Entries Tagged 'Rants' ↓

The OWS protests aren’t so much about evil bankers but depersonalization and the loss of control that brings.

With corporate influence into government you receive faceless unaccountable decision making. Corporatization of healthcare, mortgage lending, and 19^thcentury energy resources take advantage of individuals rather than aid them. The person is buried for profits.

There is nothing more aggravating than having to talk to some third party corporate broker (who only gives you their first name) to determine how much your sickness is going to cost.

There is nothing more disgusting in borrowing money from some abstract corporate bank who then slice and dice your debt and then change the fine print behind your back. There is no one to talk to in the end except an automated phone system.

There is nothing more disturbing than corporations that make billions of dollars who then barely put it back into the environment and whose profits are based on waste. Try rationalizing and breaking down your electric bill.

-XF Pine

It feels like ten years have passed but nothing has really happened.

The only progress has been via bubbles whose excitement was redacted by panic.

Maybe the disruption has begun. Maybe we are fooling ourselves with our castles in the air. I wonder if are at some invisible turning point of some huge cycle.

We’ve misguided wars thinking that we were the good guys, but never claiming any victories because we denied we were conquers. So we pay for all the wars. We are selfless good guys by principal but tempted always to be bad.

Are we better off? We are more mistrustful of nature and our frameworks. We trust technology to a fault. We are emotionally stuck in the 16th century. We are dependent upon the unseen. Everyone’s problems are our own problems.

NYC has turned into the Panopticon I always thought it would be. Privacy is a misnomer. Facebook is big brother. Your peers have sent you an invite. The government knows who your friends are.

I’ve lost my health and the faith in my physical body in the last decade. The older people I loved and trusted have passed on. There is no one in a room praying for me on a daily basis. There are only people who hate each other in their narcissism.

I’ve been through a half dozen relationships in ten years. Some of these I still fantasize about. In the end I wrecked them all because I couldn’t understand love or compromise. I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t be happy. I became someone else for people until I became exhausted. I fooled myself as much as I fooled others.

I have been distracted by my purposes and technology. I have struggled with worth. I have realized that too much freedom makes you inert. I have realized that everything is faith and the quality and quantity of faith must be reciprocal to the number of obstacles and their intensity. Faith is a scale of coping and adaptation of the unknown. Its levels are infinite as are the boundaries of success.

I’ve realized that everything is an act of improvisation and sensibility is complete collision. Money is an uncomfortable chair you must sit in for hours. It is better than standing, but makes you lazy and makes you feel like you are always missing something accidental that may be more comfortable and lush.

I attempt to listen to the good progressive voices in my head, but they lead me to isolated places where I question if they are random sounds like all the sounds that inject fears into actions I used to love.

I must focus on mentors and surround myself with people I respect. I must cut out all noise from my life.

- X.F. Pine

I think about technology all the time. I think about how much it has taken over every facet of my life in a short period of time and I now try to spend weekends offline away from screens. I think about how I am part of the first digital test generation who grew up with computers in their home.

When I was about twelve I convinced my Mother to get the first Atari 400. My Father thought it was a fad. Perhaps he was right after thirty years, as technology has finally become a fashion accessory.

My friends all got them too and before long we were obsessed with gaming and programming. We would spend hours, even days locked away in suburban basements and rec-rooms staring at screens. We would trade the latest software. Some kids became experts at piracy in their curtain closed bedrooms. All piracy was offline. This was at the advent of 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers that you attached to your phone. This got you to an online bulletin board that was only text. The computers had no drives built into them. There were clunky tape drives or disc drives for storage.

I look back at this time and think about how seduced we all were. I also realize how patient we were. I’ve gone back to these computers and games and discovered how incredibly tedious they were; so brutally un-adaptive compared to now.

I wonder if there is now a certain saturation point or a distinctive timeframe where you eventually become exhausted of a screen. Is this point part of your advancing age or is it finite. Perhaps after 10,0000 hours of staring at a screen in your life, it becomes confining. If you conservatively looked a screen for an average of 4 hours a day over thirty years, it would be something approaching 5 years of your life.

When you are twelve you do not think about the future. You do not think about results and implications. You don’t think about reality all that much. Recently I cannot get my head around the idea of how commonplace digital technology has become over security. How kids have no sense of their own privacy and enjoy putting their lives online for the sake of marketers and corporations. They don’t see the corporations because they are so influenced by their peers. Their comfort zone is the screen.

