My First Goon Squad Post

Excerpt from the 2020s portion of A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan:

"No one says 'viral' anymore," Lulu said. "I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say 'connect' and 'transmit'--those old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information travels. See, reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous. It's faster than the speed of light, that's actually been measured. So now we study particle physics."

The above passage from page 257 makes my head spin and hurt. Lulu, the young assistant versed in the new kind of marketing taking place in the book, lives in a totally different cultural/technological (by "/" I hope to also mean they're merging) moment than I think I'll ever be able to live in. So if I don't think I will be able to keep up forever, do I think that I'll be able to survive in that world?

The answer is: yes. In the future we'll be able to survive without being totally up-to-date with technology. The world has worked like that since the beginning of civilization: not everybody is living in the same age. What stopped us before was connection. Now we're all connected, but the actual technology is now just moving at such breakneck speed. The ages themselves will be come more quickly than ever before. So part of the future is going to be people willfully living in different technological cultures because they don't want to have to keep up, and it being possible for everyone to exist on a certain "base level" one, and some people will prefer to use more, some people less, etc., with different sort of socio-economic hopes/norms in each category. Or just technology will so wholly swallow and engulf culture that culture becomes constantly trading in lifestyle and Way of Thinking for a new one every few years. A world Dominated By Fad.

Teenage Leaps

The scene: the Internet. The highest-rated comment on Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" video: "Thumbs up if u want to be young forever" from halo3freakkk... he posted it 7 hours ago and it has 101 thumbs up at the moment.

I, for one, do not want to be young forever. I hope--number 1--to lose all of my hair on the top of my head so I don't have this weird tuft in the front that looks like a closely-sheared Koosh ball half-pokin' outta my forehead. Then, immediately then, I will grow the still-there sides out long because it's still thick and I'm bettin' it'll stay thick and maybe get cool and white if I look at enough scary masks in my lifetime.

Number 2--I wanna be a ephemera-kickin' adult with sweet bitter life lessons under and over my belt and experience cryin' and gettin' wiped-out upon by the Wave Pool Of Expectations so that my brain wires itself into looking at everything in a Cruising Above Perspective. Take some leaps that don't work out. Hit some bad ramps. Who wants to be Forever Potential? Who wants to be a ball at x height in a physics textbook word problem?

Without any further ado, Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," a song I truly like, even if "No regrets, just love" is a lyric I would never want my young daughter to take to heart while thickly sitting with her conniving and clueless boyfriend: