The Rise of Passive-Agressive Infrastructure

It is everywhere.

Every train station, airport, and highway has it.
Packaged consumer goods have it.
The famous Windows® operation system has it.

It is passive-aggressive infrastructure.

Our world now demands of us our time. it constantly says
-Look at me!
-Listen to me!
-Pay attention to this!

You might think that the world is simply filling up with needy people, helpless children (of all ages), and desperate governments. But no. It is worse. These people have collectively created a world to match their passive-aggression. They are inflicting their neediness on the world, and they have critical mass.


To get a measure of the extremity of what I talking about, imagine being transported to world where all males walk around carrying their balls in a jar. Men who gave up being men so long ago they forgot that there is better way. You would be shocked and saddened being transported to that place.

That I how I see this world, a world where everyone has been castrated of anthropological knowledge. Anthropology is easy, and simple. Yet an entire world has allowed this genuine path to wisdom to be surgically removed (metaphorically).

All the colossal dipshits on TV. All the whorish pundits (every single freaking one) thinks in terms of KNOWING. their minds are constantly thinking vainly
- I know this!
- I know that!
- I know that other thing!

and they are everywhere.

Leaving aside that half the stuff they think they know is not true, simply limiting themselves to knowledge, to being receptacles of received truth has made them morons. It is easy to spot, notice that they never, ever, ever talk in terms of WISDOM.

And so the world they so lead in their sad, bloated, insipid style (despite all the yelling and all the frenzies) is heading off a cliff.

Our world.

Let everyone have a moments peace. Stop being intrusive! Stop trying to be helpful so much!
Let us think! Leave us alone! Leave us in peace! Stop trying to control everything! Stop pretending you know what is best for someone else. My life is my own. Entirely and completely.

I finish with a couple of examples of stuff I cannot stand.

popup operating systems

It is not the internet or video games that are destroying the hope of the world (via crippling of the mind). It is the TV in the airports. And their cyber-equivalent, the popup operating systems. The idea of "always on top" for windows is as bizarre an idea as a "war on drugs" and so on, but no one gets this. Only a world of anthropological eunuchs would end up with an operating system with this principle. Nothing should be able to pop up on top of what I am doing. Ever (and thus "always on top" would not be needed).

headlights on cars in the daytime

Simple anthropological instincts would stop this practice. Destroying the sense of the daytime sky. Some even put up racks of brights, trying to compensate for their dullness brought about by their lifetimes of obedience. Pathetic, really. Just look at the drivers, it's usually the dullards and the creeps that do this (when they are opting for it).

the Olympics and the love of humanity

Someone at the LATimes asks

"Are London's Wenlock and Mandeville the most bizarre Olympics mascots yet?"


Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables, anticipated this somehow, cleverly saying long ago

"To love another person is to see the face of God."

I am kidding. btw.

a heaven wish is mixed in with the breath-death wish

About 5 years ago I gave my opinion on whether the West has a death-wish. I had been spurred on by a Frank Rich column.
About the coverage of the then-recent death of the Pope, Rich said:

"What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living."

Rich went on to reference CSI, the Passion of the Christ, and the Terri Schiavo controversy. He finished his column with:

"...the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade"

Forget the ideology for a second, this is about anthropology.
In my post I spacily argued that what Rich was calling a 'cultural embodiment" was more accurately a "breath-death wish". I then launched into a deconstruction of the birthday party ritual. But I managed to miss something important. Namely, the Western desire for non-existent existence, eg for some form of heaven.
I mean, you all aren't just mourning the early murder of your own enlightment (which you did yourself!), or just trying to be Settlers 'n Warriors at the same time. At some level you find existence to be humiliating and ugly.

Image by cutestkidever via Flickr

To summarize, I now think there are TWO collective "cultural" strategies happening:

--a wishing of a specific breath-death on others (a willing that others not breath to produce their own enlightenment)

and also

--a desire for a heaven

a movie about DeVere as Shakes-speare! Yippee!

In just a week or so, principal photography will begin on the first movie ever made about the actual author of Hamlet (& all that other stuff). It will no doubt show up in a few theaters in a few years + quickly end up on high-brow cable.

The working title of the movie is Anonymous (a good title for the story, and it might even resonate now, in the internet age).

The director is Roland Emmerich, an A-lister who most famous movie is Independence Day.
I imagine he got the money by agreeing to do the Isaac Asimov Foundation movie too.

William Shaksper could hardly sign his own name
The filming of the movie is historic, IMO. Considering how many movies have been made from "Bard" plays, and how much influence they have had.

Btw, the case for DeVere has gotten even stronger in the last 15 years or so.


a couple of starter links
'byanothername' blog
'Shakepeare fellowship'

As it happens, I never liked reading Shakespeare. I have followed this story simply because I hate bullshit. and the story of the Stratford man ("Shakespeare" without the hyphen) is grade A crapola.

from

And the timing gives me a buzz, too. A few years ago I happened to surf on TV into Shakespeare in Love, to me a mind-boggling work of unintentional disinformation (and it actually had won Best Picture!). It pissed me off so much I went to the trouble of writing the outline for a screenplay of DeVere's life. Not that I was (or am) much of a scholar.

I had planned a close-to-factual scene where a teen "noble" Edward DeVere was making out with a good-looking maid in the garden of his estate (not clear how seriously), and a "lowly" gardener who had eyes for the young woman, went up to them and said to the girl "Why are you making out with that queer?" and then DeVere gets up, fences with the gardener, and stabs him to death. Trained in fencing. was young Ed. And of course, he gets off, because he was aristocracy.

Then later (in my outline) DeVere is at Oxford and pens a juvenile play where a lover stabs an imagined rival. The ur-Hamlet. Again - this actually happened.

The Oxfordians know all about this link, and about many others. The life of the Oxford man and the words of the bard match just as you would expect if he was the author.
Which he was.

DeVere, btw, signed his name like this

Anyway, I am thrilled someone took up the task of writing of a bio (that matches the life the signature and the works) at the same time I did my halfass bit, and I am thrilled that someone finished that task.
No doubt that they did a way, way better job than I could have done.

But will the world learn something? I guess I have to quote Shakes-speare

"Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear."