Maybe this is freedom?
1. The Drive: Future Fords Could Repossess Themselves and Drive Away if You Miss Payments
As predicted by Rick Ross and noted by this website’s very own podcast, the robit cars are bad news for humanity.
There would be several warnings from the vehicle before the system initiated a formal repossession. If these warnings were ignored, the car could begin to lose functionality ahead of a repo. The first lost functions would be minor inconveniences like "cruise control, automated window controls, automated seat controls, and some components of the infotainment system (radio, global positioning system (GPS), MP3 player, etc.)" The next level is more serious, and includes the loss of things like "the air conditioning system, a remote key fob, and an automated door lock/unlock system." Likewise, an "incessant and unpleasant sound" may be turned on "every time the owner is present in the vehicle."
In the Philip K. Dick novel UBIK, there is a scene in which the protagonist has to keep feeding coins into the different things in his apartment to keep them functioning—the door won’t open without being fed a nickel, he has to put money into the fridge or the pantry to gain access, etc. PKD predicted the everything-is-a-subscription model of “consumer ownership” a very long time ago, and the world is increasingly becoming more this way all the time.
When you buy a compact disc full of copyrighted music on it, you are free to listen to it with anyone you like. You can’t rent out an amphitheater and charge admission to folks for a listening party, but you can pretty much share the listening experience as you see fit—a nice car ride, putting it on when a friend visits for tea, background music for sexy-time, etc. You don’t own the copyright, but you do own the disc full of music, at least. In our bogus streaming and subscription-based future, you don’t own anything. If you bought a digital copy of the first Curious George movie for your kid and Google decides it’s not going to pay the license fees for that content any longer, you’re simply out of luck. You weren’t paying to really own the thing, it turns out—you were buying indefinite rental access to the thing for a period of time to be determined by the various stakeholders, none of which are you.
The publishing house Penguin or Puffin or whathaveyou recently decided to publish, with the input of the Roald Dahl estate, all of Dahl’s books with the offensive (by some weirdos’ standards) bits removed or altered. There was much pushback, and Puffin announced that they would publish both the new ones with the bad words and ideas excised AND ALSO a set of the classic texts, full of all the harmful language, because “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” no doubt. But that didn’t stop the company from pushing out updated versions of the classic novels to people who had previously bought the unaltered texts in e-book form on their Kindle or other internet-connected device.
Roald Dahl ebooks ‘force censored versions on readers’ despite backlash
Puffin announces plans to publish a classic collection as it emerges online libraries are being automatically updated with sensitivity changes
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.
Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
You probably thought you were buying a book when you bought that book, you idiot! You were instead buying temporary access to whatever the publisher deigns to give you access to, because you are a sucker.
If you buy your next internet-connected home appliance on a payment plan, will you be surprised to wake up one morning to find that your fridge won’t open until you authorize your next monthly payment? What if you end up buying most of what is in your home through the same “BUY NOW, PAY LATER” financing company that advertises at the checkout shopping cart of every online retailer, and you miss a payment on your toaster oven? It’s not just that you won’t be able to make your toast for breakfast, because they will have shut down access to everything else you bought through them, too—maybe your television, your phone, your washer and dryer—until you put that nickel in the hole in the wall.
Pro-tip: don’t buy your keyless entry system from those folks.
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Piano
This story did not deliver on its promise. I still do not love jazz piano, because I am an unsophisticated moron who needs the structure and lyrics and melodies of a traditional pop or rock song to be able to have big feelings about music. Sorry! Jazz piano is very cool and interesting and I like to listen to it when I’m not really listening to it at all, but I cannot “love” it. I can appreciate the degree of difficulty and enjoy the sounds it makes in my ears, but the only way I’m really getting into jazz in the same way I get into other music is by getting extremely old and losing some amount of discernment or critical engagement faculty that I’m not ready to give up yet. Perhaps this makes me a philistine, and that’s fine.
Jill Filipovic — Fear of a Female Body
Controlling women's bodies is a hallmark of religious fundamentalism. Why are liberal institutions getting on board?
I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.
Universities are not doing students any favors when they reward this particular way of objecting to challenging ideas. And liberals and progressives do no one — ourselves included — any favors when we ignore the fundamentalists, misogynists, and censors who use the language of social justice to make all of our worlds smaller.
The notion of campus safetyism popularized by the Haidt/Lukianoff book The Coddling of the American Mind leaking out into the “real world” and/or causing material psychological harm to many millions of people—or just a small percentage of people who then demand that the rest of us make the world safe for them—appears to be gaining more purchase. One need only listen to NPR for a few minutes before the language of trauma and harm is introduced into one story or another—there are trigger warnings for everything from the sound of gunfire to mild acknowledgements of the fact of sexual assaults. I’m reminded of an Adam Carolla rant about how telling black kids that the world hates them and wants to hurt them is doing immeasurable harm in the name of looking out for them.
I think Carolla is wrong to ascribe a malicious, evil motive to the people he’s mad at, and I think that there is quite some important distance between forthrightly preparing your children for the world as it is and constantly telling them that the world hates them and wants them dead. But I understand his dismay and anger, and think it is in interesting conversation with the Haidt thesis and what Filipovic is saying in her piece.
Here is something I know about myself: when I’m down, or thinking about something that has me in something of a funk, or even feeling maligned in some personal way by someone or some misunderstanding, I am only going to feel worse and get more withdrawn and agitated if I am constantly asked to explain myself or talk my way through it. Either I will write about it or find some way to express it or else it will just pass, and focusing on “what’s wrong” tends to only make things worse. The way that so much of our culture tells us that we are constantly under threat, or being harmed by others’ thoughts and language, and that we must construct our identities and build our personal narratives around the ways others perceive us as a means of self-actualization seems like it might actually be having the opposite effect on people. Angsty self-reflection and doubt and being ill-at-ease with oneself is a fundamental experience of, I think, the overwhelming majority of human beings—and something we tend to do less of as we, you know, grow the fuck up. Insisting on gazing forever inward at the harm done to us by other peoples’ ideas might not be the best path to anything besides more lonely misery.
