wheeltrueing robot

Fashion

Fashion is fascist, as they say. I can't get over the original industrial purpose of the scheme, planned obsolescence. Sure, there are cultural justifications for styles and symbols that people ornament themselves with. But fashion is always about buying new things. Culture produces tradition, more often than not, sometimes it even gets stagnant. However, tradition is almost never about buying new commodities. New products, products of mass production, are definitively not traditional. Except as we become a culture of traditional production. But manufacturing in our culture changes dramatically all the time. Sweatshops get exported to places with super-exploitive working conditions like China, rather than just exploitive Malquiadoras is Mexico. So I really don't buy the concept of fashion as personal expression very heavily, our culture of mass production supersedes it.

Uniforms are there as a form of social cohesion and control. Ideally, the uniform represents the collective will. We might conform ourselves to the uniform in order to pay deference to our community, respect our heritage, etc. This situation is of course exploited so regularly by the military, that we almost always define uniforms as oppressive. Uniformity is not often a positive social value. That is ironic in a culture of mass production which might appreciate uniformity. Or, perhaps as work becomes monotonous and dehumanised we yearn for escape through individual expression. Military belonging is scary, Orwellian, if the war being fought is not one you believe in. And it is a rare case when war is a good choice. Situations where true defence can really be said to be necessary is in places that probably don't have the time to prepare a uniform.

But our modern society has lived with rebellion against uniformity for a very long time now. The 1960s represent the era of such conflict. The 1960s has become shorthand for a style of dress and simplification of politics that drowns out the human social growth taking place in that era. The rebellion has been thoroughly embraced and reintegrated into the collective norm and not individualistic conformity is not an oxymoron. The 1990s grunge era, some might say an echo of the 1960s, embraced reused clothing and personal flair. However, even that is now a decade past. Uniform uniqueness is standard business parlance. The print on demand technologies, last minute solutions, these are the buzz words. Computers allow us now to produce less massively our mass production, more efficient even than a huge factory: production on demand for niche markets is what big corporations do best. And while there is still something to be said for the hand made and truly individual. The semblance of uniqueness can be bought for you, hire a professional who has done more research, get a truly indigenous pair of genes, buy the fair trade local organic branded coffee. The market is flexible and loves to accommodate whimsy.

Now, double reverse flip flop irony shows us the uniform as a mark of truly independent minded collectivist, communalistic ethics. Star Trek utopia! Wear a uniform and be one who truly cares about people and not superficial clothes.

This is so much like Bauldrillard, the Simulacra and simulations. Irony doubles over on itself and confusion is the weapon of the barons of capital. The universal values of body image insecurity allow for a plethora of diet and health fads, fashionable ways to make yourself look good, become accepted as a uniform individual.

In the 1960s you had rebellion, where your old clothes, be a hippie, don't wash. But the mod fashion and other consumer preferences began in earnest. In the 1970s, disco polyester made those bell bottom 60s jeans into new space-age products. Back in the 1980s you had fake designer clothing. Back in the 1990s you had designer jeans, worn in by poor foreigners and then paid for in deteriorated conditions. Present fashions are supposedly copied from the grassroots. But the system of power is not inverted to match, wealth disparities grow more and more. Niche elite. There are so many latte terms of different market segmentation demographics. We are bewildered and meanwhile politics becomes less understood and never-ending war.

Fashion is about confusing people. That is clear in our post modern era. Once perhaps things were not so complex. Now, the clothes on our back can be rebellion, or ironic conformity that parodies rebellion...Fashion is for confusion. Instead of a system which looks at the situation of global diversity and complexity and tries to make products that helped that make sense, we have a system which stratifies and divides and then divides again groups into increasingly isolated sub groups.

Through the commercialised internet mass production reaches near perfection. Now everybody can get anything in any way from anywhere, and it is so cheap on the net, cheaper than walmart even. But the shipping costs. And the surveillance. And the standardisation of intellectual private property values that value those with already accumulated capital...
When I buy things on the internet I always thing I am paying less than I normally would, it's a deal that I've well researched. It almost always turns out the opposite. I am a very sceptical person, but I am easily tricked.

