Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Jul 6, 2010
Minor Random Observation
Cell phones, and other portable digital communication devices, make pets of their owners. A person carrying a cell phone pays a very large corporation for the dubious privilege of wearing that combine's digital leash and tracking device, consuming its content-exclusive digital mush, and guaranteeing that all the minor meows and growls of daily existence retain a nearly permanent documentary form, which the corporation also owns exclusively, and sells to pet maintenance facilities, otherwise known as data mining operations...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
I don't know if it is aways pets. Mine turns me into a baby, hooked by an umbilical cord to my mama. But I've been immature for a long time.
Here, here!
I thought that when I quit using one that I'd have the nagging something-is-missing feeling. I can now confirm that, quite to the contrary, I am often reminded just how freeing it is. And that was before your post.
Will (the r)evolution be tracked? Not if it's to be a realvolution.
Infant, pet - s'all good, drip.
*
Davidly,
Wife and I ditched ours, respectively, after working 24 hour on call jobs.
Freeing is the exact right word. It wasn't a perfect divorce (we bought a disposable for a 2200 mile road trip, to keep in touch with the other members of our caravan), but c'est la vie.
No one can fucking dial into our existence on their own whims, anymore.
Yum.
Respect,
Jack
Technology is the opiate of the masses.
Lenin's pissed, he never imagined people would worship technology when he said religion was that opiate.
Did y'all see the XtraNormal cartoon posted over at Siftung Leo Strauss, mocking the obsessive iPhone fans?
Charles,
Always thought Marx, et al, were wrong on that account. Religion is the opiate of the ruling class, since it allows them to relax whilst the hoi polloi police themselves.
As for tech, methinks you've nailed it on the head. But, an expensive fucking opiate, what with all those oil components.
*
Sometimes my wife and I will sit down in a public place and share a bunch of truthy stories about the passing channels of cell phoners, teenaged drones and wireless netizens, taking the snatches of overhard and self-important loudness for our base material.
Good fun. Good, clean fun.
"Technology is the opiate of the masses."
Indeed it is.
And it is "an expensive fucking opiate, what with all those oil components."
Still, I myself partake of the opiate (in various forms) from time to time---what can I say, I'm borderline "generation me" (1981) and we were raised, by and large, to worship the damn stuff.
So I instead strive to "worship" only the Creator, to love not only myself but equally my fellow man, and to use the opiate technology only as needed, and not at every passing whim as my peers seem wont to do.
Ah, Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451 people didn't sacrifice their lives and their knowledge for technology until televisions took up entire walls in a household, and people made "staying home" a permanent practice. Instead, technology struck its lethal blow not in the form of a gigantic, personal screen that kept people at home 24/7, but rather in the form of a miniature, portable screen that let people be "on the go" 24/7, all while being superficially connected to the entire world---and in reality only connected to their own personal ego.
I work in the technology field so it's an opiate that pays the bills. Being as young as I am, I only have vague memories of a world without cell phones and your example of going without one, Jack, feels so unnatural to me. The pet process is complete in me, I suspect.
I hear you, fwoan. My husband works in the technology field so it is also the opiate the pays our bills.
And of course without the opiate technology, we wouldn't all be here talking about it in the first place!
I'm not looking down from a perch, condemning what has become a necessary survival tool, for a lot of people.
I'm just noting that the necessity makes pets of those who are leashed by it.
Just take a walk some day on a busy street and look in on the passing cars. How did anyone get anything done before they had (insert chosen leash type here)? Most drivers are texting, talking, working, playing, socializing on some piece of oil. It's a chance to teach your children more survival techniques while you dodge these busy multi-taskers in an attempt to cross the street. It does beg the question "why do we even leave home anymore?"
Post a Comment