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this is an attempt to again document the effect of marketed images on my life. it is a memoir, but also a critique of capitalism & the predominant status-quo powers that i believe shape the world i have grown up to live in, be they social or economic phenomena.
i was born in 1995. the spectacle has been there all my life. there has been at least a television in my bedroom since the day i was born. disney, nintendo, sony, universal & warner brothers have all had their products in my home & brain since before i was capable of conscious thought or memory, just like almost everybody else i know. i want to be able to say that at least some of the children's entertainment i was afforded was not exclusively produced by megacorporations, but even picture books & novels are just popular articles of marketing & distribution; publishing is after all a hugely hegemonistic & industrial thing. a book does not enter a child's hands before at first being printed & pressed in a very large factory - a very large factory is not built without the land on which it stands being bought & sold. eric carle's "the very hungry caterpillar" evokes fond memories of my quickness at learning to read, but the novel joy of poking my little baby fingers through the holes the caterpillar "ate" through is something that could only be paid for by outsourcing the printing of the book to japan. socially, the book conveys to me through its images the memories of earning my mother's pride & affections, but materially, the extreme popularity & familiarity of such an inconsequentially seminal text is credible mainly to its free marketability & distribution following the baby boom, much like any of the other treats & toys i was given, such as video game cartridges or VHS tapes. i also had "where the wild things are" - this was also considered a staple in first-world children's picture books, & likely had been for quite some decades by the time i was born. i asked my mother only recently & confirmed that she did indeed read these books herself as a child, & bought new copies to read to me, her first child. it's idealistic & romantic, & i often cherish those memories as deeply important for giving me the tools to become literate & eventually understand the material truth concealed beneath such images by association.
despite being celebrated for their use-value as unique & hugely influential in the education & entertainment of young children, both of the books are simply consumer products for exchange-value. someone has a baby, & you buy them the book. regardless of whether they read it to the child or not, under the present status-quo systems, the book must be produced, marketed & sold as such. these days, & even back then, printing a physical book was certainly not the only way to do this, & i do recall seeing the very hungry caterpiller rendered as a tv cartoon as a child. i was little, but old enough to fathom how the difference in medium caused various changes to the mode of consumption. for starters, watching the cartoon meant you didn't have to learn or know how to read, which to me signalled that the voiceover of the cartoon was the replacement for not just my own intelligence & creativity, but also of my mother's direct attention & guidance. i felt sorry for the other kids, who would have no idea, & were just experiencing "learning to read" as "letting a bunch of images pass by". the book demanded direct attention & the association of the senses of sight & touch, whereas the cartoon did not. it was simply there to function as passive, dissociative entertainment. the animated visuals provided their own interpretations of the way the caterpillar should move, & there was no reason for anybody to make up their own sound effects. it was such bullshit, & even though i had no such words for it, i hated the rampant consumer commercialism, even from such an early age. overall, i noticed that there was just less room to fill in the gaps mentally - & there was also no way to play at the illusion of depth by sticking your fingers through the holes on the pages. no lesson in being too rough & tearing the pages. no reality, no risk, no danger or direct experience. the subjective experience of freely interpreting the simple words & pictures was replaced with a more information-rich & objectified product out of a strange sense of false, commercial "necessity," which i would wager to be quite similar to the "necessity" of profiteering off of a children's book in the first place. the wikipedia articles don't exactly hide the facts of both books being hugely successful commercial operations, but they mainly laud them as breakthrough achievements in artistry & storytelling, or point towards trivial facts or popular, rhetorical controversies of the books. sendak claims to have "refused" to make a sequel to his wild things book - he claims that it would have been a soulless production, but what does he really mean to say here, if his children's book became a commercial movie? how are we supposed to take his claim seriously when the film exists entirely unnecessarily, arbitrarily, & for profit alone? much like how they were arbitrarily produced as void-filling products of wage-labour, their financial legacies are sustained mainly by the marketing & redistribution efforts of their respective authors & publishing houses, who do so autonomously & with only indirect advisory or asynchronous communication with their author-illustrators. when imagining the commercial forces that reshape these children's narratives into perverse remakes, it is better to imagine the email or correspondence that put into motion the bank transactions that facilitate the material labour efforts put into them as products, rather than the actual labour process or efforts themselves. "hi there (media marketing company), thanks for your email. i'm really interested in a cartoon adaptation of the very hungry caterpillar. the media license costs $xyz. please arrange a date with my legal & accounting team & we can have some contracts written up." - try as i might, i haven't actually been able to figure out who paid who or