Explorations in the .epub format
Bought a Kindle this New Years and its been rough since. My whole library is now encoded into a portable but unsightly tablet. E-ink’s power saving-saving tech virtually guarantees that the screen will flicker on the day I decide to look past the ugly aesthetics of ‘Man and Kindle’, but it is glaring and hard to ignore.
Since the purchase I have been able to obtain the books that had alluded me prior due to cost or availability and yet I have not read them. Most remain at 0% completion, and the Interface makes sure I know that. What is the point then ? Did I only lust after Bolano’s ‘2666’ because of how scarce its print distribution was in India ? Maybe dawg, I be chasing shit I shouldnt. But what happens once every desire of ours will be met point-blank without the anxiety of anticipation ?
A Rube-Goldberg of exploitative labour allows Amazon to ensure one-day shipping. For my impatient bredren in the Americas that’s shortened to Same-day delivery. But when the moisturisers start materialising in front of us within seconds will we scramble to the floor where they apparate ? Will we lather our face according to the tried and tested methods that ensure optimal snail-serum penetration ? It is the final ritual to a product thats claimed to ensure good skin. Purchasing being the first. It is perverted to talk about the values of perseverance and temperance in a framework of capitalist-purchasing, because the point of money is to subvert mastery and time by way of abstract tender. Yet here I am talking about the ‘slow life’ in the context of a sytem where natural resources are blitzed and chopped at astounding rates to give us product, no questions asked. Ethical qualms and other repercussions outsourced to the countries that can not afford to ignore them. Ethical consumerism is ethical only when we believe that nothing will change and that ditching the straw is truly the most we can do. It is revolution without fangs. Fangs that are shorn off with each Performance of protest. I sincerely believe that outfits like Amnesty and others that champion vigils, marathons and clapping-at-5pm are agitprop to lull the masses into forgetting about the means towards structural revolution. Woke-ness without class consciousness.
Cutlass and guillotine, but figurative. Never the violence of blood because it is soul-rending in its pointlessness. Which is why seeing weapons of mass-destruction like missile ships and SR-71s do loops and donuts is mad. Means to a reign of terror, and mufuckas want that theatre of war to soothe us into forgetting that front-line workers are going to die. But seeing the military-industrial-complex’s pandering to the people emboldens me to hope that it can be toppled once we deny it our attention and support. Cutlass, figuratively. Find the ones signing these dumbass executive orders and you got your figurative guillotine.
Deciding who rises up in a vacuum of power is a hard question to answer without circling back to the same system that gave birth to the problem. I do not know enough to wager a proposal, but once I read thru the 301 pending books on my Kindle I’ll come through.