Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’
I’m never going to use this fucking thing.
Staring at a computer screen at 3:15, reading shit that I won’t remember in the morning. Every night, another one-night stand with some part of the internet, for no other reason than that I’m not wired for agricultural society’s sleep patterns. We hold to institutions from centuries past despite their irrelevance. I may be a conservative, but damned if I don’t have a hard time of it.
Consumption is effortless. Production, not so much. I stopped writing a year ago, and I stopped animating several years before that. Progress is the reduction of effort spent. Progress means mass consumption, technology to do our production for us, and who knows, maybe electric monks to do our consumption. Robots worshiping at our silicon altars, spitting out summaries of today’s sermons. So, monks, who got voted off the island this week?
Effort is the inverse of alienation. You can’t feel the emotional effect of a book from reading the Cliffs Notes, and the same principle applies to your life. We care more about things that we put more effort into. So what end does this progress serve?
The futurists were wrong. They got that progress will reduce effort, but they missed that production takes effort. Hell, I have all the time in the world; college is effortless and interaction is nonexistent, both thanks to the wonders of the internet, the single most significant piece of progress since trains made it possible for all things local to be crushed under the boot of the Almighty Dollar.
Progress.
I can’t write anymore. I can’t sit down and slam out an essay on one coherent topic. Just this stream-of-consciousness bullshit. Unedited, unfiltered, incoherent, damn this language for ruining my alliteration, and damn the Romans and Normans for making it that way. I suppose I just don’t care enough anymore. When I wrote on a regular basis, I had a whole campus full of supporters: trust fund babies indoctrinated into a reality tunnel diametrically opposed to the very idea of recognizing my views or experiences as legitimate and not the mad inventions of a raving racist with a redneck accent and reactionary politics. (Not that I can deny the last two points, of course, but I was a libertarian back then.) Why bother writing things that don’t stir shit up? I figure that if nobody wants to kill me for saying something, it wasn’t worth saying in the first place.
And I can’t even stir shit up anymore. I’m too distracted to speak, and my would-be audience is too distracted to listen. Welcome to the Age of Mass Consumption.
Consumption is effortless.
Progress.
They made a porn parody of The Big Lebowski.
I should’ve been a goddamn Viking.
