plunking, the metallic barking of
political slogans that's so heavy it gives some Seattle grunge buzz-saw
tracks a run for their money, then a haunting stumble through the halls of
mental illness with some background Penderecki strings.
What the hell?!
And then it’s
back to your regularly scheduled program, with a lovely suicide ballad (No
Surprises), the single that is/was a bridge from the previous album to
this one (Lucky), and a slow boiling, but eventually soaring ender that
begs you to, 'hey man, slow down' (The Tourist).
Those three middle tracks - 'Fitter Happier', 'Electioneering', 'Climbing
up the Walls' - gives a glimpse of the sort of experimentation that would
come to dominate the band's next two records (Kid A and Amnesiac, most of
which was recorded concurrently). It's not exactly jazz and electronica
flourishes, but it's a thousand light years away from The Bends and
whatever else you expected from mainstream alt-rock in the mid nineties,
and can really tilt your ear on its side for ten minutes or so.
Conspiracy Theories/Fairy Tales
Conspiracy theories are modern day fairy tales that say more about to the
desires of the theorist and the challenges in their society than anything
about truth.
It is the underlying belief of an ultra-powerful group of people that
control everything, and is a flimsy explanation why the believer's life is
not going the way they want it to.
In this way, while the conspiracy theorist decries those that don't
believe the same thing that they do as mindless sheep, the theorists
themselves are makers and dwellers of their own sheep-like belief system.
To them these power structures are untouchable, unassailable, immutable,
and so many people (including themselves) are forced to live a
substandard, controlled existence, even if they know the truth. The people
in charge of the world, according to conspiracy theorists, are more like
super-humans than us paltry plebs. It’s almost like the theorists believe
this is the inevitable hierarchy, that the strong and weak both get what
they deserve. It’s a terribly defeatist ideology.
But some of their beliefs are rooted in tiny shreds of past
historically-accurate examples. Governments and corporations have
certainly done terrible things and have tried to cover up the truth about
it. But to then assume that they are doing the same with diseases, aliens,
and 9/11 is ridiculous. It is a fallible aspect of humanity, that we are
so attuned to finding and operating within patterns that we search for
patterns that are not there.
A good way to conceive of different dimensions
Compare a photograph of a microwave (2D) and an actual microwave in 3D
space. Both are made of the same elementary particles, but the
similarities end quite quickly. The first is the concept/representation of
a microwave, but you would be a fool to even try to use it as an actual
microwave (It was almost a waste of words to type that). That's not how 2D
representations of 3D objects work, and that is something a child learns
early in their experience with reality.
But a photograph of a microwave is useful for us 3D entities when
we want to convey the idea of microwave.
What if all the items in our 3D reality were representations of 'actual'
objects in a 4D reality?
What if there was a 4D microwave 'out there'?
What if there was a 4D version of yourself, and you exist to it like your
2D shadow exists to you? Just a limited representation of the 'real'?
Here’s a Thought: Video Game Demo-Style
Animal Crossing and Real Consumption versus Virtual
Consumption
You can never have enough stuff.
At least when the stuff is just ones and zeroes.
As every review and essay about Animal Crossing: New
Horizons has pointed out, a game where you have an island paradise in
which you can build, furnish and fashion it however you want has come out
a perfect time, since most of the world is practicing self-isolation to
keep a very real pandemic from doing even more terrible damage.
Start off just by running around and enjoying nature
and finding a place for you tent, then settle into a relaxing life of
landscaping and fishing (and fishing and finishing).
Turn your tent into a one room shack and turn that into
a house, and slowly turn the island into a town. And you can decorate it
with thousands of sensible and ridiculous items that you can buy
(typewriters, lava lamps, garden gnomes, satellite dishes, etc.) or craft
yourself.
After taking out one hell of a loan that is. Although
it should be noted that for all his qualities as a ravenous raccoon
capitalist, Tom Nook gives you these loans interest free (you're already
doing a lot of maintenance and landscaping work for him, so he better).
Design your own patterns in-game for clothing,
paintings, flags and anything else. You can visit your friends’ islands
and show off your style or lack of it.
If you're the impatient sort, you can even time travel
ahead (by changing the time on your Nintendo Switch console) to when new
features and quests will be unlocked based on the real-time date.
And why not? Maybe at some other time than spring 2020
you would have wanted to take your time with this game and play a bit
every day, but of course it's become easy to mainline now. Fewer people
are working than ever and so many other entertainments are shuttered
(sports, cinemas, concerts). Time is more abundant than ever (for better
and for worse) to dive into a virtual world of plenty.
Meanwhile, even before global quarantine restrictions,
real stuff is becoming more and more of a luxury. Thanks to the long term
effects of the Coronavirus, the millennials and generation Z are going to
be in an even more precarious financial positions as the next several
years unfold.
'Owning' is going to become a foreign concept, and
'owing' is going to be an even larger ball and chain to drag around. You
likely have fewer places to put stuff if you don't own property and just
rent, and with paycheques having to stretch even further, the goods that
you might want to have to make you happy and reflect your personality are
not always an option.
