Wednesday, May 03, 2006

This may be an attempt to trick you

So this is my new blog, I'll probably be using it for a while, my livejournal account will still be there but I don't think I'll be using it to post anything new.

I want to have a zombie movie watching night sometime after finals. I'm in a heavy zombie-phase right now, actually, I've been in one for the last three or so years, but I mean, I've been renting a lot of zombie movies. I was in the video store renting Jarhead (which I havn't watched yet) and I mentioned to the girl working behind the counter, who is generally there when I go in and therefore sees what I rent most of the time, that I almost rented another zombie movie. She started laughing and then put her hand parallel to the floor and made a fanning move with it and giggles "calm down on the zombie movies!" and I laughed, and then walked out determined to rent dozens of zombie movies. Not to spite her, but really because her comment made me realize that I've really only scratched the surface of zombie movies, I have a long way to go. "Calm down?" I said to myself as I walked back to my car looking at disgust at Jarhead (a movie I've been meaning to watch for a while) "I need to calm up!" and then I realized that I was glad I hadn't said that out loud, because it sounded ridiculous.

I'm not entirely sure what it is about zombie movies that draws me in. I've thought a lot about it, too. I think it has something to do with the survival thing, a small group surviving against all odds, living were all others have died. I also have always enjoyed stories of apocolypse. I'm not sure what appeals to me about that, although I think I like the idea of all the world around us, all the buildings, the cars, telephone poles and commuter trains, suddenly becoming nothing more than obsolete artifacts. A ruined civilization, with archeaologists a thousand years from now digging up cell phones and computers and wondering what they were used for.

How strange is that, to think, that this new technology that we all use in our everyday life, will someday become something like stone weapons to future generations? They will see how we used them, they will understand it was the best we could do, but they would still be in awe of how we could even survive with such primitive technology. They'll look back on whatever science books survived and say "these ideas about the world are insanly simple minded! and why did they seem to worship this Einstien guy? he wasn't so smart..." I don't know, maybe thats why I like zombie movies and other movies about apocolypse, because it turns our world instantly into what it will eventually become, an old civilization, a mryiad of artifacts that are useless in the current world for anything less than study.

Although it does take a lot to think about to even conceive of the idea of what we see around us won't still be here, at least in some form, in a thousand, two thousand, however many thousand, years. But then I think about Rome and Greece and how the people living then probably had no idea that civilization would advance as far as it has since then and that that beautiful monuments they constructed and lived by (and in) have now become nothing more than old rocks of interest primarily to historians and tourists. I mean, what will future generations think of our giant buildings, our "Freedom Tower" or whatever the hell they are calling that monstrosity being constructed in New York on the Twin Tower site? What will they think of Reno, of Vegas? What will they make of the neon signs that say "Loose Slots?" Will they understand its just all about gambling? Or will they think it has some sort of religious conotation? "Is it a social commentary?" they will ask, and they will study it and maybe decide that we worshiped the gods of money by donating money to giant temples made of glass and neon by inserting whatever loose money we had into machines that told our fortunes (they will try to transcribe what the fortune of "7, Cherry, BAR" was for many years, until deciding that it was warning one of eating cherries for one week (Barring them from it for 7 days...)). Of course, perhaps with the advance of written history what it will be easier to transfer our knowledge to the future.

But then I think, what of our written history? Because it seems like, at the rate we are going, nothing is really going to be printed anymore, it will just be all online. And then I think, well, severs crash, people hack systems, it's likely that there will be, at some time in the future, an attack on the US (I'm not saying soon, I mean, like, sometime...in the future) and maybe they will use weapons against the main hubs of the internet to knock out our communications array and it will destroy millions, billions, trillians, of words that were written and now kept only on the internet. And if that happened it would be like burning the library of Alexandrea, some information would survive, but just bits and pieces, and if that same war wipes us all out then we won't have much of a legacy to leave to the future. And if you think about it, you take out the internet somehow, I have no idea how one could do it, but an increadably well thought out and executed plan by some terrorists or country might be able to wipe it out, I've heard once that there was a place in California somewhere were there were four huge servers and most of the internet was tied in with them, or you can even think of it like the Death Star, I mean, someone gets some proton torpedos shot down just the right exhast port of the internet and the whole thing comes apart. And it's called the internet, implying that everything is tied in with everything else through some long complicated plot. Find a weakness in it and exploit it and it would all fall down like a house of cards. Okay, enough about that though, the point was, if someone managed to do something like that then it would screw our whole society for a while, financial institutions and most big businesses would be seriously crippled, not so bad that they probably wouldn't be able to recover, but most companies are coming to rely almost solely on the internet for keeping track of their extensive business, and if that went away, they would be down and out for a bit and while they tried to rebuild there would more than likely be people trying to benefit off of it, either by the simple act of looting or by more complex structures of trying to change all the information while they can get access to it without anyone being the wiser because now its offline and they found out how to get to it somehow and then they are stealing all sorts of stuff and everyone gets greedy, then everyone realizes that they are tearing themseleves apart and they think "i've got to protect myself and my family!" and so everyone gets weapons and starts fighting their neighbors while the enemy who started all this chaos is marching on Broklyn and we are all sitting there going "what the fuck happened?" and then everyone explodes.

3 comments:

Maturity said...

ereryone explodes, eh?

welcome to the fold, my large friend. You'll find blogspot to your liking; I have no doubt.

It seems like, these days, if it can be thought of, it will be pretected against. The Twin Towers were supposed to withstand the impact of a jet, and still stand, they did.
I would also hope that all those connected internet hub wouldn't fall like a deck of cards, but as soon as one card fell, the other hubs would instantly disconnect themselves from everyhting else in order to isolate the problem. Isn't that how antivirus software works anyway? I should think that the internet is pretty well protected, but quien sabe?

Anonymous said...

that was an interesting way to end the post...

Moore said...

Yeah, I got bored with it.