where all the money went in the creation of this thing. i guess that is by-design, it is part of the features of "private" ownership of intellectual "property", where the rights to the image are entitled totally to its author, whose ownership & authority is unquestionable. it might be possible to discern such things just by asking or enquiring with the right people who worked at the studios, or carle himself. eric has sold over 50 million hungry caterpillar books - supposedly two per minute since its release, according to wikipedia. maurice sendak has sold 19m+ wild things books as of 2009. such excessive commodity production of what is essentially bookshelf-filler for primary schools, shops & libraries already extends far beyond the use-value of the printed books, & i'm sure if we were to go by exchange-value, then the US dollars credited to the respective authors was likely more than enough to retire on given the times - the passage of time itself would have guaranteed any amount of capital invested from such times would be more than enough to sustain generations of multiple families at once. instead of wealth being used to further the practice or craft of making educational literature for children, it has been used to perpetuate an image-based logo culture, freezing the products in time & entrenching the field within the constrictive realms of a behemoth industry funded mainly by preordained, institutional procurement. it is simply just old money changing hands - the institutions guarantee there is enough money to go around to sustain the marketing efforts of reaching into the wallets of parents & students to line the infinitely deep pockets of the private interests withholding the authority of, or "rights to" the image. what other reason is there to turn children's books into a media franchise than to fleece the nostalgic? they know it isn't going to be the same. even the consumers know that. even before the books were cartoons or films, they were still consumer products, made to be used & thrown away like everything else. it is only by their totally arbitrary reinvention by corporate interests that anything "new" is made - & it must all be within the franchises, thereby condemning it to sameness. the common-sense rhetoric of "supply & demand" is sheer falsehood. the reality is that a set of images of a false caterpillar were arbitrated through a massive, multi-national institutional authority complex that selectively allows for the liberalization of images, so long as it is for-profit.
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when pondering where the money came from (& went,) for the tv cartoon adaptation, i asked a friend of mine, a freelance animator, about what he knows regarding media licensing deals for animators & animation in general. it was actually my friend marcus, who is featured in a dream i had a few blog posts down from this one. he gave me an answer i kind of half expected - that as an animator, it's not really something under his purview, that he generally considered licensing to be a nightmare that he would prefer not to consider, & that the queestion would be better suited for a producer. our conversation was interesting because it revealed a little tiny bit of a gigantic, solid, concrete wall that stands between creators & capitalists which has pervaded modernity since the proliferation of animation & the moving image itself. such a monolithic blockade between creators & their work is testament to the guaranteed alienation of the worker under capitalism, & marcus identified more worries regarding licensing than just legal worries, highlighting that the entire conundrum is mostly a legal & moral grey area where money is made opportunistically & according to the "unspoken rules" of society. he mentioned that with ai, the policy is "steal first & ask questions later," which matches my notes. he talked about fanart at conventions being not "technically" allowed, & how it is permitted until it isn't, which to me solidifies that this is an issue of monetary hegemony rather than intellectual property or creative merit/fairness. you are allowed to do what you want until you are "too big" - which just means too profitable. the conversation illustrated for me that there is not just the problem of keeping all of the money in the same private pools they occupied yesterday, but also the problem of "creative control" & the interference of capital in personal artistry. much the same as private industries of music & film, any artist who works with making still or animated 2d images is going to eventually at least wonder what their art is worth to people, & whether their creative endeavours are eating into their piggy bank too much to be considered worthwhile. this may change the personal motivation for art to be pushed aside for material stability (looking for a job instead of doing art, art as a hobby,) or by making art the main productive effort in life, (working for commissions, commercialising/commodifying one's own artform for material gain,) but either way it is going to change the art or the artist towards serving the interests of capital before feeding themselves, & there are traceable breadcrumbs of image-objects left all over the internet's various image & logo-culures in the wake of such consumerism to prove it. in this way, the products of the skills of artistry & animation are increasingly churned by the status-quo powers that be into increasingly dismembered & objectified forms. cheap commission work remains to be the cheif method by which the average starving artist pays their bills, whilst corporate IP hegemony dictates which subjects are going to be objectified next at the global worldwide chop shop of animation & art amongst independent artists. the economy of such images has been further & further normalized since the dawn of the internet as the hyperefficient machine of spreading such images to the people of the world, & it is in this deindustrialized, service-based economy (which gave rise to such businesses as "patreon",) where commissioners & artists can act as petit-bourgeoisie, riding the trends & market waves fed to them by the