Did humanoids of the past dream of wearable electric sheep?
Bluetooth as more than fashion statement of wearable technology-
What will the future bring? Mankind has always turned his eyes outward, upward, and most rarely, inward, to glean a light for which he might shine. These matters are witnessed, or divined, never told or heard, which rules out being bought or sold. On the interim, the future has existed in stasis as novelty consumer product, or, nothing important at all - as seen on TV!
Look at these stylish get-ups from late-last century which boldly state to the world, the present is the past, the future is now, and we’re crazy as ever!
Always imminent is the future, and the transcendental reality of what is being revealed to us in the moment. He who can see the present, can see the future, as the future of the future, is the present. Only artists tend to do this, and there’s a reason they’re often considered crazy, or strange - and the truth is, nobody else wants to know. Nobody needs the truth to live. Worse, the truth is harmful to life, especially in America where truth is falsehood corporately-state engineered and manufactured for the millions and billions, to have their reality contrived and dictated for them. What will the future bring? It has always depended on what the beings here allow other beings to create for them, be it people, dreams, religion, or technology. That’s what the (never-ending) war has been over, at least.
Speaking of this precocious production of the gimp Hephaestus, perhaps the most human of the gods in his ugliness and dependence: did you know the past used to dream of wearable technology? Some trends become a way of life, and some never catch on, and while the need (for novelty, change, challenge, stimulation) is real, the contrivances produced are not. Take a look (our fashion show runs in the video below from the 1:05 minute mark to about 7:52):
Maybe its not just the need to extract labor. Maybe the end user desperately needs to tune in or tune out with their tech? Now I think we’re approaching something close to “real,” and no, I don’t mean “real” as in the present or coming future is contrived for us by the machinery of others. The fashion show ends with the host stating: “most of these models won’t be available until early next century,” to which in our own consternation, we can question and mourn, did we come too late for CD-ROM shoulderpads? Or too early? The host goes on:
“It’s shaping up to be a future in which fashion victims make fashion statements by how they wear their technology.”
Like all consumer confessions, they take place in plain-sight, is as invisible yet there as the nose on one’s face, but are ameliorated in the consumption equation. Create the need, spread the disease, twist the knife, sell the ointment. This might sound modern, but is ancient: Socratism and Christianity set the stage for this approach. Cures are not business models, diseases will keep you employed and the masses busy for eternity. Tell them whatever they need to hear, sure, you’re the precious metals born from the heart of the Earth, bronze, silver, gold, aluminum, plastic, etc.!
From the advertisers themselves: “Product X is the sexy new (or old) thing that has what you need! You and life are insufficient without product X, therefor buy product X!” Don’t worry, the salesmen won’t judge you, they were counting on the marketing to drive the desperate masses through the doors, to the next car, the next destination, the next get-rich-quick-scheme, or whatever the fantasy being sold, is. Everything sold is to make money for those selling it, never to make money for the buyer, even though everything bought and sold, at the end of the day, centers not around “survival” or “good sense” or “human values” or “morality,” but status, plain and simple: everybody wants security, to feel special, to feel that they matter, to have others fawn and desire they and what they desire - Power at work, and in America, this means not just contracting and bargaining for Power with rabble at all stratum of society, but a sort of cultural spit-swapping of those too stupid to close their mouths and get away from the creeps who only have one message to relay to the rest of you for all time:
OPEN WIDE, SUCKERS!
American reality is contingent on this mindless consumption and its propagation. Selling both products, and the deluded and diseased ways of thinking and perceiving that map onto reality as to fit the product in, and the consumer last, are contingent upon leverage of all the lowest bars of intellectuality and desire, which means, attacking, criticizing, and judging the consumer to elicit a reaction, an unreasonable emotional state that can only be satisfied by the fantasy provided for, which, convenient for the seller, benefits them by costing good money, but is not meant to benefit the consumer at all. That’s not how or why business is done, especially in America. Business is done here, because America’s grotesque imitation of life must continue. To quote the tawdry and timeless modern lyricist Maynard James Keenan: “Shut up and buy!” - a lesson for the ages. Stop resisting. It’s easiest if you just buy, don’t make us, make you buy; don’t make us have to educate you what the right and wrong desires, are, for you and your life. This is all subtext though, found in Miranda rights and the like, not protection, a warning: everything you say and do will be used against you.