So, in conclusion, when we look at how we are buying into fashion. I think we need to see what it is we are actually buying, beyond the image and the symbol that we are told it will represent. Images can be totally false. Who are the people making it for me? How does it get here? Who am I paying? Whose culture is it I am paying homage to? How do I relate to all of it. It reminds me of those 78 questions for a designer. how about 78 reasonable questions for a customer!?

There are some smaller independent art school types trying to fashion their own small industry of production? I don't feel intuitively confident that this is different enough just copying the larger centralised fashion model, to be one day bought out and cash in on the street-cred.

Too much information. Save us Computer. We must evolve the tools to know better. There is no judgement here. We need to know. We need to process the patterns. We need computers to interpret it all for us. We need you open source computers. Yes it is my religion. Computers and bicycles. Yes it is my religion. I need the trust. I need the binary truth to decipher the trickster complexity of the underlying place. I need it. My mind isn't big enough. My mind isn't cooperative enough. Individualism is an illusion.

So much injustices and the tied together truth of the wires. We need to be the computer. The extension of my body is not. Cyber bullsheet. Cyber futurismo. How could you imagine a future that is so dumb? What is the ghost in the machine? What is the ghost of ourselves in our own faces? Where is the street cred going to?

Like the futuristic films of the past, from the 1920s and 1930s. It is amazing how we will have foresight that is so blind. But the truth is still much less and more than the hype. We connect the least of them. We forget it all. So where are you going to be in the future? Are you going to brand it? Are you going to own us? Are we going to be slaves again? Is the Matrix a worthwhile movie. Are we going to enslave ourselves to the machine? Because of what? Blame the messenger. My machine is myself. My other is not. Forget to fight. We create our own reality they all say. Quantum new age herlbal supplement clense diet tour. forget the book launch. I think not. I think therefore I is. We are one. Forgetting to be here is to forget to not be here too. I forgot to fall over a cliff. Douglas Adams was the most imaginative philosopher of the future. The past is never over. My disease is growing under my skin. I am not going to raise children with you because my life is going to be one by and for the machine. I am a materialist. I am an animist. I am a trickster. I beleive in myths. I like to be told stories. I like to awake from sleeping now and then. Steal from the past. Please. Maze forever. Mazing clarity of the ancients. We once were pure and now we are not. The least of us is greater than the tallest of them. We are and they are no longer. They live on. We keep them up. We are smaller than we think. Is time progressing backwards. We see it all as progress because we live upside down?

Once the land was dripping into me as I took each step with my socks off. Once each face I saw was a kiss on the cheek and a breath on the forehead. My balding scalp will never no another place. My philiosophical epistemological end traps the wisedom beneath my fit. The less I learn the easier it is. I forget to roll backwards. Riding my bicycle in the reverse direction is not the same as pumping up the tires to the max. I was once a convert of Kenneth Patchen and then I saw Jesus and left the fold. I flew up into the sky and looked down at all the little people of this earth and wondered. Will I be ever able to see me? Will I know myself from them if I met myself in a mirror. The dream logic of vagina teething phalluses will keep living through me. Forget about the truth of anything. Crickets mate when you make a video game about ants.

Ants in my pants.

Ants for France. And his wrist was getting tired from mastrubating into the computer box.
My brain is downloaded. I have most of my music in a 160GB hard drive. It is larger because it is external and portable. There is more music in my head than in that box, but not much. Probably less than 50/50. All of the music in the world is in my God Box. My God is a little pandoras box.

Remember we have to keep selling things. Otherwise we would all just withdraw into our basements and smoke the pot together. The grand scheme of things is that the apocalypse is coming. The last time we stood together so close there was an expolsion. I am afraid.

And itis. I logic.

This is a deeper topic than I thought of it.

Soul Music.
Again the computer will fail and crash.