insatiety, artificial intelligence, & economics [Wall-E: alt post title for gullible non-geeks]

Insatiety is our problem. Fastfood nation has reprogrammed our appetites to want, always, to want fries with your burger. And if you’re weak, there’s the danger of upgrading your drink to a Coke Float; and if weaker still, a sundae. When a student, a serving of pancit bato and a five-peso cup of cola will get you through the sleepy afternoons. When a child you were praying not even to be wealthy, but have just enough of the basic elements of sustenance. Your first cell phone has accessories amounting to half the market value of the phone itself. Upgrade is a word of this century. We never stop wanting, that has become the fad. If Pleasantville is happy with their sepia faces and monochrome world, we want color. We want multi-color, every single megapixel of our vision has a thousand shades of this and that. We are insatiable.

Where function used to precede design, now is an entirely different scheme. You got hollywood celebs and Arab princes, oil tycoons, business moguls acquiring diamond-studded cars, premiere subdivisions built on the sea, units on the tallest & chicest buildings, making trips to outer space. This is the Law of Conspicuous Consumption, ladies and gentlemen. This is not normal, this is an irreverence to the Law of Demand and Supply and consumer behavior. Insatiety: When in penury, three square meals were enough; a pair of good shoes, plain white tees, a trusty old knapsack were appreciated. When coming into some wealth, you can’t pick a top from closetful of clothes. Clothes, gadgets, parties, videogames, online social networks, blogs, vlogs etc.: these are slowly becoming the main tabs in our life’s homepage.

The generation is getting angrier and detached. All this innovation supposed to keep our lives simple has brought forth an easily-angered multitude given to whining. And whining means being rude to someone, though the person you’re channeling that anger through gets a piece of that malcontent and consciously, or even, unconsciously passes it on, until the entire world is tapped by that neon green, or Hulk-green emotion.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but this entire rant has spawned from watching Wall-E. The film gives us an entirely new perspective. Well, not really new, but a perspective we’ve maybe been ignoring out of fear. It challenges us to think about the future and see that the future they’ve set is very, dangerously, possible if we continue to live like this. Which calls to mind a slogan: Live simply, so that others may simply live.

Can you imagine the homo sapiens eventually having webbed feet and fingers since human touch and human contact has been forgotten, [just like the populace in the Axiom, where people are on reclined chair conveyors and have virtual people and holograms in front of them all day long]?

Five paragraphs into this narrative, and I still don’t know where I’m going with this. Let me steer you back to insatiety. It is a problem. But isn’t contentment also a problem? You know what’s frightening? That happiness in paradise would be fugacious. That it’ll be too perfect and monotonous and boring that the end result would be to revert to [title].

an onrush of a morsel, an angstrom, a microcosm of a promise of genius [phew]

There’s a famine of prose & poetry in my head, that being said…here’s a B  tongue twister that just came to mind. [Not that you can have much use for it, but be a darling and bear with me ’til the next lucid interval]

The bibulous bum blasphemed by bludgeoning the blabbering bishop in the blue Buick.