The drone filled sunset, buzzing and whirring like Google streetview with timeline accuracy, we lament the loss of freedom on our facebook accounts, uploading our sad and long faces to be facially recognized by the image-recognition software, pumping out buyer profiles to the bakedgood/transfat/bluejean patriotic beanbag retailers. You like it? Have you read the fine print?
Privacy is a construct which will eventually be packaged and sold by the same people that are stealing it from you. Those same people work for the same boss. It all leads back to the Buck$, in high backed jet blacked leathered chairs of nanorobotic ergonomic sculpting, to fat asses and bulging wallets. They have you hooked on your friends, posting pornographic consumption of plastic and crates and barrels, cementing the Nation of Want and Desire.
The 2009 Warhol Buck$ has evolved into the 2013 Warhol Buck$. He still actively peddles green economies and politically-induced product placement, but he is now cashing in on your social meditations. Still, as always, the only social networking he does is naked and on a yacht, with pounds of cocaine in pillowcases and champagne by the keg. But he has you hooked into some sort of town hall illusion of effectual change potential, through shares, and retweets. Youtube is only 8 years old afterall, but it seems we are lost in an eternity of longtail. Whipping us around like ragdoll avatars, eyes bulging and ears bloodied. We still haven’t grasped the McLuhan immensity: content is NOT king. It’s a slave to the context. It’s medium witching.
I am not advocating the full ludditian unplugging, but at least a greater sensitivity to what true protest looks and pains like. A shaking of the collective shoulders, saying, dear friend, look at the mess we are in. Is all lost, are we expiring on the shelf amongst animated gifs and buckets of larded information? What are the glimmers, who are the chainbreakers, where are islands emerging from the sea of bytes and bits and bagel bites? The Atlantis archipelago, rising its spiny back out of the quagmire of tabloid royalty and mirroring bull-horns at the Church of Status Updates
It is in this mounting tension that the future advances. On one hand, I see it in the saints of disrupted expectations, the hope of the extra chromosomed, the consumer rebellion of garage sales, and the slow rising discontent of the 98%. All this pitted against the natural and gradual absurdity of professional sports, Metta World Peace, the return of feudalism and the ravenous merging of the religious right and tea-party militia, Taco Bell’s waffle tacos, the cable-channeling of the English language and its inevitable infestation of the human tongue. But the future has always been now and always around us, we are in the constant Apocalypse of the fading present.
Our only choice is to fight back with absurdity, to dismantle the false babeling hierarchies of beauty, success, power, excellence and efficiency. We swing at it like Don Quixotes with cardboard swords, microtonal choirs, and street waltz. We drop bombs of hiccups and jalopied chariots of infinite zeros. We make wardresses from discarded work ties, bling out with chotskies and plaster critters, duct-taped kneepads and bottle rockets hot glued to bike helmets. No allegiance other than the sanctity of all time and space, all of its travelers, and the complex relationship between dirt and sky, gravity between their lips. We dance the light eternal, sing the war song of wide supernova space, we pray to a deity that crushes comprehension.