The dark side of pervasive computing is that you don’t see where your data is going. You don’t think about it like when you were twelve. It’s perfect collectivism. Facebook is an awesome conformist tool. Any Fascist regime or Dictatorship from history would have loved Facebook as long as they had the keys to the backdoor.

Cracks in the walls of cyber-security mostly stem from social engineering or humans who give out information recklessly. If you are twenty-five and working for a major corporation or a bank is your default to share everything or do you have to be reminded to not give out secret knowledge? A curious problem is coming to a head. We have lost all respect for information. It’s our downfall. We are all eternally twelve.

- X.F. Pine

4-1

I must rip all the bushes and branches from the grotto, with long swoops of a scythe. The bricks from the garden must be removed to make way for the pathway. The trellis is now visible by the entrance. It holds the vines and the brush high above your head as you enter. By the end of the days work, the pathway is cut perfectly to the yard. This will be a place to retreat for he summer. A table and chair are needed.

4-3

The bridge is filled with nameless faces from the past. Persons whose faces you can only remember through a picture. Their names evoke a lost distant place and memory.  Most of us are traveling in one direction. I see JD approaching from the opposite way down the causeway. We barely acknowledge each other in passing. She wears a thick red jacket which is much to heavy for the warming weather. I realize, that upon reaching the center of the bridge I must return to the side which I came from.

4-4

BB and I wait outside the bar for hours. We joke about the performance we are about to see. Inside, I find myself alone at the end of the dark wooden bar. JD is at the far end of the restaurant wearing glasses. RR appears and shows the barmaid a map or drawing he has done. The barmaid is excited by his appearance. He explains the drawing on the bar right in front of me. JD walks over, glances at the piece of artwork, and walks away.

4-9

Deep within the Scum House is where all the low life from the town live. Walking down the long hallway I am trying to get to the hidden door. I need to get to school. I almost stole a bicycle to get there on time. In the hallway I see the police in their riot gear. Their radios are buzzing. There are circular floating lights. The police have just taken some piece of scum out the door. People are stretching and screaming with vengeance. There has been a fight in the small room where I almost trip over an empty beer bottle. The floor is covered in vomit. Everyone is trying to get out the small door. A man walks up to a spigot to fill a bucket with water. The sound it makes sounds exactly like more vomiting. This causes a bum to appear sick right in front of me. His mouth is about to burst with vomit. His expression is extreme. I manage to dodge out of the way and get out the front door. On the great big green front steps is the rich man’s daughter with her scum boyfriend. She looks at all the confusion with wild innocent eyes. She is from a home very much unlike this. She is here because it confronts her rich daddy’s life.  She wears the thinnest silver chain around her neck possible.

4-10

JD and I meet on the street and we both become very coy. I ask for her number. She giggles with delight. I tell her mine on the condition that she doesn’t send any big friends of hers over to beat me up. She laughs more. We are headed in the same direction laughing.

4-11

Sitting at the table, they bring out the new hat design which perfectly resembles a bowling ball cut down the center. It is also bright, furry and friendly. The finger holes rest right above the forehead. The hats look supremely stupid although it is our job to pretend otherwise. We soon discover the practical problem that the wearer cannot hear anything at all while the product is being worn.

4-13

The convention is taking place across a sunny field from the house of science where our team is staying. Within the large space of the hall are exhibitions featuring gas weapons and torture devices in different colored booths. The fascists are involved in this to some degree. Their streamline human statues of the state stand at either end of the hall. The bronze statues hold spears. Suddenly a revolutionary pulls a machine gun from a black bag he has over his shoulder and begins to destroy one particular display related to historic gas masks. The display is riddled to pieces by bullets. It is then that the seemingly solid statues become mechanized and launch their spears towards the dangerous revolutionary. The spears meet their target perfectly and impale him in an ‘X’ fashion. He is dead within moments and everything has grown silent. All of us on the team realize that we are under complete automatic surveillance all the time. The fascists control everything we do. Later as we are headed back across the field to our quarters we see a tremendous Calvary offensive far in the distance. We think it’s a movie it is so perfect. Before reaching the house of science we meet a little black child who wants to play some more football in the field. He pretends his arm is withered and glowing green, and then it turns out he isn’t pretending. It is all bone and he brags about how it glows in the dark. These are the curious effects of our science. It is then years later and I am standing outside of myself as I have become a religious preacher in a pulpit. I am watching myself repeat the same words over and over tying to get my new profession correct. I have traded in my life of science for one in God.

4-19

I leave the Irish vixen with the dimples on the train and return to the city and its white sculptures.