indomitable, all-seeing & all-encompassing spectacle in an eternally futile dance of obedience to their actual bourgeois masters, who could not give a crap about them or their art or who it affects, so long as it doesn't interfere with their yacht collection, which was built on exchanging images of cartoons. i would one day like to compile a material analysis on the resources & people's lives that have gone towards serving such libertarian interests, as i believe i would be specialised towards it. i would also very much like to be proven wrong that we are all living in a perpetually capitalist porno factory, but i have seen nothing but evidence to the contrary from both my peers & outsiders to such niche internet communities. everybody eventually at some point bends over & serves capital in some way - it could be through patriarchy, it could be through a consumerist spectacle fixation, but the common thread remains to be that people raised under capitalism who make or consume art are inescapably socialised into a world where art & images are predominantly tools of financial & ideological domination. i want to ask the question of why the profound abundance of tag-based databases of niche internet pornography & its popularization has appeared historically alongside the mass-proliferation of the image itself & envision what alternatives there are to this status-quo we all inhabit as consumers against our will. furthermore i want to liberate people from such bourgeois fascinations & identify them primarily as an illusive distraction that acts more like a commercial slave collar than a free-thinking & liberalized art community, but to make such grand claims i need to explain myself & my relationship with images further. this is, after all, an attempt to document the effect of marketed images on my life.
those two children's books are not the books that taught me how to read, & they are not the only two picture books afforded to me in my home as a child. what taught me to read, to actually read "fluently" & know how to decipher all other texts following, was renting ocarina of time for n64. i have very distinct memories of this. let this be the definitive recollection of this story, some 27 years later:
i believe it was 1998, & it was quite routine for my family to visit the video store (known in australia as a video 'shop') to peruse various escapist distractions under capitalism. unlike others, i do not romanticise my childhood or the circumstances of my birth for access to marketed media. in my eyes, society was already in a tailspin due to capitalism by the time i was born, & any further damage or stagnation is simply the same machine operating by-design. when people complain about not having any good nintendo games anymore because games are too greedy nowadays, or use words like "enshittification", this just means that they are deeply hypnotized, bourgeois people with no real problems. they are unable to differentiate between leisure & freedom. but anyway, my dad took me to the video store, & i tried to rent ocarina of time, but they gave me castlevania 64. i knew it was the wrong game because the box didn't match the cartridge, but my dad blew me off & fell asleep on the couch when i asked him if we could go back to change it. i tried to play castlevania instead, but the game sucked, so i just turned it off & put it back in the box, waiting for tomorrow. the next day, i explained what had happened to my mother, who was normally pretty against taking me to the video shop & generally saw video games as hypnotic & sedating tools that made idiots out of neglected children (she was right), but she agreed to take me there & correct the mix-up. the staff were happy to oblige & changed over the game for me. by the time we got home, the sun had gone down, & my mother was preparing dinner whilst my dad smoked on the couch in front of the tv. i fired up the game & there were already three files filling up the save data, so i picked one & continued. i ran around a bit in kokiri forest & tried my best to figure out the game, but i had no idea what was going on, because there was just too much text in the game. words were still foreign to me, but i had some rudimentary understanding of letters. eventually as i ran around, unable to progress, my mother called me to dinner, so i turned the game off & toddled to the kitchen. whilst the family ate together (this was very rare) i was asked how the game was. i tried explaining a few things with my three year old mind about the images i saw on the screen - that there was a cool-looking boy with a sword wearing a dress. i said i think there's a shield with a Q on it in the game, thinking the red symbol on the deku shield was a letter Q, trying to show that i was trying to read. i told my mother that i generally didn't understand what was going on in the game & i needed help to read it, so she sat down with me after dinner & we played the game together. she made a new file for me, & read out all the text boxes of the intro cutscene to me, doing voices for all of the different characters. initially she was just intending to have me sit on her knee a bit whilst she read out the stuff on the game like a teleprompter, but eventually she found herself pretty enthralled by directing me through the game. with her guidance, much like with the picture books, i was also quite captivated & found a lot of new meaning all at once, understanding now that i was actually able to understand what was being conveyed to me by the images of the game. we spoke to mido, found the sword & then had to get money for the shield, & doing this quest together with my mother i still have extremely distinct memories of trying to get myself to associate the letter "S", which looks squiggly like a snake, with the words "S"word & "S"hield so that i could progress through the game. i think we got into the deku tree, & then my mother read the game's manual to learn how to save & turn it off. i don't really remember much else after that. i know that we bought our own copy of the game at some point, maybe for my birthday or something, i dunno. regardless, i was pretty fixated on the game from that