The point is, no thinking is not only preferable, but even necessary in most cases, as goes with a century of “made for TV products and people.” Being a McDonald’s works to mass produce hamburgers, but is a terrible business model for what passes as “a people,” which is why most advertising ignores all this to inspire the inner-lizard and outer-ape in every sentient being. That is to say, where advertisers can Cosby1 right past your brain and any possible critical thinking, and hit your brain-stem direct to produce the reaction they want, so much the better. That’s not just the plan, but the entire purpose: to twist the knife you can’t see, or didn’t even know existed, until some asshole invented it, like a priest conjuring a non-existent god out of “bad omens” and dark skies to demand his flock listen, or else.
As for anything non-sexual, there’s nothing sex can’t sell, and sex is all about status, and vice versa: where one stands amidst a herd of millions and billions, if you’re not at the top of the herd-heap, do you even exist? You’re a lone viewer, isolated and alone, amidst a mass of fellow lone viewers, being mass-marketed to, generally with the appeal of brand identity and the individual identity it confers, cynically marketed so: be unique, special, noticeable? Among the masses who also had the same programming designed and sold to them? This is why America, or the circus left in the disciplined wake of the memelords we know as the Imperium Romanum, can’t be anything but terminally cynical, and life here isn’t cute, sweet, or romantic, but spiteful, especially the closer to the bottom of society from which one attempts to crawl out from. If one manages this rarest of feats, what they have to learn is that the well-insulated people in positions above them, will always frown on those below them: they have to frown. Life is a lot of frowning for people who were never meant to be taken seriously, or take themselves seriously. Once more, the TV programming itself makes this clear, even in static, and always in reruns.
The moral of the story, then? There isn’t one, and if there was, it would be brand (or class) association - so buy brand X, or else. It’s what special people buy to prove they can afford to prove that they are the special people who can afford to buy brand X. Anybody whose somebody knows that.
Fortunately, advertisers are a very forgiving bunch. They very much care that the masses relent to their endless, daily assaults, and their existence and profit counts on it. Whether a politician, a middleman, another hack on social media or elsewhere: their salesman schemes and dreams are contingent upon the word getting out, and driving the consumer-base through the cattle gates to seek the new opportunities they…wanted to find? Were told to follow. They needed you to be hooked, and they knew it would work, which is why they spent trillions to have the world buy their products, use their services, build their roads, do their business, and all can be expected, for observed and known, “to follow suit.”
The dark side of all this? The last thing we’d want to do is advertise the truth: “Here we have Bob, who hung himself on a USB chord, sick to death as he was of the banality of it all - and tired of having his ass jacked into the Matrix.” But this is where '“good fences make good neighbors” applies. What was the dream? As the American term “fuck you money” illustrates, it’s not to give, but to take, and to get as far away from the rest of these dangerous and deluded nutjobs as possible.
Some things are eternal. Some things never change: humanity has always had their art, technology, and reality created for them, by others. It’s apparent as to be eternal, unchanging truth. As for the nature of it, we depart from the Greek sentiments to obtain Seneca’s words on the matter:
“We live according to fashion, not reason.”
Who cares of the reason? Making money sheering people like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums has suited humanity for all time, why would the present be any different? As for Seneca’s sentiments, it’s a good thing, or somebody might be grossly disappointed in “mankind,” if they were ever to try to take the beings here seriously, as beings. Yet when you look at what they allow be manufactured for them, shoved in their face, foisted on to all monetization facets of their consumer-designed, consumer-oriented life, one sees where the age old reason was supposed: people deserve what they get, and get what they deserve. If the world loves Cosby enough, to create and elevate him every time, everywhere, without fail, buying at Cosby prices, the values Cosby sells, then we have our answer. People don’t just accept it - they actively participate, seek it out. It’s fashionable to worship and imitate fools, and America has made this a pseudo-religion for a long-time standing, curating life and experience for the masses. American media illustrates this well, as do all the stories about Americans that make the news print, but not the video screens illustrates which better illustrate: there’s no office, no position, no idea so sacred or grand, that America and its foolishness shouldn’t Cosby it into oblivion, reinterpret it through its Cosby-lens, and then distribute it too all the eager hands and mouths.
