Category Archives: consumerism

On the Borg

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Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On the Borg

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Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On peaches

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Peaches are not my favorite fruit, but a fresh peach in August with a little milk and sugar is a delight not to be missed. I mean, I like strawberries and cherries more, but a nice ripe peach is a very special experience. I say this because the peaches sold in the grocery store during the rest of the year are horrific–wooden, tasteless, dry, bitter. They look perfect, but they are only a simulacrum of a real piece of fruit. I won’t have them in the house. As a child we would often have a lug of peaches or pears in the kitchen during the month of August, so we ate fruit morning, noon, and night. They were so juicy that I had to go outside to eat the fruit as the juice would run down my arm and drip off of my elbow. The fruit was sweet and juicy and wonderful. My question is this: why can’t the local grocery stores do that today? With a few exceptions, most all the fruit is harvested green, so that by the time it reaches the stores it looks good, but it doesn’t taste good. Peaches and pears are particularly vulnerable, but when was the last time you ate a tomato or a strawberry that was actually sweet? The strawberries look big and beautiful and red, but they are dry and bitter with only the ghost of a ripe strawberry lurking off in the distance as if it were a stranger in a strange country. And I get it: stores do not want to throw away overly ripe fruit everyday. They need as much shelf life as they can get or their profits go out in the trash. They won’t take a risk and let the fruit stay on the tree as long as possible because if they all do the same thing, the consumer has no choice but to either leave the “green” fruit in the stores or eat crappy tasting fruit. I find this corporate policy to be excellent business, but a poor policy. I leave the fruit in the store because it’s not worth taking home at any price, but I get the feeling that many people do take it home and try to eat it, and then they don’t complain, which puzzles me. I guess that many, many people just accept the nonsense that corporate America wants to sell them. If grocery stores could sell sweet peaches during August back in the sixties, why can’t they do it now? If it were only a question of effort, I would think that better trucking conditions would make transporting ripe fruit over long distances that much easier, but I don’t think it is a question of effort. I think it is a question of the bottom line. I suspect that lugs of peaches were a hook which stores used to get customers in the door. I doubt they made much money on the fresh peaches, but as people came in to get the peaches, they would also buy a lot of other things as well. So the peaches were a loser to get people in the door and spending money. In the meantime, we are offered bad fruit, hard peaches, and no alternatives. The peach is such a simple fruit–fuzz, flesh, juice, sugar–a hedonistic delight when served ripe.

On peaches

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Peaches are not my favorite fruit, but a fresh peach in August with a little milk and sugar is a delight not to be missed. I mean, I like strawberries and cherries more, but a nice ripe peach is a very special experience. I say this because the peaches sold in the grocery store during the rest of the year are horrific–wooden, tasteless, dry, bitter. They look perfect, but they are only a simulacrum of a real piece of fruit. I won’t have them in the house. As a child we would often have a lug of peaches or pears in the kitchen during the month of August, so we ate fruit morning, noon, and night. They were so juicy that I had to go outside to eat the fruit as the juice would run down my arm and drip off of my elbow. The fruit was sweet and juicy and wonderful. My question is this: why can’t the local grocery stores do that today? With a few exceptions, most all the fruit is harvested green, so that by the time it reaches the stores it looks good, but it doesn’t taste good. Peaches and pears are particularly vulnerable, but when was the last time you ate a tomato or a strawberry that was actually sweet? The strawberries look big and beautiful and red, but they are dry and bitter with only the ghost of a ripe strawberry lurking off in the distance as if it were a stranger in a strange country. And I get it: stores do not want to throw away overly ripe fruit everyday. They need as much shelf life as they can get or their profits go out in the trash. They won’t take a risk and let the fruit stay on the tree as long as possible because if they all do the same thing, the consumer has no choice but to either leave the “green” fruit in the stores or eat crappy tasting fruit. I find this corporate policy to be excellent business, but a poor policy. I leave the fruit in the store because it’s not worth taking home at any price, but I get the feeling that many people do take it home and try to eat it, and then they don’t complain, which puzzles me. I guess that many, many people just accept the nonsense that corporate America wants to sell them. If grocery stores could sell sweet peaches during August back in the sixties, why can’t they do it now? If it were only a question of effort, I would think that better trucking conditions would make transporting ripe fruit over long distances that much easier, but I don’t think it is a question of effort. I think it is a question of the bottom line. I suspect that lugs of peaches were a hook which stores used to get customers in the door. I doubt they made much money on the fresh peaches, but as people came in to get the peaches, they would also buy a lot of other things as well. So the peaches were a loser to get people in the door and spending money. In the meantime, we are offered bad fruit, hard peaches, and no alternatives. The peach is such a simple fruit–fuzz, flesh, juice, sugar–a hedonistic delight when served ripe.

