There is a lot of technology that is quite impressive, but most of it feels like its still in development. The whole internet and computer industry feels like its in permanent Beta mode (similar in concept to Orwell's endless, permanent war). There always glitches and compatability issues. They always come up with a new product or service before ever quite perfecting what they provided before. The companies are more afraid of controlling their product than offering the best possible service. Its a shame considering the potential.
There are the cable and dish tv companies that have near monopolies. These monopolies are being challenged. Also, the monopolies of other media (newspapers, networks, etc.) are likewise being challenged. And they're all fearful of the internet and wary of investing too much in it. But mostly its just the monopolies from one industry butting heads against the monopolies of another industry.
Its not all negative. A few companies are paving the way. Starz and CBS have stood out as companies who are willing to make deals and experiment. As for internet companies, Google and Amazon seem to be the leaders in bridging to non-internet companies.
The problem is that integration and standardization is happening slowly and in a very flawed fashion. For example, Blu-ray won the war of new video format and has been out for years, and yet it has so many flaws as to be almost utterly worthless to the average person.
Three companies that personally interest me are Netflix, Amazon, and Rhapsody.
Netflix has a great service, but you can't buy movies from then and instead have to go to another site such as Amazon. Amazon has a wide selection of services including two that I'm attracted to. The Kindle is revolutionary, but relevant to Netflix is Video On Demand and the Unbox. However, in order for Amazon to make its deals with the movie industry they have to control the data. So, you buy a movie and yet you don't own it. Its very convenient and reliable, but whenever they lose rights to a movie you lose the product you bought. You can download it to your computer and that is fine as long as you keep using the same computer. Netflix is also having a constant change in the movies available in the online streaming. The movie industry seems to be fidgety and unwilling to come to any final agreements.
The music industry is similar, but is quite a bit more established online. Rhapsody is one of the best models ever created. They have a reasonable subscription price for an all-you-can-listen-to service which has an immense selection. Also, they've copied Amazon in selling MP3s and they've made them DRM-free which puts them above iTunes. Rhapsody is doing what most companies fear. Besides offering compatability with players they don't make, they've also encouraged scrobbling with Last FM. They've have made their own player, the ibiza which does what no other player does. It uses a similar concept to Amazon's Kindle in that it directly connects to your account. The downside of Rhapsody is that they don't have much in the way of spoken word and no audio books. Also, they don't have movies.
What I want is to have tv, movies, music, music videos, spoken word, audio books, and electronic text from a single company... instead of needing multiple companies and constantly having to search around. What I want is fairly simple in that its not beyond present technology. If Netflix, Amazon, and Rhapsody merged or integrated their services, that would be awesome. And if they could make permanent deals with the entertainment industries, they'd have a perfect product.
The problem at the moment is that there isn't enough cooperation and neither is there enough competition. There are just a few mega-corporations that own practically everything in the world, and so its not that far off from being a complete monopoly. These companies have no reason to be in a hurry to offer a great service because they have the only game in town. And any company that attempts something new (such as Youtube) eventually has to chose to go out of business or sell out to one of the large mega-corporations.
Another reason that companies don't want to cooperate is because they probably think they can get more by nickle-and-diming the customer. If something you bought a few years ago isn't compatable with somethin new you've bought, then you have buy a new version of that or a new upgrade. Also, it would seem like more money if you paid for all these technologies and services together. Separately, the customer is less likely to notice how the cost adds up.
Humans are strange. If we wanted to, all kinds of things could be possible... but something always holds us back. There were all these utopian dreams from the '50s (and also from the 1800s). The thing is the only thing unrealistic about those visions is that they didn't take into account the limitations of human nature. Technologically-speaking, we could have fully functioning colonies throughout the solar system by now. We could have robots that did almost all manual labor and people could be freed from long work hours of drudge work. War, famine, and poverty could be ended almost instantaneously. Humans have proved themselves capable of near miraculous leaps in development during certain periods... often periods of war, unfortunately.
However, it comes down to control. Change doesn't happen because those in power would rather have control than change and those not in power would also rather the world stay predictably the same. Companies only create new services if it helps them control consumers better. Corporations have become quite talented at manipulating people. We aren't free because the manipulation is unconscious to us in that its seamless. There is no way to protest except to feed back into the system which is something Tim Boucher talks about.
Its to companies advantage to keep customers contented. But its also to their advantage to control development and feed it slowly to the public. People in power have a vision and it takes decades or even generations to fulfill that vision. Its no accident that most politicians come from the same set of families and that those families have royal blood. Its no accident that politicians have good jobs waiting for them in the industries they used to oversee.