The virtual world of Animal Crossing can help you with
this. The more people (especially those who have grown up with Internet as
being immutably there) become accustomed to putting time and energy and
effort in a virtual world for virtual possessions, the less coveted
non-essential physical items will become. Keep your real money for the
necessities (food, shelter, basic clothing) and spend time and fake money
for the frivolous virtual (a massive wardrobe, a perfectly designed front
and backyard garden, a museum full of dinosaur bones). Another perk is
that virtual stuff doesn't consume valuable real resources that real items
do.
People can complain how traveling to others' islands is
a real pain in the ass to organize, with permission, placement and codes
making it unnecessarily complex.
Whether or not Nintendo provides updates to streamline
the process or another game (from the Animal Crossing franchise or
otherwise) offers it, visiting virtual homes of friends' in real time is
going to stop being a novelty and start becoming a commonplace way of
socializing and living your ideal 'virtual' life.
How commonplace? Here's a headline on a video game
website at the time of this writing:
"Nintendo Slashes Interest Rates in Animal Crossing:
New Horizons"
(https://kotaku.com/nintendo-slashes-interest-rates-in-animal-crossing-new-1843019628)
What Remains of Edith Finch (and the term video 'game')
Even though the term 'walking simulator' is no longer
seen as an entirely dismissive term for the genre, it still feels like it
is not taking these sorts of story games seriously. And in some ways
that's understandable because you can't lose at Edith Finch. You can be
mildly inconvenienced by not knowing how to use a certain mechanic to
advance the story, but that's about it.
Even then, it is not a challenge to master any of these
game mechanics. The graphics are great, and it is certainly fun to explore
the nooks and crannies of the bizarre house and the property it sits
awkwardly upon, but for the most part the game is taking you on a tour of
a family history, told in a very unique and affecting way.
The creative storytelling within What Remains of Edith
Finch's two hour-ish runtime is 80% movie, but that other 20% makes all
the difference in seeing the possibilities that video 'games' can do with
narrative. If you went to a theatre and watched only one person in the
audience 'play' this game, you will still not have experienced the exact
same thing as if you had the controller in your hand yourself. Not that
you could play the game much differently (although there are points where
you can visit rooms out of order), but you become even more of a passive
participant when you aren’t the one pressing the buttons and deciding to
move forward.
By doing that, you feel joy and relief in the way Edith
discovers her past, because with its first-person perspective, she is
'you'. It is a freeing as well as emotionally moving. That it can make you
feel heartbreak and loss on the same level as a great movie or book is a
testament first and foremost to its creators at Giant Sparrow software,
but also to this burgeoning genre of video game. The interactive story is
only going to reach greater and greater heights as various levels of
virtual reality experiences become regular (certainly a price drop for the
equipment will be part of that).
But is it a game? If game is defined as a 'form of play
or sport played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or
luck' (Oxford dictionary), then Edith Finch isn't much of one, because the
game is only decided by your decision to keep playing. In this sense, the
sport was actually played by the development team at Giant Sparrow, to see
if they can rise to the challenge and create an experience that would keep
people going until the end. And they definitely won.
The End of Consoles
Google Stadia has been widely lambasted as a
mediocre-at-best video game experience. But it's the future.
Introducing a new product or service is always going to
be rough, and it was as bad as it could get for Stadia (dropped frame
rates, lag, glitches, broken connections, too few games). But it has a few
advantages. First, it's owned by one of the world's largest corporations,
one that has tremendous brand awareness across the world, so it can be
supported financially through the tough early times. Second, its 'premise'
follows a reliable trend since the Internet took off: Have less electronic
entertainment boxes in your house.
Regardless of when Microsoft or Sony ultimately release
their new consoles (end of 2020 is still the target), they have to be
shaking in their boots at the possibility that overall this is not a good
long term investment, that this sort of product no longer has 'legs'. If
your television already is connected to the Internet, is $500 a good
investment for another box that is going to do the same thing at the same
time? PlayStation and Microsoft already have gaming cloud services, and
they might just become and more and more appealing as cheaper for both
player and company as the years move forward.
And that means PS5 and Xbox X might get the diehard fans buying
each console, but it might not be how most people game even two years from
now. Mobile gaming is almost as big as console and PC gaming combined, and
this trend is not going to change any time soon (gaming was worth about
$152 billion in 2019, and mobile contributed $69* million to that).
Nintendo sort of lucked into releasing their latest
console (the Switch, by the way) in 2017 (with the slightly lesser 'Switch
Lite' coming out last year). By incorporating an easy on-the-go option for
playing, it had a versatility that its competitors lacked. It has sold
very well (great games and great game selection helps), and has given the
company plenty of time to wait and see what the future of video games
might look like before considering a follow-up (although Nintendo's
unwillingness to make obvious changes going forward has hurt them in the
past).
