Much love to K-Squared in Dallas for this thought-provoking link that poses the notion that Huxley, not Orwell, might have been correct about the future — ie that we’ll be controlled not by forces that inflict pain but by forces that inflict pleasure; that the truth won’t be kept from us, but rather will be drowned out by oceans of information; and that we will become a passive, trivial, self-centered culture obsessed with useless activities and meaningless “news.”
Sound familiar? Well, all I can say is that I’m very, very proud to have been part of this incredible revolution. And if you haven’t yet purchased the new MacBook Pro, please do so immediately, because you are already at risk of falling behind. And while you’re there in our dazzling, gleaming retail store, please be sure to upgrade your iPhone 3G to the new iPhone 3GS, and then get busy downloading every last one of those 65,000 amazing, life-changing apps.
Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.
Ain’t we all so cool? Well, peace out, info-forward tech-savvy zombies. Have a great Saturday, and fire up the Twitter, and try not to think too much. Namaste.
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