Under the Dome: The Newest, Dumbest TV Adaptation Miniseries

I haven't read the Stephen King book Under The Dome, but I got the idea it was like The Stand in length and mildly interesting in its content. Mind you, I haven't so much as read even the critic blurbs about the book, so I'm really guessing what it is like. Recently a miniseries adaptation of the book premiered. I watched the first episode and almost immediately it was apparent that this would be a great study in TV as the Dumbest Form of Entertainment (which I know is particularly a Cantankerous Old Fellow and Pessimist discipline, but I do concur with it on many points). Within five minutes, a hyped sequence involving The Dome coming down around the small town of Chesterfield or whatever leads to a cow being split in half... the best part is that the cow is depicted as being a mass of undifferentiated flesh, as if your given cow in a field were made of 100% American AA grade steaks, and little else. This is basically the execution and guiding philosophy behind the show, as I understand it, and its greatest symbol. Send the anatomists!

I don't know if it was pure stupidity, pure laziness, or pure necessity which led to this hilariously maladroit example of cartoon special effects, but it gets better. The writing is atrocious. The characters are like what you'd expect in a Stephen King novel if he were currently a self-publishing erotica/mystery/fanfic author – or in really bad television. The plot, if it is reasonably close to the novel's (I hope not for King's sake) is itself a good barometer that Under the Dome as a novel is 1000+ pages of tedium: a mini-dome for your mind to suffer in while you fill the time between plot developments and intrigue. This miniseries is going to be a third-or-fourth-rate Lost, except as a miniseries it will waste less of everyone's time.

In television miniseries adaptation the book works out to this: little bit of characterization, then plot device is introduced, then show sputters about trying to create action and tension... then it becomes a huge bottle episode. A massive bottle episode, possibly the biggest and dumbest one ever attempted. In a way, one might even consider this art, not in a sneering 'populist vein' way – but as a true statement from this weird consumeristic world, where a cow being made entirely of ground beef is just this side of believable, and won't get an FX artist fired, or anger the censors (who as always are right on point: what really matters in a show where a guy's pacemaker explodes out of his chest is that the cow being split in two doesn't get too realistic or gruesome for primetime, but somehow remain cartoonish enough to get views).

I don't know why I am watching. Part of me thinks you need to eat a lot of shit (a.k.a - consume lots of mass media entertainment) before you can try selling your own. You got to get the spirit of the times right, and TV is still a grand social barometer, if a bit sterilized. It beats the internet, which can warp a person's perception of reality in bizarre and monotonous ways. But, to continue with the matter at hand, I am watching Under the Dome, and it is fucked. It's going to go down in history as a dumb bastard and, sometimes, amidst the ridiculous dialogue and illogical plot points, I enjoy it. (Eating shit. Gross. I really ought to rethink some things.)

My favorite part so far happens in the fourth episode, where a character who is supposedly a doctor or person with creditable medical knowledge tells a boy that an EEG machine "measures the electronic activity in your brain". A statement so broadly incorrect and dumb, so baldly and ridiculously wrong, that it got me to make this blog post about a TV miniseries in 2013. This show must be written by the texts of high school drop-outs. Fact-checking must have been outsourced to Antarctic Gerbils. It's insane. It sets a great tone for a show which may, despite its best intentions to be generic and dull, become a sleeper comedy of errors. If I look at it just right, it's the best comedy on a mainstream network all year: it got me to laugh out loud. There are all kinds of social commentary going on in this show: like how kids use smartphones (but only to take pictures of themselves right!?), or how everyone is secretly cripplingly irrational. This show has the self awareness of an invisible teenager and the attention span of a troubled child. It will never be glorious. Alas, we hardly knew it...

'Ok, Johnny Kidd, your brain is showing normal levels of electronic activity, what this means is that we don't know about this mystery of the dome at all, but we don't yet know if it even IS the dome so stay tuned while we whittle the device down into something underwhelming so we can keep telling human stories, like yours, getting your electronic brain activity levels checked, by me: a lesbian woman trapped in Small Town America with my wife and child all because of a Mysterious Dome...'

Legal and Moral Panic over Teenaged Trolls; the Coming Age of Anti-Troll Legislation

When Amanda Todd killed herself there was a fury which the internet-related deaths of hundreds of others failed to awaken. There was media hyperbole and the ever-present pointing of fingers. Yes, it was unquestionably a horrible, senseless ending to a young life. No, I don't think I'd blame teenagers for it – exclusively, at least. Teenagers, for all their precocious brightness, are almost without exception immature and are generally pretty impressionable as well. They are caged in shitty little worlds and it makes them inexplicable to older people who have escaped. Sometimes they feel like they can't escape, sometimes they think life sucks, and these and other things make them intolerable.

They're not particularly nice: they might respect their elders (which is immensely satisfying to smug elders), but they will go after each other with a wonderful blend of hatred and conviction one rarely sees outside of politics or ideological clashes. They're mean as rabid dogs: and in a culture which is arrogant enough to blame them while simultaneously encouraging them, it doesn't seem like there are a lot of people who really care. Society loves stories like these. They appeal to baser natures: outrage, righteousness, fury, voyeurs. They are easy to explain: evil kids, internet anonymity, lack of empathy, etc... The story needed to be told, but it was without reservation a story which was disgusting. Nothing about it seemed right, and looking into it was looking into the abyss of the internet and pretending to know what the fuck. Experts ran their mouths about how parents could prevent kids from falling into a similar trap. Punishments were devised. The police were all over it.