If the hiccups that ruined Stadia's launch are fixed,
then why ever own a console? Why not just have a controller and a USB or
HDMI stick that plugs into your TV or monitor? And Google doesn't have to
fix the bandwidth issue on its own. Improving internet speed and
reliability is the goal not only of telecommunications giants, but nations
as well. Stadia can ride the
coattails of these projects and improve connection issues, and get itself
into the hands of serious and casual gamers.
In 2022, the PS5 might be an expensive paperweight.
*-nice.
Majora's Mask Right Now (April 2020)
Majora's Mask, the sixth game in the Zelda franchise
was released twenty years ago. In it, the moon is about to crash into the
earth - more specifically, right on Clock Town, the main setting for the
game - and Link can walk around and interact with the citizens and see how
they are dealing with the news as the terrible calamity inches closer.
Some go about their day, some are terrified, some businesses are open, and
some are (eventually) closed. Essential workers - such as the postman -
are going crazy because they want to flee but feel obligated to do their
duties regardless of the overall risk to their health.
Link can even go into the mayor's office, and watch the
befuddled, clueless mayor hem and haw and not make a decision over whether
to evacuate the town or the have the annual Carnival of Time festival go
on as planned. The soldiers implore him to evacuate, meanwhile the
festival organizers say this entire matter is overblown and that the event
should still occur.
You can talk to the organizers and construction workers
after the meeting and they will complain about how weak and foolish people
are for worrying about this...while the giant moon with a hideous leer
grows closer and closer right above. By the last day most of the citizen's
had fled the town and go to a ranch where they try to have the semblance
of a normal life.
And since Link's task is (as always) is to save the
world, you have the power to relive the three days again and again, making
changes and gaining power to finally stop the moon from crashing down. The
repetition becomes numbing, where you go back and forth from pitying the
people who at first don't have a clue at what is going to happen, to
resenting them. It gets to the point where you don't really care what day
it is because it starts to feel like every day is the same over and over
again.
Just sayin',
[on a maddening side note, if you'd like to play
Majora's Mask, or the epic masterpiece that came before it (Ocarina of
Time) right now...tough. You need to have a Nintendo console that is
either nearly a decade old (the Wii U or 3DS) or have the original
Nintendo 64 (with expansion pack).
Please, for the love of god,
Nintendo, make these games (either the original or the 3DS remakes)
available on the Switch's eshop. You are depriving current and future fans of the series of a
wonderful, magical (and cough-profitable-for-you-cough) experience.]
Conduct Together: A Good Bad Game or a Bad Good Game?
This game is maddening.
It is a nice simple concept for a mobile timewaster. On
a 2D isometric map, guide trains around to pick up passengers at one
station and deliver them to another. Make sure the trains don't crash into
each other by starting and stopping them and changing the track switches
in time. If you move enough passengers within the time limit, you beat the
level.
It is hard to tell if they intentionally made this game
very hard and frustrating, or whether they screwed it all up and it ended
up being hard and frustrating. And not the good sort of hard where you can
master the controls and nuances in each level and feel a sense of
accomplishment when you finally beat it. There really does seem to be
prickly problems with the gameplay that seem borderline unfair and can
just drive you nuts.
Either they built in a slight lag when you are trying
to use the track switches (so you never get any to move correctly 'in the
nick of time' for the approaching train), or they screwed it up. The
switches themselves don't follow numerical consistency. Some levels use 1,
2 and 3, some use 1, 2 and 4.
While the cartoony graphics have a certain bit of charm
to them, they make it difficult at times to discern which tracks intersect
or go above and below each other. It is hard to tell when you are in a
safe spot so another train won't hit you, especially on curves. Even when
you press on the brakes there is a lag that means you still might get hit.
Some levels have architecture and sprites that actually make it difficult
to see what is happening on the tracks and at certain switches.
While there is a decent system of unlocking new worlds
by earning money by shuffling passengers in the levels, the rewards for
passing these levels are the best part of the game...if you're a train
fan. You get some cartoon versions of real-life trains to use in the
levels, but there aren't any perks or buffs, it's just cosmetic. And for
how many actual variations and models of trains there have been throughout
history (and the chances are that if you are playing this game, you also
like trains), that fact that two of the models available when you unlock
the medieval world are just fantasy trains from that period is just
disappointing. And not every world grants another vehicle for completing
it. Sometimes they just give you money and eventually there aren't new
worlds to spend the money on.
At the moment the game is $20 on the Nintendo Switch
eShop, but for a decent amount of time it was reduced to a single penny.
In terms of how you view this game, that difference in price is huge. It's
a great deal if you want to have a heart attack and scream for essentially
nothing, and it's stab in the eye and a mouthful of gravel at twenty
bucks.
But I...
Can't...
Stop...
Playing Conduct Together.
It's the Dark Souls of disposable mobile games, and
fucking hell.
The Pillar of Average-ness featuring 'Starlink: Battle
for Atlas'
By trying to appeal to everyone, you risk disappointing
everyone.
