House of Eratosthenes

Planning my bike route last night, I noticed there was a “New Google Maps” which looks more like Bing. And so Mrs. Freeberg had to put up with yet one more rant.

Nobody took the time to ask me. They never do. This suggests a lack of importance on my part, which would actually be my preference; but let me ask this one thing. If I am so unimportant, then why is it that every time this-thing is made to look more like that-thing, it is a constant and consistent observation of mine that the thing being changed was so much higher on my unimportant list of personal preferences, than the that-other-thing? The thing to which it is being changed?

What could explain that, other than some sadistic power-broker huddled in a back room somewhere saying to a room full of other power-brokers — Morgan likes this thing and he doesn’t like that other thing, so let’s get moving.

Make James Bond more like Jason Bourne. Make Star Wars movies more like C-SPAN. Make *all* of the police-procedural dramas on the teevee, look like Law And Order. Make all the talk shows look like The View. Make not-Apple products look more like Apple products.

I guess they’re all just little reminders that the universe is not my personal property. We can all use such a reminder now & then; some of us, more than others. But there is more to it than that. As Scott Adams pointed out three years ago, it’s likely to have an effect on us when we never have to be bored. It’s the bunny-trails in life, the paths not tread, the avenues without asphalt. Not too many people are looking at those anymore. There’s no reason to.

Entertainment merely sheds the best light on what is happening to us, making this effect upon our behavior most pronounced. Entertainment is most expensive. And, risky. The producers of the entertainment want a built-in audience.

And we seem to be living in an age in which the largest and most lucrative audiences, have no objections to offer if everything they’re seeing is something they’ve seen before. Recently. Repeatedly.

None of this is cause for concern, I suppose, except one thing: The reaction we have lately when we make make the increasingly rare acquaintance of something, or someone, outside of this narrow confine of our Apple-Starbucks-The-View urban cocoon. It was not so long ago that people would generally find such a thing refreshing. Perhaps, in the outlying areas, they still do. But the urban, modern living is becoming more sharply and crisply defined, the “footprint” of such living shrinking into a pencil-sized dot of expectations, enforced daily and dogmatically.

The expected consumer of such goods is, therefore, also becoming more crisply defined; this is both a cause and an effect. S/He is not me. This is more like an anti-Morgan. Someone who likes movie westerns only if the gunfighter looks like a hipster douchebag, and when s/he turns on the teevee s/he completely loses it if the forum is not always the same big table with four or five women clustered around it, clutching big gaudy coffee cups in their manicured claws, talking over each other.

I feel more pity than envy toward such a creature. What’s it like to live in a society that panders to your most tangential preferences minute by minute, year after year? Doesn’t the day ever come where they find themselves wanting something that everybody else doesn’t necessarily want? This, I infer, would be a jarring experience to someone unaccustomed to it. What happens then? That would be a personal-decision-point, I guess. It couldn’t be anything else. They’d learn to push past the pain and start thinking for themselves, or else they’d succumb and get reined back in, back into the world of chocolate mocha frothy drinks at McDonald’s. Much more often the latter than the former. A gilded cage.

Meanwhile, my “center map here” command has gone missing, and zoom seems to be broken. I’m glad they’re continuing to get and see only what they expect to get and see, nothing more, nothing less. Just yet another research project for the rest of us that we didn’t want.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 05/31/2014 @ 06:52

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Making This Thing Look More Like That ThingSaturday, May 31st, 2014

Making This Thing Look More Like That Thing
Saturday, May 31st, 2014