What's the Printed Matter?

Will the degradation of digital media lead to a resurgence of print?

Video did not kill the radio star. Though it seemed, at one time, in the pop-and-lock latchkey ‘80s, it surely would. Today, aspiring VJs have as much career opportunity as Morse Code tappers.

So it seems to be progressing with online content. What we all believed would surely be the greatest media revolution, a mind-expanding and democratizing tool, the internet has turned into a prison with only 3 or 4 bars of reception.

How could we have not seen this coming? After all, it was the US military that laid the cables for our neuromantic lifestyles. How could we have been so easily duped into fantasies that the strong arm of the planet would boon us an Arab Spring or any other liberation from oligarchy?

My only hope is that the next media collapse happens soon; and with it online content will be, if not erased, than rightfully debased by that old dusty run-down hero, see him persevering down Main Street full of bullet wounds, the printed word.

What else on Earth can be trusted?

Easy to dispatch bots into the comments section; to engineer warped realities inside a social media platform, or to skew truth with a biased search engine. But do you think Musk or Zuckerberg, or any of their cronies would ever go to the trouble altering a printed artifact?

Imagine a scrubbed hardback of Plato’s Republic, for example, in which Plato argues for the veracity of shadows in a cave? Or a new paperback edition of The Communist Manifesto in which Karl Marx brazenly advocates for the concentration of wealth.

Me thinks the Masters of the Universe have abandoned the printing press. Good luck to them. I am going to the used bookstore to peruse Bonafide content and hopefully preserve my thin tether to sanity.

Reading The NY Times online used to be ok. But then the interloping of text alerts and sending calls to voicemail began to taint my intake. And the cookies must have started crumbling, leaving breadcrumbs for other content providers to assault me with inanities until all of it became just click bait in a waterfall. If you can’t throw it out after reading, it’s not a newspaper.

Fucking Plato, man. He had some things right. Oh, but the Allegory of the Cave falls on deaf ears in a bar. People look at you like you are the last gasp of the patriarchy, even though what you are doing is trying shed light on the resistance. It doesn’t matter. For those who have read it have cellulars rammed up their asses charging all the time. And those that haven’t are confident they aren’t missing much.

I have been meaning to sit back down with Plato’s text, because as far as allegories go, it kinda resonates with the global mental breakdown that is happening right now. The total annihilation of reality through whirling dervish devil shadows on the back wall of the human psyche.

Consider the Holocaust denier I have been harassing online. He must have so many puppets dancing in front of him, he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. I can’t wait to unload on his comment section; an act that will no doubt cement his antisemitism and raise my blood pressure to the point of making me twitch over margaritas as I imagine pummeling his avatar and ruin my family vacation.

The truth is I can’t make time for Plato. Books are hard. Like football coaches or nannies that use corporal punishment. But at least you know where you stand with a printed book. It cannot shape shift. Yes, there are edits made for different printings. Recently, I read a new translation of The Stranger. Some of the words had changed, but it was still…The Stranger. Because ultimately books don’t lie. They are true to themselves whether true or not.

What we experience online now is proudly inconsistent with itself, a buckshot of ideas customized for each user, what they call the Echo Chamber, peppered with bullshit from a mob of the deceitful and the deceived. Everywhere taglines call to you like a seductive sex worker you know has herpes, yet you commission her services anyway. That’s what it’s like for me to absorb online content these days. It’s like getting herpes from that hooker and spending the rest of my life wishing I never logged on.

I really should read more…Plato might have straightened me out.

Maybe one day music videos will come back. Who would have thought that they would be whittled down to lyric videos, ignored and only listened to? Ultimately, it is for the best because it is the lyrics that matter, the power of the word. The song. The corollary image has always been a distraction.

I should have known when MTV planted its flag on the Moon that the shadows fell in the wrong direction. Clearly it was a US Government lie, the same way Democrats eat babies, god saved Trump and there is no Zyklon B. No printed book could ever house such madness in one volume but look online and these lies are ubiquitous.

Video did not kill the radio star. Video killed itself. And each night I pray an internet suicide is imminent. That all these content providers should do the honorable thing, what MTV did when it abandoned M. They should forgo their founding principles, forget about objectivity, transparency and free speech and acknowledge what they really are: entertainment. Because when all the garbage we see and read online is understood as requiring a decoding like that necessary for the disinegenuous banter of ditzes on spring break, then perhaps people will decide it’s not worth it. Perhaps they will choose to return to some sort of intellectual decency. Lord, bring back the greatest tech boom ever so we might regain our powers of concentration, have access to reliable sources and sit down again with a flourishing economy of printed matter.