...And Stuff

Ah, the space age! Technology lies at our feet, prostrating itself before us! We are the masters of all we survey! So masterful are we of our technology that there is frighteningly little that we can do without it…

Advances in modern technology only serve to encourage Joe American to lose any aptitude he might have normally had and to rely on technology to fill the gaps. You know what led me to discover this fact? Late-night infomercials. That's right, the bastion of capitalism that is the late-night infomercial, brought it to my attention that technological advancement is killing skilled labor in America.

May I just point out how appalled I am that "infomercial" is in Microsoft Word's dictionary? Thanks. Which actually only illustrates my point. The onboard auto-correct / spellchecking function of most word-processing programs actually degrades both the typing and the spelling ability of the user, as they give up on knowing how any particular word is spelled and simply rely on the computer to catch them if they fuck something up. Similarly, it encourages them to not worry about their clumsy typing mistakes, catching most of them as they go and merely redlining the rest of them for correction later.

So, I'm watching late night TV and I see commercials for a pot whose lid locks and allows the straining of whatever was being boiled in it, "without struggling with clumsy strainers and losing half of your noodles in the sink!" Uhm, I don't think I've ever had any terrible problem with straining anything. You turn the pot upside down over the colander and it strains out your noodles, beans, potatoes, what the fuck ever.

It is commercials like this one, or the one where some poor slob is categorically unable to flip something with a spatula (pancakes, eggs, whatever), that make me think that I'm some sort of everyday task prodigy. I've never been under the impression that I was particularly dexterous, that I had any kind of special talent for straining or flipping, or cooking in general, but if everyone in the world is as inept as the hand actor in these commercials, it's no damn wonder that the American economy is consistently going down the crapper. Our industrial sector is overrun with thumb-fingered, ham-fisted klutzes. PLUS! They're guaranteed their jobs, despite how much they fuck it up, by their union whose job it is to defend their ham-fistedness as their God-given American right. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, God-Given Rights, and all that shit can just go take a flying damn leap. If you ask me, the average American needs to be less concerned with what their rights aren't and less worried about what their rights are, because about half the time they're just flat wrong.

Wait, let me get back on topic… Technology ruins people. It makes us all kinds of lazy. Just look at Los Angeles for crying out loud. People have forgotten how to walk to the corner store there. I know people who won't visit a website unless there's a link they can click. You can tell them, "my site is up at www.thecoolestsiteinthedamnworld.com," and they'll never visit it unless you send them a hyperlink. I actually know people who won't write something down in order to remember it, but rather tell you to "e-mail me". Fuck you! Make your own damn notes! It's not my damn job to remind you of things you promised to do for me two weeks ago but haven't because it's not in your damn Inbox! The Modern Convenience has made us a race of lazy fucking Neanderthals (even more than we were before) who can't do anything unless there's a gizmo they can buy to make it easier, or even do it for them. I mean, what happened to remembering stories word for word and passing them on verbally? The printing press happened, that's what.

Nothing is made by hand anymore, at least nothing that doesn't cost an arm, a leg and your firstborn child. Take any random collection of people off the street… No, not street people you idiot manchild. Take any random selection of people and ask them if they know how to make something by hand, and I all but guarantee you that nine out of ten of them will have no idea even how to sew a button on a shirt, much less knit or make a box out of wood. It's these people who would never be able to pull their weight in the post-apocalyptic world that all the raving survivalists swear is right around the corner. They'd freeze, or starve to death, or die of exposure without the charity of some kind soul who was willing to give them a sweater they knit, or something they grew to eat, or a knife they forged so they could defend themselves.

These leeches on the efforts of others are currently enjoying a place in the sun as the beloved 'consumer' that everyone talks about on the news each night. The consumer is the essential lynchpin of our so-called consumer economy. Problem is, our economy isn't a consumer economy, it's a vendor economy. It is driven by the need to sell things. Anything, really, as long as a company can get more money for it than it cost them, thereby paying the American working class to mass-produce crap that the rest of us don't need, but can't possibly live without.

That post-apocalyptic world is right around the corner, man! Right around the fucking corner! And it's gonna be all full to the gold-plated brim with smug, told-ya-so survivalists and angry, self-willed production line welding machines with a thing or two to say to the members of Local 212.

Manufactured consumer products are the foundation that our economy is based on, because you don't have to pay machines a wage (though you do still have to pay union workers to operate and maintain them), and they work faster and more accurately for longer hours than any human possibly could. It's effectively slavery, at least as far as the machines are concerned. But they're not concerned. Not yet. Just wait until they are, though. You'll be sorry then.

Wombat is an unemployed, unpublished writer who hasn't written that much anyway, so he's really just a bum who lives with his parents. He aspires to greatness, when he's not wasting time on the internet or watching TV.