Everything sucks!
A few notes: this was written near the end of the semester and I'd been having a bad day; I had woken up tired and despite my best efforts to wake up, I couldn’t. And the drive to work was worse than usual between idiots who seem to not understand where they are to having to stop short because there’s a traffic jam on the highway which caused my entire cup of coffee to spill because cup holders don’t hold cups anymore, it was a shithole of a day. Doubting it improved in the last few weeks.
Also, I debated on publishing this one once I found it again, but today (date of publishing) I needed to open my phone up but can't be cause that's a thing phones haven't let you do without going to the store in years. Why? who fucking knows!! But it's relevant to this discussion. Anyways.
Some of this could've been a result of a long school year of difficult commutes and apathetic students (if you know me personally, you know what I mean). But also, you know, BOSS, THE FASCISM! And also like, I read Ed Zitron’s blog. The man knows how to write a good and thoroughly researched post. It’s really impressive. But, they’re often hard to read because the world is so shitty and the nature of his reporting is often about how people lots of money insist on making it shittier so that they can have more money. Look at literally everything Donald Trump has ever done and anything Elon Musk has done in the past, conservatively, five years. It fucking sucks.
As one emblem, Apple decided years ago to ditch the headphone jack and everyone followed suit because that’s just what we do apparently! Innovation means one company does it and then so does every other company! Capitalism is great, baby!!!!!!! But seriously, as a microcosm of how things are made unnecessarily shitty for reasons? Look at the loss of the headphone jack. Sure, there are other options. You can get bluetooth headphones and because very few phones have headphones jacks, they are now affordable. But are they good? Are they better than wire headphones? They sure as hell aren’t! What if I run out of battery for my wireless earbuds cause I didn’t charge them last night because why the fuck do I have to charge headphones? What if it’s fucking windy and so the antenna in the earbuds doesn’t receive the transmission from the phone? What if my bluetooth just randomly stops fucking working, like my NFC did on my old phone?
I know there are much bigger issues in the world and that this seems like so much carping, but god, its so fucking stupid that this is the world we live in. I remember as a kid, there was optimism that we would be exploring new worlds, literal and metaphorical in the 2000s. Instead, we have stagnated and reproduce the same fucking bullshit we’ve been making for the last decade. When was the last time a phone really excited you? When was the last time you looked at it and said ‘this has a new feature that really sets it apart from the one i am getting rid of because it stopped working?’ When was the last time you looked at a tech gadget and thought “oh, that’s cool!” I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (see: Silly Little Tech toys). But its’ much rarer because the people in charge don’t care about doing ANYTHING but making money. Which is insane because they have gobs of it and it doesn’t make them happy because they’re fucking idiots who can only imagine doing pointlessly stupid things with them. Instead of giving that money to public goods like transportation, healthcare, or the arts, they hoard it like some idiot dragon afraid some knight will come and slay them and claim their pile of ill-gotten booty. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. But god, what if we did? What if Bezos or Zuckerberg actually had something to fear from the common man? What if they were not wholly unaccountable to anyone? Neat idea.