On Autopilot: Yodelling into the Digital Void
Having successfully equipped myself with precisely the wrong set of mental tools and concepts to survive in this particular hyper-commercial and aggressively competitive world, I find that utterly galactic-scale psychological alienation and social dispossession have set in. I can not see any adequate method by which to improve this situation and precisely because I can see that there is no wise Controller behind the Wizard's green curtain, no central pivot to configure and no adjustable logic which might alter this situation. Flying as it is on virtual auto-pilot, this is a world that in gestalt is seeking little more than simple self-propagation through the collective, blind and unwitting ignorance of hundreds of millions of passengers. A vanishingly small number of us are running around the back of the plane trying to warn the other people about the risks of our collective direction. It remains both bitterly and spectacularly ironic that being able to see the nature of this problem does not avail ourselves of resolving it.
A non-trivial problem seems to be that this program is running "headless". For all the self-congratulatory denizens of C-suites shuffling profit reports and all those disingenuous political power-brokers enjoying their own variously-acquired cultural status-aligned return-on-investments, this process is running without any presentation layer, user interface or metaphorical cockpit. In all those places where it seems as though political pressure or sufficient intellectual influence might generate a deviation of course or produce some generalised collective or distributed benefit and narrative effect upon this self-accelerating horror of hyper-technological directionlessness, it also emerges that there is no weakness or point of leverage because there is no controller or control-set to manipulate.
Through identifying what I perceive as the agent-less, center-less and subjective vacuum of this self-gravitating beast of global directionless acceleration, I am confident in my ontological accuracy and quite able to generate endless thousands of words on the topic. But there is no point. Again, having acquired the conceptual tool-set and vocabulary with which to identify this staggering headless monstrosity and self-reflexive teleological negation, I find that the psychological and existential incompatibility between possession of an awareness of the problem and a capacity to successfully continue to exist within this world, so fatally captured in orbit around its own yawning void, remain discontinuous and deeply problematic.
,,, don't you wish you took the Blue Pill?
ReplyDeleteNah, there are certain aspects of the human gestalt which are drearily predictable. Competition, if you're a human being, is pretty much reduced to seeing if you can get away with breaking the rules. For that, you need lawyers. But if you want to break the rules, then you need the services of politicians, who are also for hire.
Further affiant sayeth naught.