Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (21 page)

Unfortunately, the farther your timeline is from Point Zero, the more certain it will be erased in less than an instant when someone travels back to change things for his own interests, and only one person will ever know you existed (until that person too is negated by someone who arrived a picosecond earlier) (who will be obliterated in return) (and so on and so forth). Traveling back a small distance produces small changes; traveling back a large distance produces impossible changes, and trillions of possibilities will occur and disappear without any sign of their passing. Countless loves will never be consummated, countless wars will never raze countless hopes and
dreams, countless scenarios will never resolve—because someone will always be heading back to Point Zero to rebuild the world the way he thinks it should’ve originally been.

In fact, once time travel is invented, the only actual outcome anyone will ever see is the incomprehensively brief instant that is the smallest unit of time possible in this universe before the method is destroyed—by either the massive influx of would-be alchemists fighting over who gets ultimate control, or whoever finally figures out that the only way to create a stable future is to blow up any possibility of rewriting it. All it takes is one person in the infinitely large realm of timelines to go back to Point Zero and shut the whole thing down, and we’ll never even know what led him to do so.

We can only hope the explosion isn’t too big.

Y
ou know what really pisses me off? Those stupid super-thin toilet-paper sheets that make you feel like you’re wiping your butt with a cardboard rag. They have the consistency of rough sandpaper and all the staying power of an ice cube inside a five-hundred-degree oven.

It’s not the consistency or the durability (or lack thereof) that makes me upset, though. It’s the idea behind it.

You see, the reason these abominable little squares of hell get sold is that they’re cheaper than normal toilet paper (which doesn’t make you feel like you’re scouring your rectum with a steel-wool brush), so of course some brilliant middle-management person looking to streamline proactive efficiency in the name of confratulating the herpaderp says, “ERMAGERD, we can save five cents a roll on toilet paper, WE’LL TAKE ALL THE HELLSQUARES,” and then there’s nothing for it but to bend over and accept the pain.

Unfortunately, Bill from Accounting’s brilliant plan doesn’t actually save any money. I’ll use some simple mathematics to illustrate why (along with nice round numbers for easy mathing!).

Let’s say one normal roll of toilet paper costs two dollars. You’re conscientious, so you use two sheets per wipe, just enough to get the job done, and we’ll say there’s one hundred sheets in the roll. Each wipe costs you four cents.

Now let’s look at the shitpaper. We’ll say it’s super-cheap and you’re saving 50 percent, so it costs only one dollar for a roll. There’s the same hundred sheets in the roll, but each wipe requires six sheets, because anything less and you’re literally smearing your own feces around in your hand as the wafer-thin material shreds apart on contact (I’d recommend using Bill’s shirt to clean off if this happens).

Total cost per wipe? Six cents.

Carrying the square root of negative one and dividing by zero, we find that even though each roll of recycled broccoli-stalk fiber is costing you only half as much as a roll of regular toilet paper, you actually spend 150 percent more per wipe. This means you’re actually LOSING MONEY over the long term (trust me, it’s numberology).

This is called valuing short-term gains over long-term consequences, and it’s driving me insane, because it’s not limited to just toilet paper.

Mortgages? Check. Who wouldn’t want to pay an extra 125 percent on top of the value of a house because it’s easier to make just the minimum payment each month? I mean, it’s not like you’d need that extra one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars after thirty years of payment, right? Might as well give it to the bank, I’m sure they’ll put it to good use.

Credit cards, payday loans? Sign me up! Do you want to know why all those friendly people are so eager to give you money? Because they know you’re not going to stop and think about what the actual long-term cost is. That two-thousand-dollar big-screen you just put on the Visa is going to end up costing you close to four thousand dollars if you make only the minimum payment each month. You could have had TWO big-screens! That’s DOUBLE the pornography- and motor-sports-viewing potential, and you would have had it if you’d used your brain for more than keeping your ears apart!

