All Your Favorite Social Media Channels Are Going To Hell

This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.

2013: Coming Highlights via Crisis Nightmare 3000

2012 was a pretty good year. There was plenty to see, talk about, and worry about. I'm not going to waste anyone's time with how great 2012 was. I'm not going to elaborate on how great a year it was for just about everyone to to feel truly offended, scared, or wronged. I sure felt the winds of change, and I bet I'm not the only one forced to watch, for merely one small instance, Facebook turn into less and less of a place for drunk students' idiocy and more and more of a place for self-aggrandizing politics (a learned behavior) and doomed verbal slap fights (an inherent characteristic) between imaginary monsters in the dark (???).

As great a year as 2012 was for getting miffed about rumors of rumors and unfounded quackery, 2013, by all estimations, will prove to be even better, with exceptional levels of panic. I am only a small and limited individual, fearful of the Lord and His hatred of our Eternal Imperfection, but even I can see the sort of wickedness that will come from the foremost voids of collective moral and existential mania:

- The use of stem cells from aborted fetuses to create so-called 'ethical' meat products such as nerveless chickens and baby sandwiches.
- The use of stem cells from aborted fetuses to make PepsiCo products even tastier and healthier!
-The use of stem cells from aborted fetuses to power a giant abortion center/bath house/tolerance indoctrination center/abattoir.
-All national anthems will be replaced, by global plebiscite, with Psy's 'Gangnam Style'.
-The use of rogue-harvest stem cells from living babies to make homosexual, gay, queer, transexual, questioning or pansexual clones of all new babies.
-Global decriminalization of all drugs / abolition of all drug offenses except alcoholism, which will be heavily prohibited.
-Upcoming mandatory biochips for all newborns, which will be specifically geared to cause autism, homosexuality and socialist tendencies in all newborns. All younger generations, regardless of biochips, will continue to be inceasingly sissy.
-Justin Beiber's official crowning as The King of Rock and Roll; retirement ceremonies for outgoing king Elvis Presley.
-Prayer inoculations made mandatory for non-atheists.
- I.E. 10 becomes mandatory web browser; Firefox users are shot to death in droves in the streets across most of the known world.
-President Obama, as he kisses Angela Merckel on the lips during a pagan pansexual cocaine infanticide orgy (including aliens, notable elites and celebrities, and Vladimir Putin) will sign into a law a fourty-term presidency applicable only to himself or any of his socialist ideologues.
-Stem cell-powered mass transit, gun incinerators, and electric vehicle charging stations. 
-Stem cell-powered solar energy. 
-Stem cell-powered wind power. 
-Stem cell-moderated nuclear fission with options for stem cell-stabilized nuclear fusion.
-Mandatory global 'sin hour', details forthcoming, likely to include excerpts by sin experts De Sade and  C'Thulhu.
-Libertarians proven entirely right about everything and promptly imprisoned and/or muzzled en masse. Ayn Rand enshrined as underground deity. Libertarianism outlawed.
-Christmas 2013 will be retooled to celebrate an exciting blend of non-Judeo-Christian world religions and non-straight-monogamous sexual orientations. Also, more emphasis on shopping and consumer culture!
-The moon will be settled by a coalition of European and Chinese evolutionists with left-leaning socialist tendencies who will farm organically-sourced stem cells for vague and shadowy purposes.
-Mandatory world-wide one-child policy. Extra children will be rendered into fuel for mass transit, space programs, or returned to the parents as an Ethical Flavinoid Generator – all excretions can then legally be sold to the state via a closed market for an equal, fair, and regulated price.
-Hipster movement greatly compromised and weakened by increasingly worrisome internal power squabbles, advancing the arts by five months.
-Completion of the war on Christmas – total casualties: Christmas. 
-Carburators will be outlawed on pain of death forcing many to adapt or starve, paralyzing carburator-based economies. Fuel injectors will no longer be for 'sissies' and women: they will be mandatory. Automobiles built prior to 1950 will be exempt but heavily taxed.  
- Any and all muscle cars will be recycled into public park art projects, luxury vehicles will be recycled into bus stations, buses, and public benches.
-The use of stem cells from aborted fetuses to fund Al-Qaeda and Al-QaedaCo-related entities.
