Dismay Among the Martian Race
For the first time in many years I smoked a cigarette the other day. Without exaggeration its only flavour was of mild burning paper.
We have got so used to this sort of thing that we do not realise how deeply odd it is. Why for example is supermarket bread tasteless or unpleasant? Why do country music radio stations grade the songs from 0, for rubbish, to 5, for very good, and then play the 3's - they all do this as a matter of conscious policy in the US? Would not the famous Martian, freshly arrived among us, react with confusion?
The Dismal Regiment of Windows
Windows is
COMMERCIAL in big letters. Meaning it treats us, like all thing supposedly commercial, as
infantilized farm animals. But what do infants like - why
gaudy bangles, '
eye candy'.
But Windows is perhaps the dreariest looking thing ever to get on a cathode ray screen. Where the hell is the eye candy?
My thing has silver window borders, inlaid with amber. I look out across an animated lake by moonlight through a picture widow upon which the rain plays. Each window is translucent, so that lower windows all show through, they have drop shadows and wobble, as though rubber, when dragged. Get the idea? In short, I've got more eye candy than an undertaker's shagged dead bodies.
And yet Windows has none.
What Can It Possibly Mean?
It is a rule of controlling the
farm animals that Microsoft, for example, cannot just do what
suits it; it has to square what it does with the other elements of power, with "the state" if you like.
Making people bored and less happy than they would otherwise be is a fundamental of social control. Spending your life sitting in front of Microsoft's ugly, dull screen, with its horrid "start button" (to which Bill attributes much of his success) fills the farm animal with quite desperation and despair. And this is what Bill gives to the rest of power, this is the social control red meat he throws them in payment.