works of wanderlust

Tag: politics

  • flick: idiocracy

    I jumped on the bandwagon and last night I watched a flick I haven’t seen in almost twenty years: Idocracy.

    And, boy, does that hit differently these days.

    You’ve seen the meme shitposting, no doubt. “Idocracy wasn’t an instruction manual, guys!” At least people are screaming it into the void on my social feeds as kind of the defacto answer to every other news article gurgling out of the fetid swamp of american politics these past couple months.

    I risk devolving into political rants here myself if I’m not careful.

    The crux of the film hinges on the opening sequence where—even before Luke Wilson and an almost unrecognizably vanilla Maya Rudolph (she’s really honed her vibe and her craft so well lately, don’t you agree) are hibernated into the grim and stupid future—two characters named in IMDB as simply “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband” stand in for rational america opting to hold off having kids meanwhile the literal trailer-dwelling mouth-breather characters standing in for stupid america are breeding like its a race to the bottom.  There is no subtly or hinting that director Mike Judge sees some kind of devolution of humanity occuring by raw natural selection at work. Selection of the stupid by sheer overwhelming numbers.

    Jerry Springer eat your heart out (while may you rest in peace.)

    Fresh out of a biology undergrad and back when I first watched the flick back in 2006 or so I probably could have explained the genetics a little better, and maybe even argued against the premise using big science words. I wouldn’t be so lame these days. Satire as this was intended is meant to show us extremes… and extremes we are shown. 

    Spoiler: the dough-brained inhabitants of the remnants of twenty-sixth century america are watering their crops with off-brand gatoraid and wondering why there aint nuthin grownin. Plot ensues.

    Back in the twenty-first century real world we’re not quite living in idocracy, but the government seems to be filled with reality television personalities, irrational “i researched it mu-self” antivaxxers are arguing themselves into letting their own kids die of preventable diseases, and the stock market has become little more than a roulette wheel where the chips are crypto coins (that by the way are generally understood by the average person in a way best summed up by my father-in-law who legit asked me if he needed to download Minecraft to get started in bitcoin.)

    Idocracy is not an instruction manual indeed, guys.

    When it came out I laughed this goofball comedy off as ridiculous absurdist science fiction. Gawd, tho, if it didn’t hit like a sledgehammer smacking a warning gong when I watched it last night. Not an instruction manual, but satire-come-documentary of the moronic twenties perhaps.

  • undeleted

    To be fair, I didn’t actually read the article.

    In these days of click-bait headlines it is equally likely that any given bit of tripe posted in traditional media is some too-clever journalist writing a bit of sarcastic parody humor prefixed by an all-too-clever title to draw in the crowds who are almost certainly looking for some bit of legitimate-seeming news to validate their screwball wacky viewpoints. The author then typically tries to write some clever well-actuallies… but then who actuallies need the article when most of us never read past the headline anyhow?

    So I didn’t read it. Couldn’t read it. At least not without forking out money for a subscription. So, won’t read it. Can’t read it. Don’t need to read it.

    The headline was “Go Delete Yourself from the Internet. Seriously, Here’s How” from the Wall Street Journal.

    And in this day and age of terrible tech advice abounding I’m pretty sure this was not parody. It might have been well-meaning. It might have even been sensible. But it was probably not good advice.

    Today is a day I have marked in my calendar as my “blogiversay” which is twenty-four years to the date of when I made my first blog post on my first blog. I didn’t put it into my calendar until years later when I noticed that the first post in the archives of the blog was, and would for a long time be, April 20, 2001.

    And then one day I deleted myself from the Internet. Seriously.

