Benblog

The end of history

When Ceaucescue's Romania fell, the first thing the dissidents took was the state television station. During Tianeman square, we even know about the event because of the internet.

The ability of individuals to convey perspective more broadly than ever before, defeating, ultimately, the power of mass media, by making a media of the masses.

Over time, I believe this will help achieve piece.

The Future is Here

We watched a television commercial on Tivo tonight where you could order a subscription movie channel simply by pushing select on the remote.

Before long, politicians and charities, even retailers, will be able to allow you to make a purchase on impulse. This makes the neutrality of the net absolutely essential if we are to allow the full power of the internet to reveal a more comprehensive invisible hand to make manifest.

Working overseas with overseas developers is making the world much, much flatter for me, and I think when you allow a widely distributed and accessible marketplace to unfold, human relations have a way of working themselves out more quickly than a society where the few hold power over the many, requiring a level of unhealthy (for everybody) ideological and physical oppression to maintain authority - the more ideologically and, especially, religiously based, the easier it is for a priviliged class to hold sway over the many.

Distribution of Thought

As we create a world in which more people have access to the means of distributing content, there will be a subsequent increase in the number of content producers, whether on the micro scale of having an easy to use content management system, or on the macro level of music production and distribution.

Evil Food Science

I have to say that having had a McDonalds chocolate shake on the way back from Xmas, they have concocted something that resembles a perfect shake, and I'm sure they know how to mimic the mouth feel of real cream on the tongue and give it a little extra lift with the carageenan. But it's not something I'll ever try again, for fear that my olfactory will confuse it with the real stuff, and replace my actual scent memory with the corporate intruder.

The power of brand

I realized today, using my Morton salt Spanish Sea Salt, that one value of brand is distributing goods more cheaply to more people, especially when the brand is a little more staid, maybe not as nimble.

Keeping the faith

Yesterday, I was interviewed by Channel 11 news reporter about what I thought about gas prices. I almost told him he wouldn't use anything I said on the air, and I wish I would have, just to throw out a gauntlet. Divurgent views do not get air time, especially if they in anyway challenge the consumerist paradigm. I said I thought gas prices were artificially low, and that as a result we have an unsustainable transportation infrastructure, and people going off to war to protect our petroleum economy. I also mentioned that despite the fact that prices were lower again, I was still trying to ride my bicycle to work or meetings, and that my wife was carpooling, especially in light, for me, of my cousin being in Kabul, and that I thought other Americans were catching on as well.

Language in media

I wonder if people understood back when language became written how much it would radicalize the transmission of information. I watch shows like Robot Chicken and Family Guy and the packets of info they contain are so rife and ripe with meaning. Writing is still essential - look at how many years writing has survived, and how well read writers inform the next media, but subversive shows are the antidote to the subversion of free expression Christo-fascists would like us to submit to, in the name of their false Gods. Not that the media has it right, but the words we find course in our language will be the (not entirely translatable) Shakespearean English of yesteryear - Shakespeare was not popular because he was proper - he was popular because he was violent and sexual and vulgar, helping some of us, in future generations, begin deconstructing the language that sometimes calms our limbic brains enough that we can hear a moral truity.

Watching Nanny 911, with only a few episodes, the fathers and husbands are abusive - no doubt about it - and the kids probably addicted to TV as a palliative. But you would never see Fox portray the reality of what is so disruptive to those children's lives, just as Dobson would have us beat our children to save them - we are oriented towards the father simply lending more of a supportive hand, not ending his domination over his wife, his wife ending the use of television as a pacifier. We don't see those elements in our easily packaged 1-week segments, as if the woman is to be blamed for her victimhood, the children for their sense of distraction, as the parents work too hard, if only the father, to achieve an unsustainable level of consumption globally, as is, as Ari Fleischer has stated so clearly, the American way.

The horror, the liberation, the polarity to manage. Pluralism.

How smart were those late 18th, early 19th century dudes? What has happened to all of us since that brief enlightenment?

Soma, anyone?

