G,FB,T,I & Co is desperate. This combine will stop at nothing. They will turn this whole thing into a distraction if they can. But their trouble is, you can't differentiate aggregated attention into these little markets-of-one, when everybody's gaze is riveted on the same thing, this deadly killer infectious disease.
We'll see how long it takes them to yank us back into line. Get us to squabble over whether it's a hoax? Not playing so well.
No wonder the President and Wall Street and the so-called Parties are all dancing around trying to downplay this terrible tragedy. The Internet isn't acting like an ideological spiderweb all of a sudden. They're all being exposed to light. AAAaaagh!
All our individual worldviews are converging on an alignment: something like, we're-all-in-this-together, and somebody's trying to sell us down the river.
***
Right about here, while I was writing this, the power went off. Here I thought I had wrapped up this little literary gem, and -poof-
That would certainly cure Google's first challenge, how to slice and dice we're-all-in-this-together back into orderly little "consumer" markets-of-one; but also would bring the great unprecedented "national conversation" (surprise, there actually is one now, and the media can't even find it) to a dead stop.
But it's probably just that some poor motorist hit the pole in our village, and our intrepid local power company will have Ed out there scrambling up the pole in a few minutes. I'll go out and hook up the generator, so the fridge and the pellet stove will run. If I do this, see, the power will come back on about when I'm ready to start it up.
Heat and cold, to defend us from cold and heat, respectively, running on Steam Age power, but with water boiled by hot radioactive rocks, or wind-turbines, or coal, or oil, or gas, or "biomass" (which is far from not-easy-being-green), or worse.
In the third month of the Pandemic, this little shutoff is the first time we have been reminded that all this wonderful connection can stop instantly at any moment, and never come back.
This writing, a form of conversation, if readers read it, would end at that point. Then we would all be isolated in our houses, apartments, motels, hotels and gated McMansions, for real. Then we'll be all-in-this-together with the rest of us, in cells, industrial, ditches, favelas, toxic dumps, junk cars, cardboard boxes, and on park benches.
I started out to discuss the odd juxtaposition between our zooming conversations, some with a thousand seats or more, and the isolation machine that makes them possible in the first place. But now I'm thinking about how ephemeral it all is.
How is it that we keep speaking seriously about "the Government" and "the President" when they are so absolutely useless in the face of this catastrophe? The President has encouraged armed gangs to invade Statehouses, for gosh sakes, and they've obliged him enthusiastically. Nobody seems interested in putting a stop to this radical overthrow of our national government. Or maybe, nobody can. And either way, we're looking at a collapse worse than that of the Soviet Union.
When are we going to get it? America isn't going to be destroyed: it is no more, already. Kaput. The Great Experiment has ended in failure. It's just a location now. A crime scene, with no chalk outlines, and no yellow tape.
We're on our own, and the "Tech Giants" are running everything now. We do what they want us to do, or we are left out in the cold and dark. We'll find this out the hard way, if there's any serious opposition to this crime.
As soon as I got all the wires connected, and went out to pull the starter on the generator, the lights came back on. Took me a minute to realize I didn't have to start the thing now.
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