This game is a lesser No Man's Sky, a lesser Mass
Effect, and a lesser paint-by-numbers kids film, all rolled into one.
Strangely, the odd appeal is that you can practically
see the strings (or code) behind the puppet. At no point are taken in by
the story, the gameplay, or the graphics (well, the racing segments on the
crimson moon are pretty damn good). You are just way too aware that this
is a video game and can easily imagine it being put together in Ubisoft
meeting rooms and cubicles piece by piece.
The 'famous' line that you only need to find a fun
thirty second activity for a video game and then have it repeat really
means you have to find a way to disguise this same activity in as many
ways as possible.
And when you have a Frankenstein game of cobbled
together parts, the unusual thing is the decision to use this literally in
the marketing and promotion of the game.
It came with toys, the sort that you would buy at a
Best Buy or toy store. You can buy the physical versions of ships that you
fly in the game, as well as different parts that you can mix and match
(like weapons and wing styles) that would be reflected in Starlink.
Like the game itself, this was a good idea on paper.
But not only would it be an additional purchase on top
of the price of the game, it wasn't exactly rolled out and promoted very
well.
The game meant to have more updates and toys after the
initial release, but when all these plans were cancelled, it was assumed
to be because it didn't meet the sales targets.
Maybe people thought you needed to have the toys to
play (you don't).
Maybe people thought you needed to have the toys to
actually have a good time when you play (you don't, but they don’t enhance
it much either).
Maybe people thought that having toys at all was a
cheap marketing gimmick, a way to make an extra bit of money, and an
attempt to cover up any weaknesses with the game itself (well...).
To make matters worse, Starlink has an odd uncanny
valley situation. Their graphics aren't too realistic, but because the
humans are paired alongside aliens, they certainly look more realistic and
familiar compared to lizard, cat and bird people. But in this game, the
corny plot and awkward lines just heighten the uncanniness of the
earth-based characters and somehow make the cliched dialogue the aliens
speak less awkward.
Bad lines and a stiff performance is bad enough in a
movie, but it's magnified in a game where you actually have to interact
with these character, sometimes over and over again to complete a mission,
quest, or story beat. Saying the same line of dialogue can save time and
money in the development process, but can complete drain the realism out
of the game-playing experience. On the flip side, games that have a much
more cartoonish art style can get away with contrived plots and lines. Be
very careful not to sacrifice fun for realism. People play games for the
former, and the latter is a nice add-on, but only if it's done properly.
And Starlink's biggest sin is having some tiny little
bits of crud that get in the way of the fun (and there is some fun to be
had). In a game that is an open world (or really, open star system),
knowing exactly what you are supposed to do is essential. Not in terms of
how to solve puzzles, mind you. But when you have to go online to figure
out how to build something in order to advance the main story, there's
definitely some structural problems.
Here's a deep dive example for a game you (probably)
haven't played: You are tasked with building a massive Starlink energy
tower on a planet once you help your allies on the surface. But you aren't
told how exactly to do this. So you take time destroying some of the
enemies and wait for a prompt and none comes. You destroy all the enemies
and there is no prompt. You start to solve some the puzzles on the planet.
No prompt. You start to accept fetch quests from allies. No promotes. Any
search for help in your mission files still just says you need to 'help'
your allies. After checking online: You find that you need to kill half
the enemies and then a new option (build Starlink Tower) will appear in
the 'upgrade outpost' selection when you interact with one of the
outposts. But there would be no reason to check that selection again to
see if anything's changed if you had already upgraded your outposts to the
max. [insert ‘disappointed’ meme here]
'Starlink: Battle for Atlas' is unique for being not
unique at all. Even the best game has some problems that will bother
players, and even the worst game has a few redeemable qualities. And this
game manages to be one of the most okay-est out there.
Gamer Lore:
Daigo's Parry at a EVO 2004
If you know a lot about video
games (especially fighting games), you will know what's happening, but you
won't believe it.
If you know a little bit about
video games, you will see what's happening, but think it's impossible.
The first reaction might be that something is wrong with the
programming, that there is a sudden glitch in game play. Chun-Li is
unleashing a devastating Super Art move, but Ken isn't taking any damage.
It's not possible to avoid a power attack so perfectly, right?
If you don't know anything about
video games, it's just some anime characters fighting on TV and then a lot
of nerds cheering.
Here's a thought February 2020
Looking for patterns is ingrained within the human experience.
First and foremost, our biological process (as with all living things) is
based heavily on repetition, and our experience with reality around us
requires us to memorize, organize and categorize our sensory inputs and
make sense of them. We identify patterns both good and bad, and attempt to
manage our lives around them.
This occurs within society as well.
It is tempting to believe that we have found patterns when there is no
scientific basis for them. This can be both important (trying to figure
out why you have recently fallen ill) and frivolous (believing that you
'catch every red light' on the way to work).