-Sex addiction will be recognized as a veritable (taxable) disability, as will necrophilia; perverts worldwide, it is theorized, will be coddled and enabled by corrupt and morally-apathetic governments.
-Millionaires and billionaires will be taxed upwards of 75% per annum. Proceeds will go to struggling socialists, funding OWS protests, and hippies.
-Any new jobs created by the rich will be immediately taxed into the ground, and all proceeds will be used to keep drug addicts from suffering withdrawals.
-Tobacco smokers to be punished by instant death in many countries, smoking prohibited in the rest.
-"Soylent Green is people!"
-Public stonings will not only become a hot new meme, but enshrined under sweeping free speech reforms.
-Wal-Mart given a seat in the UN, kicking out Bhutan.
-Consumer goods will be sustainably harvested from the stem cells of aborted fetuses; global rights for non-laboratory non-human lifeforms; "New Murder Laws Get Poachers into Hot Water!"
-Men will no longer be allowed on public transit and will also pay an additional 50% in auto-insurance because of their inherent emotional instability as discovered through internet social media such as forums, blogs, and Youtube.
-Adult males will also be prohibited from consuming beer, watching sports, or masturbation. Men will also be subject to random curfews, spot-checks, and will be prohibited from loitering.
-Mandatory, bi-weekly public mocking and flogging of all artists, including self-styled artists.
-Catholicism will be replaced in situ with Feminism- doctrinaire rejection of birth control will be replaced with mandatory castration and partial-castration for heterosexual males.
-Facebook will be granted all rights to its users, including power of attorney, and unlimited licensing of all uploaded content with no concessions to the end-user.
-All IP addresses to be made public, resulting in severe but mixed changes to the Internet, and a new niche for powerusers.
- Banks 'too large to fail' will be granted explicit legal and diplomatic immunity.
-Privatization of nature; mandatory, global human genome tax.
-Single women without children will be able to claim compensation from unsatisfactory sexual partners and will have birth control, contraceptives, and abortions paid for (in full) by their governments. Countries not adhering to this global mandate will have their national anthem changed to Carly Rae Jepson's 'Call Me Maybe'
-Texas will be placed under martial law until every ranch is empty, a co-operative enterprise, or farming alpaca wool and soybeans.
-All leather jackets will be replaced with pastel coloured cardigans, any vendor found to be selling black market leather goods will be flogged and mocked in public, and re-educated in a Tolerance Centre.
-Nerd movement gains critical momentum, delaying any theoretical technological singularity by more than 100 years. 
-Feed lot model expanded to feeding the poor; "Low Standards; High Expectations - The Profit of Poverty"
-All world religions outlawed, all higher beings to be replaced with notable celebrities, scientists, and political leaders. Dissension will not be tolerated: private residences will be periodically monitored for signs of worship.
-Mandatory quota of internet slang for all publications in any language to encourage youth engagement. (A modern translation of Charles Dickens' 'David Copperfield' will begin this trend, a neo-modern treatment of E.L. James' '50 Shades of Grey' will prompt the new industry standard. Homer's 'Teh 0DY$$3Y' will establish sales records.)
-Goods manufactured in the East will now be sold in the East, and Eastern citizens will use money sourced from Western taxpayers to afford said goods, creating a self-aware form of global capitalism. The West will be forced to produce its own electronics, garments, and cheap trinkets. Corporate elite will balk at decreased unemployment figures and go back to lovingly stroking their industrial robots and moneybags.
-Pharmaceutical drugs will be outlawed and replaced with what are now unfairly referred to as 'illicit and/or illegal drugs' with a decided emphasis on psychedelics.
-The West will stop paying attention to the rest of the world, and, in a stunning reversal, begin to focus on itself.
-Resultant drug addicts are confirmed for serious government coddling!
-Stem cells from aborted fetuses will replace any and all bullets manufactured since 1898. Modern bullets will be powered by the new ethical physics of hyper-abortion.
-Completion of secret project "The End of Men".
-All firearms unrelated to ethical hunting and/or safety training will be outlawed with no exceptions. Any persons refusing will be fired upon and killed by police or soldiers, who will be be armed or overarmed in accordance with New World Order directive HMO-SX-14 s.12
-Dec 21, 2013: The Brony Rebellion.

