Text and Hubris

I was feeling nostalgic so here we go. This is a throw back to what the Greyrealm and Text and Hubris used to look like. Sometimes, simple is best.

What to do, what to do? I sit here and stare at my future. I have three papers to write and all I can do is ponder how to merge them all into a new media narrative. I feel so far behind and yet, in some ways, I am still ahead. My goals are coalescing. New Media narratives can and do exist but only by accepting that we cannot hold on to the paradigms of the past. That includes the paradigms of the the Internet.

New Media is not youtube, it is not the Gutenberg Project, or Google’s mad dash to digitize all text. Text exists within and without. Narratives are human creations and we now live inside and outside of the machine. Inside the machine the world is only slivers of grey. This is the Greyrealm that has hosted me for so long. Beyond the realms of that are only illusions and vast tracts of advertising. Narratives exist in between. They exist in the colleague who tells me of a dwarf who stands against the horde. They exist in a boy who delights in telling me how so silly tripe changed his mind and in the many shared laughs caused by that cursed narwhal song. They are teh reason that a crappy boy band from – what was it, Moldova – will be forever remembered for one really annoying song. New Media is the narrative of life and in that it is no different from the narratives of the past. The only real difference is that more people are talking and more tales are being told and the giants of old media are doing whatever they can to make money while the giant corporations of new media prepare to devour their forefathers.

Into all of this we are born, the storytellers of the digital age. Finally, I think I start to understand. The technology I have spent my life wandering through, the digital wastelands that encompass most of my life exist because I can tell a story with it. All this work…and now I sit and look and realize the tools before me. I have them. I am ready.

Wow…I hope I don’t fuck this up….

I am taking a course this semester on The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. This past Sunday, the professor offered to show the class Pasolini’s 1972 film version of the tales I racconti di Canterbury. She stressed that attendance was entirely optional but said she would buy pizza for those who attended. All we had to do was sign up and then show up.

In total, eighteen people signed up. I was actually impressed. A lot of the people in this class seemed to be taking it to fill a requirement, but this showed me that more people than I expected were actually interested in expanding beyond the required subject matter. It turns out that I was wrong. Of the eighteen, only five of us showed up. This would have been fine if the professor hadn’t been kind enough to order the pizza. Since she believed 18 people were coming, she ordered several pizzas. In fact, she set everything up for eighteen people and what she was left with was nothing but pizza and disappointment.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. I work all day and sometimes part of the night. I do everything I can to stay caught up and to pursue my education and that is a full time challenge. I hate that I don’t have the time to take better advantage of the opportunities out there. Most of the students have no such excuse. They are there, ostensibly, solely to learn. Many have only a few classes and all the time in the world. I can’t imagine wasting that when so many different options are offered. These speakers, symposiums, lectures, studies and readings all help us to expand and grow beyond the confines of a classroom.

The bad news is that college is going to end for these kids and the world outside makes finding things like a viewing of a Pasolini film far more difficult. The sad news is that most will probably never care. In some ways I think I preferred being studying on my own. While I have found my return to college to be a positive experience in regard to my goals and my learning, my faith in the future of mankind is even more shaken. I always expected apathy but I am truly amazed at its depth.

“This is how the world works!” they told me holding forth the paper, white and black, in outstretched hands. “Read the words, learn the secrets, you too can have value.” It was hard not to retch. I imagined a life spent living in worship, in pursuit of a number, a number arbitrarily assigned by towers who only saw me as a unit in their vast operation. What value did I want with their enterprise? What care did I have for any of them. These vast creatures that devoured humanity were not to be trusted. Their victims, still chanting before me, confused and disturbed by my resistance, grew silent. These people, these worshipers at the idols of gold and silver never owned anything. They toiled for a tower that gave them a shelter, they toiled for a tower that gave them a transport, and they toiled for a tower that gave them food. They sold everything to own nothing and I pitied them.

My chains still rattle, though, reminding me that I once shared their fate. I can see them now wrapped around me. I am Marley reborn and I have systematically torn the chains away. Someday, I will be free. Even today, I am freer than most and the towers know it. They tease with invitations, they beg and wheedle, the seek to make me theirs with a constant influx of garish advertisement that disgust more than interest. I won’t go back.

This is not “how the world works,” it is how the world dies. A thousand souls offered up with cheer and joy to our gods of chrome, steel, silver, and gold. We stumble over ourselves, rushing to curry the favor of the tower, never realizing that the tower will never care. Look, another soul devoured, another dime for the pile, another debtors’ prison created. The dreams of millions shriveled down to a number, modern alchemy of the most evil kind.

“This is how the world works,” they tell me and I want to scream. I want to shake them free of the blind acceptance of such idiocy. They cannot hear me, though. The tower took their ears, eyes, mind, and soul long ago. There is nothing left to save.

An¹ initial response to Indara’s Lazy Society:

I am becoming more and more convinced that in order for our present society to operate successfully, the majority of its members must be infantilized. It is the only way for the corporate state to maintain control. By artificially lengthening adolescence, the corporate state creates a society that is dependent upon it. Those products which are deemed “good” and “acceptable” are determined not by an individual who is considered too young to adequately comprehend value but instead by the very same corporation whose function it is to sell the product.

This is the world in which we now live. We do not cook, we do not produce, we consume. We are told by our corporate parents that this consumption is good. From an early age we are taught that we must consume to live and so we do. Since consumption is survival we happily attach ourselves to the state and the corporation in order that our consumption can continue unabated. We enslave ourselves to the very apparatus that perpetuates this condition.

The truly terrifying prospect in all of this is the totalizing power of the corporation. Your description of college as a netherworld is incorrect only in that it does not go far enough. Colleges have become little more than agents of the corporate state. They are no longer places for the education of the populace and academic rigor. They are, instead, places that produce able functionaries for the corporation. This is precisely the problem with our current situation. Those things which act as antidote to the corporate state are inevitably assimilated and become a part of the state. As this occurs, the people become disillusioned and eventually accept that everything is subservient to the corporation. They are, therefore, not only aware of their position but convinced of its inevitability and its correctness.

I should clarify that this position is not a Marxist one. It is, in fact, in accordance with the very essence of Capitalism. As we have repeatedly seen, corporations must undermine Capitalism in order to survive. They rely and grow by centralizing resources under a singular control. They only recognize the individual by his or her role within the context of the corporation. While certain class structures remain at the highest levels there is often little difference between the worker and the supervisor and they can be moved within the corporation at will like cogs in a machine. By appropriating the identity of a human being, corporations have become the dominant structure of the state and of society. Their homogenizing and infantilizing effects are not specific to a single corporation but are a condition of the system. While you are, most certainly, right to mourn the costs to Humanity and to the Arts (the value of which I shall address in a later commentary), so too should your brother mourn the centralization of capital and the diminished competition that remains at the heart of capitalism. While neither Disney nor Marvel is blameless, the purchase of Marvel continues the trend that, sadly, illustrates the system.

^{1. An initial response is heavily influenced by the conditions of the time in which it was produced. Depending on future developments, it may undergo significant change.}