Magical & Revolutionary

The iPad is and I'll tell you why.

The magic is that Apple can create a firestorm of interest off of an underpowered device and get people to fork over $500 for it. That's magic. They have the opportunity to create a touchscreen tablet that could do anything a Macbook could do but elected to force an unmitigated piece of shit down consumers’ throats. I think it's a device solely to push a subscription model even further.

Apple knows what you need, you don't. You need whatever the hell we tell you to need and be happy paying for it on credit at 19% interest.

Their subscription model has entranced people and competitors into supporting it. RIM fell for it also because people believe Blackberries have to sync with iTunes in order to compete in the user space. Compete hell, it becomes subservient to it.

You know Apple owners are culturally superior, hip creative types. It was sad to see Mr. Jobs unveil it as the "Best device we've ever created." It was sadder that people fall for the hype associated with it. Apple consumers are not unlike the "Lemmings" commercial aired during 1985. Maybe every consumer (formerly known as citizens), regardless of the product, exhibits this trait.

It is almost revolting to see the gadget induced euphoria of some slob standing in line to get the latest iPad or iPhone. It used to be this kind of joy was the birth of a child or a wedding.

Warning! I'm about to go off!

Your every thought is pushed into the direction an army of marketers want you to be in. They have the resources and the data most likely willfully given to them by the consumer. They have invaded your mind and create interesting and new problems that can only be solved by the chosen few. Fanciful algorithms that can target you via email based on your interest, suggest other products from a limited pool that you may be interested in and sell any data you give to anyone with no regard to your privacy.

Whatever independent trend that arises of your own volition is quickly capitalized on and they start calling the shots. The counter-cultural and revolutionary company that spawned personal computing has in fact obtained the very attributes they loathed in the past. Anything that swam against the tide 25 years ago has fallen to the same engineered constructs that continue to exist and most likely will for the next 100 years.

Any power the computer revolution promised will become a method to catalog your every interest and purchase. The goal; to market more crap to you and control your every thought (It has got to be true, it’s on the internet!). Companies are now determining your needs and crafting your wants. It's a science. We have been marketed to our entire lives and pushed into cliques which widen to contain the newly found individual consumer, like a crowded Tokyo subway car. We're all going in the same direction, like it or not. It is just planned obsolescence my friend. You are never as good as the next best product pushed upon you. You can out do the Jones'es for a few weeks until the next scheduled event that will hail a self-proclaimed revolutionary product that's magical. It'll put the world of predetermined licensed products in the palm of your hand for a 2 year contract and end up in the Pacific Ocean leaking toxic metals, although you felt good about buying a "green" product. The blame falls on you for destroying the planet, so you separate you paper, plastic and glass, pay for the service to buy it at a higher price because it's recycled material.

Things that bother me

· Billboards - How about a billboard that says "Pay attention to the road!"

· Commercials - I think television shows now break up the monotony of commercials.

· Spam - Pretty much geared to selling an erection for 4 hours.

· Direct mail marketing - Not even read by the crows in the landfill.

· Telemarketing - "Hello I'd like to take a few minutes of your life to sell you a product you don't need during dinner.

· Banner ads - Not here.

· Airplane Banners - The final act of desperation in marketing.

· Goodyear Blimp - See above. The most recognizable act of final desperation in marketing.

· Radio ads – “Two for Tuesday.” Really! How about all fucking day!

· Any event that shouts “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!”

· Infomercials – Does anyone need to see a thirty minute program on a damn broom, stain remover or a piece of cloth “that will change your life forever.” If that changes your life, you are as dull as they come. Is the culmination of human achievement that a sham-wow picks up water just as effectively as a paper towel?

You cannot go one damn day without seeing one of those. Is there any solace or peace from this nefarious crap? Is there anywhere a person can go and not be thought a nutcase to get away from this constant bombardment into my thoughts? It’s almost as if every crevice of your mind is being filled with the next revolutionary product.

The internet replaces TV as television can only push propaganda to you. The internet is used to collect every conceivable metric your social media site can collect for its panopticon and funnel your information to either corporations or the NSA. “Its fun to share information and privacy is so outdated.” You'll have to rethink it to fit into the new world of technology and be a productive member of society looking for porn and visiting "career" sites looking for work. You can pretend you are a Dominatrix although you are a member of a respected civic organization. You can be anything you want to be except when you checkout your shopping cart items. Hey if you are the CEO of a major communications firm that still holds privacy sacred you'll lose government contracts to your competitor and they'll send you to jail for insider trading (Wink Wink Worldcom).

