The End Will Come With A Whimper Not A War.
This is a repost of a ranty post I wrote pre-Covid 19.
The End Will Come With A Whimper Not A War.
We blew it.
Ever stopped and thought about why you live in a world like the one you do?
Probably, briefly, when at your most content. You’ve stopped to think about the lot of people less fortunate than you are at that given moment, as your feet are up and your belly is full, and your day is free; you’ve cared about the lot of your species, ever, ever so briefly. Then netflix has loaded and you’re back in the zone.
I get it.
I’m a human being too. I’m a slave to thirst, hunger, sexual release and avoiding too much effort.
Our needs are taken care of, on the whole, in my world anyway. We are controlled by them and our corporate overlords know that. They control us with gadgets that make us feel enriched. They’ve made our needs accessible and affordable and we’ve all fallen under the spell. As our struggle with urges are dampened with the ease of accessibility to ‘urge protectors,’ we’ve allowed the creativity to die. Without struggle, its hard to comprehend what art is at all and where it is born.
Why write, or do anything creatively any more? You have nothing to say surely? Your content. Contentment is the enemy of invention and that’s what the man wants, contentment. Even those of us who are driven by the desire to write can fall foul of this. I have.
It’s good to live in a country that is largely contented and has its needs, mostly, taken care of. I mean, sure we still have homeless people dying beneath motorway overpasses where they are forced to sleep because they couldn’t make ends meet, but they also don’t have social media to complain about it on, given their status and poverty, so it no longer matters to anyone who does. You can read this, you can share it, no one cares; no one cares about these words or the plight of those who exist outside the perceived reality narrative. Collateral damage from a contented world, that is all they are. No one wants to have their boat rocked by that, so its best I just leave it as a glossed over moment here. Sorry about that. If you quickly justeat yourself a pizza and watch some more Family Guy the moment will be over in your mind like it simply never existed. In twenty minutes the body is taken away and you’ll hear nothing about it on your news apps, phew! Sorry, I am now rocking the boat myself a little. Should I do a sad face emoticon or selfie snap of myself with a rolled down bottom lip onto instagram? I’m never sure which one is the most sincere.
If I may indulge myself, as I’m allowed to do these days by internet law, I’d like to go a little rose tinted with my spectacles that are no longer the right prescription, but when they were the world was just dandy.
In the olden days, where I come from, you know the past, yesterday…? Ten minutes ago? I hope someone remembers. Well we had a thing called the proper internet. It existed before smart phones, and apps and social media. Oh yeah and let me tell you two things about social media, its not social and its not media, so stop pretending you’re Kim Kardashian. She can only get away with it because she’s also famous; famous for sucking some d*ck on camera and then somehow accidentally allowing it to leak out to the wider world. I mean before that she was nothing more than the daughter of a lawyer who helped a man who is now serving life in jail for armed robbery get away with murdering his wife and her lover, which is enough to be famous these days, but still she has some kinda back story which is based around the fact her dad helped a man get away with brutally murdering a woman who had enough doubt in her mind not to love him anymore and look elsewhere, and now Kim has a perfume line, a fashion line, and a line of morons wanting to see her latest mostly naked selfie from her facebook page that comes with a link to her husbands latest album et al… but I digress.
Proper internet was just that, proper internet. People had pages of innocent information about their cat, their love of Star Trek, their writing and a list of the ten things that are continuity errors in the Back to the Future films. It was a simple and better time for the internet.
Now the internet is a wild west of anonymous messaging apps that are used by terrorists to blow people up as they walk around innocently looking for Pokemon characters, websites dedicated to social media so that ordinary people can feel like celebrities because they now have the ability of celebrities to stage manage their own persona and endless news sites begging for your unedited mobile phone footage of any tragedy in the world so they can have a scoop that inevitably involves showing barely visible, blurry footage of someone’s loved one lying in a pool of their own blood.
The world has gone mad. And the internet has fuelled it all.
You can shout all of the platitudes that the owners of these website shout but they are meaningless and corporate. You earn them cash as you share your misery.
People are getting too used to just being able to click something, to get something, like Pavlov and his dogs, or was it Skinner and his rats? I can’t remember anymore as its been more than ten minutes since I studied psychology. But if the power went down right now or the internet froze for 24 hours we’d have death, destruction and anarchy because the species that dreamed of more and more labour saving devices to make them move around less and consume more and more were offline, clueless and angry at being expected to make any effort.
And all of the minimum wage, gig economy people who deliver all of these services, in reality, would be scared of unemployment too, and they have so many pay day loans too.
I sometimes wonder what the end of the world will look like. As a dreamer and a writer I expected an apocalyptic battle between Humans and disease/an evil genius/alien invasion.
But in the end we’ll fight a battle with nothing.
We’re an oil crisis away from self destruction.
How far we came, how far we rose, and how far we will fall.
Can we bounce?
No, no we can’t.
People splat.