Round
Acid     The
Clock
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Reality TV
source: Union of Concerned Realistas Digest
posted: Feb 2, 2005, 9:01 AM
by: djs
Because it is so hard to get rid of TV, the only way to get rid of Reality TV is to get rid of reality.

It could be done behind everybody's back, while they're watching the film where a failed gunfighter follows a retired outlaw from Santa Fe to New Orleans for one last shoot-out.

Studies have shown that, without reality, everyone's just a small injured bird, hopping around, looking for a dark place to crawl into and die.

And as soon as someone questions their authority, they immediately fall asleep and later don't remember a thing.

But aren't all objects and appearances and desires just fetishes and aren't all stories just soap opera peopled by these fetishes? And so, isn't reality already less than nothing?

Their answer is, of course, NO! Because, if it were true, then why study anthropology at all (other than the universal reason for studying anything at all: i.e. "know thy enemy"1)?

And furthermore, they would argue, reality is the place where Satan, working overtime, created what we now know as religion. This was clearly her greatest, most infinitely recursive subterfuge, and has kept people oscillating among inconsistencies for millennia.

In Christianity and Capitalism, for example, Satan's ironically anti-Satan religions, people are asked to leave their souls hanging out to dry while their bodies go inside to worship. Of course, once all their heads are bowed, Satan can just come along and easily snatch the souls off the church/market clothesline and resell them2 at exorbitant markups to wealthy CEOs and clerics.3

And when the people come out from worshipping, it's a brand new day and they really don't have the time anymore to bother hunting down their crappy old souls. They have to learn to give a whole new brand of lip service to a whole new set of story lines.

Then, when that doesn't work, they have to learn to merge into just one big signal, where each of them is just a pixel in that signal, or just a single sine wave in its Fourier transform.

In this new new day, the workers are gone and the Capitalists have to clean up their own shit.

Suddenly it's easier to throw out the whole bathtub rather than just the bath water or just the baby or just both.

And since everybody feels the same about everybody else, affectional relationships, both on and off camera, are grudgingly played out against a temporary suspension of a permanent and profound disliking.

Everyone is free to chose between 2 shades of gray, and the plural of failure is 404: file not found.

Meanwhile, their culture is churning through the space of all possible culture faster than that space's specs allow.

On one level, they don't live on a planet or through days and years of history -- they live in a search, and if something isn't a search term or an object that can be searched for, by definition it does not exist.

All activity, therefore, is fundamentally searching, and life is simply the sum of all the results never looked at.

So talking about overcoming is really just a way of doing wallowing rather than just blindly relentlessly traversing nodes.

As for food, burnt hair on toast where the toaster blows a fuse early on, is everybody's favorite appetizer. While ice cream modeled with incredible accuracy on human body parts, is only the SECOND most popular food, contrary to popular belief and common sense expectation.

Politics has pretty much been reduced to a desiccated spit particle on the outer rim of the radar screen, and presidential statements of compassion are greeted with questions like "is this your true heartlessness showing through, or is it just you resisting your cheap attempts at emotional manipulation?"

And though reality has truly been eliminated as we set out to do, Reality TV stays on as historical artifact, rotting in museums and trotted out on appropriate holidays, and now consisting of just a stationary camera pointing at people chatting about how life isn't really life, but just the collection of insults TO life -- like unfreedom, selection, and stupidity.4

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Notes:

1. "Or know thy self.... Or know thy enemy.... Or know they self.... Or know they enemy.... Or know thy self AND thy enemy." -- Faye Dunaway

2. Before sale, of course, the souls are factory-refurbished so they know that life isn't really life, but just the collection of insults TO life -- like unfreedom, selection, and stupidity.4

3. You may have thought these men paid themselves huge salaries because they were just greedy scumbags, but, really, they need every penny of it just to pay the exorbitantly high price Satan charges (i.e. fair market value) for a soul.

4. As determined by reverse engineering the continuous flow of what everybody pours down their drain, tosses in their garbage, and flushes down their toilet.

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copyright © 2005 by HC