I remember talking in the tens about the correlation of the aughts with the advent of the means of observation you're looking at now. I remember in aught-one, my first online argument took minutes to dial up and download; once it had begun, its continuation curated, concurrent to the anticipation of a response hitting my observation glass, an adrenaline rush of agitation that augured the required effect of the growing technical efficiency of this process.
In case you're confused, I've not got that backward. The tech growth alone can't necessitate its necessity. It requires the effect. You could say, as has been said, that the striving for that effect has taken centre stage, and while "need" is inaccurate, the conjuring of need from the shallow end of desire is just one aspect in these roaring twenties that's not necessarily new.
I remember strolling past rows of newspaper boxes prior to the turn. Some required a quarter-&-a-half to access the eye-grabbing content; others you could grab for free. It's important to note here that the truly valuable stuff was behind the flaps without a hitch. Everything enriching was in those pages. People, their pets and their culture, and how to engage with those people, walk those pets, grow in communion with the culture. Everything else was spackled upon the Times.
For the most part, back then, the demon that was not so new was the observation glass that projected the urge for all the things that shed destruction. Even if as implied, all that bled was not read — an innuendo that would mock the boob tubers' tendency toward fearful fascination in peak audio visual ascendancy — the Tribunes, too, remained a platform that was gawked upon.
It's where you went to dig deep into the news that was afoot. It didn't mean you were smarter than anyone else, although I'm sure there are studies that indicate a level of readers' being more informed. Aside from there having to be a point of diminishing value when it comes to loading one's mind with bits of detailed information, when that information diverges from the headline that got you there, you might call it quarter-&-a-half bait.
After all this time it's tediously cliché to shake one's head at the masses in unbroken stride while glued to their newspaper box display windows. So what if they spend most of their time looking at the personals. For here we are.
The business model has not changed. For all the rightful wringing of hands about the big baddies surveillance of minds and manipulation of the same in striving for ceaseless access to attention spans, you'd be hard pressed to make a case that it would be possible without the wilful submission of their targets. So what else is going on?
The message is the medium. It undergirds a great notion that survives on vice. The truth in the argument that there's no freewill manifests when there's no will to resist what the argument's selling, the ultimate result of which is the notion life has no meaning except in buying pointless arguments that lend the utility to define the parameters of future arguments.
Only if you've supplanted your reality in favor of another are you a simulation. Anybody who makes the claim that alone due to some possibility it's in any way probable we're already living in a simulated reality is advertising to the vice that would rather not take responsibility for one's own.
It also happens to use the philo-sophistry that just because someone said it, it's possible. If that someone is a construct-like creature of a human who just happens to be able to cast spells upon the desperate in their need to be pumped and dumped, you might want to take a closer look. Or look away.