It's mind-share baby. Given the fact our trusted institutions have crafted your behavior, marketed to you in every conceivable way imaginable the other 90% of your brain is fodder. The 10% you use simply responds like Pavlov's dog to new stimulus. If you shove away the bullshit your mind is cluttered with, what if anything remains?

Think about a few things:

Rock and Roll was a distant outcast form of music detested by the mainstream. It represented sexuality and rebellion against the establishment. It was quickly contained and put into a jar. The industry molded it and feed off of it to push products. Even started crafting teen heart throbs for general public consumption. Rock and Roll is dead and the industry-indentured slaves are musicians whose profits pale in comparison with record labels.

Don't forget that your favorite band of the sixties, whether it be the Rolling Stones, the Beatles , The Who or whatever was marketed to young teens, a growing market segment. They had lawyers and agents. They signed contracts. They made money for corporations.

They push controversial music until it's saturated and move on to the next disposable product. Rap.

Rap idolizes the gangster mentality, debases men and women. Rap actually has its origin in the movie industries portrayal of Mafia bosses. A people whose culture was destroyed who, lacking any role models, choose negative ones who represented power. I consider rap to be hideous. That's my opinion, but in its controversy it was quickly snatched up and marketing to the largest audience; white teenagers who have no culture identity themselves. Lost little suburban souls who want to identify with a manufactured culture. That's the catch the savvy marketing folks know one thing well. Humans are social creatures. What are they?

Country music represents the heartlands traditional values. Right. It's about conformity, drinking, lying cheating and every other vice not contained in Rock or rap music. Listen to it. If you play it backwards you find your dog, your wife comes back, you sober up and find work.

Can you take comfort in throwing your leather chaps on and "Live to Ride, Ride to Live." Flip the bird to suits and you stand in line to pay your membership fee and sign a waiver in the event your road captain gets 5 people killed on a ride and absolves the Motor Company from any responsibility. You'll bump into a 20 million lone wolves just like you. Your activity is geared around riding to the dealership to buy more bolt on parts (and being a member of the cycling family). Hard rugged individualist with a custom chopper designed by a multimillion-dollar company. You're bad-ass Skull & Crossbones T-shirt being made in China by children. Pretend to Live, Live to Pretend. They took a counter-cultural movement and turned it into a product. There is no refugee for individuality.

Products to invade every nook and cranny of your mind. You can repetitively listen to the same song on your iPod, be locked into a contract and a subscription model that can be remotely deleted based on a small teams decision on how you use (or if you can use) items you've purchased. Ever looked at software End User License Agreement? No warranty, their property you have no rights. You have to consent to the agreement even after you bought the product or you don't use it. It’s that simple. Sure, the producer of your favorite product cares about you. You are statistically represented by the number one but you mean zero. You are a fractional margin of profit. Get one song off of the internet and a team of lawyers will descend upon you like a storm of locust. They want you to be raped in prison by a killer with no hope of parole. A child of the universe who had no hope, education or parents. Prison is the only thing they'll ever know. They will die there. Meanwhile the remaining family cannot survive the turmoil and is broken apart

To be one of the few employees of that glorious company! You'll go to seminars to be a better employee. You’re instructed to be a loyal member and how lucky you are to be employed. However, we'll reduce our manufacturing plants and outsource it to China. We need to lower production costs yet charge the same, if not more, for cheaply produced products. If we lose money, our shareholders will demand a change of pace and have a overpaid psychopath do further damage, doctor the books, lay you off and wish you luck in the future. If the CEO fucks up or gets caught he'll have a golden parachute of millions. You? Why you'll be selling you house at a loss, move in with relatives if you’re lucky enough to have anywhere to go and think it's your fault. Maybe you'll have the unemployment for 6 months at 20% of your income for food. That CEO will be cleared of wrong doing; blame the market to start the cycle again.

Human resources will constantly remind you that you are the member of the family. Until they lay your ass off and remind you that you have a limited time to apply for CORBA, which will cost you $800 a month of money you no longer have. It's like a divorce, so I guess maybe they are family.