    There were a lot of good reasons to have done it. I was, what? Twenty-four when I first posted. I had just moved out of a backwards little life in a backwards little city (which you can ready-aim-fire at me for being judgemental but you could easily google the name of said city and you’d be greeted with a lot of right-wing, nationalistic, hyper-religious news-adjacent references that would vouch for my then and current opinion of the place.) I had a lot of growing to do, and I did a lot of said growing right there live on that blog, sixteen years worth. A lot of that blogging, those growing and changing opinions, may not have aged well, and good or bad, I don’t care to read and edit two million words of my blathering personal blog writing for any reason.

    So I deleted myself. I deleted myself when I got a semi-public job. I deleted myself when I started managing people, particularly a few stubborn ones who didn’t like me, and I deleted myself when it started scraping up against the gentle opposition of my peers.

    But here we are in 2025 and there are suddenly and realistically a lot of reasons to undelete oneself from the internet. There are a lot of reasons to hold one’s ground and push back against the very idea of ceding this digital space.

    Mostly? There is a vacuum that will exist in the space where each person deletes themselves from the internet and that vacuum would almost instantly be filled by something else. Something bad.

    Maybe some terrible AI content will slurp into the vacuum.

    Perhaps what people will see will instead just be more terrible influencer content and the tidal wave of stealthy and deceptive advertising.

    Or worst, and what I fear the most, is that the vacuum will be filled by the relentless creeping onslaught of political propaganda and the opinions (agree with me or not) which are increasingly anti-fact, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-reality. I fear the space will just get filled with more lies, more manipulation, and more noise designed to overwhelm and crush what little remains of these fragments of freedom and democracy to which we cling.

    April 20, 2001 was a few months before 9/11, a day which for reasons beyond the obvious changed the trajectory of western civilization. On that day we went from an optimistic society progressing towards something special and we collectively did a u-turn into fear and suspicion and surrendering our rights for the illusion of slightly more safety. Now, arguably, many of those rights have been gone for a generation, nearly twenty-four years gone, and yet we all feel less safe than ever. What are terrible trade. What a terrible decision we all made together.

    Right now, a big part of me feel like that happened so easily because we deleted ourselves from the conversation. Deleted ourselves from reality, from truth, from the fight, from purpose, from everything. We deleted ourself from the internet, a great big town square where we should all be shouting and having a voice, arguing and making better choices for us all. We deleted ourselves and turned over our voices to corporate social media, to algorithms, to AI, to billionaires who claim that they are guardians of that voice but who only put it in chains.

    We deleted ourselves and surrendered.

    I am undeleting myself. This stupid little resurrected blog is the beginning of that effort. I am trying to reclaim my voice, small and unpracticed as it is.

    Undeleted.

    You next. Stay tuned.

  • blog-iversary

    This coming Sunday, April 20th 2025, marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of my first blog post.

    You can’t even read it.

    I can.

    I mean, I have an archive of it somewhere in a document, stored away safely on multiple hard drives and backed up to the cloud and generally tucked away for some future time when I want to read about how I spent some random, idle day in April 2001. 

    But you can’t read it.

    That said, I have been thinking about that blog lately because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is the state of technology, freedom, democracy and more in this world, and how so many of us enthralled by the idea of cheap fame are dumping billions of hours into populating the apps and websites of private companies. And how some of those companies are revealing just how much of a bait-and-switch this aways was, how sinister and self-serving they have always been, how much of this gets fed into the AI behemoth, and how we have collectively tethered a decade of creative energy into feeding a corporate beast that does not care a whit about the soul of humanity.

    I should never have shuttered that blog of mine, the one that would now be twenty-four years old and a few millions of words strong.

    Every so often I sit down and try to resurrect something of that vibe, though.

    Every so often I kick off a new site with a grand idea and think, now if I could just get some momentum on this topic or that theme and maybe I could start writing more again.

    But it never sticks.

    And maybe it never will again.

    But it doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to write, because as I realize with each passing day, not writing as much as I can, logging what I want to write about and not caring my own whit about cheap fame or filling up the follows or feeding some corporate social vortex, I can maintain my own little bit of that human soul. 

    And you can definitely read this.

    For now.