Let's read together uncle Al Schwartz' Hexadecimal Dependency

Uncle Al is damned good. Here's an example :

HEXADECIMAL DEPENDENCY
The singular attribute of a self-aware entity is loneliness.ⁱ

The instant a consciousness crystallizes the vagary of "I," reality shifts unhinged.ⁱⁱ An unbreachable detachment is torn dictating the perpetual solitary confinement of a sentient soul. Isolation invokes yearning born of pursuit -- the endless search for other souls with which to join and perforce heal the fracture of solitude.ⁱⁱⁱ Religion, custom, and law function as obdurate casts. They confine violent twists of estranged minds by erecting rigid duties, defined paths, and irreversible strictures directed toward slaking the thirst for shared spirit and restraining the pitch and yaw of emotional upheavals. What is more deadly than a human being unrestrained by the investments of shared existence?^iv

Our organic selves contained within our genes were written over the past 100 millennia. The script persists unrevised. American society over 50 years has expunged the agenda, hopes, and rewards fulfilled within isolated bands of hunter-gatherers by.^v It impressed the "safety net," stolen from those who feed it and awarded to the deserving.^vi Western civilization is contrapuntal to fundamental expectations arising from our internal universe.^vii Isolated within and without, gnawed by the ceaseless disparity between visceral longings and dogmatic reality, more than a billion of our species' most affluent, powerful and advanced minds flutter at the fringes of insanity.^viii

The bland uniformity of the System^ix -- standardized material wealth enforced by pervasive, encroaching advertisement^x -- undergoes a phase inversion at its impoverished periphery. Gangs of hunter-gatherers enfolded by a realm of personal, social, intellectual, and material indigence evolve proprietary rituals to refashion themselves and fill the void.^xi Shaped by self-imposed uniformity and by contrast with their enemies (other clans, and society as a whole), they are tolerated, exploited, and quashed when warranted by the select majority. Though baneful, they are trifles.^xii What of the System and its willing inmates, the bristling reservoirs of existential sociopathology?^xiii

Through the 1950s, mainstream family was formulated by exacting standards, enforced economic and personal submission, absence of alternatives, and draconian retribution for attempted infraction. The liberalization of American (First World) mores canceled that contract. The friction between adults, traditionally lubricated by the needs of their children and contained by social mandates, has exploded outward. What will fill the void?

Pets have forever served as uncritical and dependent companions. For all that, they are unsatisfactory foils and feeble contenders for the hungry intricacies of the human mind. Hobbies and games create a precious environment, but only emptiness truly resides.^xiv Such constructs deliver challenge and triumph, the stuff of being, but finally cloy as artifacts of intellectual deceit. The dystopian anguish of individual isolation requires for its resolution a doppleganger oozing the perfume of mind.^xv

The crude business machines^xvi brought forth by IBM, principally mechanical steel behemoths modestly decorated with a frosting of electronics^xvii, held spellbound and delighted beyond measure their meaty keepers. What impels a man to compulsively chuga-chug-chug tables of arctangents, and find glory in it?^xviii Pong embraced the intimate formality of turning a rheostat and watching a voltmeter swing its needle.^xix It enthralled millions. We are easy prey to the interactive mirror of our minds. Man beholds man!

What will be our fate as billions of transistors come to reside within each Intel multicore microprocessor? Beyond the lure of varied chemical ecstasies, the best and the brightest have been swallowed whole by a hexadecimal addiction. Crippled by education and social context from unearthing and cherishing each other in the flesh, they debauch the productivity of entire corporations by playing DOOM via modem.^xx They skid mice across mouse pads or savagely twist joysticks in delirious sincerity, shouting out the silence with an internal rhapsody and savoring the hum of manic mentation, their adrenals smoking through the night of their decidedly unaltered isolation. An obsessive stimulus/response addiction is lodged so deeply within our souls.

The Internet is a triumph of the innermost of human desires. We are hunter-gatherers once again, lurking through the World Wide Web. We seek, find, weigh, and acquire. Our gigabyte sacks fill with plunder. The discrete declaration of a card catalog is now hypertext, wherein each entry is interwoven with every entry. No matter where you stand to observe, you are at the center of the universe. Our ancestors looked out into the African savanna and saw the same untouchable horizon. The Net is every individual's shout into the night, answerable by all humanity^xxi kept at a safe physical and emotional distance lest an unpleasant predator gain sovereignty over our vulnerable core, and squeeze. We revel in our newly conjured digital dependencies. We have found the meaning of life and are eager to discard inferior gods.