Tracy and I saw The Island last night, with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johanssen (whom I hope will maintain her real body - she seems to be getting more Hollywood), which I thought was going to be some overly obvious social satire like The Matrix. Fortunately, it became a rolicking good action flick, and mostly softened of the Brave New World feel.

One of the more interesting commentaries in the film was the notion of conciousness. You could almost feel the film makers getting into a little over their heads, and backing off the fundamental questions of what comprises individual being, which is so much more than what exists in our own little heads. The message that with compliance comes a loss of individuality and free will is compelling in itself - the next level, that in giving up freedoms for a false sense of security, protecting what we think of in our limited view of self, we limit our full potential, not just in our "performance" but in our survival as a species.

Lincoln goes back to save the realized conciousness, rather than simply saving his own skin. That represents a higher social evolution than the personality he cloned.

The other fascinating aspect of this film is that it offers so much room for interpretation and debate, whatever your politics or beliefs. This is one of those rare summer blockbusters that offers more than just thrills, but an opportunity to debate core issues in a fairly neutral way. I found myself going over my beliefs checklist and finding ways that the movie both supported and refuted those ideas.

Laugh tracks

Deborah pointed out tonight that Seinfeld has laugh tracks. I never noticed, and it is as if my entire memory of the show is questionable. Part of that is true, but I realized that one of the things most appealing about laugh tracks on shows is that when people watch something funny (and there are hilarious moments in Seinfeld) and hear other people laughing, even in the privacy of their living room, it makes them feel less alone. Even something like The Daily Show, or the Chappelle Show (with its intermittent stand up), help build an audience by creating some shared community, in the dark, in front of the warm glow of the television, telling you what is funny, what is scary, and what you need to simply feel more alive or safer, as if anything outside you can lead you there.

Thats of the ironies of the extremes of radical individualism - the one diminishes the self to a consumer of items and ideas, the offerings we receive from consumer society, that that will bring us happiness. The other recognizes our fear of mortality, and how we play that out by wrenching struggles with death, requiring an almost spasmodic grasping towards the divine, fearful of the unknown.

Neither bring satisfaction - in the case of consumerism, you only hunger for more, and your cravings never subside. In the case of religious radical individualism, you insist that your version of God is the only way to salvation, and are fearful of belief structures that take you out of that comfort zone. Both perspectives lead to greater unhappiness, not only in the world today, but for future generations.

The assuaging of fear by consumption has fairly obvious consequences. The assuaging of fear by worshiping a jealous, vengeful God denies the divinity to which it lays claim. One of the underlying tenets of world religions is that divine force, whatever the name, is love. Even if God doesn't exist, we are still taught the importance of believing that God does love us, despite all our imperfections. Shouldn't that be the greatest example to us of all, to love one another, to accept our imperfectibility, our fundamentally flawed nature, and be happy, and, in religious terms, to even be filled with God's grace?

The scariest combination is consumptive zealotry, as if, as Jerry Falwell has been quoted (possibly misquoted, or taken out of context), "Material wealth is God's way of rewarding those who do his will," those words have replaced the true context and meaning of Jesus' message - in some of his most corroborated teachings. Unfortunately, the notion of the widow's penny, the smashing of the money changers tables, the story told to the rich man, which probably actually corroborates messages of radical communitatianism shared in the old testament.

When I see how everyone is so ramped up and angry, and our television programming so amped up, even the commercials, especially the SUV commercials, I fear we will have a collective heartattack, taking down a big chunk of the health of society with us, from which may take years, unfortunately, of even worse violence before we overrcome.

The manufacture of history

When I think of an epic film like The Aviator in the context of historical texts, I wonder which is ultimately more accurate - the actual, so called recorded history or a presentation that recreates the feel of a personality. Certainly, a fictionalized account may take some liberties, but what are our lives if not stories?

I wonder how people would feel about their own accounts if they thought of themselves as primarily accountable for living a decent yarn, rather than being so caught up in the vagaries of reputation or social mores, or the limits of what one can reasonably do. Lives are only what we have of time, nothing more, and to shop up for class as expected, as it were, leaves not much room for being accountable to our true potential.

Part of me wants to pick apart the film, what I think may already be untrue, but I am also left with what I think may be a record of the man I could never understand from text alone.