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News Briefs 22-08-2006

By Gregon

Let’s pump ourselves full of magic monkey juice and take a trip to space land…

Quote of the Day:

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Philip K. Dick (1978)

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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3 Comments

  1. P K Dick
    We’re getting two Philip K Dick biopics next year, with one titled Panasonic and starring Bill Pullman, and another untitled biopic starring Paul Giamatti. Of course, both actors could both be playing Dick in the same movie. 😉

    “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.” – Philip Pullman

  2. Rewrite of Harry Potter porn article
    >>More on that Harry Potter porn story I linked to a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it just looks like a rewrite.

    Rewrite? I’ve read both – the original article at The Observer and today’s version at The Age – and as far as I’m concerned, The Age‘s ‘rewrite’ is a pointless hatchet job that cuts out many of the details that were a necessary prelude to the author’s conclusion – details which were also set-ups for the author’s dry sense of humour.

    That said, I’d also like to point out that, like me, most adult HP fans neither read nor write HP fan fiction – of any variety. So this article (and especially the author’s conclusions) only applies to a tiny subset of adult HP fans – the 1200 people who attended this year’s Lumos Convention in Las Vegas.

    Early on in the article, the author discloses that, not only is she not a Harry Potter fan, but her first reading of any Harry Potter book was on her flight to Las Vegas. She hasn’t even seen any of the HP movies. Due to occasionally being a tad too sincere for my own good, at first, I just thought it was odd that The Observer would assign someone so completely unfamiliar with HP to cover the Lumos Convention. But given the high number of convention-goers who enthusiastically confessed to writing Harry Potter gay porn fan fiction, eventually it dawned on me that giving the author this particular assignment must have been someone’s idea of a practical joke.

    For the most part, the author successfully overcomes her lack of familiarity with all things HP by using it as a foil for her humour. Her one failure in this regard comes when she brings up “a group of teenage boys from the website, Mugglenet, who appear to think that they’re in a boy band.” Her condescension losses a bit of its bite if you happen to know that the leader/owner of this Mugglenet ‘boy band’, 19-year-old Emerson Spartz, currently makes more than $100,000 USD per year from his little Harry Potter fan site, and has more than 20 paid employees as well. How’s that possible? Well, among other things, Mugglenet’s official forum, Chamber of Secrets, has 58,260 registered ‘students’ (and, yes, I’m one of those).

    Kat

  3. On the P K Dick quote…
    It seems ironic that the word “society” should show up so early in the quote from Dick. He is far from the first person to claim that people think the way they do because of external forces acting upon them, the implication being that people would think differently if these external forces were disabled. I’ll take a contrary view, that it’s society which is the problem and that people subscribe to herd-think because they’re pre-disposed to do so, that the people putting thoughts into Joe and Jill Sixpack’s head can do so because they’re hard-wired to let others do their thinking for them.

    Man is a social creature. We’ve been gathering in groups for a very long time, groups which would be hostile to each other from time to time, for various reasons. The survival of a group under attack would be aided by there being a lot more followers than there were leaders, more spear-chuckers and fewer generals, so to speak. It would not enhance the likelihood of the survival of the group or of the members within it if many members of the group started to display free thought and individuality, far from it, in fact…like zebras running from lions, the ones that go with the herd stand a fair chance of survival, whereas the individual who runs off on his own stands a good chance of being a lion’s lunch. Whether you look at a herd of zebras or a group of humans being attacked by another group, the odds of group survival with the fewest member losses would seem to favor the group that co-operates most effectively, that thinks the most alike.

    So…are there forces working to influence and indeed control people’s thought processes? Of course there are, there have been to one extent or another pretty much as long as we’ve been gathering in groups. Whether it’s the alpha male in a tribal group imposing his will on the group or an advertising company trying to influence people to drink one kind of soft-drink and not another or a creature like G.W. Bush killing Iraqi civilians by the tens of thousands so that they can die knowing the blessings of democracy makes little difference in kind, only in degree; all cases are still the minority seeking to impose its will on the majority…and it works, to the extent that it does, because people let it.

    The average member of a group has little incentive to think independently; it is simply easier for someone to let another do the thinking. People often follow the course of least resistance and for a herd animal the course of most resistance would be to oppose the conventional wisdom. To think, freely, creatively and critically, is hard work…it requires effort and discipline and practice and it is abundantly clear that such toil is beyond the common run of humanity; they often don’t want to do it and that may be just as well since a lot of them aren’t equipped to do it, either by history or by inclination.

    Consider Europe a thousand or so years ago, consider the raw, naked and virtually absolute power of the Church and various monarchs…within and sometimes without their respective spheres of influence, reality was what they said it was, without any electronic aids, without any books to speak of, for that matter. This is where there’s a ray of hope to be found; in comparison to previous times when individual thought was so discouraged as to be almost non-existent, today there are some feeble signs of people rejecting the herd-think that some would seek to impose on them.

    How’s this for possible proof…in a recently released poll, 30% of Americans asked could not correctly name the year that the 9/11 attacks happened in. Leaving aside for the moment that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they couldn’t name the month the attacks happened in, fact is that a large number of people can’t seem to recall a fairly basic detail about what was supposed to be a rather significant event in US history, at least you’d think it to have been significant if you’d listened to GWB droning on endlessly about 9/11. Clearly the message hasn’t reached a lot of people…granted, it’s pretty sad that what I find hopeful in this mess is that those people have their heads so far up their lower openings that they can’t pay any attention to current events, recent history or government propaganda, but still, attempts at brain-washing and programming of the Man in the Street have not been a universal success and, not all that long ago, in terms of Man’s history, they would have been completely so.

    As such, I can’t help thinking that Dick is somewhat alarmist, assuming far more power in the powers that be than is really warranted. I don’t blame him for wanting to paint things in a certain light-it sells books, after all-but things could be a lot worse, for the moment at least.

    Cheers

    So many idiots…so little time.

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