Then... there was diversity -- admission for reason of disqualification. Rather than foster brilliance we allocate for its suppression.

Aaaand then ?

1. This is actually true, and flows from the very definition of terms, exactly like the (relative) herding instinct of idiots! They may seem like "rules of the universe" of whatever "unbreakable, eternal" mettle, but in fact they're (both, and in the same way to the same degree) properties of the definitions employed! They flow from the words, not from the facts, they're not in fact rules at all! [↩]
2. Let's put it another way : in Romanzo Popolare, the old man (Ugo Tognazzi) who managed to capture a pretty young wife (Ornella Titties) who is of course besieged by a tiresomely overintensive, utterly peniless dork (with a moustache -- as if that fixes anything) realises his mistake while taking a trip, and on the train home has a dream.

   The way his dream actually flows is that there's a loud siren as the train approaches Milano Centrale. To this, that portion of Basletti's mind responsible for perimeter security inquires "what might that noise be ?" and that portion of Basletti's mind responsible for not getting up responds, "oh, it's the police siren". "What police siren ?", wishes to know the portion of Basletti's mind that deals with factual coherence in perceived reality while locked so deeply underground it can't even tell whether the beast carrying it is awake or asleep. "Oh, the police siren of the police coming once the three Mezzogiorno brothers each offered '''me''' his switchblade in an operatic show of strange timing (really, they were waiting behind the door ready to spring, like Calogeros-in-a-box ?!)." "What switchblades ?!" continues the inquiry, and the answers continue in turn, "You know, when they threw me out and I knocked on doors in a panic" "Who threw you out ?" "Vincenzina and her lover" "They threw you out ?!" "Yes she called me a cornuto and said she hates old people" (the cannonical form actually is "Non puoi sapere che cosa sia per una donna vivere con un uomo vecchio. Tutte le volte che mi tocca con quelle mani grasse vorrei mettermi a urlare.").

   The way Basletti "himself" represents the hallucinated reality we conveniently call "a dream" so as to avoid having to deal with the scary situation underneath (some'd rather call it ugly -- they're the truly scared) -- because no, there is no substantial difference between your perception of "reality" and any dream whatsoever, they're both mediated by the same abused tool that very much wasn't made to deal with any of this nonsense, the brain isn't the throne of truth anymore than the urethra is the hunting lodge of Prince Albert -- is that he slept, and he had a dream, which flew in reverse order of actual reality, and besides, "le sogni non se sbagliano mai". Because how could they!

   You would like this to be the case with dreams, but it is not the case with dreams, it is the case with everything. Your notion of attention, because attention is not a thing, but a notion, is based on clues you interpret after the fact -- at the time of examination, not at the time of occurence! You perceive coherence "in the world" on the basis of coherence in the results of that examination, but the coherence in results is based on the reliable manner in which the broken tool fails every time the same way, nothing else. The reason children have a problem with "attention" at a young age is exactly the same, not similar but exactly the same they "have trouble" with the velar consonant or using the toilet : they've not yet internalized your convention of what attention "is" and don't readily know how to convincingly fake its presence, for their and ancilarily your benefit. That's it!

   All the rest of "subjective life" is exactly of this same nature, the dream "happened", if we ask you, a you finding itself in the right instance of mind ; attention "is a thing", in the exact sense only having half a body is a thing for some stroke victims, and so following all the way. This is that "I", not a fact but a hallucination and evidently "reality flies unhinged" at the contact with hallucination, which is exactly like observing that "the train station ran away after the train started". What could it possibly "have done" other than staying put while you flew away ? Hm ? [↩]

3. In some cases.

   But the mark of the simple intellect is an inability to correctly handle hierarchy, and so instead of actually searching for souls with which to join and perforce heal the insanity of hallucinated identity, the idiot (also known as obnoxious cocksucker) simply searches for extras willing to participate in the cinematic substitute for reality he's writing, directing and starring.

