by Noah Watching humans fly around from one social media app to another like bees that have ingested just the right amount of pesticide to make them deranged yet still alive amuses me in a dark humor sorta way. I can't help but wonder how all these "latest cool things" will shake out. I mean, which ones will hit the scrapheap first? As someone who's spent a lifetime in radio stations, recording studios, and film editing suites, not to mention the dire environments of corporate offices full of drugged-out suit-wearing robots, I can tell you I've witnessed a ton of technology, both human made and naturally born, come and go, sometimes in the blink of an eye. Often, not fast enough. Sometimes sadly way too soon. I've seen the birth of BETA video cassettes lose out to inferior VHS just because of poor marketing. I've seen quadraphonic sound lose out because the corporate idiots flooded record stores with the "software" before they'd seen to putting enough, if not any, of the audio equipment needed to play such quadraphonic records into retail stores. Especially since the 1980s, laserdisc formats and audio recording formats have come and gone so fast that most people can be forgiven for never even having heard of them. They are now the stuff of thrift stores across the land. Remember DAT cassettes? Floppy discs? Or, a personal favorite, Magneto Optical discs? I could bore you with an extremely long list of such things but I'm confident that my point is made. I'm not here to bore you with nerdity. My point is that I remember hearing that there was this new cool thing called twitter and that it was going to be all the rage, which it was, for a while. Seemed like the be all and end all at least to some. Perhaps, its downfall began when it increased the number of characters you could use in a given message. "Oh boy! More nihilistic conspiracy bullshit per tweet!!! What could go wrong?" Hey, at least the company wasn't taken over by some brain-eaten lunatic who wants to literally test drive a Tesla into the Sun. Be my guest, Elon! Pedal to the metal! Can't happen soon enough! Meanwhile though, Big Brother is right in your hand. You carry it everywhere you go. "Sign up Now! It's New! It's Zucker! It's Threads!" It's a new and even better way for corporations to seize upon endless opportunities to use the "latest cool thing" to mine all your personal information and chart your personal habits, fears, and preferences so they can make gazilions of dollars selling advertising and worse in order to get you to buy (or buy into) absolute mall crap and mall crap politicians while their bankster brethren suck money out of your wallets, er, a, digital bank accounts; money that nobody ever actually "sees." We're all just one big lightning bolt away from first having no currency in our pockets, to, Ptoof!, having no money at all! "Sorry about your cash! We can't find it, but please deposit more, and as a very special incentive just for you, we will offer you a "cash bonus" of up to $150 if you do so by June 30th." And, of course, you won't receive that little communique until on or about July 14th because of either "an inadvertent programming glitch" or the simple fact that no one at your bank or whatever or wherever knows how to use the technology either intelligently or responsibly. Oh and there's also: "You want Crypto? Here's your Crypto right here!" As they stroll across your computer screen/smart TV/kmart TV and wave their hand at nothing but air, right in your face. Yep, here we are, a parade of Korporate bozos constantly piling out of their Korporate Klown cars to get to the podium first to announce their "Next Big Cool Thing," Inevitably, Threads will one day be called "Threadbare" or "Zucker Threads" and it will be subject to endless mockery or at least more than a few chuckles. Let me start right here and now: How about, "There's a Zucker born every minute" or something along the lines of, "Remember when we thought Threads was cool?" Christ, in less than a year, it will be quaint and it's all downhill from there. Damn, can't we just go back to smoke signals?
Some of what you mention are simply the evolution of tech from rudimentary to advanced. While I still have my Ipod in a drawer somewhere, I can't really lament it too much.
but all the social media apps and devices... just proves to me even more that people have stopped evolving and are going the other way. Everything now is just who wants to profit the most from the, literally, billions of uber-narcissistic humans who are becoming ever-more dumber than shit. this yin-yan progression only leads to one place -- that stinking swamp where life first crawled out of the muck. maybe nature can do better next time and evolve a truly advanced being without all the ... stupidity.