“Matter is mostly empty space,” Luna piped up on a walk through The Club’s bocce courts. “Ergo, everyone has a big sucking vacuum between their ears.”
“Ergo?” I quired. “Fancy word for a fido.”
“Fancy?” she sniped. “You wouldn’t know fancy if it bit you in the Birken.”
“Give me a break. You can’t even carry a handbag-”
“That was a metaphor, you dinkbink. Seems only Er–Go between your ears.”
“Haha. Er– let’s go, Kid.”
every song about new york city wonders what life is like anywhere else
There will be a day where computer generated images like DALL-E outnumber actual photos of actual people, places, and things. At that point, images of reality will be more and more rare – and less believable, or relatable.
“No way that’s real!”
“Uh, it’s a picture of the actual Grand Canyon.”
“Haha I flew through that in Meta on a Jetpack. It was fun to bounce off the walls.”
10. Photographs are form of listening.
20. Listening is a form of mind-reading.
30. Mind-reading is a form of photography.
40. Goto 10.
The only people who complain about fame are celebrities.
Most tweets have zero likes.
The last time they checked, in 2010, 71% of tweets went off into the ether, unliked, unengaged (never to marry). We’ve only gotten lonelier since.
200 years from now there’ll be an advertising metric around how many likers of any tweet are still alive. There will be tweets with 200,000 likes where, like, 197,000 of those likers are no longer around.
Lol, “Dead Twitter” takes on different resonance when everyone who ever tweeted is in the past tense. Savvy celebrities will will their social media feeds to favoured family members. Most people, tho, will have no one to continue paying their hosting costs or iCloud subscriptions beyond this life. Some insurance conglom will def get skin in this game.
:30 SECOND SPOT
CLIENT: GEIGERBERCO INSURANCE
AGENCY: SOCK DRAWER STUDIOS
PRODUCER: CAMILLIS RENVALL
INT MIDWESTERN KITCHEN, 2078, LATE AFTERNOON, FALL. Pot roast in the oven. Sunset through the window. GLENDA, 78, checks on the roast as she talks to EUNICE, 84.
EUNICE
Glenda, can you believe what a funeral costs these days?!
GLENDA
Tell me about it , Eunice. Soo expensive. But it’s got nothing on keeping up a digital life after death.
EUNICE
Digital life? Like, OpenLife? Or Littergram?
GLENDA
Not just that. We’re talking any part of life you pay to put online. Photo storage, music, a Dropbox, verification badges – Hey, didn’t Henry’s Minecraft Archive Verify fee go up?
EUNICE
Oh, boy, it sure did. I never thought about that! Henry would kill me if I let his Minecraft builds expire when he does.
GLENDA
Exactly, Eunice. That’s why Kyle and I have internet life insurance from Geigerberco on top of our real-life life insurance. They will maintain all that stuff when we’re gone. I mean, why die online, amirite?
EUNICE
Oh you is, Glenda. You is. I’ll talk to Henry tonight.
VOICE OVER
Learn more about Internet Life Insurance, the life insurance for digital life. From Geigerberco Insurance, the protector of the gone.”
END ON fuzzy focus on the kitchen scene, GLENDA and EUNICE wrapping up their confab. SUPERIMPOSE full-screen with GEIGERBERCO logo, phone number, website, etc
Lol in Twitter bios when people write (wrote?), “RT’s are not endorsements.” Sure, the RT may not endorse any “pernicious” ideas in the RT, but, honey, every tweet ever tweeted is an implicit endorsement of Twitter.
And the only way to rescind that endorsement is to Fully. Delete. Yourself.
Then there’s the world where your Twitter deletion request gets put to public vote, the same as re-instatement has been.
Everyone thinks dystopia is a velvet rope that keeps people out when dystopia is a velvet rope that keeps everyone from leaving.
And, in the end dystopia is only dystopia to people who lived the difference.
People think the party’s over when you run out of beer, but in truth the party’s over when you run out of ice.
-Westy Reflector, 1999
Crazy how the Big Bang’s being proved by observing the nanosecond aftermaths of CERN nuclear reactions.
Maybe we were programmed to develop nuclear weapons because the universe needs us to explode atomic bombs to create more universes. Like, two atoms smashing is how the universe fucks (or at least asexually spawns).
Quantum theory doesn’t prove life is but a dream. Worse, it may prove we’re just a passing thought in some being’s head, and they’re already on to the next thing. Like, maybe, they’re programming the simulation to allow dogs to drive.
You can’t call a slow-motion disaster everyone watched develop for years, an apocalypse. At that point we need to call it our fault. And admit that we wanted a tidy ending to everything all along.
Like, if enough people become certain of the apocalypse, the Rapture happens as an organic result.
And believe you me, enough people out there want a Rapture. Judgment Day might even be a pay-per-view event.
Imagine the selfies.
Certainty is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy.
In the end, certainty, not stupidity, is the true epidemic of our age. Everybody is just so fucking sure they know the answer. To everything.
Srsly, how much intrinsic value anymore is there in originality? What even is original now? Nothing comes out of thin air – not even ideas.
Most “invention” is conflated with mere discovery. Newton didn’t invent gravity – he just discovered it. It was there all along. And even then, in reality, lol, the first person to go Splat! chasing a saber-tooth tiger over a cliff, discovered gravity. So Newton didn’t really discover, so much as explain Earth’s pull on us, using the constraints of our language.
Jury’s out as to whether we’ll ever understand the forces that create the universe. Humans are best at quantification, and yet the universe is in the long run unquantifiable. All science, in a way, no matter how beneficial to our existence, is an adventure in pure folly, because there will always be a place too vast to see in whole or too atomic to slice in half. Curing cancer is still a rage against an uncontrollable light. (That said, I hope we cure it.)
For sure if we ever “discover” the switch that turned the universe on, we’d figure out a way to flip it off. Or at least some cabal or another would always be threatening to flip the switch for profit or power.
Hi ho.
Most things that are “discovered” or “invented” were there all along, waiting – just begging – to be found. Everything is so obvious in retrospect that it’s painful.
The only thing in the last 60 years that’s actually been invented from nothing is Pickleball.
Today…
The world is not an idiocracy
(Where no one knows they know nothing, so everything’s ok.)
The world is a smartocracy.
(Where everyone knows enough to think they know everything, so nothing’s ever ok.)
And in the end… this smartocracy (or an intellio-cracy, if you will) strolls hand-in-hand with a media-cracy, where our physical lives are spent in constant mediation between machine and mind.
Artificial intelligence and robots will first come for all the jobs that require repetitive motion and linear thinking, but eventually also will usurp all work, even the work that requires the most abstract thinking (like, say, a Supreme Court justice). In the coming paradigm, you can’t afford to be stupid, but there will be no need to be so smart, either. Just look at the winners of Survivor and you’ll see what’s ahead, too.
As for plain-ol’ demo-cracy?
Hi ho.