point on, & i recall by the time i was 4 years old being able to sit there & play through the whole thing unguided by my mother after we'd completed the game once together. there was an incident during my initial playthrough of the game together with my mother where i learned the hard way what the word "erase" meant, accidentally deleting my own save file whilst my mother was momentarily busied in the other room, so we had to play half the game again. there were a lot of times where relatives or friends would come over, only to interrupt my mother in the middle of her zelda session with me, only for my dad to have to entertain them or for me to just wait with the game on pause whilst they were over. my mother described the game as "addicting". she never played any other video games before or after. my older half-brother always insisted on doing the fishing minigame all the way to getting the hylian loach, because he was just easily swayed by images of fishing. to this day he is still in love with images of fishing, completely unaware of its settler-colonial or ecological implications, let alone the implications of the normalisation of such images in video games for children published by the japanese, accreditable to their giant fishing industry & traditions, which today largely destroys the planet with its ecocidal industrialism & hypercommercialism mimicking the western industries of beef & pork. it is no surprise to me to see this cultural vestige mirrored in a cute, cartoonified fishing minigame from the same country's mass-entertainment industry, which makes no mention of the fish hook tearing at the inside of the animal's mouth as they are routinely captured & released. the largest "record-breaking" fish you catch sits unblinking in its idle animation in a puny fishtank at the counter where you pay pretend money to a business operator/counter clerk who replaces the sword you are normally able to swing around at the push of a button with a fishing rod. there could have been any way to write a fishing minigame into the game, but perhaps the programmer of the fishing minigame (who was a specialist programmer, whose work encompasses the whole of the fishing game & therefore would have had to have been done as a small, embedded system in an already-prefabricated game, hence the minigame, his name appears in the game's credits,) thought it would be either an elegant or professional demonstration to hook into the very systems that change the controls of the game, writing all of the functions very neatly within the systems provided to him by the other workers before him, but i think there is at the very least a thematic comparison to be drawn between the same button being used for the stereotypical hero's sword of justice, which may only be drawn in certain locations (especially not in the houses of NPCs,) that the "environment & enemies" respond to by being slain or cut down, but only phases through the NPCs uneventfully, & the fishing rod which interacts with the environment by baiting, luring, hooking & reeling in & capturing fish. i would say that this comparison reveals a stereotypical japanese cultural norm/tradition that is expressing itself through images mediated to my three-year-old brain by the neoliberalized capitalist market of japanese video games brought to the west by international corporate efforts with the united states of america, whose settler systems are also colonial & primarily worship the image-object of the captive bovine object in the same way the japanese idealize their captive piscian objects. the fish are not living beings, they are not sexed, they are just numbers in a computer, part of a programme cooked up by a japanese man who had less-than-unusual inspirations to draw from as his pockets were laced with wealth for generations past & to come by his bourgeois colonialist computer distraction propaganda image-machine job in the 1990s.
the images mediated to me by ocarina of time at that early stage in my life set a number of fixations & patterns in motion, some of which i have written about in my blog post from 2026/06/10. i had learned to read & was now a voracious & early reader, not just of english text & books but of television, film, music & movies. that is how i ended up teaching myself the way to the library & how to check out books from there, & it is why i asked my father for a wagon to carry the stuff to & from. that is the first "data centre" i accessed, the local public library, which i also covered in my second blog post, from 2024/10/19. that date is one day after my birthday, & i was in almost the very middle of a three-month stay in japan during that time. it was actually also by my obsession with nintendo games that i eventually came to learn the japanese language - by the time the mother 3 fan translation had come out on my 15th birthday, i had imported & played through the game 7 or 8 times in japanese, assisted by the game's all-kana text. i had previously taken a japanese class in grade 4 (age 10) at a grammar school i attended for a year as a child (because my mother picked me out as a "gifted" kid,) & catholic all-boys high school allowed me to select japanese as an elective & specialize in it as the years went on. it was actually solely because i studied japanese that i received a pass mark for high school at all, because it boosted up my ATAR score (like a GPA for americans) by 12% arbitrarily. it is again no surprise to me that a patriarchal institution of colonialism allowed me to elect to learn the language of a fellow neoliberal empire-colony, & it is no surprise again that this enabled a totally commercial interest in a passing video game fascination. like i said, the spectacle has been there all my life, & it has never began to fade to the background, only becoming more encompassing of the world's communications whilst singularizing me as an alien merely for even recognising it, identifying it, considering it. it perpetuates itself & is inescapable; a commercial weapon of war that invades your household through subversive coercion & bedazzles you into being uncritical & blind to superstructure by its intended function.