Now, when studying history, it is logically impossible for events to
repeat themselves, but we can certainly learn much by comparing similar
events and trying to plan accordingly for the future (looking at past
recessions to try and prevent another from happening).
Quickly advancing/changing digital technology has thrown a wrench into the
works, however. Even if we can look to the past for some information on
how past societies dealt with issues that are similar to ones we face
today, our technology is changing at a pace unseen in history, and
consequently, our behaviour is, too.
More so than ever before, we are unable to look to the past for guidance,
because the present (and therefore the future) is so unlike even the
recent past.
Technology shapes behaviour, and we are in the middle of the greatest
change in human history since...ever. And while at first this might seem
like hyperbole, it is not so much the change to a digital/virtual
experience, but the speed at which it is occurring. The industrial
revolution occurred unevenly across the glove over a period of one hundred
and fifty years (if we go by late-eighteenth century as the start).
The
current digital revolution is affecting the whole world at once, and is
only fifty years old (when computers could first start to 'talk' to one
another).
It is no wonder so many people are so overwhelmed.
In stories, the best villains are the ones you kind of like,
respect or just want to see more of. Darth Vader, the Joker, Hans Gruber,
Erik Killmonger, Loki...they all have great lines, great plans, incredible
powers, and are treated right by the script, the story, and the actors
playing them.
Heroes are much more limited when it comes to the traits they can
possibly have. Even when you veer into anti-heroes, there's still a
character arc of redemption or a new appreciation of positive values. How
bad can a hero act before he or she is no longer a hero in anyone's eyes?
When a story goes to far, then it's just two bad guys fighting against
each other.
The better the villain, the better the hero looks when they final
defeat them.
This is not a new phenomenon. In John Milton's Paradise Lost,
Satan/Lucifer was by far the most interesting and engaging character,
spitting out lengthy soliloquies regarding morality, individualism and
regret (it was the 'yippee-kai-yay, motherfucker' of its time).
The surveillance state may be inevitable, and in the West we all might be
choosing it passively (we add cameras and sensors to our homes, while
stores, workplaces, and plenty of public areas do the same, all in the
name of protecting you), rather than having it pushed upon us.
And all of this footage is accessible via servers that exist far, far away
from the surveilled location. It should be no surprise that since a lot of
powerful corporations have access to the information (ostensibly having it
ready for you to watch), the government does as well.
London had long been the city with the most CCTV (closed-circuit tv)
cameras in the world (ostensibly to discourage/thwart on Ira bombings,
back in the eighties and nineties), but more and more of China is getting
caught up in this digital panopticon.
Will it comes to
the West?
Perhaps the
surveillance state will arise during the process of preventing the rise of
the surveillance state.
The government will
start on those it believes to be threats (those that genuinely want to
cause harm to the populace, like terrorists), the move onto those who are
simply troublesome in its eyes (immigrants, people of colour, union
leaders, critics of the government). And if more people criticize, then
the surveillance widens, and then everyone can effectively be monitored.
In public via cameras, and in private via the GPS on your phone (as well
as all the communications - from texting to banking to websites visited -
that you do on your phone).
If we grant that
the institutions and individuals in power (especially in high
concentration) will do everything they can to keep power, then taking
these steps are seemingly inevitable. The people who work for these
institutions can be a faceless rotating group of citizens who passively
believe this is just the way things are now, that it is just their jobs. If
the technology can, then people will.
We are treating 'speech' more like 'deed', where someone taking
mental/emotional offence to certain ideas or terms can result in
widespread criticism and isolation for the speaker. This is the community
attempting to police itself due to law and order not yet catching up with
what the community deems permitted or prohibited.
No doubt that people who argue that free speech is a basic right and who
feel that political correctness can have huge and unanticipated
consequences will be disappointed with how 'sensitive' people are
supposedly becoming.
Yet it is technology that is dictating these changes. People's physical
and digital identities remain separate for now, but this will blur to a
greater degree as time marches inevitably forward. While our Twitter
handles and Instagram profiles do not have to worry about stick and stones
(for our digital identities have no bones), there is still emotional
exposure there, and that means words can definitely hurt you (because this
immaterial form of interaction is all there is online).
Here
the importance of the body lessens, and the importance of the
non-corporeal concept of self rises.
What you do becomes less important than what you say. In a place
that is non-physical, saying is doing. You can't physically hurt someone
in cyberspace, so the wounds you inflict are mental. It is possible to
hurt someone('s feelings) without even intending to:
Involuntary Thought-Slaughter
In
the 21st century, Art (here using the very broad term, from painting to
video games) is expected to be self-aware and participative in its own
presentation of its socio-historical context. It is expected that within
itself is a defence from anticipated public criticism, whether this
includes how it handles matters of politics, social issues, gender or
diversity.
This is not necessarily a reasonable expectation.