Given the quackery and audacity of the masses and their fungineers, it at least has the illusion of computing, or computes to represent the image, to help you forget it’s someone else’s codes, or, ones and zeroes on a display screen. The real values? The real gold? That was exchanged for paper, and the paper itself for ones and zeroes, leaving the rest of humanity and the future, peanuts. Scamerica, we salute you. No other people or nation taught an entire human world how to sell bullshit, or to quote the hilarious 50 Cent - how to "“get rich, or die trying.” Who knew a nation could do both at the same time! The heart only ever has room for one master.
What am I really saying here? No, I don’t mean to play Luddite or curmudgeon. I have no problem using some tech, and ignoring the rest or pretending it doesn’t exist where relevant. To most humans, most of the world and its people and processes don’t matter, at all, or as American programming goes: how to feed the ego, or, how to condition someone to think their being is more important than existence itself (a religious mania resides here). The entire world is made up of myriad processes, of which the human world includes but is not limited to electro-plating, plastics, rocket-science, and computer technology instrumental to the very life of the masses, most of whom have no clue as to the parts or whole. “Who cares,” is the correct answer. Nobody cares for the sorcery in which its produced, they only want the final product, and they want it to work: something to give reason, design, meaning, efficiency to their lives. Surely more than busywork and fashion? Don’t look too hard. At best, you’d be disappointed, at worst, you’d become one of the legion of the damned. Recognize that modern marketing works so well, because people are so hopeless and hollow, as to not want it, but need it, and so have their lives, expectations, values, and everything fashioned for them, by others. In this regard culture is what it has always been - not a friend to the individual member of it (it has no regard for ‘an individual’). Even worse, in America, culture is a larval state of mind one obtains by watching, listening, and adhering to too much of the programming that was designed for them: arrested development, people can’t grow up, and seldom leave the headspace of emotionally volatile teenagers and high-school mentalities. Again, the consumer culture depends on these teenager idiosyncrasies and insecurities, to peddles what it does, how it does. America is hopeless people and nation, and this hopelessness makes its markets go round.
This is how advertisers, through the corporation state and its media, have completely fungineered not just wearable technology, but the consciousness of the modern psyche, or as has been called, a perpetual warfare, the self under siege, until it at least disappears in the objectives of modern marketing and advertisers: the only things that are real, are apparent, obvious, copiable, and reproducible. The net, net of it is “psychoanalysis in reverse” - the medium is the message, you are the message: you are target, audience, and victim all-in-one, and also its Typhoid Mary, Silly Susan and good old John Doe - repping the brand, carrying the broadcast, the medium and message forward. Thanks for working as unpaid labor for the company, or as the corporation states: “you’re part of the family.”
As with heads of household through all time, there can only be one leader, few trendsetters, and everyone else has to follow (or else). Technology doesn’t lead the way, it just makes it easy to inflict anything you like on an eternity of fashion victims.
As for the hopeless conditions I mentioned, why the average consumer is helpless to not have their lives imagineered for them? Before it was bankers, debtors, salesmen, and technology enthusiasts, it was priests castes and classes, or other appendages of the state (the few who always wield total power over the many), but its also personal, and no advertiser could ever create the individual’s life and experience, even though like all marketers, the best business-people, philosophers and gods learn to take credit for what they can’t take credit for. Perfection? Redemption? How about a desirable future? Deliverance, then? To, and from, what?