We live in a world saturated with bullshit and make believe institutions corrupted by the very people we need protection from, cleverly determining your needs, telling you how to think, what to wear, who to buy from at the lowest price with the highest interest, entertaining us with murder, rape by poorly portrayed stereotypes by dysfunctional actors with shitty lives who have no control in their personal affairs and paraded to the public as role models. It's the only thing you'll ever know or what they want you to be aware of.

The only important issue is sports, cheating on exams and stabbing people in the back to get ahead of the game while calling everyone a potential terrorist who can't accept our ideal of democracy viewed by the barrel of a gun. We kill remotely by drone aircraft, by expendable soldiers who want to believe in honor and join because of limited education and opportunity to decay scared and limbless in a military hospital that ignores them or the high suicide rate, apparently all for corporate interests and foreign lobbies. "Support the Troops" although they most likely have not served and their kids are going to the best college money can buy. How about waging a War on false pretense? So, we'll give you the next moneyed candidate who will promise you peace and scale up deployments after election. To top it off he’ll get a Nobel Prize prize as he escalates and expands the war. “Think of the plight of the women who wear burkas! What about those human rights violations?” We continue to kill civilians because "surgical precision warfare" is conducted by the next general willing to take a consulting job in the defense industry at retirement if he supports policy. Oh about that "surgical precision." Ever notice that civilian deaths in war have climbed using "surgical precision" more so in modern than in the past? The way around that is proclaiming them "Human Shields." Maybe they were in the wrong place. Easy to do since we brought the war to their backyard ain't it.

You are convinced the state cares and will solve your every need provided you are aligned into the group-think of your party line, whilst they are simply different sides of the same coin. Your religious institutions call you a sinner and commit sexual crimes against you, pushing you to declare others unbelievers on the path to hell while they line their pockets with your money to do gods work, while they pervert the teachings of their founders. Religion decries science; science becomes a religion and falsifies data to support politically motivated agenda. You are told you are responsible for global warming, so buy earth friendly products and mass produced organic foods as we create genetically engineered grains to manage the environment and market fluctuations.

Don't think as a citizens but revel in your purchasing ability as we crash the market and funnel your great grandchildren's money to financial institutions "to big to fail" and give bonuses to the very people who fucked our country up and don't pay taxes themselves under a three page letter that says the government cannot disclose who the money goes to, inquire thereof or sue the perpetrators of this fraud. We'll give you mandatory insurance and call it health care in a well crafted law that destroys any remaining right the Patriot act hasn't snatched from your ass and we preach a free market mantra to your jobless population who's manufacturing base is lost to a country whose political ideology we have fought the against for over 50 years, meanwhile a small group of the elite can disseminate information to the six remaining media companies of which they sit on the board of and determine government policy from private, members only think tanks who have zero interest in you as a person, nationality or country and believe you are simply useless non-productive eaters and cannon fodder to be used to support their goals.

We'll have the highest incarceration rate in the world using a three strike rule for offenses some of our corporate leaders exceed on a daily basis. Let's destroy any indigenous group in the name of progress. Better yet, prop up dictators until we decide the defense industry needs more money and bomb them back into the Stone Age, only to have contractors steal our money by building shoddy infrastructure at 20 times the income of a soldier. We'll protect dignitaries with paid mercenaries who answer only to the perceived value of a fiat dollar and rape females and kill civilians with impunity. Every investigation clears them of wrongdoing.

We humans created tools to solve problems. We turned those tools into weapons. We kill for our leaders; we worship those tools until we become victims of them. Now we become tools to serve the need of a minority of people we never see. They divide us based on a false ideology they created. We outnumber them but if we are poor, uneducated and apathetic we are powerless. Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes into play and we seek survival and security, nothing more. They preach law and order but rain destruction on us. We are pacified by religious leaders who are simply going to tell you it the unknown will of a distant god who will reap the souls of 144,000 elect and destroy the world for his chosen people.

You can't make this shit up.

Understand the point of this wildly chaotic diatribe? It is magic. It is chants, symbols and mythology. Shamans used chants, wizards use symbols and religions use mythology to invade your mind. Rhythmic repetitive messages and powerful logos that bombard you into a trance. We are told magic does not exist. Politicians and marketers use these very tools. Enthralled and hypnotized, you submit.

"Designed by Apple Computers in California, manufactured in the Peoples Republic of China."

For unique, hip assholes with disposable income.

"If you are in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. There is no joke here."
-- Bill Hicks.