At
the risk of putting too much stock in a quote, 'art is whatever you can
get away with.' (McLuhan)
Every artist is also a citizen, and in the role of the citizen they must
adhere to the laws of the state, and will ideally treat other with
courtesy and respect. Just like every citizen should do. But in the role
of the artist, this person should have no such restrictions. Here they can
'play', where no conventions or laws must be adhered to. The story, the
painting, or the whatever can be a thousands times for fantastical and
beautiful (or ugly and disgusting) than real life. Critics can argue that
it is meant to reflect a portion of reality and the artist can shrug and
say it doesn't matter what the critics or the public thinks. The act of
creation with such freedom is essential to being human.
Of
course it also should be acknowledged that art is so tied up with
capitalism that is sometimes hard to escape the fact that it is hard to
take the higher moral ground of 'free expression' when raking in grands.
As
the world economy becomes more digital and interconnected, the
incidental/unexpected effects of political, economic and social decisions
multiply.
Environmental changes, the rise in public/private debt, the rapid
disappearance of job security. These examples have their own wide and
intricate effects on how our civilization operates.
‘A butterfly flapping its wing can create a typhoon across the planet’ is
the old adage. Similarly, we do not realize how our individual actions can
affect many people in other nations. Every time we buy something – or
choose not to buy something, because of a social media post we read – we
can alter the sales projections of the company, and the CEO or board
members might make decisions for layoffs, cutbacks, or complete
reorganizations. And that can affect many people’s lives, not just in the
company, but all the other companies it does business with.
This is true in politics as well. The Arab Spring began when a frustrated
fruit seller in Tunisia lit himself on fire in the capital in an act of
protest over government corruption.
Bad
moods can topple governments, 25% off a similar product can bankrupt
companies, and every hamburger can raise the sea levels.
We
have become so accustomed to rapidization of our private lives (how
quickly we interact with each other, how quickly information/work is
shared, how quickly we can have a wealth of tangible items delivered right
to us) that we have become much less patient and are not willing to wait
for changes and reforms to our political/public lives. Massive projects
undertaken by governments - infrastructure, health care programs,
redistribution of tax dollars - take longer to create, support and
actually work, and it is easy for the public to lose interest or not
support it anymore if it does not bear fruit immediately. And the living
standards of the state suffers.
Let's not forgot that just how amazing the idea of 'whatever I need can be
delivered right to where I live in a matter of hours and whatever I want
can be delivered in a matter of days' really is, and how it is changing
human society and behaviour.
As
more of the global population moves to cities, technology can adapt to
them. Realizing that you are almost out of orange juice, you can think,
'next time I'm out doing errands I should pick up another carton', or
think, 'I am actually a five minute walk from a store where I can buy it
almost immediately', or ultimately realize, 'actually, if I willing to
wait a few minutes longer, I can have someone deliver me a carton of
orange juice right to my doorstep.'
While this seems mundane, it is actually incredible, and it is unknown how
much this can change not only the economics of our society, but our daily
standards and expectations of our society.
Rapidly developing technology has altered our conceptions of narratives
and meta-narratives. Our access to information and the varying
perspectives to this information is near-instantaneous.
The
subversion of expectations is baked into our expectations. We are looking
back at the same time that we look forward. The time it takes to
experience events is conflating. While an abstract, philosophical notion
before, now it is how we experience culture, thanks to the internet.
The
medium is indeed the message. (McLuhan, again)
Internet Rights
The
Internet began as the wild west/gold rush, and has become a giant
monopolistic enterprise run by a handful of wealthy Silicon Valley
gatekeepers, and the next step will be a heavily regulated
'democratization' of this now inescapable and essential component of human
society. The Internet is too important to largely be a money-making
enterprise for the few.
The
very wealthy people who run and own shares in companies like Facebook and
Amazon will loathe this transformation (it will be one hell of a haircut
to wealthy investors), but there will be a tipping point where what
constitutes your identity will change to give more legal protections to
your digital information.
Consequently, these companies will no longer be allowed to treat you and
your data (which will be viewed as an essential part of yourself) the way
they are now.
Certain social media sites will be identified as public squares or a place
where a community gathers, and this means they will be nationalized (to
varying degrees of regulation). This means there are public sites and apps
that can be considered 'separate' from other aspects of your online
identity. Certain password protected spaces will be seen as your 'home',
and rules about privacy can be applied to them.
To
arrange this, you buy 'space' on digital servers that is yours, or you pay
a fee to the government so they can set up this way of interacting with
the digital realm (and pay it annually for its upkeep). It is like
property, and you pay a property tax to retain this space that you will
furnish with your data/online identity.
But…will more wealth equal more server space?
Filmmakers can decry the dimming/dumbing down of the medium of film, but
the truth is that the people who do appreciate what is typically
considered to be 'high art' of the movie world have moved onto
appreciating similar form of creativity and exploration found in TV, video
games (yes, video games), and other artistic endeavours. Nearly one
hundred years ago theatre fans and critics were upset when people turned
away from that enterprise and instead focused on films, decrying these
'moving pictures' as nothing but a gimmick and a fad.
