Rhetorical Questions Round a Rectangular Dining Table
Vol.16 The “Cut and Paste” Generation and where do you see yourself in 25 years time?
Vol.16 The “Cut and Paste” Generation and where do you see yourself in 25 years time?
Star Date 29th May 2022. Destination? Well that’s entirely up to you. It is still a free world with freedom of expression, bodily autonomy and the absolute of freedom of speech after all. Rejoice I say!
And why not?
Profound thoughts rarely penetrate the inner sanctum of my tiny mind but this afternoon was a different matter entirely. There I was, sucking a thoughtful tooth as well as the end of my pencil as I tried in vain to follow the sliver of sunlight creeping across the back garden when, a thought occurred to me. Baby Boomer Generation? Gen X? Gen Y? Gen Z? Millennials?
All consigned to the label dustbin labelled pointless distracting labels.
We are now the “Cut and Paste” Generation.
Why?
Take a look around! As the Narrator in Fight Club exclaimed “Everything’s a copy, of a copy, of a copy” and I rather think the troubled young man and cinematic friend of Tyler Durden may have had a point, and a truism that plays out in our every day experience now. Shame the same can’t be said for the dystopian film as for all it’s dark allusions to a crumbling societal edifice, at least there’s hope springing eternal at its cinematic denouement. Sadly, there’s a rather different “Year Zero” planned for all of us, providing you live for another quarter of a century and you reach the concluding chapter of this, my 16th volume of rambling rhetorical questions and tangential existential thoughts.
Will you live another 25 years?
Will you even reach the final chapter here?
The beauty or otherwise of these late night Sunday rambles around a rectangular dining table is that I haven’t written any of this or given any thought other than to the sub-title of this article. And why not? Exciting isn’t it? A fresh page, nothing cut and pasted from elsewhere (an item we’ll return to shortly) and just an idea, a frustration, a question, a rhetorical question, and abracadabra, the written magic appears. For example, I had no idea that I would include the reference in the above paragraph to the genius film of 1999 directed by David Fincher that, despite it’s ominous title, isn’t about fighting whatsoever. Not a jot! OK the through line is of an underground fighting club for otherwise timid and broken males at odds with the world, but this is merely the window dressing for a fractured society on the brink of a totalitarian controlled collapse. For the relevancy of this, please do continue reading until the final chapter.
But everything is a copy of a copy isn’t it? Even those ten words that formulate the previous sentence you’ve just read with your very own eyes is a copy of sorts, so we’re drowning in copies. We are, the “Cut and Paste” Generation. Social Media is awash with the same old regurgitated stuff and, with a simple use of a forefinger and a couple of presses of a magical button, that picture is now your picture, and we all share and share, and copy and copy. Some add words to their copy and some use every available character open to them in the social media platform of their choice. Some generate enormous likes and retweets. Some generate not a single response from within The Matrix.
Social Media is now akin to a casino, and as we all know, The Matrix always wins (House, surely? Editor).
There’s nothing new under the sun and even if there was, some pesky jobsworth would cover it in sunscreen and hide it in the digital shade. Everything is a copy of a copy after all. Mixing my David Fincher metaphors, envy is my Se7en deadly sin, and it’s also a constituent part of my overwhelming admiration for true and original writers. I myself am not a writer but, I have written an awful lot of words, most of which have been eccentrically original. I copy and paste with the best of you, mainly to a much smaller audience it has to be said, and that’s where my sin of envy emerges, screeching and bawling into the world.
As well as patenting such phrases as the “Cut and Paste Generation” and “PlayStation Football” I’ve also held a long affinity for my phrase “Pyramid Schemes. Pyramid Dreams”, and that’s where the copy of a copy comes in to a fresher and more distinct focus. So many articles these days, and not just here on Medium, are merely cut and pasted with oodles of links to various other Matrix destinations and all in aid of possibly gaining a miniscule amount of cash and/or links to other written works. So many articles too are almost exclusively devoid of any original writing whatsoever. Click on this link if you want to be successful. Click on this link for 500 guaranteed followers. Click on this link because, unknown to you, it’ll feed into a gargantuan amount of algorithms, filling spreadsheets of doom with yet more detail, yet more telephone numbers, yet more email addresses and yet more digital information that can be cut and pasted to order.
Marvellous isn’t it?
Whatever happened to allowing your written work, your original written work, to stand or fall on its own merits?
Pyramid schemes. Pyramid dreams?
One of the most odious and vacuous questions I find is “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” so I’m going to up the ante and ask you where you think you’ll be in 25 years time? Why? Well, 25 years ago, and almost to the very month, I found myself in Paris, France to support my beloved footballing heroes dressed all in red from Liverpool. The similarities, 1997 and now, and a quarter of a century on, are eerily familiar minus my not being present last night in the very same city of lights and supposed love. A quarter of a century ago I drank in the delights that Paris in the springtime has to offer before being “kettled” or, forcibly contained within a small area by local Robocop clad Police, as we were pelted with all and sundry from the ever welcoming local Parisian hooligans. The team I adore would lose a crucial European game and the whole event would leave a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth.
25 years on and last night’s events were far more sickening and potentially life threatening and dangerous than our free range containment as we were forcibly grouped together and huddled in fear against the flying debris from our Parisian cousins as well as their finest in Policing uniform. The sporting result was similar, as was the sporting heartbreak, but 25 years ago it was deemed fine and dandy to forcibly corral football supporters (FOOTBALL SUPPORTERS!) before, stereotypically pun intended or not, frog marching us to the stadium. Last night was horrific by all accounts, and across the board from the so called ordinary fan (who is anything but ordinary) all the way through to families of the players and VIP guests (many of whom are anything but important). Tear gas in the French Capital is common place sadly, but fired at families, children and the elderly, all of whom were queueing peacefully and many for over 2 hours and simply to gain access to a supposed state of the art football stadium? Alas this too is common place and especially so if you travel to a European “hotspot” following your football team. The stories are legion if you follow Liverpool and I have two of my own from just seven trips to Europe following my footballing heroes. Others, and that of other teams, are exceedingly worse, more brutal and at times dangerously leading to the most horrific of injuries.