Environmental issues? We’ll take care of those, one tiny little step at a time, doing the bare minimum to scrape by. Sure, our children may have to evolve gills and learn to swim because we’ll flood the entire planet, but at least we all had our choice of iPod-case color and Happy Meal toy. Fuck it, it’s not like we’re going to be around to care anyway, right? Let them deal with the mess.

If you’re curious, you can go to any casino in the world to see this principle in action. Do you know why there’re so many luxuriously magnificent buildings in Las Vegas that ply you with free drinks and food? Because the house always wins. Always. Vegas understands long-term consequences. That’s why that little green 0 and 00 are on the roulette wheel, and why you’ll get kicked out if you start counting cards. They want you to play the odds, because they know what the odds say. Pro tip: They’re not in your favor (shhhh, don’t tell anyone, though; I like getting free drinks while wandering the floor).

So let’s continue shipping all our jobs overseas to fatten the corporate bottom line. Let’s continue laying off our workers to pay for another multimillion-dollar CEO bonus. Let’s continue cutting our science funding to build more missiles and mortars.
Let’s continue picking tanks over tolerance, handguns over health care, entertainment over education—all the stupid shortsightedness that makes this world such a fucked-up pile of shit.

Just don’t expect to clean it up with toilet paper. That’s not going to work at all.

I
was browsing the app store on my phone the other day, looking for a decent game to pass the time, and I had a moment of unusual clarity. I was reading a review of a popular franchise and people were upset that it was going to be available only on mobile iOS platforms, that they couldn’t play it on a more traditional gaming medium, like a 360 or DS or PS3.

I read their words, their complaints, and all of a sudden, it was as if I were reading gibberish. What they were saying didn’t make sense to me; I literally didn’t understand it.

I had a confuse.

People were angry over the fact that a traditional video-game franchise, made by a company that had grown to prominence during the eight-bit and sixteen-bit eras, had an entry that could run only on a machine that made those traditional consoles look like a caveman banging two rocks together.

Buh?

I mean, take a moment and think about it. The piece of hardware in your hand or your pocket, that device that’s called merely a phone, has every single capability of any gaming system from fifteen to twenty years ago, in addition to its being able to make voice and video calls, and
people are angry when games are released on only that platform
. They get profoundly mad. Frothing-at-the-mouth, vitriolic-rant, online-petition-with-thirty-thousand-signatures upset.

We’re talking seriously butthurt here.

I want to know why.

Why are these people so angry? Why are they so upset that something we would have killed to have ten years ago is now considered rubbish?

When did we forget how to recognize that moment where the future becomes the present? When did we lose that sense of wonder that right now, RIGHT NOW, we are capable of accessing any recorded media or literature in the entirety of human history via a palm-sized portable device? When did we become inured to the fact that if we were to describe our current tech level to someone of even twenty-five years ago, he or she would most likely lock us up in the insane asylum or tell us to go back to our parents’ basement and read more nerd books?

When did we become immune to just how impressive our tools actually are?

We have power plants that work off reactions that are found in
stars
. We can talk to people on the other side of the world like they were right next door to us. We use a system of geosynchronous satellites to navigate our personal automobiles, some of which run on pure electricity. I’m currently writing on a machine that automatically
spellchecks my words, that can reallocate my finances, that communicates through thin air with a giant network of other machines all across the globe in case I need to look something up, and that also edits music and videos I could make appear on demand if I were so inclined. The only thing it doesn’t do is brew coffee, and that’s because I don’t have a wi-fi equipped coffeemaker (which I now know is an actual thing because I just Googled it).

If you told Ronald Reagan he would have the ability to shut down an Iranian nuclear-weapons facility by
writing some words in a coding language
, he’d have lost his mind. We are living Star Wars here, people.

Why are we so incapable of examining the wonder around us? The terror around us?

I believe it’s because we’ve forgotten how to remember the short-term past. We’re so enthralled with what might be, with what potentialities await, that we rarely stop to look around and see what is. What we’ve created from what we used to be, the slow shifts that add up to drastic change, these are buried in the mind’s memory banks and left to lie in their sepulchral dust, forgotten in the mad dance of now and tomorrow. Sure, we can open history’s archives and learn lessons from one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or more years ago (for those who care to look), but we have a curious set of blinders when it comes to events that happen in our own lifetimes.