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Bookishness Reloaded

50 Shades of Grey and its ilk have been on the bestseller lists all year. Really long now and I'm wondering about it. They've basically made it a place for them to hang out. I don't know how any serious watchers of the bestseller list feel about it. I don't even know if there are serious watchers of the bestseller lists. I suppose, ultimately, there should be a few, and none of them should be surprised by what generally hangs out there. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with what hangs out there.

The whole 50 Shades debacle is the latest of an entire series of its kind. The ecosystem of modern publishing doesn't strike one as exclusively healthy – but there's nothing wrong with it, per se. Or so one thinks, ultimately the nonfiction lists aren't really super hopeful either. But there's also sometimes interesting stuff. Whether or not it's brewed by committee, exploits the zeitgeist, and has 'buzz' and 'word of mouth' and 'traction' are the great indicators of sales. Commercial success nullifies critical success and proves the naysayers wrong, inept, and out of touch. Or it should/might/doesn't, depending on how you feel about unlimited free market, incorporated.

The funny thing is, in this era dictionaries have actually created entries on mots célèbre that have no longevity or ultimate worth. I'm looking at you, 'frenemy'. The news crowed joyously about frenemy and friends getting into Webster and Oxford for the better part of a week, probably more than 12 months ago now. What increases the hilarity factor is that the conservative book set (most publishers, consumers, etc) actually sees the potential for twitter literature as a good thing. They might shit if it was considered to switch to a pure paperless market (which is sort of a scary idea when one considers it), but they will fill their own pages with the sort of meaningless colloquial twaddle that has no fundamental role in language. The white noise of language and of literature, and the much hyped 'echo chamber' effect of Twitter is involved somehow. Publishers bank on books that are too big to fail and they go to town whenever some book becomes so important that everyone needs a copy right now. They aim to remain relevant as opposed to fundamental. Language skills and general output are fucked enough without a neoliberal approach to neologisms.

So if you really think about the situation as it stands, the publishing ecosystem is a bit like every other large-scale market ecosystem: some smaller companies, independent organizations, and identities cling to the vestiges with varying success; by and large it consists of gigantic entities producing essentially a monoculture. So what? The incredible size and awesome power of these entities is something that should inspire us, their offerings are delivered with unthinkable force to vast numbers, on a scale that was relatively recently unthinkable. This is no minor business, even this allegedly 'dying' publishing industry.

There exists more written word than can be reliably processed by any one person. This condition is hardly new or revelatory, but it seems worth mentioning no matter how many thousands of years it's been true. Seeing as the human world still exists, and written word is still very essential to its development and even survival, the immense pile of written work should not merely be considered refuse. Some of it obviously stinks, but it's necessary.

Still. At this advanced stage the offerings aren't always on the level. The fact that one book hangs onto a bestseller list for months, in one country, means that not enough books are being shared, or that the market isn't dynamic enough, or anything because its actual value cannot be the ultimate monetary sum represented by its time on the bestseller lists. All of which is beside the point, I know.

The New Microsoft Logo: Explicit Huey and the News Reference?

Well it's kind of funny on a few different levels. I could make a joke about the Samsung lawsuit also, if it was necessary. I don't think it's entirely necessary. I guess, though, what they are saying is that it's hip to be square. Or maybe they're just futureproofing the brand. It's tough to say, at this distance, what any of this really means. It could be a meaningless change, and it could be the herald of some insane twist ending so devious that it drove its author insane and hid itself in a dusty pile of manuscripts, waiting for a foolish hack's sweaty fingers.

The real issue isn't whether or not rounded edges are completely illegal, but rather what exactly a non-curved surface means for the consumer. Will it entail a less-flexible Microsoft Windows? Will tiling finally wear out its welcome?

Is this a sign that yupsters are on the make? Is the 99% going to have to deal with the fallout? Is the 100% going to have to? Where do I send strongly-worded letters about this? Why is my local mailbox welded shut?

No, this can't be so drastic. But my eyes can't be lying to me. This isn't anything like Morrowind to Oblivion in terms of regression, but it makes me wonder if I shouldn't switch to... but wait. Apple's undergone its brand shift already, and it's planning something as well. Macintosh and Microsoft. It's the ongoing browser crisis all over again, which makes Microsoft Chrome; Apple Firefox. Except Apple is a more yupster brand than Microsoft, anyway, so really nothing makes sense at all. I only hope they do a commercial with the proper mainstream pop rock song accompanying shots of stressed office workers, pale and/or fat kids, and septuagenarians holding conference calls on Win8 phones.

Well I for one don't care so much. Things will be alright even if the vistas are grimmer than the early-adopters and hype-men would like. I think Win7 is where it's at, and I'm happy to square about that. As long as it can run Age of Empires 2, an operating system is pretty good. Anyways, anyone who knows anything knows which was the best logo and is still puzzled, like me, about the incomprehensible loss of that incredible relic. Rest in peace,

Mars Then and Now

Our attitude towards the planet Mars is puzzling. It lies a long distance away and only by merit of being slightly more hospitable than Venus do we bother to choose it as the planetary neighbor to visit. In twenty or so minutes NASA will attempt a fantastic science-fictiony landing of another rover onto the red planet, in search of traces of water and cellular life or organic compounds. It's an interesting thing but I wanted to talk about the past.

Around 1999 the Mars madness was palpable. The Pathfinder mission was a huge cultural moment still somewhat in the spotlight and there was hype and references and exciting stuff. Upcoming missions made it seem all kinds of things were about to be discovered. It only makes sense that two big-budget movies would come out about Mars that year. It was the Deep Impact/Armageddon rule: find a cultural sensitivity and fight to the death to capture it perfectly in a movie.

In 2000, two Mars movies were released. Both were unscientific, dumb, melodramatic, action-packed, special-effects-laden, and not very remarkable. One was slightly more action styled. It was called Red Planet and was unapologetically stupid – as a film it was an abject failure. It tried to have 'deep' and/or 'thoughtful' undertones, but these didn't work out, because the film was about survival and strife and action. It was pretty cool as an action movie about Mars, but it was not sharp or exceptional. Wikipedia helpfully points out that it was a 'critical and commercial failure'.