Times change and so does technology. These other forms of storytelling
offer something that movies could not. Streaming means long form episodic
storytelling, and video games offer an even more immerse and interactive
experience. Not that the movies are 'over' (just like theatre is not
over). It is now just going to be sharing the spotlight more with TV and
video games.
And video games themselves are changing into unique and artistic
experiences at a rapid pace. You are no longer just running around
shooting enemies or stomping on their heads. Play as a troublesome goose,
annoying townsfolk in the hilarious ‘Untitled Goose Game’. Get your inner
David Lynch/Steven Spielberg on with the dark, hypnotic, sci-fi puzzle
simplicity of ‘Inside’. Solve a heartbreaking family murder mystery in
‘What Remains of Edith Finch’. Step into the beautiful painting that is
‘Gris’. If all you think about video games is Mario and Call of Duty,
there is an incredible world of joyous exploration ready for you now.
Changes in the Heavens
Early concepts of the afterlife were either for
the god-like equivalents on earth (emperors and Kings were welcome to live
on, but the regular people were not, such as in Egyptian mythology), or a
meditative-like annihilation of self plus infinite regress (Buddhism,
Hinduism). The sun always took the centre stage because damnit, that sun
was oh so important to human existence then (and now).
In Greek myths, certain 'normal' people interacted
with gods, who usually watched from Mount Olympus high above (some of
these interactions were against these people's will, as Zeus had a
terrible habit of coming down to earth and raping women).
Trying to appease the gods above was done in many
ways, but it was always doing whatever the priests in the society said was
the right thing to do (funnily enough, it always started with 'listen to
the priests'). Not only was it relating to your behaviour, but also
sacrifice (typically making an offering of something of value, like an
animal you could have eaten).
But this wasn't because you, the average non-king,
wanted to live on in the afterlife. That wasn't in the cards. No, you were
trying to keep the gods (or god) happy so that they wouldn't curse you or
your offspring. These gods apparently meddled in everything. Your crops
died? It wasn't because of random bad storms or an increase of locusts.
God did that to you because you did something wrong.
With Christianity's rise, the idea of an afterlife
available for all that led the proper life god expected of them became the
dominant view though the Dark Ages (and was also adapted by Islam) and
into the Renaissance. The reward was heaven, more of a place than idea, a
paradise, something akin to the myth in the Torah (which both Christianity
and Islam sprung from) regarding the garden of Eden.
Depictions of heaven involved the sky, the
unattainable, the above, the place with sun, moon and stars, all of which
played important symbols in all myths. Where you couldn't get to and
couldn't understand...that's where God resides. Because that's what God
represented.
The Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead are probably the greatest American band. Their
competitors aren't numerous: The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground,
Talking Heads, REM Pixies, Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan.
[note the
intentional omission of solo artists (Dylan, Michael Jackson, etc.), or
solo artists that have a regular backing band (Springsteen w/E Street,
Prince w/Revolution and others)]
It is a divisive choice (some people really don't like the Grateful Dead),
just like America is.
The Grateful Dead
are the band that best embodies the sometimes glorious and sometimes
ignoble spirit of the United States. A
band with its share of luck and fortunate and triumph, as well as curses
and tragedy.
A band that
persevered through old-fashioned hard work (touring and songwriting in the
late sixties, early seventies) and became a great success, but was
ultimately overcome by bloated excesses (in part through middling studio
output post mid-seventies, and the addiction issues with several band
members in the late seventies onward).
A band of accomplished musicians from different musical
backgrounds and whose sum of abilities were much, much greater than their
parts. Blues and country covers mixed in with laid back psych rock.
A fusing of generational sounds. A little bit weird, a little bit slow, an
experience where you have to ‘buy the ticket and take the ride’.
Those who loved The Grateful Dead
loved them a lot, almost unhealthily so. The Deadheads’ (as they are
called)
passion for the band made the band seem unpalatable to others. Their live
shows became a spiritual exercises for hundreds of thousands of people,
but that meant they were all worshipping an overweight heroin addict
onstage. It’s complicated. Just like America.
But damn if ‘High Time’ (off
Workingman’s Dead) doesn’t just get you right in the feels and you just
want things to be how they were when everything was fresh and new.
A
Feature That Became a Bug: Set Election Dates
In
the 21st century, always having the same day (or month) for a national
election has become a terrible liability.
Policy decisions, candidate narratives, and pre-packaged talking points
can all be set up on a calendar, revolving around (in the United States’
case) the first Tuesday in November. Budgets for lobbyists, PACS,
committees and anyone who wants to put a finger on the scales of power are
set up around these election days, years in advance.
Campaigns cost money and spend money, and that means work, both direct (an
assistant to the candidate) and indirect (a web-designer for a political
website, a hotel owner in Iowa). There is an industry that revolves around
campaign season, and that means people are dependent on it growing, not
shrinking.
Fundraising results per quarter are like profit results for a company, and
the media attempts to equate financial success with electoral success.
