The Parasite, Michel Serres will make you go on tangents, if you let it. Streams of thought like you would connect the roof pieces of a geodesic dome, but neglecting to go back and fix the mixed metaphor, straighten the kinked connections of a brain. No filling in the blanks, no making right angles, no connecting dots, no explanations, no organization. Prose, but unpolished, natural without chemicals or preservatives. No one can pin this one down. It's a live one, a slimy one, not from around here. A parasite, a different species.
Serres is a nut, but I like him, and not just because his name is an anagram. He makes me want to think in circles, not back and forth a linear origin. Parasites multiply exponentially: Y is N to the x, as opposed to polynomial growth: Y equals X to the n. Symbols, language.
Language is a parasite. Symbols are parasites.
Poetry a parasite
Poetry a parasite
love is a parasite. Humans. Sex a means to spread the parasites.
Population growth, exponential in one generation.
I still love this quote. "The societies of giving have disappeared... since then, we have been caught up in an economic history..." (Page 31).
Brings me back to economics, again: the study of how consumption leads to happiness, util by util, and The Corporation. The full-length documentary is really worth it, but there's a trailer. Reminds me of Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn and how we were "meant to live" and the "givers" and the "takers." And, of course,The Lorax Part 2 Part 3.
If The Lorax is Ismael, then the Onceler is the Corporation. Monsanto, the corporation of corporations. Food, Inc. just one of several documentaries about Monsnanto and genetically engineered food products, which are completely integrated into the market in this country, but many countries, especially European are resisting the International trade of genetically modified foods.
Consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs. I remember this from Psych 101 my first semester of college. Oldskool! The theory goes, once people have their basic needs taken care of, then and only then does one seek intellectual and/or spiritual paths. Hmm...Maslow, whatever the fuck he thought, about the brain and the human psyche. "Self-actualization" at the top of the pryamid looks very much like enlightenment to me.
While I'm in this sort of a vein, while I'm standing in for this archetype, or whatever identity it is that I have fallen into, I'm just going to got for it. Here, I have nothing to lose.
The invention of the mallet, and later the hammer, was useful in the evolution of tools for work, to build shelter, at the very basic level of needs, or maybe a baby-step above breathing.
The internet is not a mallet. It has become not a tool to build a structure, but is the structure.
The environment is which mallets exist is an active one.
Contrast that image to one plugged into cyberspace, the screen.
I wonder if the addiction comes from the high-class need for intellectual/spiritual growth/self-actualization.
We crave magic. We have a need to "tap into" something outside ourselves.
As nature is beginning and continuing to melt away --> Polar ice caps --> polar bears, seals, etc. another type of cold weather species extinct, as Spring gets earlier every year, I wonder.
What do you do to make you feel human, living in a digital reality?
Posts
Re-boot?
ReplyDelete"We crave magic."
ReplyDeleteI love this line. I might steal it (with citation, of courz) for my next TE. This idea (and the line following it) is very hero's journey, catalyst, use-something-outside-to-cause-something-inside. Pilgrimage stuff. It's interesting to think of the interwebs in terms of that kind of stuff--goin' to lolcats like church, takin' a pilgrimage to 4chan (I haven't yet--that place still sounds too sketch for me). Like you said, it's an environment. But still a tool.
"The theory goes, once people have their basic needs taken care of, then and only then does one seek intellectual and/or spiritual paths"
I wonder if these can get flip-flopped or tied up in one another? I read a short scifi story where the government put birth control in the public water to control a swollen population (and also because they were kind of douchebags). If one wanted to have children, they had to pass an intelligence/creativity test. The main character didn't; his girlfriend left him as a result.
"I wonder if the addiction comes from the high-class need for intellectual/spiritual growth/self-actualization."
An addiction to transformation? That's an interesting idea. And sort of at odds with the original purpose of self-actualization, I feel. But maybe not.