On public transportation

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There is something inherently populist and democratic about public transportation, and it isn’t that I want to get up on my soap box and scream about this being the only sustainable means of transportation, but that may be true. The car with one person in it is not only extremely isolating and egotistical, it is a waste of resources, and I would not be suprised to see a day when that mode of transportation is gone. When I am in large cities I make sure I know where the subway goes, how the buses can get me to and fro, when the trains leave. I don’t mind letting someone else drive, I don’t care if I have to sit next to a complete stranger. The fact is I am also a complete stranger to whomever my seat companion is. Why should the world be just for me? Yes, subways can be noisy, smelly, slow, and inconvenient. Often they are packed in the mornings with hundreds of thousands of people going to work. They all know that even if they had a car, there would be nowhere to either drive it or park it if they all decided to abandon the subway. The reality of the situation dictates that they must use public transportation because taking their own car is impractical. The big benefit of public transportation is its sustainability over the long haul—subways and trains are a long term investment that can pay out over decades, whereas highways are less sustainable and more expensive. One of the personal benefits of public transportation is the connection it creates among its users. One tends to feel a little more sympathetic towards all of humanity if one sees and experiences lots of humanity every day. Locked up in your car with your cell phone and your café latte, you tend to see yourself as unrelated to the rest of the people and have no real sense of empathy for others. You drive like a brute as if you were the only one on the road. When you have to share a subway car or a public bus you have to learn to share and take turns, let the slower ones have their chance to move, give the mothers with babies a chance to sit down, let that tired factory worker sleep. Humility, empathy, kindness, sharing, these are not simple qualities or experiences, but they are a commentary on what kind of people we are or have become. You can have bad experiences on public transportation, no doubt, you might have to stand, someone might get sick, some kids might make a raucous, things happen, but at least you are in the middle of humanity having a real experience, not locked up in your air-conditioned car complaining about how rotten the traffic is and how much parking costs. Today I took a much needed nap on the bus, and nobody bothered me one little bit. Now that is sustainable transportation.

On public transportation

Posted on by

There is something inherently populist and democratic about public transportation, and it isn’t that I want to get up on my soap box and scream about this being the only sustainable means of transportation, but that may be true. The car with one person in it is not only extremely isolating and egotistical, it is a waste of resources, and I would not be suprised to see a day when that mode of transportation is gone. When I am in large cities I make sure I know where the subway goes, how the buses can get me to and fro, when the trains leave. I don’t mind letting someone else drive, I don’t care if I have to sit next to a complete stranger. The fact is I am also a complete stranger to whomever my seat companion is. Why should the world be just for me? Yes, subways can be noisy, smelly, slow, and inconvenient. Often they are packed in the mornings with hundreds of thousands of people going to work. They all know that even if they had a car, there would be nowhere to either drive it or park it if they all decided to abandon the subway. The reality of the situation dictates that they must use public transportation because taking their own car is impractical. The big benefit of public transportation is its sustainability over the long haul—subways and trains are a long term investment that can pay out over decades, whereas highways are less sustainable and more expensive. One of the personal benefits of public transportation is the connection it creates among its users. One tends to feel a little more sympathetic towards all of humanity if one sees and experiences lots of humanity every day. Locked up in your car with your cell phone and your café latte, you tend to see yourself as unrelated to the rest of the people and have no real sense of empathy for others. You drive like a brute as if you were the only one on the road. When you have to share a subway car or a public bus you have to learn to share and take turns, let the slower ones have their chance to move, give the mothers with babies a chance to sit down, let that tired factory worker sleep. Humility, empathy, kindness, sharing, these are not simple qualities or experiences, but they are a commentary on what kind of people we are or have become. You can have bad experiences on public transportation, no doubt, you might have to stand, someone might get sick, some kids might make a raucous, things happen, but at least you are in the middle of humanity having a real experience, not locked up in your air-conditioned car complaining about how rotten the traffic is and how much parking costs. Today I took a much needed nap on the bus, and nobody bothered me one little bit. Now that is sustainable transportation.

