Here’s an excerpt from a story I’m working on. It’s still amazing what can fit in your pocket these days, but while standard computing and gaming devices like iPhones and Mini-Wii systems continue to dominate the market, the most expensive and advanced personal computing device, the Time Box, has had a rough couple of months. Both the recent problems with the marketing and introduction of Box3.0 which met with less than the projected demand, and the chorus of consumer complaints that the Time Box version of history is too self-contained and static ( for instance, thousands have written to the company and complained that their visits and revisits to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland always concluded with the Titanic sinking), has led to a downturn in the company’s stock. While educators, science fiction fans, and historical hook-up artists are still purchasing the box, the company must do something to increase sales beyond these niches, and the company is pinning its future to the hope that version 4.0 will reinvigorate sales. The new Box includes many features consumers have come to expect with hand held computational devices like the Box. Partnering with Sprint and Dell, the new Box will allow customers to make cellular calls from the past, to maintain an internet connection as long as one is within the last thousand years of history, and to photograph and video tape both past events and encounters with what everyone agrees is an ever expanding present. –The WSJ, December 20th, 2013
If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire died years ago, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should serve. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while it’s hard to fathom that the product may suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, in a world where people have no history let alone a future it’s conceivable. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.
Just doing my part to catapult the propaganda. I look forward to seeing this movie in the theater in October.
Here’s an excerpt from a review in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer points out several “flaws” in the film which, from my perspective, all seem like strengths:
As an alternative to the profit motive, the filmmaker cites the example of Jonas Salk, who gave the public his polio vaccine rather than patent it. For his part, Mr. Moore gives the public plenty of snake oil. He blames government and industry for the decline of American unions without mentioning foreign competition. He illustrates the scandal of subprime mortgages with glib cross-cuts between bank executives and Mafia thugs. He shows the anguish of an eviction, which he characterizes as “a robbery,” without a clue to its factual context, and assigns far-reaching significance to a family of Miami squatters in the process of reclaiming their repossessed house: “Sometimes,” he says, “revolutions begin in unlikely places.”
In this year’s 9/11 extravaganza KMO welcomes Doug Lain, author, editor, and fellow podcaster, to the C-Realm podcast to help make sense of some 9/11 themed commentary from James Howard Kunstler, John Horgan, Gwynne Dyer, and (indirectly) Douglas Rushkoff. Doug & KMO then continue the conversation in episode 22 of the Diet Soap Podcast. Lorenzo Hagerty of the Psychedelic Salon adds his perspective on attitudes surrounding 9/11 to the C-Realm mix in a prelude to next week’s show.
HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?
RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.
A very thought-provoking collection. Taken collectively, the stories have a real undercurrent of melancholy and even anger to them, but individually they’re breezy and quirky and amusing. I kind of like work that pulls me in different directions like that, so Last Week’s Apocalypse really pushed my buttons.
Commercial filmmaker Jon Kane joins the Diet Soap podcast this week to discuss his work with Godfrey Reggio on the nonnarrative film “Naqoyqatsi.” Also included this week is Genevieve Valentine’s story “Synergy” as read by MK Hobson. Sound collages featuring clips from Pepsi ads, Mountain Dew ads, and the pro-situationist film Call it Sleep are also featured. And Miriam pops up in the end with another Titanic factoid. You can download the episode at podomatic or subscribe at iTunes.
This episode features an interview with Jason Horsley, host of the Warty Theorems podcast, leader of the Stormy Weather Existential Detective Agency (SWEDA), and proponent of paranoid awareness. Jason and I discuss whether the Universe needs us to create social change, whether or not we can shut down the factory or tear down the wall, the story of Osho Rajn […]