Truth of the matter is that such a thing will inevitably happen again, and something worse will undoubtedly happen if the law tries to get more deeply involved, pushing the criminal verges of cyber-harassment further underground where less idiotic and more dangerous people will continue in impunity. The internet is the last frontier of group psychology, and the denizens are very suspicious of lawmakers. There are many reasons for this, many of them despicable, but that's the way it is.

When I was a teenager cyber-bullying was nigh-impossible, because you could block people on MSN Messenger when they bothered you and few people were poser enough to use Myspace. The Digital Age was in its infancy: cameraphones were shitty and rare; cyber-bullying happened, but it wasn't a big deal because people lived offline. You simply weren't tethered and beholden to a 24/7, identity-bound life on the internet unless you were a nerd. Hints of a darker future were around, but those hints are in any past. Generally I bode my time until my personality had settled enough that I wasn't an insufferable shit, and then things started to look up. Towards the end of my tenure as a teenager high school was something that I had taken a positive leave from, and so distant it didn't always seem like a miserable prison anymore. In an even more distant past, as a veritable child, I logged into chats and started trouble for the hell of it on slow nights. Lots of us did, and following generations continued the tradition until...

Internet culture is filled with trolling. Often it is done with in a lighthearted spirit, and anyone who gets offended or falls for it is considered an idiot, ridiculed, and forgotten. 'Griefing', an online-game version of trolling, is almost a respectable pastime, and some 'griefs' have become legendary in their own right. Generally, when you see a troll on the internet, you are dealing with children, teenagers, or the mentally unfit. Sometimes they are amusing. Their antisocial stance would be interesting if it were self-aware and purposeful, but as a provocative measure it has few peers. Trolls are determined and capable of things many adults would balk at, such as trolling public facebook memorials about the recently deceased. Long story short: keep it private, or (I hate to be the one to say it) keep off the internet altogether because that shit is trashy, full stop.

The Fate of the Book

So much very subtle and quiet hype about the end of the bound stack of paper sheets known as 'the book'. There have been many books over the years, and I think everyone can agree that they were not always perfect, nor ever had an overwhelming reputation for improving the world. But there's a certain something to books and even if they are dying, take heart: our generation will be able to come by books cheaply for the duration of our existence, unless they begin burning bales of books.

If the global stock of books is significantly destroyed in the next twenty years, or publishing is severely repressed by economic or colluded forces, then at the very least books will have predicted that. Basic reading and communication skills will not likely be replaced, so language will continue, and the flow of ideas will merely take on another, potentially better form. Or our eyes will atrophy from an unmitigated hegemony of digital screens, flashing lights, and confused information.

Maybe there will be a tidal-wave of information in the future which will overwhelm us. Maybe it will get the better of us. We could be changed forever.

Or the book could go on well into the future, as some type of elitist symbol that nobody understands. Probably this view of the book's future is already some cliche that has been analyzed and exploited in hundreds of books. Maybe the book will suffer a renaissance in a few years, or maybe all the news sensationalism and existential dawdling will come to naught, and the book will be as ubiquitous and burdensome as ever – perhaps forever.

In the end, if it goes, the memory of the book will either be exterminated, merely forgotten, or enshrined by some freakish bibliophilia committee as the centerpoint of some futurist, knowledge-based cargo cult. And however it goes, the book will remain as at least a symbol.

But in the meantime there is all kinds of mawkishness about books and print media in general. It seems that the publication industry gets more fatalistic while the technology industry fills with empty hype. There is no real confrontation between the two industries. Largely, the recent history of the matter is that the print industry has had to accept and learn to work with tech, gadget, and electronics industries. It's not really the same as the music industry and the internet, though there are similarities.

So these publishers and maybe even some bibliophiles are very worried and the internet is very unconcerned. That's basically the gist of the story. In my mind television, the postal service, and radio are the real danger zones, and they're still around more than ten years after the internet. Writing killed or perverted most oral tradition anyway, so whatever happens at this point is fair and not unprecedented.

News for the Internet: I do not Not have a mobile phone.

I am sick to death of mobile content and the big existential stink about that shit. It's not going to end the world if people start having Pavlovian responses to touchscreens and ringtones. If anything we can construct an industry on that business, which is good, because our current vacuum economy is starting to sump. Whaddup?

Here on the internet you get a lot of offers to use, say, some useless app on your mobile device. Mobile devices (will we even call them phones without any sense of irony in 20 years?) already do all kinds of shit. But as I log into my account here I get news that something will look great in my mobile. I guess I owe it to the 3.4 people who have viewed this blog once with a mobile phone to ensure it looks good on a tiny screen when you could probably be talking to the people you're with, watching the road, interpreting your surroundings, or facing an uncomfortable situation bravely.

I'm hardly even in step or in touch or in contact with my generation, but they look at their phones enough times each day that you could harness that action for enough electricity to power their electronics with energy left to sell into the grid. If we do enough little things like this we could eventually create localized, public, energy markets. Maybe just electricity, but we can do things with electricity now.

Anyways I'm tired of mobile content. Give it up, internet. You and I both know I'm not on my phone right now.