I’ve been thinking about the connection between packaging and politeness lately. When individuals say, “please”, or “bless you” or “thank you”, or "excuse me, it tends to make us more comfortable, to give familiar punctuation to the ryhthm of our lives.
Maybe the modern corporation has learned how to hack that circuitry with packaging. We’ve come to think of, “brand new” and “factory fresh” as better than pre-owned or homemade things, and I remember several deliberately ironic ad campaigns that imply our relationships with corporations are more reliable than our relationships with each other.
After all, the assumption behind 'big L Libertarianism" is that once you take away the troublesome element of government interference, private industry will finally be free to create the perfect world that consumers and shareholders and laborers deserve!
The video reminded me of these questions, because in the larger metaphorical sense, the ones being drowned by the robot, don’t even seem to be struggling. If anything, we seem to be taking bets on the robots chances even as we go under for the last time.
It’s all just marketing: the companies spread these stories about mistreated replicants rebelling because it lets the punters convince themselves that they’re the “good kind of owner” and distracts from the ethical implications of the intrusive mind-blocks that prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.
There’s something deeply incongruous about people putting so much effort and engineering into trying to recreate a past that never quite was instead of imagining a future of their own. It’s like getting a MFA in literature and then using it to write Ayn Rand fan fiction.
I found that troubling, I guess that’s why the Apple ones have a four year lifespan.
Life used to be so simple before they started bioengineering even the basic pleasure models, I remember lining up outside the store to get a Cherry 2000.
