So it's like this ... (The YANLI Manifesto)
This is the kind of society we live in. Your value as a being is, broadly and generally speaking, literally your value -- that is, how much you have and how much you can spend (particularly this last; I'd point to that social pressure as the chief reason for the explosion of untenable consumer debt we've seen in recent years).
I'm not even saying that's necessarily or entirely wrong. To a certain extent, if you're not contributing greatly to the arts or the sciences or philosophy or things like that, the one thing you can do is work and buy things. And if everyone stopped buying anything but the bare necessities and made everything else themselves, I daresay our society would collapse. But everything in moderation.
And we've now arrived at a place where we pay for everything -- our TV, our internet, our telephone ... even water, despite the fact that there's perfectly good stuff coming out of our tap (though sometimes it may need a little filtering), and still we get marketed to.
With technology, too, it's possible to crunch data about us that we didn't even know we were leaving behind, so as to narrowcast advertisements and endlessly customize media and online content to match us and only us.
In the process, we become prisoners of what the computer thinks we are. Our identity is that trail of things with which we've identified ourselves. We become slotted into an increasing number of tiny boxes, usually to the exclusion of other things. We become a listener to British hip-hop who gives to Republican candidates, reads the New York Times, watches The Office and only calls long distance to Pennsylvania, and always from the cell phone, which has a Lady Sovereign ringtone purchased for $2.99.
Each of those bits, and hundreds more besides, puts us in a little box from which those who study the data think they can draw information about who we are. Each of those choices implies the exclusion of others, because when we become one thing, in the eyes of those who need to study these things, we equally become not a whole bunch of other things they've decided are mutually exclusive of the thing we are.
So when you are logged in, you are telling The Machine to classify you, to stratify you, to tell you who you are. What I strive to be about here is shattering that paradigm, embracing the duality and multiplicity of existence and embracing the necessary hypocrisy of modern life. Because if nothing else, if you can hold two 'opposing' ideas in your head at the same time, or see how they're not really opposites at all if you hold them at the right angle, you at least have something going for you that the Neo-Cons never will.
This is not a political blog. But politics may enter in sometimes. I can't help it; I'm a political animal.
But music, pop culture, consumer electronics, the fate of humanity and the incredible shrinking (and simultaneously ballooning and growing-more-complex) global village, random deep thoughts and carefully considered silliness ... I intend for them to be more the par for this course than the heavy blog entry you're reading now.
If you're reading. I can't tell.
You are not logged in.
I'm not even saying that's necessarily or entirely wrong. To a certain extent, if you're not contributing greatly to the arts or the sciences or philosophy or things like that, the one thing you can do is work and buy things. And if everyone stopped buying anything but the bare necessities and made everything else themselves, I daresay our society would collapse. But everything in moderation.
And we've now arrived at a place where we pay for everything -- our TV, our internet, our telephone ... even water, despite the fact that there's perfectly good stuff coming out of our tap (though sometimes it may need a little filtering), and still we get marketed to.
With technology, too, it's possible to crunch data about us that we didn't even know we were leaving behind, so as to narrowcast advertisements and endlessly customize media and online content to match us and only us.
In the process, we become prisoners of what the computer thinks we are. Our identity is that trail of things with which we've identified ourselves. We become slotted into an increasing number of tiny boxes, usually to the exclusion of other things. We become a listener to British hip-hop who gives to Republican candidates, reads the New York Times, watches The Office and only calls long distance to Pennsylvania, and always from the cell phone, which has a Lady Sovereign ringtone purchased for $2.99.
Each of those bits, and hundreds more besides, puts us in a little box from which those who study the data think they can draw information about who we are. Each of those choices implies the exclusion of others, because when we become one thing, in the eyes of those who need to study these things, we equally become not a whole bunch of other things they've decided are mutually exclusive of the thing we are.
So when you are logged in, you are telling The Machine to classify you, to stratify you, to tell you who you are. What I strive to be about here is shattering that paradigm, embracing the duality and multiplicity of existence and embracing the necessary hypocrisy of modern life. Because if nothing else, if you can hold two 'opposing' ideas in your head at the same time, or see how they're not really opposites at all if you hold them at the right angle, you at least have something going for you that the Neo-Cons never will.
This is not a political blog. But politics may enter in sometimes. I can't help it; I'm a political animal.
But music, pop culture, consumer electronics, the fate of humanity and the incredible shrinking (and simultaneously ballooning and growing-more-complex) global village, random deep thoughts and carefully considered silliness ... I intend for them to be more the par for this course than the heavy blog entry you're reading now.
If you're reading. I can't tell.
You are not logged in.
Labels: hosiery, luminescence
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