The Intoxicating Jolt of Now

Those little red circles with the numbers in them, that top out at 99 on the iphone, but soar upward unbound everywhere else.

How many people have read me, hearted me, shared me, linked to me?

The graphs at the on-line etailers. I just sold five books! I haven’t sold a book in two days!

Your sales rank graph at Amazon, KDP. Your KENP page reads.

The progress of readers at Goodreads. Ten people have added my book. I can see what page some of them are on. I can check each and every review.

The control panels, where you can track your trend lines. 

Your twitter followers, your retweets, your FB friends, your Youtube subscribers and views, your mailing list sign-ups… and drops. 

Your award nods slowly accumulating at the SFWA site. (if you do SFWA) If you get nods. 

“Sure, the world of the future is like a swarm of angry bees living in your head… but there they are,” said Firesign Theater a long damn time ago. 

This week I successfully avoided talking about the hats, a reference that may or may not be decodable in the future, assuming there is a future, which seems mostly safe to assume. But not entirely. 

I didn’t share the Hat thing, so I didn’t have to apologize about sharing the hat thing or double down on the hat thing or drill into the hat thing to find the deeper truth of the hat thing. 

Instead I read my feed without liking, or sharing but occasionally commenting in others threads, congrats and condolences. Brief engagements that spurted way too many words into someone elses comment thread.

A friend asked me to not derail the point of her tweet with a long orthogonal rambling and I deleted my posts and she said she’d be sure not to waste time commenting on my comments again. 

Ouch. And mission accomplished, I guess. Unintentional of course, the way I do most things.

• There’s no way to interact with the feed that doesn’t entrance you. 
• The feed is designed to entrance you.
• This entrancement is designed to sell things to you. 
• It is designed to prevent you from selling things to your ‘friends’ —unless you pay for ads.
• Your feed is not a publicly regulated utility. It may be entirely composed of lies. If you choose to fill your head with lies and rage, your feed will feed that to you in auto-amplifying waves until you are ready to second amendment whoever it is you are mad at.
• Your feed’s author and owners, when warned that their platform were being weaponized, shrugged and said, “that isn’t our responsibility.” 
• Your feed is a nineteenth century vitamin elixir chock full of opium before the Harrison Act.
• Your feed is a radium cocktail toasting the new millennium.
• Your feed is a Shoe-fitting fluoroscope spewing hard x-rays in all directions.
• Your feed is a glowing watch dial painted by radium girls –taught to twirl the brushes in their mouths to get a sharper point. 
• Your feed is energy  too cheap to meter.
• Your feed is free… but TANSTAAFL.
• What else do billionaires give you, specifically you, for free? I’m not talking libraries built by governments. I’m not talking about soup kitchens or food stamps. Billionaires. Giving. You. Stuff. For. Free.
• Nothing. Nothing else. Ask yourself. Why do I get this for free?
• Your net search is free, too. Shiver.
• TV was free… but the broadcast spectrum was limited. TV was like drinking a six pack a night. Not good for you. But endurable. 
• Your feed is infinitely large. It scrolls for ever. It is a billion billion channels.
• South American native people chewed coca leaves for centuries with harmful effects similar to coffee. Until the leaves were concentrated into powders and the boiled into crack. Becoming more and more concentrated.
• The info billionaires are using deep learning and research and all the shiny tools they have from the whole billionaire thing to concentrate your feed and make it ever more entrancing. 
• You are the product. You make the product. You are the employee. You are the market.
• You work in a company store and every interaction makes money for the store owner. 
• You are addicted to the adrenaline jolt of Now. I’m doing it to you now, too. The irony isn’t lost on me. We’re falling off this cliff together. Have we reached terminal velocity yet?
• When will we hit bottom?

But my blog is a backwater, a church basement and a ring of folding chairs. At best I hope to grow into a grainy, hissing channel 2 with PBS and reruns of Monty Python, new to you perhaps. 

We’re all mad as hell. But are we going to take it anymore?

Pull up a chair, introduce yourself, and smoke ’em if you got em.