Squatters' Revolution

Well America is looking as dirty as the last 30 years predicted. Sometimes I get the sense that there are significant instabilities in North America in general, and that the oligarchy can no longer mask itself and therefore has adopted the obscurantist angle. "Obscurantist?" you ask, mouth agape stupidly. Yes, stupidy, obscurantist as in not revealing anything to anyone AKA dealing with the world sensibly - information-as-necessary style living. Which is a pretty great hypocrisy in a system where your bank is entitled to know your state of employment in addition to the wealth of other personal information they are entitled to. Yes the ability to go to your bank and cash a cheque and go home without them having explicit statements from you concerning your status is probably eroded.

Now it seems a small thing, and it is. Frankly I don't really care so much as I find it odd the bank cannot just simply assume a thing like that. So you know nothing about the people who ultimately shape your reality (unless you think actors, celebrities, and personalities do this) and the global reality, but you share your information on a 'no-need-to-know-basis' because the information of your life is so useless to anything but a marketer or criminal that it is a balm to your existential angst that at the very least you can have a cyber-billboard. This could be protested by refusing outright to identify yourself on the internet, boycotting Facebook, Google+, etc... but of course your networking opportunities would suddenly revert to mid-90's standards. In other words we could go back to making personal statements in person, but then we can't hope 1000 strangers will praise us. We could hope for maybe 10 intimates to admit our ideas have some merit.

Not that protest will mean anything since freedom is still exactly what it was at the dawn of humanity: a dream that can be indulged in only by the most powerful individuals or through the most powerful delusions. Freedom is a pretty goddamned stupid goal, yet it is a noble one Oh, but ironically the idea of freedom has generated the idea of slavery. Currently there is also a pervasive mode of thought which infers that freedom can be bought, assuming freedom is laziness, recreation, or inaction and time is the currency which buys it. Microfreedom does exist - yes in day to day experiences you have a sense that anything could be done; in the macro scale there is no significant freedom at all. You must acquire and spend wealth, dress well, pretend to be contented with the system, and enter automobile culture or else live as an abnormal, stunted, or subnormal individual.

Survivor Watch: 22. Pt.2

What they'll never be able to reproduce is the novelty. Other features of this gilded idol may be failing, but the one thing that cannot be produced (via magic or trickery or money) is any significant excitement to parallel the drawing power the show had in its first season.