eternity (the alleglossary of the futureshock)

‘we steadfastly refuse to face such facts. we avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change.’ (none of your accelerationism here - or perhaps the start of it)

horsemouth has been snoozing in the garden in the sun (ok he went down the market and bought another guitar tuner) and watching tv (x files etc. - he can’t work out how to use the dvd player yet). he’s probably been farting about on facebook too much. today is cooler and more cloudy - he will go for various walks.

is horsemouth one of those people who has reached his adaptive limit in terms of technology and has now begun to retreat from society into the forest? probably.

futureshock is a strange book (and a little dull) - perhaps the strangest things about it are the literary texts that serve as structuring metaphors.

karel capek’s the war with the newts - humanity teaches a species of newts to speak, they employ them in commercial enterprises and under the sea for warfare, the newts revolt and sap out and gradually sink most of europe.

ray bradbury’s fahrenheit 451 - the decline of the book (yet earlier we are told we are going through a publishing boom and a vast increase in knowledge) and the rise of the interactive soap opera.

the happening/ relational art piece dionysus in 69, the lottery in babylon by borges for experiential gambling (presumably the dice man had not been written yet), the weather man (theodore l. thomas) for weather control.

the undersea kingdoms have not come - instead we have strip mined out the sea of fish from above, polluted it relentlessly, rendered it acid, plastic and radioactive, drilled (again from above) for oil.

toffler is right in that the bureaucratic apocalypse (1984, brave new world, brazil) has not come into existence quite as envisaged (horsemouth says this but he was scanned by a 25 seconds to comply machine on his re-entry to the country) - toffler instead posits the ad-hocracy (all those endless teams and projects, and the modular employee (the zero-hours contract), the rented equipment, the timeshared space, the endless mobility. some are up and flying. some visit the dream. some retreat to the forest.

the city is set to become a huge party town by night and a moloch by day - but a moloch of low paid service sector jobs.

this weekend is the anniversary of the recording of alice coltrane’s eternity - for horsemouth where it goes off the boil (only to come back on the boil later in the albums of religious chanting).