On Counter Culture

I would like for everyone to take a moment of silence to mourn the passing of counter culture. We hardly had time to get to know it and may never have time to truly understand it. It gave us some of the greatest art of the past century and we will enjoy the memories for the rest of our lives and will weep for the generations to come that will never experience it first hand. Most people know the counter culture as the goths and emo kids, weird and pretentious artists that can never truly say what they stand for. The most common criticism concerns them trying to be different from everyone by looking the same as each other.

Either two emo girls or two emo boys. Or maybe it's an emo boy and-
you know what, forget it. It's just one emo kid.   Source

Most people never really tried to figure out what the source of this terrible, terrible fashion statement was. They would write them off as whiny teenagers and keep walking and, most of the time, this was true. But few realize that this trend was only the latest and most pathetic incarnation of a social deus ex machina: Counter-culture. Going back the generations, we have industrial, grunge, punk, metal, disco, hippies, all the way back to beatniks in the 50's. The former generation writes off the antics of the latter as them being rebellious teenagers, just like they used to be...but they forget why they rebelled in the first place.

In our society, there is always The Norm. This is the standard for with which society maintains equilibrium. The Norm can be as mercurial about certain things, but for the most part it stays somewhat the same. The counter culture arises when young people are exposed to the sucktacular nature of our society and try to buck it off. Of course, a single rebel is worthless. They look absurd and sound like a lunatic, speaking cultural heresies. They find themselves sad and alone, on the fringe of society. It's here that they find others like them. It doesn't occur to most people that rebels aren't trying to be different from everyone, they just want to be different from you.

Most especially you.     Source

They band together and piss everyone off around them, but manage to make some of the greatest art of any modern culture. Nirvana, Marylin Manson, Ozzy Osbourne, and The Beatles (their later work) are all in the same vein of our nations circulation, which is ironic, seeing that two of them aren't even American. The counter culture isn't limited to music, of course. Francis Ford Coppola, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Kubrick have shaped the art and movie communities, which worked with the music industry to influence our culture. They were all counter cultural in their day and have since become icons of a time and world long gone.

Of course, not all of the counter culture is counter cultural. There is a vast expanse of participants who don't give a damn about a cause or a purpose. As I said, this sub-culture is responsible for the greatest art this world has seen and that can be very lucrative. Indifferent people adopt fashion styles and musical tastes in a hope to be edgy and different and it doesn't matter to the merchants of these clothes what their customers believe. The lunatic fringe becomes a commercialized product, causing the crazies to either conform or risk being lost forever. The younger generation watches the previous sell out and create the next paradigm. This is how it has always been.

But now...now the counter culture has fallen off the face of the earth and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. Every day, American bombs go off in Iraq and Afghanistan...and Somalia...and Yemen...and Pakistan. After a decade of war, literally nothing has been accomplished except alot of people have died. Society is in an unprecedented state of distress, with nationwide protests against the war, the 1%, and authoritarian legislation. The stage is set for music, film, and publications full of rage and passion, art that simultaneously decries war while calling for rebellion. Never has there been a wider gap between the ruling elite and the common man. But where the counter cultural movements have always been about sexual freedom, racial inequality, peace, and not a small helping of drugs, the hipsters are take a stand against not being pretentious. Drugs are involved, but only as long as they're ironic.

But maybe that's for the best. When the nation is a powder keg that's smoking cigars while shooting fireworks, maybe it's a good thing that nobody fans the flames of revolution.

This has just been some random thoughts by a casual observer. If you agree or disagree, that's your prerogative. These observations are casual and so I wouldn't be surprised to find them inaccurate and in the end, grossly off-topic. But they're my thoughts and it's boring to keep them to myself.

On Automation

So the other day I was in Wal Mart and I just happened to go through the self checkout line. For those of you who live under a rock (You know who you are), a self checkout is basically a scanner that has a vending machine attached only instead of giving you delicious Skittles that let you taste the rainbow, it spits out nothing but mechanical heartache and rage. I didn't think about this ahead of time. I was actually wearing pajamas and bathrobe, so I obviously wasn't thinking of anything ahead of time. If you think that's odd attire to wear in public, you are wrong.

Traditional garbs of the ancient Wal Mart tribe.

Now that you're done ogling obese mutants, let's continue. Where was I? Oh right, mechanical heartache and rage. So halfway through scanning my groceries, the computer starts flashing a warning that said I hadn't put my Pop Tarts in the bag. This might have been an error with the scale or the artificial intelligence had misjudged how much my groceries were supposed to weigh or maybe I had already eaten three of the Pop Tarts. I don't know, I'm not a computer programmer. I'm Joey. Hi.