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once as a child, during a similar era of being about 3 or 4 years old, i recall the first time i'd ever put my head up very closely to the television tube & examined the individual rgb dots making up the image. i examined carefully how each colour was made, & i remember thinking it was strange that the three primary colours were different - i expected yellow to take the place of green, since red, yellow & blue are the three primary colours of art, which was taught to me by my mother very early on, & i was always mixing paints & stuff with her. after examining the tv screen closely, & seeing how all of the pixels worked together to form a rasterised image, i thought about the radio apparatus used to beam the images accross. i figured that the tv could display pretty much any imaginable image, which set me off worrying about the horrible visual fears i would conjure in my nightmares. i became pretty worried, but not totally distraught, because i somewhat knew that my message of warning & worry carried a social significance of what we should & should not do as passtimes, & that i would have to convince people by organised protest & honest & open communication of my fears of a society turned docile & unthinking by incessant telecommunication of the moving image. it suddenly made sense to me why my father would drool & pass out in front of the television, or go unresponsive & become fixatedly mesmerised at particular scenes or shows. someone without his best interest in mind was simply beaming images into his eyes from accross the globe in a mere instant, & i was determined to do something about it. i gathered up all of my lego bricks in the house, dismantling all of my creations & kits to try to build a big wall in front of the tv, planning to black it from view, which i imagined would prompt a serious & concerned discussion about the future of our family & the human race in this unregulated world of broadcast imagery. i told my dad i was going to build a wall in front of the tv with my lego, & he barely responded, not really caring or paying attention to what i was saying or doing during his routine hypnotic fixation on the television. try as i might, all of the lego in the house only got the wall about 4cm high, but it was enough for my family to notice. my dad laughed when he finally realised what i was doing, bemused by my seriousness & determination in rescuing him from the enslaver of his attention. he told me i don't have to do that, that i just have to try to talk to him, but i didn't believe him, & i saw him as delusional & addicted to distraction. i told him he doesn't pay attention to me & falls asleep, that he's never awake or doing anything, & he just said it's because he's tired from work. on the same day soon afterwards, i remember my cousin came over, & i explained to her the principles behind the goal of my project to block off the television. i believe she just said some typical older-cousin voice of reason thing & lead me away from the living room to go play with her, but i don't recall much else, only that she interrupted & pulled me away from the task. to this day, my dad spends all of his off-work time as escapist spectacle time, consuming very much the same kind of things he always did, just on youtube or streaming services rather than cable television. much like my own, his life was also always indelibly marked by images & symbology of the spectacle, him being about two years old when the society of the spectacle was first published. he recalls dreaming in black & white & having extremely vivid childhood delusions of frontier space fiction & westerns, which were popular at the time. his memories of life in australia as the child of an immigrant family are mostly of settler conditions - a lone house far out on the very edges of rural townships, bought for british imperial shillings & pounds after my grandfather turned down a block of inner-city units which would have made that side of the family's real estate empire even more wealthy than it already is, had the decision not been made that there were too many junkies & street ruffians inhabiting the area. regardless of his own father's isolationist & protectionary instincts in selecting a plot of land very early into the post-ww2 economic miracle, my dad did end up running around with some pretty crazy crews as the streets suburbanized & his peers, also the children of both immigrants & non-immigrants in the area, grew up alongside him in the same neighborhood & city. also alongside him during this era of rough-&-tumble larrikin behaviour was the spectacle, the very same spectacle that predominates in the current generation. the images are different, & so too are the mediums of transmission, but the principal modus operandi remains the same: an invasive, commercial force enters the home, unquestioned as routine or regular advancement in "consumer technology" & projects broadcasted images into the minds of common people en-masse, sometimes nationally for the news & weather & such, but usually from the united states.