I recall listening to the radio some lonely nights as a kid, and in between the commercials, which read to me like static, dead-air, there were the voices of the show-members, and the music, and that was letting me know, things are okay with the world. A night light of sorts, but for the ears, not the eyes. It is through technology all such comforts are accessed, where real humans aren’t present, or present, but still not present. We all know this yeah? Of course we do ; )
Technology, like style and fashion, art, is never “one thing.” People use and adopt it for all manners of reasons. With tuning in, comes the blitzkrieg as well - that’s not your fashion, or your media, that’s a space curated for someone else to sell you something.
Some people wear Blueluetooth, to tune others out of their environment. The politest thing such a Bluetooth wearer could say is, “I’m wearing this to pretend like the rest of you are not here,” or the way they wear their fashion really says, “Pretend I’m not here, and especially not as a sort of ‘talk-toable-object.” Or perhaps, “Pretend I’m just one machine among many, it’s not far of a stretch.”
Some wear Bluetooth to tune into others. Some wear them simply to stay jacked in, because who could stand to be so small and alone and powerless in such a wide and all encompassing world of twisting cables and machinery and electric that manifests its dominant and totalizing power before our very eyes, and has been for generations? Or, what if there are monsters in the closet, or what if they come after me while I’m alone or in the dark? Better tune in, better to view, better to follow, better to leave that night-light on. Even if it does and changes nothing, it feels better, and sometimes that’s enough. Seneca understands how all this is beyond reason, just short of falling into endless abysses: pasts that never were, dreams that never flowered, and futures that will never be, one instead stops short, and finds comfort in the familiar, in the repetitious.
People question why Art no longer reflects life, why there aren’t original artists anymore? A century of dystopian novels should tell you why: that is the production, and the reality people do not want to see. These are all the majority aspects to human reality, that are completely left out of politics, television, and other fictions, and all the real places where nothing happens, or, where history stops. That is to say, there is almost nothing that can exist for modern people that wasn’t created for them, claimed by them, owned by them, known by them - a leveling process of all time and distance, that robs man of all innocence in becoming. Comfort makes little and grand tombs alike. There will be almost no novel artists because genius is the rarest thing in the world, there isn’t a surplus of it hiding anywhere; the investments are incredible, not measurable, not understood, and you don’t get second chances; the average repetitive world is a war of attrition against all genius, and against all novel dreamers and their dreams. What’s known and now is always the enemy of “the better could that be” and every other “possibility” that is undreamed of or not recognized until someone forces it to be so.
These things don’t happen with fights (see the aformentioned ongoing war), at least when it comes to anything that is real, or matters. American commercialism has been a blessing in this regard, a good proxy and nihilistic representative stand in for “life, future, and man.” It’s like a well-kept zoo in this manner - a bit of a playground if you’re rich (and watch your ass as closely as your nose), if not, you’re the animal in the cage, or one of the animals who take care of the animals in the cage, or your tending to the machinery behind the scenes. Wonder what kind of hidden Brahman built such a strange sanitarium and menagerie? The kind who knew for whom, and how, to make it profitable, that the standards wouldn’t be high, and the opposition, intellectual or otherwise, would be so minute and rare, as to be minuscule, completely negligible in the total mass of profitable human bodies - nihilism achieved, realized. This present system is no different than the medieval bonds of old in terms of sagging structures that always somehow zombie on longer than they conceivably could, or would - none can escape, all are overtaken by the horde, and the message from that age is the same as this one: if humanity had their way, these largely unimaginative animals would have never left the trees. Having left the trees, we would then live in the stupid ages for all time, or just as bad, the church, but it was bravery and creativity that set man in motion, and it is only these two things that will keep him living into the future, even if most of the species is increasingly dead and dull inside. This is what it looks like at scale. Que the need for prescription medications, and serious denial through “idealism” - which of course sells better than anything real, that isn’t directly profitable, or, removes the layer of sublimation from the show. Think of the difference of being a doctor performing surgery, and someone who is not a doctor, and has no interest in the medical field at all, watching a show about a doctor performing surgery. All these people live in completely different worlds (the real doctor, the TV viewer, the TV writer and actor, etc).