After hearing my howls of animalistic rage, an attendant comes by to help. After searching through my bags, she shrugs and swipes a card. This overrides the problem and I get to go on my merry Pop Tart way. But I couldn't enjoy my Pop Tarts. They no longer tasted like thunderbolts and strawberries. They tasted like failure and a robot apocalypse.

Everyone has seen Terminator. If you haven't, why in God's name are you on my blog? You need to be going out and watching that movie. When you see Linda Hamilton's boobs, think of me. For those who still haven't watched the movie out of fear of Linda Hamilton's boobs (understandably), I'll do a quick recap. A robot is sent back in time to kill Linda Hamilton before she can give birth to a son who is destined to save humanity from the aforementioned robot's boss...I didn't realize how stupid that was gonna sound. What can I say, it was the 80's!

                                    Pictured: The 80's                  Source

Anyways, the Terminator's boss was a rogue AI named Skynet. Skynet, upon gaining self-awareness, had deemed it necessary to nuke the world. Why it would think this was a good idea is never really explained, but again, 80's. The concept of a rogue AI isn't anything new. Isaac Asimov even went through the trouble of analyzing the morality of human and robot interaction over 60 years ago. Frank Herbert's Dune repeatedly referenced the Machine Crusade, a terrible war where thinking machines tried to wipe out mankind. Some people write it off as technophobic and conservative, but I'd like to point a few things.

You remember that self checkout I mentioned at the start of the article? Some people see that as progress. Sure, there may be bugs right now, but they'll get that ironed out. What if they replaced all of the registers with self-checkout? That's, like, ten times more progressive! Of course, Wal Mart isn't putting these in their stores for the sake of some technological revolution. They're putting them in because there's a one-time fee and then they never have to pay them again. In science fiction, you see robots doing all the bullshit labor most people don't want to do, but it never answers one question: Where are all the people?

Robot is based off a Czech word meaning slave and that's exactly what they are: Laborers you don't have to pay. It's a perfectly logical conclusion, why pay these schlubs every week when I can pay a robot a single installation fee? In theory, it lowers the cost of production and raises efficiency. It's every employers dream! Of course, it's also every employees nightmare. Everybody's heard the Tall Tale of John Henry, they taught it in school around the time they talked about Paul Bunyan. This American myth (or true story, depending on your school's budget) details one of the first stories about the worker's struggle against automation. In a perfect corporate world, robots would do all of their work while the executives get all the profits. Of course, the robots would have to build walkways from building to building so their corporate masters would never have to walk the streets and risk an ass kicking by all the laborers they put out of work.

I can think of at least one man who's not
afraid of skyscrapers....     Source

It's pretty much undeniable that machines are more efficient than people. Robots don't show up late to work, stinking of booze and sticky with hooker saliva. They can make millions of computations in a fraction of the time it takes a human being. They are, for all intents and purposes, the perfect worker. Of course, on those rare occasions they do make mistakes.... This happens. Stanislav Petrov was faced with ass-tearing Armageddon and, in a moment that proved his scrotum was full of Batmen swimming in molten metal, he played it cool. Pure instinct told him that the United States hadn't launched missiles at Mother Russia, despite the most advanced computers in the Soviet Union telling him otherwise. If that had been a completely automated system, we'd all look like that stuff that comes off the end of a cigarette. What's that called? Oh yeah, fucking ashes.

But as an intellectual (in my humble, gold-plated opinion), I have to ask a serious question: In God's name, why are we putting up with this? Why are we standing by while we lose our jobs to C-3PO? It turns out there is an entire religion out there that embraces the idea of robots replacing humans. I don't just mean in the workforce, I mean in every walk of life. Whether that means uploading your brain into a robot or onto the internet, or maybe replacing every part of you with cybernetics. They're called Transhumanists and it's what happens when we let the nerds win. They didn't watch Blade Runner or the Matrix and root for the good guys, I'll put it that way. I'll admit, it all sounds good until you get realistic. There has never been a machine in the history of the world that didn't malfunction and when these do, it won't just make a weird clicking noise. That cyberworld you live in populated entirely by naked Scarlett Johansson's? Yeah, the Overmind just missed a zero and all the loveslaves turned into naked Danny Devito's.

This article will be continued at a later date, as I can go on for quite some time about it. When I do, it will probably be in a more somber style, but for tonight I've just been having fun.

This has just been some random thoughts by a casual observer. If you agree or disagree, that's your prerogative. These observations are casual and so I wouldn't be surprised to find them inaccurate and in the end, grossly off-topic. But they're my thoughts and it's boring to keep them to myself.