Why can’t we see the constant flux that surrounds us through a twenty-five- or fifty-year period? Is it because most of us judge the world based on our personal experience, and in our personal experience, changes accumulate over time so gradually that we don’t even notice?

Don’t bother thinking that one over, I’ll answer it for you—yes. Just look at all the stories from people saying climate change isn’t real because they wore sandals in the winter or jackets in the summer (never mind the increasing severity of weather patterns and seasonal fluctuations!), those who ignore statistics in favor of anecdotal tales (you’ll totally win the lottery this time!), or the multitudes who consistently choose short-term gains over long-term losses because the latter is diffused over a much broader spectrum (too big to fail now, but look at those quarterly reports go!). Hell, look at all the poor people who perennially vote for rich people to take more and more of their rights away and then wonder why social inequity keeps rising. We’re a pretty fucking dumb bunch of animals when it comes to paying attention to what’s going on in our lives, I’m not gonna lie.

Case in point: all the iDevices people take for granted. Constant innovation, upgrading, features—the differences between the first iPod and an iPhone 5 are nothing short of amazing, and that’s over the course of barely twelve years, which is leaving out the fact that if you showed an original iPod to some people from 1990, they’d shit themselves. No one blinks an eye, though; people don’t think back to CD players and Walkmans and tape decks. They just download another album because it’s not like they’re going to use all thirty-two of those gigabytes anyway.

(Seriously. Thirty-two gigabytes of storage space on something that’s three inches by five inches. Holy shit; beam me up.)

But there’s a darker side to that calculus, that constant change without scrutiny. It ain’t all gleaming plastic and entertainment. Take a gander at the current state of civil liberties in this country. You think there wouldn’t have been a public uproar if Nixon tried to pass something like the Patriot Act? If we indefinitely detained
our own people without giving them recourse to a jury trial in a functionally illegal prison? Yet now we’re talking about surveilling our own cities with drones and executing American citizens without a trial—national security applied with a conveniently wider and wider net. Innovation goes both ways—one man’s Jobs is another man’s Rove.

Sadly, it looks like we’ll just keep taking those changes for granted. We’re like the lobster sitting in the pot of slowly heating water, too dumb to realize that eventually it’s going to boil. For every outraged geek who’s busy mashing away at his keyboard because his game is available only (only!) on the phone, there is a mindless citizen who thinks Freedom of Information requests really aren’t that important now, are they, I mean, it’s not like they’ve really told us anything for the past ten years anyway, right? Both limited by the same worldview, the same tunnel vision of now. Both unable to see just how much things have really changed because each step was so small, so logical, so natural. Both simmering away, content in their hot tub.

Well, whatever, fuck it, I’m bored. Time to go download Drone Hunter 3. I really wish it were on 360, though.

I
t’ll start small. A bulky pair of glasses, power pack hanging on your belt, cord running up under your shirt snaking the two together. Basic functionality at first—primitive heads-up display, perhaps monochromatic, able to place waypoints and give directions; an in-ear speaker connected to one frame providing audio options. Input delivered by a handheld trackball controlling a cursor or haptic gloves; Internet capable, video recordable, a computer using you to see.

The glasses will slim down as components shrink—thick black box shades, trim Oakleys, rice-paper-thin spectacles stretched between invisible carbon nanotube frames. Wires will shrink and disappear as well, power source absorbed into the glasses themselves or generated by biomechanical motion. Tech indistinguishable from no-tech.

Functionality evolves fitfully, beginning with vision enhancement
and GPS tagging. Once users figure out how to append information to locations, they’ll see every restaurant glow with a neon cloud of food reviews, see stores graded on customer service and prices, the omnipresent churn of AugNet inescapable. Lurking everywhere, advertisements for services and porn, hacked into the underlying structure like electronic tribal graffiti.