The new frontier: rebuilding our lost cities – Levi’s style
The death of manufacturing and the towns it leaves behind–like the home of a dead person.
Beautiful, but sad.
Living life online–as if real life isn’t enough
How the fuck am I supposed to keep up with them–the fads that we’re all hoping to be THE early adaptors of. Hell, if I’m the first to post on whatever the newest Twitter or Facebook is, then I might have a bigger audience than the later adaptor. It’s all for the audience. What kind of narcissism are we creating as a culture–are we taking self-involvement to a new level? Will this evolve the next generation and the one after that to new negatives and new psychosis? Will the PTSD of online life be the next psychosis we first won’t accept as a reality, then we’ll slowly embrace, then finally start developing drugs and rehab for it–finally a reaction to symptoms but not addressing the cause.
Of course addressing the cause of PTSD would be to stop fighting someone else’s battle in the Middle East. Oh wait, it is our battle because it does feed our consumption. So keep fighting, Jihad on those Jihadists. Thanks Obama, for continuing the fight. What would we do without that form of job creation in this economy? Sad sad. But fortunately I can foursquare myself while I twitter and post to Facebook. You know my location, my thoughts and my friends and family. Someone else knows my social security number.
Perhaps if we remade Fight Club it wouldn’t be the Financial district that we blow up in the end, but the servers for Twitter and facebook. What if we blew up those facilities–what would life be like–how would it be reformed? I guess, because it’s the web and only information and bits, it would be living somewhere else in a matter of hours. But it would be interesting to blackout the online lives of everyone for 24 hours–would panic ensue, would people riot? Would they take to the streets? Or would they just be angry at facebook, sue them for lost content (lost lives, or moments in their lives, lost thoughts? Lost comments? They were valuable enough to post, are they valuable enough to want saved, archived, zipped up somewhere, preserved? Has this become the sum of their lives? Will their future generations want to discover their ancestors personalities by reviewing their facebook pages–which will probably still live somewhere, if the venture capital is still funding it)
I guess the only answer would be to take people’s internet away–because Facebook and Twitter would quickly be replaced by competitors or by other versions of themselves. Is online living an effort at immortality? Is it the new sought after spring of everlasting life? Or is it just another form of plastic surgery, cover-up and mascara, to present only the side of yourself you want to present, or re-imagine. Is it vanity (narcissism) over the fountain of youth?
If I answer a job post now, I have to prove that I’m living online, that I’m following all that’s new and improved on the web. What have I gotten myself into? I have no interest in living online, in receiving more messages than I can handle each day, from too many sources–even if I’m using the best collator of all that content around–the newest one, the most user-friendly. I don’t even know what that is right now.