the future luxury of anonymity

did something abnormally normal last night: went to the mall, ate and saw a movie--'the social network'. a saunter through the monmouth mall almost inspired me to poetry of the post-postmodern: i gaped at the face-slapping irony of glitzy window-loads of sportswear being peddled to overweight, and in certain cases, obese teens and 'tweens'...immediately i realized that this was the fate of pretty much all of us against the leviathan of total consumer media saturation, as it must be...for why would a self-assured, healthy person need discretionary products in order to feel good about his/her self? the answer: they wouldn't and don't. so, go ahead...be an elite athlete, you fat fuck! or at least buy the sneakers...

as a child and pre-teen, i never felt like i had to wrestle with the cunningest of cunning madison ave minds...even the most well-meaning and well-prepared of critically-thinking adults are hopelessly outgunned in the cultural showdown for hearts and minds--hearts are subliminally won, while the mind shuts off and is pulled along. meanwhile, children are just dead fish in a barrel. not a chance! what's even worse is that the whole enterprise of a mall is like a giant tv of constant commercials, through which you can walk and only spend your way out, interbred with a low-lying, child-level checkout aisle candy rack: the kids grab, the parents pay and are converted into child-abusing curmudgeons if they don't. in fact, i feel that any dissent from or critique of the system instantly makes the critique-er/dissenter into the same. i feel it now, writing this modest blog entry. to even question malls is to hate puppies and children and sacred cows. [no, i don't hate any of the above.]

speaking of that: another sad moment for me...seeing boy scouts selling popcorn at the mall in order to fund their existence. i fondly remember being in the scouts, but don't remember having to do anything remotely as commercial and separated from 'community service', which was an integral part of the entire scouting experience! i felt bad and gave them money without accepting the popcorn. this action seemed to blow their minds even while they thanked me. good scouts...

so, the movie...as a film, it was very good, engrossing even to a non-gen-y-non-facebook-user...i see the facebook phenomenon as strikingly similar to my mall experience, actually: a non-place space to be where everybody is and to see what everybody else is doing. in a word: gossip. in the old world: the town square. my intuition about the trajectory of such an enterprise: right now represents an age of digital communalism/feudalism, wherein everybody except the old wants in---if i may map the historical development of [western] economies onto the development of the internet as a commercial medium...next, i feel that colonization can/will happen, pulling developing nations into the fold [just like getting them cars and cigarettes----new markets, my son, new markets!]...

once everybody's in the pot and being stirred, we'll have to pay---probably a premium---in order to get out....just like at the mall, just like the suburbs vis-a-vis the city! the future luxury of anonymity! this stage would represent the 'bourgeoisie-ification' of our internet society. a current example from our commercial culture is paying more for products without the cheap and sometimes harmful additives expedient to industrial mass-production, but not necessarily to humanity. in an age of total or near-total connectivity, anonymity will be a sought-after/bought-after privilege.

this past week, at the shop, a co-worker talked about the hypothetical tooth-implanted music chip we'll all have...it then came to me that we'll probably have to pay for silence, too....we already do: exclusive living away from the noisy mass, vacations...'getaways', in a word...pay to get away...away...away from....you and you and you and you....