Hide It From Yourself

I guess I could be more of a narcissist. I already think I do a pretty good job of it, to be honest. I mean, I spend at least one night a week making the effort to type up and broadcast my unstructured thoughts for (ostensibly) public consumption because I guess I'm convinced these nuggets of irreducible value have to be shared. For the sake of, you know, humanity. But in all things there's room for improvement.

And I could be lazier. I did spend a not-unremarkable chunk of the last weekend watching Taskmaster on YouTube, procrastinating my way out of weed-pulling and bill-paying in favor of watching adults throw a potato at a hole. So OK, unlike the narcissism thing, maybe I actually couldn't be lazier. On second thought though, the act of actualizing my narcissism, typing words into this blog entry pane, when I'm getting neither paid nor rewarded for it in any measurable way, constitutes a recordable effort. And fucking hell, I've only been doing it for 11 years, and that's just in this particular venue. If nothing else it stands as a testament to my failure to be maximally indolent. And that maybe I should be medicated against compulsive behavior.

I'm not sure if it's further proof of my un-laziness or just evidence of my descent into curmudgeonhood that I still turn on lights and set the thermostat and answer the door with my stupid, dirty monkey hands. The kids today, they're all Harry fucking Potter with the hands-free voice-activated and remote interactivity of not just devices, but of intangible aspects of modern living. It's at the point where I feel like Piltdown Man* because I still have an iPhone 6S+, the kind I can't even turn on with my face.

It's also been really difficult to convince me that this place I call home, this wonderful cocoon of fiberglass-insulated safety that hosts my forced air heating and my Netflix, is so singularly special it requires full time camera monitoring all across the dimensions of spacetime and accessible on my (old-ass) smartphone. Yeah, crime is real and people steal shit and homes get broken into, but there's almost nothing in this place that wasn't handed down from another family member at some point. If some burglars wanted to break in, having their faces recorded by the doorbell to send to the police as evidence would be my second instinct. My first one would be to make them some tea and apologize.

The safety and security and convenience of course all come packaged with the same lie, that they can be had with no social cost. I'm not talking about the bullshit about the compartmentalizing of human lives into vehicles of pure input with progressively, inexorably degraded capacities for interaction with slower, analog things like books and other people. I mean the obvious point that in order for Alexa to know when you say "Alexa," that bitch has to be listening to every fucking other sound you make before and after. Up to and including "fucking" (the word and the verb). 

The movies and comic books about technological dystopias always posit it as a top-down dictatorship of control, the hard lockdown of the digital boot stamping on a facial-recognition-algorithm-satellite-identified face forever. An all-seeing state made up entirely of sensory organs, with individuals trapped in the same quandary between collaboration and resistance.

Late-stage capitalism is so much more polite. As the decade ends, we can take stock and see how over the last 10 years the promises of convenience and security have convinced us to invite a different kind of power, corporate power, into our homes voluntarily, to the point where surveillance is not only opt-in but our default state, a branded lifestyle. Surprisingly, somehow, it turns out that the largest corporation that ever was may not be interested in your individual best interest. And, maybe just to satisfy the dystopia completists or traditionalists, are now more than happy to deal your minute-to-minute existential details to the conventional sources of sociopolitical power. You know, the ones with the jail cells and the guns.

Luckily for me I get to rely on my natural defenses of paranoia and skepticism of the new-fangled. I don't fuck with any kind of fangling if I can manage it. I live with Gen-Z digital natives, however, so I'm sure it will end up getting me eventually. In the meantime, I guess the best we can do is remember, if worse comes to worse, we always have the hard option to take out the batteries.

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*That's right, a fossil and a total fraud.