vaporwave – Page 40 – A Piece, of the Sky

Ran rolled the small amount of water around in her flask. What if she were to chug the whole thing down, right now, and feel refreshed, only to feel greater thirst later? Instead, she took the smallest of sips. Ran was lost.

It was only supposed to be a two-hour hike to Riverside, but it seemed like her navigation skills were not what they used to be. Using the position of the sun, she had continued to journey in what she had hoped was the direction of Riverside, but the wooden shacks at the edge of town had never materialized.

She slung the flask back over her tingling shoulders. The sun could mummify her skin.

She tried not to think about the pain in her feet. Sharp burning has subsided into an ongoing ache, that was beginning to give way to numbness.

If only she could sit down, like the Buddha, cross-legged in the sand, and dream herself back to where she wanted to be, back to New York City, back to the stuffy, creaky sitting room of her old girlfriend, Karen. She could see Karen sitting in the splotchy red-violet armchair, watching the news on an old set. What wouldn’t Ran give for Karen’s rickety, old Jeep? She would go back to New York, after a short cruise, in the Caribbean.

The orange desert dwarfed her. It was a slow rolling plain, ringed by distant crags. Above, various black-winged birds screeched, wheeling in the white sunlight. They hung like stationary planetary mobiles, in a quivering blue sky that was painful to look at.

The night would be cold and brittle. She could dig for water then. Right now, she could find some shade and rest in it. But only shrubs sat along the orange expanse. Rocky outcroppings were far away and off in the direction she would be going.

It was a trade-off: take some time to rest or perhaps even stay there, under a cliff, or in a cave, until someone came by, or use what little, time, water and nutrient bars she had left to keep trekking in the direction of where she was supposed to be. Ran didn’t recognize any landmarks. She could be travelling deeper into this desert, deep down in the heart of the United States.

Four days ago, she had been to the sea. Ran had come here from the West Coast, from her surf shop in Los Angeles. Visiting San Bernardino had been a holiday. It was strange how the simplest of things could get so radically overturned, spun in the wrong direction. Ran tried not to let things get her down. She cleared her mind; it was a blank plaster wall, as flat as the land in front of her churning feet.

She puffed out her cheeks and exhaled slowly. Every time she did that, the pain moved farther away, but every time it was pushed back, it would flow back from where it had receded, like ocean waves.

She moved as fast as she dared, hobbling on her throbbing feet. Why couldn’t she move any faster? She had forgotten her camera in the desert.

a good rocket for space a bad rocket for world destruction

There is a market value, pressure or a share for having all our media – film, video games and even books – start to look the same, like they all came out of a shared internet or digital machine. A valid point on the digitalization (and I would argue game-itization) of almost every aspect of our culture – ATMs, phone games – can be made. Almost every social network, from Facebook, to LinkedIn or Steam, edges you along with “achievements,” goals taken straight out of the world of gaming.

Web pages in Web 3.0 are starting to look alike, with the same slick interface straight out of the latest blog templates – just check out Tumblr, Blogger, Gmail (anything made by Google – search, etc.), Twitter, Pinterest, Storify, Instagram, Bing and the latest victim – LinkedIn.

There is talk of a technological singularity – which is very well possible. Instead of having a separate phone, tablet, music player, computer, game console and TV to sync every day, to the cloud (or worse, with cables) why not just have one portable, convenient gadget that does everything? There’s a market for that.

Consumers will pay for the convenience, the same way today people pay for the convenience of ready-made food (fast food) and ready-made computers and operating systems, that come with all the programs you want built-in, already installed.

It’s all about convenience – why do it yourself when you can just pay someone with the specialized knowledge or you can pay for a ready-made device or software that does it for you? I’m not making a right or wrong judgment here, just an observation on the way things seem to be going or the way they are.

Before that technological singularity, a media singularity will come first. Movies are adapted from books. Comic books and video games are made for and from movies. A video game can spawn comics, books and movies, in a media circularity that never ends. Through this process, all media forms will begin to look alike and borrow from each other, such that you no longer really have a piece of entertainment anymore – an individual film, book, video game, etc. – you have a franchise, a brand. This brand system already exists and has existed for centuries now (remember those advertising Mad Men in the 1950s?). It is simply exponentially faster with the new distribution pipes of the digital age.

You can deploy a brand into almost any kind of entertainment or medium and get the maximum amount of market share and the maximum amount of profit – so long as there is a desire for those products. It’s convenient. There’s a market share for that. Why have fans of a certain franchise or brand – say Star Trek, Taylor Swift (individual celebrities are brands too – hence why many artists go by one name, like Madonna) or Twilight – fantasize and write fan fictions about a movie when the movie/book/film/video game/soundtrack can be made for them and be available on their iPad/Smart TV/Xbox/Steam Big Screen/etc.?

The technological and media singularities reinforce each other and make for maximum convenience and therefore maximum profit. It just comes down to what people want. If people want convenience, products, goods and services are going to be made for that desire for convenience and they will be profitable because people want that convenience. If people don’t want those products, they won’t exist.

It’s a bit circular and chicken-and-egg, but this is how the “industries” – the film industry, the video game industry, the toy industry, the computer industry (Apple), the high-end “gamer” video card industry – all work: give the people what they want and make a profit off it. This is like the profit structure of World of Warcraft (although I disagree on whether video games can be used to ‘train’ people)

The moral, ethical and political questions then arise of “well should it work this way,” “could it work another way,” “would it work better another way” etc. or statements like “perhaps it works fine this way” and “it is morally and ethically right for it to work this way (people have the freedom to choose)”, etc. The better ethical, moral and political and economic questions should be concerning what people want and why they want it, and can people freely choose what they want.

That’s what’s at the heart of it, that’s what’s at stake. That’s how these products, services and trends are made. We can’t turn around and think that they appeared out of thin air. They weren’t made and foisted on us – at least not theoretically. No, what we’re getting – from the 1950s, the 1800s and perhaps longer than that – is what we want.

sony