The one nice thing about this internet age is that the world is becoming more complex. Its less clear who is manipulating who. Its easier for the oppressed masses to manipulate in return. The real hope is in the potential for cooperation. Humans have never been good at equal-opportunity cooperation especially on a large-scale. This is becoming a real potential with the internet, but its still yet to be seen whether it will ever become more than potential always just beyond the horizon.
From a spiritual perspective, maybe seeking for freedom in this world of power games and materialism is looking in the wrong place. Still, it seems we humans are incapable of giving up on the hope that the world might eventually be transformed. Places like this here Gaia seem to be all about that hope. Gaia maybe primarily about the connections between people, but human connection is inseparable from human technology.
Even our understanding of God is limited by our technological metaphors. That is an area that is explored by many Sci-Fi stories and movies. I guess I managed to bring this blog back to my recent thinking.
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I'm standing in a kitchen, but it isn't familiar. I'm on the phone talking to my mother, but she isn't my mother... she is all mothers, a piecemeal recollection of primal longings for mother. Her voice is, at first, the voice of a mother from a tv show... now, shifting, the voice of the mother of a childhood friend.
I'm so focused on this voice that I'm barely aware of the kitchen, but I sense there are children nearby, my children. I too am a mother.
The cord to the phone lengthens as I feel myself moving (stepping?) backwards across the kitchen floor. In the periphery of my vision, I see flickers of movement. I worry about the children getting tangled in the phone line.
Then, as if stepping back onto stairs that aren't there, I'm falling. It must be the basement I'm falling into... oh yes, there is the door to the kitchen, a framing of light. I clutch the phone tightly, the cord still connecting me to the light above.
"Mother, are you there?" I hear her breathing, her heartbeat. I grip the phone against my cheek as if it were my mother's breast. I can now see where I am. I'm falling down a hole, the walls almost within reach. Faces appear in the walls, strange faces melting into one another. They luminesce like dying lightbulbs, but when they smile and giggle I know they are my children. I still clutch the pone and the line still stretches upwards. I know the cord will only stretch so far before breaking. Should I let go?
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He had inherited this old house from a side of the family he didn't even know existed. Apparently, his name had been at the end of a long list of heirs. It was fortunate for he needed a place to stay. His landlord, prior landlord that is, had recently evicted him. He had taken in a stray cat and cats were prohibited... it said so in the lease. So, he arrived at this house, just himself and the cat. The cat promptly disappeared, surely exploring as cats like to do. He decided he should also explore as it was a very large house.
He went from the foyer to a side room to a dining room to a kitchen, every room with doors leading to other rooms and in every room clocks: cuckoo clocks, massive grandfather clocks, simple wall clocks, and even a few hourglasses mostly in the kitchen. He finally came to a room that had display cases of wrist watches, pocket watches, and unusual devices that he thought might be timers. Looking at these time pieces, he realized all of them were stopped. He now wandered upstairs and it was beginning to dawn on him that none of them worked. There was a loose pattern to the times they were stopped at as if each room was not only stale with settled dust but also with settled time.
He now stood in what must have once been a bedroom. A table with a mirror, where he imagined a woman might have sat to comb her hair, had become cluttered with small clocks of the sort found in souvenier shops. These clocks were held by small figurines or enclosed in globes, and they were all set a little before five as if they waited to be called down for dinner.
Walking on, he noticed that each room was captured in its particular moment. When he made his way to the attic, even the clocks in boxes were stuck in their shared crevice of time. He kept mental notes of these times hoping he might discover an order to it all, but he couldn't grasp why a room with clocks set almost in unison at quarter after 9 pm was next to a room with clocks set at times dispersed over the hours of late morning. After a while, he began to notice something or rather a lack of something. No clock or time piece in any room was set between the hours of 2 and 3 in the am.
Continuing to wander, he ended up in a wing of the third floor. He came to the last room he had yet to enter which was at the back of the house. The door was part way open and it creaked as he stepped inside. This room was furnished with just a bed and a bedstand, but more importantly there were no clocks. He was so struck by this oddity that he didn't initially notice the cat curled upon the bedcover. The contented feline purred and squinted up at him.
He suddenly realized how tired he was. The time had slipped by and it was now quite late. Sitting down at the edge of the bed, he tugged his shoes off placing them upon the floor and he unstrapped his wrist watch laying it upon the bed stand. He lay back, the bed felt so comforting. The purring of the cat fell in sync with his own breathing. In a half-dream state, these sounds slowly merged into the clicking of gears and the whirring of springs. As he further settled into the soft mattress, it felt as if the whole house shifted ever so slightly... but he was so deeply asleep within a moment of time that he didn't even hear the clang of chimes and other distant clamoring noise.