As with all other business, corporate buzzards have picked every carcass of every art and artist clean over the course of the last century, salting the fields of the dead as they pass through as to make sure none shall grow or profit here, and when the quintessential corporate hack finally killed the artist (after making millions off his back, while paying him pennies), they agglomerated his works, scraped it with AI, and repackaged the same old burnt-out future of yesteryear once again, while paying the artist, that perennial sucker and dreamer, nothing for it. But that’s just life. There wasn’t important things happening here. People just needed money to get by another day.
American business, that is, the need for the many who give nothing, to take everything, has killed American art, and damaged the minds of those it infects. The American state, just like the church and people themselves, ran out of ideas a long, long time ago. It’s only been the Einsteins and Oppenheimers and Werner Von Brauns and other weird geniuses, deranged, and often mentally unwell, that, along with the American artist, have helped contribute to the best, most alluring dreams ever concocted on modernity’s receding stage, which is to say, the idea that anything new, and creative, or the idea that a people, and their lives are transpiring here, is the greatest illusion of all. It serves as warning, and attracter.
That is the ultimate illusion - that anything is anything, but what it is, except when it comes to ugly reality. We intentionally ignore that, and write scripts over it, because people prefer scripted to unscripted reality, it’s more clever. Or maybe we’d prefer the familiar and warm, to the hostile, alien, and ugly, of which no people have ever been in short supply of. As for the rest of what there is to say on art, those paths have been trodden, retrodden, resampled, remixed, and resold again, just as I’m sure more Hendrix tunes will be used to sell more burger king whoppers (everything repeats). By the time you play out ten 30-year cycles of advertising the flame-grilled whopper with “let me stand next to your fire” playing titillatingly, scintillatingly over a video of burger ingredients thrown around a production studio and green screen, you’ve almost certifiably started a new religion. The children will love burgers and Hendrix, not know who they are, or why, but the legend has been flamebroiled into the fabric of their own being at this point through algorithmically curated target marketing and its repetition, at this juncture, and our ways of life come full circle and are completed. This is how people are started, and continue.
Not only must every sanctified grave be overturned and robbed, so must every wild forest be cut down, all the ground churned up, every last log burned to melt and mint every penny available, until there’s no humanity, no future, no artist, no dreams left. If America has one success, and it does - it is this: achieving non-entity status, a new sub-human low of all human history, but that’s not the story we tell or sell, is it? No, don’t listen to these people talk, its as impressively stupid as it is horrifying, but just look how pretty they are, and how white their smiles! Crest fully clean, mentos and zest and cola and all that and more! The commercials have blurred together in the consumer orgy singularity of no future, yet, what’s one more plank over an abyss? We like our marketing like we like our reality: lies!
For so much “on offer” - who could or would miss out? This is beyond what people call “FOMO” - or fear of missing out. Once we turned the TV on, we never turned it off. Or has been said, a possibility once, becomes a need forever, but those needs create new needs, they never stop forever at one, to the consternation of monotheists, idealists, or anyone really who seeks security and power in this world where technological nihilism, a step beyond the psychological nihilism of last century, now rules. What’s that mean? Now the machinery will unplug us, before we could ever unplug it. Those who think these problems are singular, social, solvable by law or state, and not total and all-encompassing, have been well educated and blitzkrieged by their reality’s programmers and designers. They are the ideal consumer, its product, and message and brand, all in one, and as the human heart knows, no relations being equal, that there can only be one.
If you can’t have one god, one people, one nation, one revered spouse, especially anything resembling “the ideal,” let alone “the real,” the next best thing will have to do. Whatever the future brings, we know it will be fashionable, and while expecting good taste is always a stretch - we can at the least, hope above all else that the future Will indeed be stylish, if nothing else ; )
Cosby-ism, or, the Last Eichmann’s Patriarchy - A style of culture, family, business, and marketing fostered as incestuous and dangerous ingroups of predators and prey, as made famous by Christians, especially in America and the UK. The lack of concern, and the enabling of such predation by large, powerful corporations and countless conspirators in low and high places, shows you how deep and dangerous “the real world” is. Jimmy Savile is an infamous case from Britain of of such a wide-reaching Cosby network. He makes the common and average American gooner (child-predator or otherwise) look like they’re not even trying.