On a peak experience

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Perhaps some things are meant to be shared, and maybe peak experiences are some of those things, but many peak experiences are experienced in the solitary halls and passageways of the mind. What we have in common are the mundane, humdrum experience of the daily grind–alarm clocks, traffic, grocery stores, ringing cellphones, deadlines at work, crabby clients, upset co-workers, television, the weather, eating fast food, delayed flights, lost baggage, coughing, whatever. You know what kinds of experience crowd your daily calendar, making life a grinding experience where you sweat and worry and do the same thing day in and day out, and you have no peak experiences, you don’t make it to the mountain much less climb it. I am not a literal mountain climber, but I find both the actual experience of mountain climbing and the metaphor of climbing a mountain, leading to peak experiences to be both intriguing and inexplicable. The “peak” experience occurs when you make it to the top, and you are filled with that pleasure of having accomplished something difficult and the pleasure of the sublime view from the top. The literal and the metaphoric mix indiscriminately and endorphins are released into the brain and the pleasure center explodes with joy. We are in a constant fight against the mundane that invades our lives at every turn, turning us into dystopic apocalyptic zombies who have no hope for a better, brighter future than that which is offered by the big box retailers who constantly tempt us by “rolling back prices” or exponentially larger sales via Black Friday frenzy and similarly conjured false experiences which are meant to enhance our consumer experience. What is lacking here is the personal, the individual, the unique which makes each person a person and not just another statistic to be manipulated by cooperate giants who despise the individual and love the mass of sheep who flock to the stores to take advantage of those new lower prices. Peak experiences in life have nothing to do with buying anything. Every person, every individual has the ability to have their own peak experience whenever they want, but going to the store is the antithesis of the peak experience. Only by searching out that which makes us all unique can we explore the passions that will bring about a peak experience. Passion, emotion, creativity, vision, imagination, all of which exist only in the mind have nothing to do with physical objects. It is our objects, frequently, which enslave us in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Money, gold, silver, trophies, electronics, automobiles, buildings, entrap us, snare us, throw us into prisons of our makings, dragging us further and further from even the possibility of a peak experience. Only by shedding the desire for material possessions can we begin to explore a life which might take us to a higher level of the human experience ruled more by beauty, art, creativity than the mundane daily grind of deadening routine. I think the current with dystopic and apocalyptic literature is a direct reaction to the extremely unsatisfying consumer society which has replaced real experiences (peak experiences) with simulacra such as shopping or digitally mediated communication or perhaps the most horrific simulacrum–shopping for digitally mediated communication, which completely cuts us all off from each other, rendering us helpless to create with another person on any level, cutting us off from all peak experiences of any kind. Shopping is not a peak experience, but for those whose lives have been reduced to buying things off of the shopping channels, life is shopping, shopping is life, and no peak experiences are allowed because nothing experienced through simulacra can be a peak experience. Just ask Mildred Montag.

On a peak experience

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Perhaps some things are meant to be shared, and maybe peak experiences are some of those things, but many peak experiences are experienced in the solitary halls and passageways of the mind. What we have in common are the mundane, humdrum experience of the daily grind–alarm clocks, traffic, grocery stores, ringing cellphones, deadlines at work, crabby clients, upset co-workers, television, the weather, eating fast food, delayed flights, lost baggage, coughing, whatever. You know what kinds of experience crowd your daily calendar, making life a grinding experience where you sweat and worry and do the same thing day in and day out, and you have no peak experiences, you don’t make it to the mountain much less climb it. I am not a literal mountain climber, but I find both the actual experience of mountain climbing and the metaphor of climbing a mountain, leading to peak experiences to be both intriguing and inexplicable. The “peak” experience occurs when you make it to the top, and you are filled with that pleasure of having accomplished something difficult and the pleasure of the sublime view from the top. The literal and the metaphoric mix indiscriminately and endorphins are released into the brain and the pleasure center explodes with joy. We are in a constant fight against the mundane that invades our lives at every turn, turning us into dystopic apocalyptic zombies who have no hope for a better, brighter future than that which is offered by the big box retailers who constantly tempt us by “rolling back prices” or exponentially larger sales via Black Friday frenzy and similarly conjured false experiences which are meant to enhance our consumer experience. What is lacking here is the personal, the individual, the unique which makes each person a person and not just another statistic to be manipulated by cooperate giants who despise the individual and love the mass of sheep who flock to the stores to take advantage of those new lower prices. Peak experiences in life have nothing to do with buying anything. Every person, every individual has the ability to have their own peak experience whenever they want, but going to the store is the antithesis of the peak experience. Only by searching out that which makes us all unique can we explore the passions that will bring about a peak experience. Passion, emotion, creativity, vision, imagination, all of which exist only in the mind have nothing to do with physical objects. It is our objects, frequently, which enslave us in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Money, gold, silver, trophies, electronics, automobiles, buildings, entrap us, snare us, throw us into prisons of our makings, dragging us further and further from even the possibility of a peak experience. Only by shedding the desire for material possessions can we begin to explore a life which might take us to a higher level of the human experience ruled more by beauty, art, creativity than the mundane daily grind of deadening routine. I think the current with dystopic and apocalyptic literature is a direct reaction to the extremely unsatisfying consumer society which has replaced real experiences (peak experiences) with simulacra such as shopping or digitally mediated communication or perhaps the most horrific simulacrum–shopping for digitally mediated communication, which completely cuts us all off from each other, rendering us helpless to create with another person on any level, cutting us off from all peak experiences of any kind. Shopping is not a peak experience, but for those whose lives have been reduced to buying things off of the shopping channels, life is shopping, shopping is life, and no peak experiences are allowed because nothing experienced through simulacra can be a peak experience. Just ask Mildred Montag.