Elvis Died For Somebody's Sins But Not Mine by Mick Farren

Author:Mick Farren
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781909394001
Publisher: Headpress
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HUMANITY V TECHNOLOGY

(WE MAY HAVE ALREADY SURRENDERED)

“Nothing can change the shape of things to come”

—Max Frost

“Belief can be manipulated, only knowledge is dangerous”

—Bene Geserit maxim

“It can only be attributable to human error.”

—HAL 9000

ON THE EVE OF WATERLOO, WELLINGTON CAUTIONED his officers about “running around like wet hens.” A cool simile, and still apt, after 190 years, when applied to our media, as we enter this brave new 2006. Tech is in such uproar that few can factor it into their thinking. 2005 saw unprecedented, multi-leveled upheavals in mass communications. At one end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times dropped in circulation, downsized its editorial staff, and gave up its online edition to free access/no subscription. At a far extreme, highly illegal, if enterprisingly twisted young boys sold webcam voyeur sex, quite without any recourse to adults except as customers and Internet providers. Change shakes windows and rattles doors. Something is happening here that is probably exponential, but does any one have clue as to what it is?

The majority of the power structures currently running this world have roots that stretch all the way back to the nineteenth century. Both Marxism and capitalism were products of Victorian smokestack industry, and early indications are that neither is making an exactly smooth transition to the high-speed, headlong, and unstoppable progress of twenty-first century techno-development. Newspapers flounder while what might have once been their readership reduces their attention span to the 140 characters of Twitter. The global economy teeters on the brink of the unthinkable as market traders treat money as an abstraction. And who the hell really knows what’s happening in China?

If current floundering augurs anything, the answer is “the hell we do.” While Netflix eats the video store, Hollywood thrashes like a dying ape, creating movies that look like video games, and wondering why the XBox generation fails to show at theaters. In a world that dreams of liquid crystal home cinemas with cheap Chinese hardware, and where game CGI is better than the last Charlize Theron movie, movie houses full of popcorn reek and babies on cell phones lose their appeal. Print and The Electron go head to head with the end maybe sooner than many expected. Daily newspapers show battle fatigue, and make undignified advances on the youth market, trying to prove they’re not twentieth century relics. But everybody knows that The Electron will win, if only because The Electron says it will.

The Electron’s Labyrinth, however, is not without conspiracy and conflict. Cable television/Internet providers slither fat in local monopoly, but phone companies are straining at the government leash to deliver programming to subscribers. Fundamentalists—via the FCC—have been led to believe they have oversight of everything, and now complicate every regulatory move with absurd stipulations of morality, and make the chances for even marginally intelligent solutions close to hopeless. The New American Century is hardly a golden age of clarity and vision. Communications are a massive sector of global Roll-erball capitalism, and operate with the same tooth’n’claw audacity that allows a Bechtel monopoly to sell the Bolivians’ their own rainwater by order of the World Bank.

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