   That search is necessarily going to come up short, because there's very little satisfaction one can derive out of interacting with borderlines qua borderlines ; and this is why narcissism is a kind of mental retardation -- just like some brains stop in their development before crossing the gate of language, and some others stop before crossing the gate of abstraction, and some others stop at other junctures on the tall mountain, just so some unfortunates run out of braingas before reaching the point where they can form meaningful relationships with others. What can you do ?

   Supposedly, nothing. Who knows ? Supposedly no one knows what you can do. [↩]

4. From practical experience -- one so restrained. [↩]
5. I can't even tell if this is a typo. [↩]
6. This utterly needs quotes -- they "deserving" of a safety net are specifically those who do not deserve a safety net, as per the very definition of terms and very much exactly in the way those people who most need borrowing are exactly the people nobody should lend to. [↩]
7. Western doesn't enter into it. All female-led "civilisations" are fundamentally hostile to human life, which they fear in a low level, obnoxious sort of way. Nobody hates water quite like she tasked with carrying all over the place large trays filled to the brim that must absolutely not spill, you see.

   "Western" (in the only proper sense of the term -- Western portion of the North American continent) civilisation only split away from proper civilisation into the female gutter sometime last century ; which is not to say that pantsuitism hadn't ruined another republic before that. [↩]

8. Out of the question. If there's a million within that actual billion I'll count myself blessed beyond the reach of any gods. In practice, it looks more like a dozen or two, no more. [↩]
9. Let's cull from like, this week's private conversations.

   Eu tu, io tin minte ca pe cind erau parintii mei de virsta mea, intr-un orasel deci de PROVINCIE da ? intr-o tara marginala in cica lumea de mina a doua, se adunau draga acasa la cite unu' si faceau bancuri si ziceau lucruri inteligente intre coniace.
   Ea aha, da' a cam murit dupa '89 vizibil asa

   Eu tocmai ~ca sa nu~ urmeze "social agreement" ala lu' peste prajit. ca si pe-atunci era o linie oficiala de cum ii cu mediu si cu handicapatii si cu negrii si cu pizdele de liceu.
   Ea linie uficiala sigur exista mereu ca doar de aia e uficial

   Eu noa. dar intelectuali si orase aparent dispar ca "stelele" din planetariu cind se stinge lanterna.

   I'll translate it when you actually show me a city somewhere, aite ? [↩]

10. Back in the day it was

    Ca rezultat al profundelor transformări petrecute în anii de după eliberare, al victoriei orînduirii socialiste, al uriașei activități politico-educative desfășurate de partid, în țara noastră s-au obținut rezultate deosebit de importante în lărgirea orizontului cultural, în ridicarea nivelului politic și ideologic, în formarea conștiinței socialiste a celor ce muncesc.

    Read the whole fucking thing sometime ("Tezele din Iulie"), it's riotously pantsuitidiotic. [↩]

11. Check it out, he has prophecy also! [↩]
12. This is somehow the secular error, the traditional "stage n" argument, that exercise in circularity where the proof of whether you set the idiot parade on fire is predicated on whether the idiot parade has put the fire out -- if it put it out then evidently you had "triflingly" set it ; and if it didn't it's not because it can't but because there's no fire. [↩]
13. Nothing. And I mean this literally. [↩]
14. This phrase... his problem, of course, is that he is succint. But also his strength -- such expressions belong in gold leaf. [↩]
15. Which is the correct correlate of ye olde "have you tried the naturally-occuring solutions first" : people don't want a computer girlfriend to fuck "her". On the contrary. [↩]
16. So much computers as brains are thoughts. [↩]
17. This is quite exact ; and quite important. [↩]
18. Simply put, manhood. [↩]
19. It didn't go away, either, hence "spreadsheets in space". [↩]
20. Ye olde "videogames ruin the bright youth" call of the 1990s.

    Remember the 90s ? Back when people actually thought these will be the problems, rather than the complete absence of any such bright kids ?

    Back then... back then everyone genuinely, honestly thought the unkempt youth living (with no life experience) in the messy room in their house is "bright", like you know, The Graduate. For lack of any testing, it was an easy enough thing to believe. Delusions are by their nature believable, aren't they ?

    Then the years passed, and exactly nothing came of the lost generation ; and their successors are... well... let's call lazy "confused", shall we. [↩]

21. At the very least ten companies, which have been given the $15 opportunity. Because that's what it's all about, the magical supermarket price. [↩]