Taste of Chaos

The following is the result of a fugue state I reached recently after a combination of excessive work stress and not enough drinking. I am making no attempts to logically or ethically validate these thoughts. The world around me speaks in strange voices, and sometimes I can even make out the words.

Consider for a moment, how well the hallmarks of a rational, civilized society hold up in a modern context. Thirty people are born a second. Approximately 15-20 die in that time frame. Despite our wars, our environmental destruction, famines, plagues and natural disasters, we repopulate so quickly we may not actually be capable of human extinction with anything short of complete global destruction. There are over 6 and a half billion people, spawning little bastards at a near exponential rate.

On top of this, we live in a time where information is near-instantaneous and so abundant that if you took every file, bit of information, reportage and commentary compiled into the Internet, books, audio files, television, video files. et al., a single person would spend a lifetime and likely not sort through the entirety. And that's just one day of information.

In these third world countries where there is virtually no infrastructure, there are still many who have wireless phones and computers with direct satellite wi-fi. I have literally seen pictures from Zimbabwe and the Congo uploaded from a village with no paved roads or running water and posted on blogs. Teenage girls in Myanmar/Burma who spend their days blogging about shoes and American pop stars become vital journalists when military dictators decide to stamp down hard on protesting monks with iron-shanked boots and the only photo evidence is a few phone cam pictures posted to a Myspace page. See the military gunning down unarmed monks. See an airheaded teenager do more political damage to the tyrant than the U.N. and every major news corporation combined could manage.

Think of it, you spend years clenching your little nation in a brushed-steel grip, choking off dissent and preventing even sunlight from entering your country without prior authorization just to get totally pwned by a fourteen year old Paris Hilton fan. LOLZ indeed.

The downside is that warfare and military strategy is now rendered obsolete in the obscene. A terrorist cell can coordinate efforts without its members having to meet in person, using GPS locators, and readily available public information available on the intrawebz to conduct affairs, carry out money-making schemes through simple information theft and e-mail scams. Through simple codification, a website can direct people on a global scale into a process for strategic implementation of militant insurgency.

Porn is not just free, the very nature of voyeurism has evolved to be a post-post-modernist participatory event. Through blogging, social networking, and real-time video, chat, and broadcast, millions now create spectacle in conjunction with others, a simultaneous audience and performance in which the boundaries of what is real and who is involved no longer exist. We aren't just fucking and watching people fuck, we're simulcast fucking.

Simply stated, the world has changed. This is perhaps where most conservatives completely fail, clinging to the traditions and mores of an age that no long exists except as a memory. Their hope, as always, is to slow if not downright stop the momentum of this change. In their sick fantasy worlds, somehow we may even be able to reverse it, unlearn the past 20 years and pretend that the whole Internet thing was just a really bad fucking dream spawned from snorting coke off the asses of cheap D.C. hookers. You can almost hear that Nixon voice saying "Oh thank god, TCP/IP is just the acronym for a new long range nuclear missile. Johnson, hand me the Scotch and lets bomb a Southeast Asian country that's thinking about going Communist. And make sure to get out the press-releases so that everyone reports exactly what we want!"

However, there is a deeper consideration, beyond just the usual anti-progressionist brigade's battle cries against change. It will be necessary for us to seriously reconsider some of the most fundamental assumptions we live with as we continue to move forward.

Without seriously reconsidering our notions of acceptable cultural, legal, and social norms, the constant fight against restriction of freedoms and opportunities aplenty will be lost in a very unpleasant manner. Organized religions the across the globe espouse the blasphemy of birth control practices. "Marry and fuck with god's blessing, you know, so long as you make more Catholics/Muslims/Hindus/Capitalist Assholes." We use non-renewable resources at such a rate that we may very likely see them entirely depleted within our lifetimes, but oh well, the kids can deal with that later. Except we promote sports teams above teachers and celebrity above science. Most of the largest medical breakthroughs are all built around our creation of anti-aging, beauty-enhancing, mortality-denying culture. So of course, the same assholes who used up the resources so prodigiously will likely still be around to bitch about it when they run out.

The average fat-ass in a first world country will eat ten times as much as someone in a third-world nation, and still be considered a victim of malnutrition because nothing s/he ate actually had actual vitamins or nutrients. Solution: we'll drop money on pills to make us less fat and make sure we get our vitamin C so we don't have to get up from the fucking desk and unplug from WOW.

And we will continue to make unreasonable laws which continue to diminish our radius of freedoms in attempt to somehow fight a losing rear-guard action against the inevitable chaos, all the while somehow pretending the real problem is that we can no longer cling to outdated modalities of thoughts and broken down social paradigms.

There are certain deconstructionist arguments that, to generalize, view morality as a social construct reflective of societal needs. Beyond even utilitarianism which would determine the course of right by what serves the greatest portion of the population, the argument is that a society creates a premise of what is reasonable and acceptable, and moral behavior will either coincide with this normative, or it will exist in opposition and thusly be "wrong." Needs change, to varying degrees, but when circumstances change dramatically, what was moral and required can become counterproductive at best, and downright destructive at worst. But what comes next?

I don't propose a solution as such. It will take much greater thinkers than myself to recognize exactly how we can continue to function as a species in the coming years. And as an advocate of chaos and change so violent and vicious it would make the Gods' sphincters clench tighter than a choir boy's in room full of bishops, I frankly welcome the awesome madness and bloodshed.

I envision a world where the problem of over-population and hunger are solved with the same solution, and cannibalism is the new fast food chain. Welcome to McDahmer's, would you like to try our new French-Canadian wraps? Only fresh-imported Quebecers used.

I envision a world where half the population lives through Second-Life avatars, interacting in wholly virtual societies that look identical to the ones they left behind, only everyone is a millionaire, looks like Brangelina but with giant cocks and fake tits. The rest of us keep their feeding tubes unclogged and empty their piss bags for ten dollars an hour. We get a quality dosage of mood-suppressants to keep us from being to unhappy about our glorified janitorial work.

A world where news events are broadcast ten minutes before corporations enact the events, and nothing happens that hasn't been scripted or story-boarded. The line between reality and reality TV will cease to exist entirely.

A future where war is literally scheduled between various factions and sponsored by global multi-national corporations to help boost the economy and make sure the constantly exploding populations have a proper control. Nations exist only to give people a sense of national identity but every politician, is that much more the personal whore of whichever CEOs are in power (okay, so that's pretty much already true.)

I want to see a whole generation of bored, juvenile hooligans who have replaced tattoos and piercings with weekly body-modification surgeries that change race, gender, and features as easily as we change clothes now. I see them listening to music that only they can actually hear, in frequencies they have tuned implants to pick up, super/subsonic atonality that exists as a song only with digital interpretation. They raid across cities for cans of gasoline and drinkable water, new bits of metal to keep their digitals working. The same devices implanted in their brains at birth so that they no longer need to speak words to socially network and have rendered geography meaningless. They review the archives of our culture, sort through to find the good bits, and recreate them en mass, recreating an asymmetric, asynchronous hybrid from the stuff we fucked up, only better.

But that's just me. Hopefully, a few people out there will keep fighting the good fight and we'll find a place of balance despite the chaos. Idealism. I love it. But I never forget the reality. Film effectively came into being around the last decade of the 19th century. The first pornographic film followed it within a few short years. "Oh neat, we have the ability to capture history... dude, let's see if we can record someone fucking!"