The other movie was Mission to Mars, slightly more highbrow, slightly deeper, with less pervasive action scenes and a crippling addiction to nonsense and melodrama. It had a way better cast than Red Planet but the script was roughly just as bad. The main difference was the level of action. In Mission to Mars an important character takes off his helmet in space to discourage his wife from trying to rescue him from sure death. Melodrama, right? Pure melodrama, and out of all context of reality considering these are elite astronauts. Why even allow a husband/wife team? To make the story a little cozier, sure, but thoroughly unrealistic. The movie is still heartfelt in many ways and the ending, while cliche, dumb, and scientifically bankrupt (like the whole movie) is kind of touching in its absolute madness.

I suppose we're due for a Mars themed movie soon, depending on how this lander does in twelve or so minutes.

Notes on the Not-so-Recent Fad of 1980's Revivalism and Nostalgia

The 1980's are roundly praised for absolutely no reason. Everywhere you looked six months ago people were going on about the 80's without actually knowing much about the 80's. This 'retro-movement' is by all means a strange thing. People who haven't seen Gremlins in theaters walk around citing Ghostbusters and E.T. as if they've never seen a fluorescent windbreaker. The 70's had better everything and the 60's were strange enough to win any contest for oddball decade. So what does the 1980's have left that its sound, its appearance, and its (utter lack of) soul are praised by clueless jags?

The first point is that the people who grew up in the 80's are becoming adults, and by extension tastemakers. Some of these people are making music and film, or TV and literature, or whatever, and consumerism needs its 'movements' even if such things don't have meaning. The generations that were born in the 80's are clueless and willing to attach themselves to any movement to gain friendship and acceptance, because they are not quite yet adults. Folks born in the 90's are sort of alienated but since they don't have even faint memories of the 80's it is far easier for them to look upon the time with rose-tinted glasses.

Finally, a crowd of people as far removed from popular tastemakers as anything, American Republicans, praise the 80's for Reagan and Bush. Anyone who has followed American politics from Nixon to Obama knows that there has been little reason for public trust and acceptance. Anyone who is willfully ignorant of this will praise Reagan for gutting the economy and being a tool of special interests. This set a pattern that is more or less still followed today, and more knowledgeable places than PUBLICATO can tell you all about it. So even people who are not hip, and who consider hip people to be a crowd of fornicating, godless sinners praise the 80's.

Operation Just Cause, the Iran/Iraq thing, Contras, Noriega and lasers in Panama... the list of strange and shadowy 80's events goes on. That's not even including domestic issues, global music, fashion trends, computer games, and the incredible spread of corporatism and globalism during that time. You'd have to be insane to look to the 80's and enjoy anything about the aesthetic (except for Robo-Cop, Blade Runner, John Carpenter's The Thing [NOTE THE RECENT REMAKE], Prefab Sprout, American Psycho, Michael Jackson, but I digress and contradict myself). If you're still willing to try, and think the list of 80's saviors is indestructible, I have a stinging rebuff for you to swallow.

Everyone worth a damn knows about Leonard Cohen and his minimal songs with masterful lyrics... most people know that he released a decent album in '88 called "I'm Your Man" which, despite being made in the 80's, was pretty decent and almost managed to overcome its production, which is synthy and generally aged a lot worse than The Cohen himself. Then there's this which is probably the one and only time Cohen is unable to overcome production. When you think of the 80's, set this song to the bombing of Panama, the crack epidemic, or anyone wearing a bright pink jacket in an acid rainstorm and cry, because the world ended in the 80's and all that misguided nostalgia is people burying their heads instead of dealing with the present.

It's easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses if you were too fucked up to realize what was happening, or too young to understand it, or you were simply born in a later time and it is a mythical place for you, but the 80's aesthetic was roundly panned as soulless and shitty for a lot of reasons. M83's newest release is probably the final bit of sub-popular 80's worship before the inevitable backlash and death of this rather unbelievable fad. M83 is years past its prime itself, so this final affectation is rather ironic and fitting. By 2013 only clueless people will "OMG I loooove the 80's baby!" mindlessly. Goodbye, 1980's, until the 2030s. You will not be missed and you have not been missed and your best achievements will still be safeguarded and the fact they took place in the 80's will be a footnote.


I can't exactly trace when 80's revivalism began, but judging by the attitudes of some of the hip girls I know I'd say it began, in the underground, between three and six years ago and hit sub-mainstream maybe a year and a half ago, and maybe a few months ago it became a thing that even the most culturally retarded person could indulge. People are going to be tired of it in a few months, because true hipsters are already making fun of the 80's again and have moved into the 90's where they will literally starve to death or the 70's where the drugs will kill them.