For a future we can all relate to.
I returned home to a message on the answering machine, a digital recording locally stored just as in the days of analog cassette tape. The facsimile of the voice itself, too, was of a computer, as the original message was an apparently typewritten text message, which was then read by a robot larynx service so that advanced hominids can accommodate the endangered troglodyte. If time travel were possible, this'd be it.
The problem is, People Of The Future, I can't understand you. Maybe you could speak more slowly, mind your Ps & Qs (& Ts & Ks).
And I cannot identify your number because I lost my phone. I know this is the running bullshit excuse, but I have
documented evidence here if you don't believe me.
Why am I getting so defensive? Okay, I admit it. And since I have it on goog' authority that state-of-the-art hominids don't click on complementary links, I'll excuse myself on the technicality that I have, of course, pencil'd each & every number into my analog address book (same one going on two decades). But you see, Dweller Beyond the Cave, as easy to read as those lead marks are, they are not cross-filed by number; for there are two things I refuse to do in this regard (three if you count not cross-filing) and that's get a smart device or search my entire address book for a number.
What good am I? I'm using this computer, aren't I? Why am I getting so goddamn defensive?!
__
Moron missing link
It occurs to me that the technological advances that achieve the dual duelling result of making life easy & queasy are so numerous as to make the human not just incomprehensible to ancients like myself but also to the smartest version of themselves. Whence the coining of 'cognitive dissonance'? This language they've created to describe the dilemma does nothing to counter their forever recalculating tipping point, not that the tipping point itself is doing the recalculating. A recapitulation of duelling denials in due time.
For sure. there are many fissures past that've held the rift 'til today. In respect to (& apparent lack of respect for) the state-of-the-art hominid-named Anthropocene, they have become gaps gaping back at virtually everyone who's ever adjusted their rearview. But this is a digression, for I mean to refer here to what reminded me of this, which is those technologies that at once enhance & diminish the quality (and quantity) of interpersonal communication, without which quality the collective cannot converse about anything but "the conversation", and then ineffectively.
Benevolent Billionaires: They plundered themselves!
The claim by hominids who were raised on two-car plots that they can't forgo the
Fahrvergnügen of fossil fuel (gotta figuratively feed the family) forms a feed-loop of similar effect to what they could confess cannot be done without today: these always newly updated new-fangled talking toys that make what seems like yesterday's way of living inconceivable (yet I think I'm still talking the wheel and fire here).
The conversation is constant and the frustration frequent, but all bets are on the benefits of having a connection. Collective consent is plausible. Each extra application is optional to the individual, yet unimaginable to most. Beneath it all lurks the notion of
compulsion. Deeper still lies a kind of
coercion. The choice of terminology is what's not being denied by the chooser of the term. Who but the lexicographer can say for sure whether 'denialism' denotes a blatant refusal of accepted reality or a latent rejection of discomforting truth?
I've claimed the existence of two types of climate change denialist: 1) the dreaded disbeliever in human effect; 2) the critic of the former who spouts as if their own connotation of denialist is the only thing standing between present projections and the bringing of the Earth back from the brink of present projections. The former would say that they aren't buying the bullshit, which the latter either deems dishonest, especially as it relates to the position of industry, or ignorant. It's a different bullshit they're not buying.
What they're buying is somehow lesser and better. The only way to improve their own lesser & better consumption and to lessen & better the worse consumption of their lessers is by way of benevolent coercion by billionaires who run the putative pragmatists they prefer to vote for.
How many of the above have their own wheeled combustion, if not two, to haul their rotund rear-ends to places to reinforce what makes them so well-rounded? Where does the roundness begin and where is it shameful to even mention (or be posted to one's mentions)? When is the trip detrimental and when is it indispensable? Just how small does a contribution have to be to be negligible?
Ennui
My abstinence above from the plural 1st person is so as not to identify you in "we". I used "you" in the opening paragraphs where it equals whoever might have left that message on my machine. If you feel implicated in any of the subsequent theys, that's on you, but I do count me in both we & they when I tell you that I ask these questions of myself and, despite a belief that I burn an above average ratio of my own energy to live and a claim on my part of my part as only a part of the Pillage People, I nevertheless hasten to add that I deny the sensibility of believing in relatively harmless levels of rapaciousness amidst this enmeshed network of planet pillaging of ours and am convinced that a technological brainwashing of state-of-the-art hominids convinces them not only of that fallacy but compels them as prime contributor to the overall level of ravaging.
This horse is being flogged by individuals automated to increase their consumption, book it to the archives, and face one another delimited to a handful of choices of expression of preference (or simply set to 'ignore'), irrespective of the belief about- or level of awareness of the mask of light reflected across the ayes of each lone ranger.
I have proof of nothing but if I were called to testify, I'd say I suspect we're all full of shit and that a measure of each as compared to the whole is pointless. I'd also note an absence of evidence that there is a conversation expressing an authentic desire to do anything significant about it.
It's not in the interest of the captors' court to issue subpoenas even where their subjects' love is in effect unconditional. The trial, if there was one, would go to the issue of how we're held hostage. The testimony would recount our apparent assumption that our addiction is worth our abduction and how each shot of serotonin makes the promise of depression all worthwhile. A scintilla earns a lifetime of devotion. </swipe>.
