Podcast #144
John Steppling, Dennis Riches, Max Parry, and Shaenah Batterson
https://www.mintpressnews.com/marco-rubio-perfect-little-puppet-most-dangerous-man-alive/288757/
https://x.com/Kahlissee/status/1879587584999055745
https://x.com/johnsteppling/status/1879862035070222675
https://www.csun.edu/~rdavids/350fall08/350readings/Davis%20Case%20for%20Letting%20Malibu%20Burn.pdf
https://justinpodur.substack.com/p/evaluating-bashar-al-assads-human
Re: Onanistic technology, I have been struck by an underlying quality I detect beneath almost all current pop music. It’s there in Kate Perry, Billie Eilish and the ubiquitous Taylor Swift. It’s a generic watered down streamlined glossy sound that has a curious DOURNESS to it. It feels like the music of machines that used to be human. All spontaneity and joy has been purged from it. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) there is a kind of seductive masochistic sweetness about it.
Your tale of technological breakdown re: parcel delivery recalls the tale I spoke about previously whereby my son and I tried to buy a meal in a supermarket store where the canteen had been totally computerised but the system wasn’t working. We ended up leaving. The staff were there to serve, the food was there to go, the public were there with money but none of it could come together because of a computer glitch.
Other tales of techno-meltdown: In the work we have a database where there was a glitch and I tried to get it fixed. I was supposed to log a request via a portal which was incomprehensible and I just took a wild guess and fired off a message, only to be told that I had done it wrong and was given a set of instructions which led me to a series of suggested failures, none of which gave me any room to make specific details. The weird thing is that every panel I went through had a little price sign off to the side as if I was ordering items from a shopping app! And this is the fucking council’s “care” department!
A young work colleague recently applied for a passport and had to travel an immense distance (I think it was to Edinburgh) only to find herself put on a computer link to a guy in Northern Ireland! After which she was interrogated to an insane degree and, it almost goes without saying, had to pay a fee way in excess of anything in my own day. But this is clearly part of the general drift towards fencing off certain areas of consumerism so that only the rich can afford them. It may well be that flights will soon be a thing of the past for the vast majority.
We have recently bought a new TV – it arrives tomorrow and my wife noted that it used to be fun to buy new items but now it’s a major source of stress since you are dreading a rip-off. And trying to get customer service is mostly futile.
Meanwhile the most important matters are neglected or forestalled. I have heard that the population of India are amongst the poorest in the world and yet a colleague who visited there noted that she never met an unhappy Indian. This is due to the fact that they all have enormous extended families which create powerful support networks. Compare that to the Western emphasis on “individualism” in which a ferociously competitive environment has led to a neurotic fear of asking for help as if that would be like a shameful admission of failure.