Redefining the relationship of man and machine - an audio-visual meditat...

The weird turned pro, then gave up.

Oh yeah! I forgot about Polls!

Poll! Double Plus Poll! Double Plus Ungood Poll! Never Mind This didn't show up in my feed so I never saw it. My Feeeeeeeed *snort* Mud's a bit dry today Doris. Two legs Baaad. Squirrel! Netflix n chiiiil It's got electrolytes.

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It's weird to be an old man in the future, and I'm still a couple of months off 40. But I guess I'd already be dead in Huxley's version.

I made a facebook post in about November last year saying something along the lines of "dear psychopaths, please don't blow up the world until I've seen the new star wars". There was some confusion with Putin deciding to start taking out some of the lunatic mercenaries destroying Syria, and I didn't think it would be well received as it didn't appear to be part of the plan. But while I was trying to be funny, I genuinely meant it on some level.

Then something strange happened. The year ended, and the world carried on. But since then, I don't know if it's just me, but it's like the futurist weirdness, that we of my generation have since 2000 been joking hasn't happened, has kicked up a gear. And while there are definitely real signs of all kinds of dystopian potentials, there's also a surprising number of things to feel positive about. And unfathomable mounds of uncertainly oriented weirdness being shovelled on top daily. In fact YouTube is getting something like 65 years worth of video uploaded every day, which is birth to retirement covered. Well it was. The retirement age will have probably gone up a couple of years by the time I've finished typing and a few more jobs have been made obsolete by bots.

And I've just been watching "we are legion" then "the Internet's own boy" about Aaron Schwartz... that was depressing.

This  [Ableton] forum was kind of my pre-facebook facebook. Funny thing is 15 years ago, around the time I discovered Ableton and this forum, that sentence would have made absolutely no sense. And there's a whole load more that could go with it.

I'm not even sure we said "Google it" yet in 2001. We certainly didn't say things like "I just swiped left on Tinder and sent a snapchat and just got off skype and found out we were already Facebook friends and following each other on tumblr, instagram, flickr, and I liked a few of her posts and she retweeted one of my tweets before we called an Uber to take us to an AirBnB to watch some YouTube then stream spotify and do some Jaeger bombs then netflix n chill, I mean literally [figuratively] OMG LOL."

I mean what the hell is going on? That kind of weird is straight out of Huxley, Orwell, PKD and all the dystopians. It's double plus untweet in the Feelies, I think I left my soma in the cloud.

I thought I was one of the modern futury types, and I'm not sure if people are still speaking the same language, or if I'm in that Twilight Zone episode where the guy starts to not understand anything anyone's saying and at the end he's sitting on his kid's bed at story time looking at a kid's book that shows a picture of a dog and the word says "Wednesday".

The really weird thing is I actually think the weirdness is just getting started.

We're really likely to see self driving cars in use by the end of the decade, and augmented and virtual reality, after having billions thrown at it from every major tech co., is getting started this year. We've all just started getting used to people constantly looking down at their phones, after the first iPhone isn't even ten years old yet, but there's a very real chance that the same amount of time from now from when I first joined this humble forum of what was then a humble music startup, no one will be looking at phones, they'll be walking around with AR glasses wildly waving their arms around touching holograms no-one can see while waiting for their robot Uber and that Tinder date may be less than 50% of the same organic matter they were born with for all kinds of reasons.

So will I say the same thing before Star Wars XII? Is it even possible that someone who saw the original Ep. IV when it was still the decade it was made in — the 1970s — might actually be able to watch Ep 12 and enjoy it? Or will I not I give a fuck if President Kardashian-Trump and 90% Synthetic Putin nuke us all first?

So in a way I feel like with every legendary figure that keeps checking out it makes more and more sense that they have to go because that whole age is over. The new world is the wrong kind of weird for them.

The real canary in the coal mine was Hunter S. Thompson topping himself. His actual motto was "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." If even he, the biggest tripper of the 20th century, had decided it had got too weird, it should have been a clue.

Oh yeah, happy new year!