Much of the donated money (some from average citizens, some from wealthy
citizens, much more through PACs and SuperPACs) is mostly spent on
advertising, so it just creates more powerful media companies that spend
more time covering the gossip of the campaign rather than the policy.
The
candidate has become a CEO of sorts, as well as the product.
It
is as if running a political campaign is supposed to be preparation for
the challenges you will then face if you win the election, but this only
true on a very superficial level. Making politics more like a business
inevitably results in frequent interactions with other businesses (read:
wealth) and much less frequent interactions with citizenry (read: poor).
Having all this occur on a schedule that is known permanently in advance
also creates media coverage like it is a sporting event. With candidates
ahead at one moment and behind the next, and whether one of them can ‘win’
a debate to mount a comeback.
All of this has absolutely nothing to do creating sensible government
policy for a nation.
Die Hard: A Critical Analysis
Reinforcement of conservative values
- the reuniting of a family for a traditional religious holiday, the
failure of the state (mostly foolish police officers and FBI agents) which
means the individual must triumph despite overwhelming odds (fighting
bureaucrats and the actual villains)
Class commentary
- the powerful men wear fancy suits, have lots of money (either the
businessmen at the party, or the terrorists, the latter with expensive
fake IDs and military-grade weapons), smile while they lie, can create
destruction with a gun or a pen (as Ellis notes), meanwhile the actual
good guys are cops in uniforms or plain clothes (or limo drivers, or city
hydro workers), speak a lot more plainly and directly, and are just doing
their jobs for much less pay
Neo-Colonialism
– ‘America’ is now beset on all sides, with Asian businesses setting up in
Los Angeles (Nakatomi corporation) and expanding rapidly, and European
terrorists here to rob them blind, it is up to an American caught in the
middle to assert his dominance, but for his own personal and professional
interests (saving wife and hostages, the latter because he’s a cop)
Hero Archetype
– the typical qualities of the protagonist and antagonist are turned on
their heads, with a mouthy, emotional (anti)hero, and well-dressed, calm
villain
Feminist - Holly wants to be seen as completely
independent (her own last name despite being married, a high position in
the company, how she takes charge during the hostage threat), but still
requires a man to save her (at the end of the movie, to truly be free of
the villain, her husband must remove the expensive wristwatch the company
gave her)
Media – ruthless, invasive and hyperbolic,
irresponsibly attempting to be first to report the story, threatening a
housekeeper with deportation in order to get access to the hero’s children
Spacetime and the Buddha
You can't have it both ways
In earthly (or planetary) terms, you can't go straight
north and straight east at the same time. You can go northeast, but that
means you're giving up a bit of both directions.
This basic form of physical limitation is seen in more
complicated aspects of human society and individualism.
You can't feed the poor while trying for a state of
total enlightenment in a mountain monastery. You have to descend from the
higher planes of existence to once again participate in earthly affairs.
God can't meddle on earth unless it has got a little
bit of 'earth' inside itself. Hence the constant myths and stories of
half-gods. Popularized in Greek myths, but best exemplified by Jesus.
For most of human history ‘god’ was the placeholder term and
representative of the unknown, and science has been set against the
unknowable because it’s goal to understand and explain how the universe
works without relying on an omnipotent agent.
But now we are finding that baked into the basic
operations of the universe itself is unknowingness and uncertainty. If the
rules don’t break, then they certainly bend. Heisenberg says position and
momentum get a bit fuzzy the closer you look, and quantum physics has
certain properties and events that go faster than light, like the space in
which light itself propagates. Hence:
"if you think you know quantum mechanics, then you
really don't know quantum mechanics" - enthusiastic
astrophysicist Richard Feynman.
It's not so much that you cannot understand quantum
physics, it's that to accept quantum theories and its conclusions you have
to acknowledge that there are things that will remain unknown, because
this unknowingness is built into the operation of the standard model of
physics.
By being alive and engaging with the particles in the
universe (in part by being made up of the particles of the universe), we
are affecting the outcomes and states of everything in the universe at
every single moment. Famously, it's by locating/measuring a particle's
position that we affect its trajectory. The particle does something that,
if we were not to measure it, it would do differently.
But this happens on a much wider, expansive, permanent
scale. Any one particle can affect any other particle, anywhere in the
universe, (almost instantaneously). This is quantum entanglement, and it
leaves the speed of light in the dust.
These contradictions and impossibilities in science (to
say nothing of dark matter and dark energy) are well-trodden ground for
those seeking spiritual enlightenment.
Hindu religious texts talk of reaching ‘higher than highest’, Jesus
is half-divine as well a being a third of wholeness of god (the other
being the concept of ‘father’ and the holy-spirit), and Buddha asks us to
renounce the material world even though we are material beings (meaning
inevitably to the renunciation of self, since the state of nirvana is
meant to be that is beyond individuality).
While science and religion take very different approaches to the
question of who we are, the ideas behind them sometimes intersect. Our
relationship between the known and unknown greatly defines human
experience.
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