the 21st century has seen artists give voice to the machines. they have allowed themselves to act as vectors and messengers of artificial intelligences.
Darkstar said
Aidy's Girl is a Computer was essentially them trying to get the machine to sing.
And if we were, collectively, to stop medicating, what would happen? What conclusions might we come to?
That DFW bit from
The Pale King seems appropriate here.
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.”
In other words is there an event on the horizon which is catalysing these responses
I noticed a bunch of people echoing some of the sentiment in the catastrophe thread under a Reddit post about Hong Kong the other day. They were all saying they've always known something bad on a mass-scale would happen in their lifetime, that Hong Kong was a vision of the future, that they just have this feeling the world and their way of life will be drastically changed within the next twenty years.
There's a book by a bloke called Clifford Simak called
City which had a section added to it about an ant city on Earth with a slight twist on the 'human boot' line from
Nineteen Eighty-Four and it often comes to mind when I see how everyone seems to be fixated, consciously or unconsciously, on some approaching destructive force or doom.
Simak wrote the ninth and last tale in the City saga in 1973, twenty-two years after he wrote the previous episode. Jenkins is on the original Earth, living at the old Webster home, surrounded on all sides by the Ant City. He comes to realize that the Ant City is dead, just as a spaceship returns to take him to the robot worlds. Breaking through the wall of the city, he sees nothing but infinitely repeated versions of a single sculpture; a human boot kicking over an anthill.
It may just be death tbh. It's the one thing that hangs over everyone and we're more aware of it than ever due to the internet, scientific and medical advances and the ephemeral nature of contemporary culture. We're collectively sliding down a slate roof, grasping at tiles as they go whizzing past and smashing on the concrete below.