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Here is a dream from last night.
I was wandering around a large interior structure. I didn't seem to have a purpose other than exploring a place I was unfamiliar with. There were other people around, but I think I was walking by myself. I can't remember most of it. There is only one particular thing I can recall clearly.
There was a large stage and seating area. I think there were many peole there, but I don't specifically remember them. At the back of the seating area, there was another smaller stage-like structure, and by smaller I mean not normal human-sized. This is the confusing part. I don't know which stage I saw first, but I think it might've been the smaller one. I think I didn't even realize it was a stage at first.
Now for the truly strange part. The small stage had something like pupets on it. I went to investigate. I think that might be when I became aware of the larger stage. It seemed as if the two stages were connected, and I suddenly worried that what I did on the smaller stage would be seen on the larger stage.
Isn't that wacky? The puppets were influencing (controlling?) the people on the stage. Also, the real people on the (real?) stage were just as vague as the puppets.
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Here are the things my mind was contemplating this fine evening...
I was walking home with an empty aluminum can that had a screw-on lid. As it was cold, the air in the can took up less space. The can contracted into the shape of a square. That amused me for some reason. Why did a round shape contract into 4 sides rather than 3 sides or 5 sides? This incites my child-like curiosity... for whatever that is worth.
Another mildly interesting observation....
While still at work, I was talking to my boss. His son has a learning disability. I asked him about it. His description of his son could just as well have described me as a child. His son... has recall issues with words and facts (such as abstractions like dates and phone numbers), has good spatial ability in figuring out mazes, does math by breaking down numbers, and likes nature which he enjoys learning about (meaning he can remember certain types of facts that traditional schooling doesn't care about). What was particularly interesting about this is that my boss reminds me almost exactly of my mom, and deals with his son's disability as my mom did.
Its strange how humans fall into similar patterns as individuals and also in relationships. Is there a connection to why a parent like him (and like my mom) might have a child like his son (and like me)?
Okay, next thought...
I started reading a new fiction book: Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory. I picked it up because it plays off the idea of VALIS from Philip K. Dick. Anyways, the character hears these sounds that no one else hears, and even he has a hard time of explaining the sounds themselves as they aren't normal. It reminded me of certain experiences I've had. I don't hear unusual sounds or anything, but I've had many experiences that are hard to describe.
I don't know about other people's experience. I'd guess that everybody has experiences that aren't easily described, and probably for that reason most people don't try to describe them or maybe even try to think about them. Its easier to just ignore the unusual.
So, about my experiences... I've had certain experiences that are very specific. I've had these experiences at different times of my life but not very often. However, every time I experience them, I very clearly recognize them and remember having had them before. The thing is that its hard to recall these experiences when I'm not having them. They are state-specific memories of specific states of experience.
At this moment, I only vaguely recall one of these types of experiences. The closest I can come to describe it is that its like what I've felt while under the influence of Nitrous Oxide. Its a cool buzzing sensation as if I were a contracted cloud of energy... or something like that. I have no clue where this experience comes from. I don't even remember the last time I experienced it... maybe several years. It doesn't seem to have any rhyme or reason, no explanation or cause. Its just there and then its not.
And the last thought...
For some reason, I was thinking about audio book services. Finding some spoken word on Rhapsody and Last FM reminded me of how much I enjoy listening to people read. Its the main reason I fell in love with Burroughs work. He has an awesome voice.
There is a demand for audio book services. There are many services, but they're not very innovative compared to the music and movie industries. Why is that? My favorite movie service is Netflix and my favorite music service is Rhapsody. Why isn't there a audio book service that compares to either of these?
I'd be willing to pay for such a service if it was comparable to Netflix or Rhapsody. So, why isn't any company willing to offer it? Why does this industry lag behind all others? Is there just not enough demand? Am I unusual? Are most consumers of audio books happy with services that compare to where the music industry was 5 to 10 years ago?
Here I am just wanting to give my money away to some company. Yet, no company seems to want my money enough. Well... their loss... fine, I'll just keep my money. Ha!
That is the end of today's broadcast. Tune in next time for more deep insights and probing observations of life.
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January 2009 
Marmalade
Regina Spektor
The Moldy Peaches
Kimya Dawson
Adam Green
Jeffrey Lewis
Antsy Pants
Play Kate Nash - Pumpkin Soup 
Play The Sky Is Blue - Millions 
