In This Age Of Unoriginality

Through the reinvention of corporate theft
I wonder how long it will take, before
the corporate recycling will meet itself,
coming back from it's previous thievery?

When it does, what will it recognise,
given how vanity does not recognise itself? 

The Partial Attention Span Economy

Not only do I start to read fewer books
than I once did, but I often don't finish
what I read either. It could be, to quote
the writing on the work house clock,
that 'The Time is Short', where the urge
to work, whether my work is at words
or at the physical labour of the sort
the clock once encouraged, is no longer
as urgent in seeking achievement as it once was.

In my new self I lapse from the standards
my older selves once set. I like who I am now,
much more than who has led me towards  being that person

I am less drawn in by past and present day versions
of the partial-attention-span-economy
that misses the point it once attempted to make.

Open Thought

To underthink something
is less about approaching the subject, or idea,
with so weak a formal agnda that it is formless, bare,
much more that the idea is strong but spare, and open....

To underthink something is to let the idea breathe,
and allow the idea to follow the tide of the air
through it's natiral course, nearer it's concluson,
like a river undiverted where the only dams
are the barriers that get set up by Mother Nature..... 

Forty Years Before 'Animal Farm' Was Pubished,

amid the clamour and noise of WW2,
there was another alegorical novel
that drew on how country life was torn
by division and strife, which also used animals
to illustrate human politics.
 - 'The Wind in The Willows', by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame used animals to describe the class system,
just as much as George Orwell did. But where Orwell
aggressively divided his animals via different tasks
which amounted to a managerial theory for how a farm,
or enterprise, might be maintained without a owner,
Grahame's book was a responce to the then-new threat
facing the Edwardian social order - where historically
the aristocrat protected the peasant. The threat came from
the newly urban peripatetic peasnts who saw socialism
via the redistribution of land, as the solution to their unrest.

They saw themselves less as upstarts, more signs of new growth
 - part of a new eco-system, that was drew from the old,
which it would in time replace. In the end the upstart weasels
in the book were defeated, as were The Labour Party in real life.

The old order of Toad in charge,
Badger Ratty and Mole as his friends,
when he wanted them to be, was restored.

The old feudalism won over the calls for wider redistrobution
and restored it's hidden divisions and mutual denial, fit enough
to defend itself against future challengers. Wherever they started.....   

Second Hand Health And Safety

I like my present day neighbours, I really do.
Neighbours who can agree with each other,
whilst being from such differnt backgrounds
are a 'win - win' particularly when they share the prizes....

Even so differences can be divisive, particularly when  
I can admire, but I cannot quite follow, their ideas,
on health, safely, and risk.all of which depend on a wealth,
education, and life chances, that my head can't get around.

But when the space makes us all slightly looser,
for a little drink, I can be honest about how rough
some of my life was, without me sounding like
I took too many wrong turninings for my health,
wealth, and sense of safety, being so second hand.  

The Comparisons Where We Don't Recognise Ourselves

Elon Musk has sometines been quoted as saying
that 'Douglas Adams is my favourite philosopher',
often after quoting Adam's advice on the cover
of 'The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy'
on the prototypes of his (Musk's) latest venture.
as if quoting 'Don't Panic' gave Musk license...

But in other people's minds the Adams character
who Elon Musk has the most in common with
is Zaphod Beeblebrox, the archetypal playboy
billionaire ruler who is so trivial in his creativity
that he never gets beyond his own playfulness,
in whom the narcissism has so inflated his ego
that he cannot recognise it, and who is blind
to the consequences of the chaos he causes.

Similarly Space X, xAI, and Tesla combined
are all like Adam's Sirius Cybernetics, where
the self opening doors of the space ships
sigh with satisfaction as they let people through,
and the lifts share aggresssively happy slogans
with their carriers to a level of cynical indifference
to the general effects of 'hubris thought technology'
at any, and every cost, where irony remains unknown.

Knowing ourselves means knowiing our own irony,
I keep refreshing mine, when I have to re-teach myself
to accept it when I have landed on my feet, when
I know how to be myself on other people's territory.

I wish Mr Musk well in his respecting
the unlimited ironies of his creativity,
and finding out what his wealth can't buy.

When Will The Next Luddite Revolution Begin?

As a new generations of skills that were once purely human,
laborious and poorly remunerative but which allowed people
to live, are now being copied, and 'improved on', en masse,
by machines so powerful they seem to dwarf the common man.

As the new hyper-wealthy present the new technology
which not only monetises what these machines do, 
the help the hyper-wealthy reinvent the idea of 'money'
for people who are too poor to reinvent themselves.

'The new elite' present themselves
as the measure of everything.

But for all that their technology reinvents them,
it is only the new guide to recent past, re-explaining
recent life in the latest distortions of human understanding.

 Who is going to tell the tech bros, so that they will listen
that they are has-beens of tomorrow? Whilst they think
they equal the total sum of human history?