You're quite right Jones... for what it's worth, I genuinely appreciate
both your attitude and your approach.
This "conversation" doesn't belong here, so it should stop immediately.
Your points about unaccountable (unearned?) wealth are well taken. I've
been studying a little, the art of Japanese block printing, and one current
practitioner - a Westerner, in fact - explains that he simply sells his
work - piece by piece, day by day - for relatively small amounts of
money. In this way, he makes a living in a very simple way, and survives,
day by day, piece by piece. Contrast that by the quest by most artists
these days, to get famous and make lots of money quickly by selling each
piece as a "big (important) one."
I don't know if I explained that properly, but the idea is to work (at
anything) day by day, piece by piece, so that in the end we'll have
fulfilled our lives in a natural way... The natural process of life.
Otherwise life is just a giant, very foolish, lottery.
P.
At 07:19 AM 11/12/2006 -0800, you wrote:
Oops... sorry to have been a participant in opening this can-of-worms,
even if it is labeled as Off-Topic. Enough already.
Lest it gets lost in the shuffle of justifying the rant of a relapsing
alcoholic with a large fan-base - there WAS a real point to all of this!
... yes, the original point that led to this unfortunate digression is
that the entertainment industry, especially the video game industry...
AND THIS IS AN IMPORTANT SOCIETAL CHANGE
...for really the first time in the history - has put inordinate amounts
of *discretionary* wealth under the control of a less-mature and
less-responsible segments of society.
Sure, there have been child kings and pharaohs in the past, but then as
always, the real control of state was in the cadre of military generals,
religious priests, and ministers, and the child king could do little
permanent damage to those outside an immediate purview. IOW the available
wealth was comparatively small and not very discretionary. How wealthy is
any child-pharaoh who cannot watch TV, enoy a Big Mac or get minimal
dental work? (turns out many of them suffered and died from dental abscesses).
These days, a population of wealthy computer geeks and movie and recording
stars -teenagers and up, but with tens of millions of discretionary wealth
at their disposal, presents another human dynamic, especially in the
information age - where *reality* and *virtual reality* are converging
rapidly - to the extent that real confusion is certain, and rather soon.
From that point on - the repercussions of unaccountable wealth digress
into a myriad of possibilities, among which are very elaborate ARGs in
the future. This is likely since some of that discretionary wealth is in
the hands of the very segment of techies who will know how to manipulate
reality - to the extent that an artificial reality story, of the "Wag the
Dog" variety - when fostered into mainstream media, can have negative
intended and unintended conswquences.
Yes....believe it or not, this post started out as pertaining to the ARG
trend of phenomenon ... and what that societal change might mean to our future.
... if H.G. Wells was able to frighten the socks off of quite a few
farmers in New Jersey with "War of the Worlds" broadcast on Radio in 1938
... imagine.
well one thing for sure... the times they are a changin'
Jones