Just to follow a football team in another country?
25 years ago I had hair and no children and now I have more children than hair follicles! A quarter of a century can be roughly calculated as one and a half adult generations or two and a half decades or indeed a blooming long time in such a short existential experience. If you’re 25 years of age, as I was in Paris in 1997, you’ll be my age now in the year 2047. Will you have children by then? Will you have had additional children? Perhaps a proud grandparent? I can almost (almost) guarantee you, perhaps even regardless of your current age, that by the year 2047 your tastes, interests, hobbies and pastimes will have changed. Will you be married, re-married or hopefully not, divorced. Perhaps you’ll adore wedding cake so much you’ll take more than one trip on the marriage merry-go-round! Will you experience the Radiohead quoted “beady eyes” of death in the next quarter of a century? Will you travel more, save more, give less fucks, more?
I’m not drawing a lame comparison between the two events to simply state that nothing changes. That would indeed be lame.
It’s far worse than that.
You see, when you deploy several thousand riot gear clad thugs in uniform, arm some of them with guns and the majority with tear gas and pepper spray, you’re not only encouraging but in fact endorsing an aggressive “us and them” mentality. It’s a football match for crying out loud. But the rot set in a long time ago. You, and our, collective human species is no longer required you see and and there’s a Year Zero coming, but regardless of where you see yourself in a quarter of a century it’s far from where the subjects of the video below wish to see you:
Full disclosure: I don’t watch the above TV “News” (stop laughing!) channel, but I do love the cut of Neil Oliver’s jib. He’s a Scottish Historian amongst other things and I only briefly note this as he acknowledges this well known fact again in the above video as well as cleverly using history for our current plight. I’ll leave you to watch this video before I continue after this quote from 7 minutes and 34 seconds onward:
“The strutting peacocks of Davos, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the World Health Organisation are no Romans, but they do want our obedience and submission and have endeavoured to gain as much by stealth. They thought we wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t see what they were doing, wouldn’t feel it, but we did, and we do”
What I adore yet again in the words of Neil’s opening monologue to his regular show is that the underground and unspoken is said with such calm authority and a Fight Club-esque rallying cry for a far better world than is currently being built back better in the darkest of all dystopian images. Where once hushed toned conspiracy theorists talked earnestly of one organisation controlling the entire planet’s health (WHO) or a singular army (UN) or particularly that our electrical devices would become implanted as our human species vanishes quite literally into The Matrix, now it’s on a mainstream news channel and not, crucially, being shouted like an alarm cry from the biggest of mouths. Rather than a loud mouthed “Shock Jock” you have an entirely different “Jock” of Scottish descent calmly informing all and sundry of our collective compliance into a managed and submissive decline.
The video speaks for itself so here’s a question for you: Does a 5,000 strong military police force and innumerable and heavily armed private army currently surrounding the small and expensive Swiss surrounds of Davos suggest freedom and democracy to you? Why do the richest 0.00001% of the world population, with enough filthy lucre for a thousand lifetimes, need to dictate the fine detail of everyone’s lives?
And why do they need a private army? Who are they scared of?
And why?
Shortly after departing Davos in their fleet of private jets, many of the attendees will then be gracing a meeting entitled “Bilderberg” before the exclusively male members will then no doubt travel to California for yet another super secretive meeting at an Uber secretive club called “Bohemian Grove” set in the densest and darkest of Californian forests. Here, according to tradition and conspiratorial theory, many of the men will cavort around these secluded forests before partaking in a “Cremation of Care” as well as worshipping a 40 high stone owl. Madness I know, but it’s conspiracy theory no longer, and hasn’t been for some time. Nor is the utter odiousness of the World Economic Forum and their dystopian future for the whole of humanity and for whom they have absolutely zero say.
Hardly screams freedom and democracy now, does it?
But you see, there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything’s a copy of a copy. Everything’s a pyramid scheme. Everyone has dreams. Only one set of people decide whether or not those dreams can have the ability and mechanisms to materialise.
And when you have such an incredibly wealthy and powerful Uber elite clique of people determining the next phase of the human species, you’re going to create a chasm of division. So you need a private army to protect you.
And a member of your Swiss private club would have no issues whatsoever with seeing his Capital city’s Robocop's spraying football fans, old and young, and without a care in the world for the fans individual health, nationality, sex, gender, identity or political or sporting affiliation, with tear gas.
Tear gas?
Are you seeing the bigger picture yet?
Thanks for reading, and I hope you found my original words written on a long Sunday night into a Monday morning thought provoking. At least they’re original and written by a human of the species! Please see links below (that will not send you to a thousand other links and articles!) to my articles on last night’s Champions League football final and the monstrous actions of the French Police, an article I posted a few months ago on my 1997 trip to Paris as referenced above and the previous volume in this series of rhetorical questions and a frustrating continuance in a lack of coherent answers:
Tears and tear gas as Los Blancos triumph in Paris.
Real Madrid seal their 14th Champions League victory as it’s heartbreak for the Reds.medium.com
7 European trips following the Mighty Reds of Liverpool
Volume 2: Paris St Germain, Semi-Final, 1st Leg of the 1996/97 European Cup Winners Cup, 9th to 11th April 1997.medium.com
Rhetorical Questions Round a Rectangular Dining Table
Vol.15 Does anyone buy books anymore? Anyone want to buy my book? And what am I going to do with myself?medium.com