i have never really stopped being afraid of the image-machine. i have always considered it a powerful & decisive force of political nature dwelling within people's homes & occupying a large sum of their unconscious minds. as i grew, i kept up with video games, children's literature & cable television cartoons as my primary forms of entertainment in a way that was heavily skewed towards the video games, being no stranger to spending entire days or many hours entertained by the same video games. i had a relative abundance of them compared to other kids, who often only had once console with a few games, & was a very proud & conspicuous consumer of video game goods until much later in life. similarly there was also an oversaturation of 24/7 cartoons being broadcast into the house, which enabled many a day of passive consumption of cartoon network & nickelodeon shows. where most would find comfort & nostalgia, i find the breeding grounds for pervasive mental illnesses & developmental challenges. often times i was so understimulated by school or life outside of my fixations that i would be totally bored - they considered me for adhd as early as 8 or 9 years old after a series of behavioural outbursts & tantrums at school, but the consultation with the psychiatrist came accross more as an invitational challenge towards authority for me, as i knew the job of the person there was to label or categorize me, so i refused & resisted a lot of his questioning & therefore learned how to change my behaviour to suit the situation, protecting myself from any clinical labels or prescription drugs. i recall that the session was interrupted midway through & my mother was called in as i was seen out. i sat at the door, listening intently to their conversation whilst i kept my younger brother quiet & entertained with the toys in the waiting room (i remember doing an eddie murphy voice impression for a mcdonalds toy of mooshoo from mulan, much to his delight). i knew what they were talking about when adhd was mentioned, because i'd paid attention to people calling me "hyperactive" when i was too energetic or active for them (especially authority figures,) & also from having my mother explain the rudimentary principles of add to me a few months earlier, when i asked why it was that my older half-brother had such troubles at reading, writing & learning. i felt a wave of relief pass through me when my mother similarly seemed resistant & refused the idea of putting me on stimulant medication. when they were done, i returned to the room as my mother was seen out, & completed the remaining half of the session under a totally different demeanor, suddenly hyperconscious that i was being monitored & checked for suspected adhd. i made full & total eye contact, didn't act distracted or depart from the topic at hand at all, & gave full, focused answers to the questions i was asked. i complied with every request he made. this seemed to somewhat bewilder & frustrate the psychiatrist, who seemingly gave up on the session & turned completely towards his notebook after tasking me with drawing a picture of anything i wanted - i chose to do a still-life of the wall, so that i could draw a picture of the clock pointing towards the specific time that he gave up on the session, intending to prove that i spent the last 15 or so minutes left of the one-hour session just drawing a picture of the wall because i was a completely "normal" child. we never went back, & in the car ride on the way home my mother & i laughed at how much of a creepy weirdo we thought the psychiatrist was. we talked about add & adhd & i explored my identity relative to the label, explaining that i don't really have trouble paying attention, & am instead just very understimulated & dissatisfied by the school system & the work given to me, so i deliberately choose to act up in a way that often resembles the kids who did have adhd that behaved in such a way with no control or regard for their actions, & were unable to actually learn & focus in the same way that i had no trouble with, especially with literacy tasks such as handwriting. recently my younger brother explained the possibility that i may simply have been "masking" the adhd during the session. he believes there is some adhd in the family, & i definitely believe that with my older brother's diagnosis & the general challenges of attention i see my father & two brothers go through, but i think i dodged the bullet. i can get distracted, & sometimes i crave pretty high degrees of stimulation, but i've worked a regular job before & find my executive functional capacity to be quite higher than theirs. to rule out genetic determinism, i also have a half-sister to my father who does not have any adhd symptoms or challenges.
regardless of my own insistence on not having adhd, i spent most of my childhood consuming a lot of "adhd-fuel" content. first with the video games & cartoons, & then with the introduction of the internet providing me early flash movies & youtube poops acting as rocket-fuel accelerant for the memetic commodification & spread of such images, i spent most of my early life as part of a captive autidence of people who were subject to the rapid quickening of the pace (that is, the rate of replacement,) of entertainment, which today has outrun its own course & evolved into the conceptual beast known as the "attention economy" in popular terminology. it was indeed the advent of the internet into my parents' household which punctuated the first major shift in what i valued in life becoming directed & aligned by the spectacle, as it was through the internet that i was first able to peer into the world outside of pre-ordained media & find consumer or fan-created artwork, as well as the totally free piracy of media, which neoliberalized my unconscious, consumptive habits & reformed my attitudes towwards ones of self-awareness. i believe it is this reform that was preceded necessarily by the origins of my image-consumptive habits that i have outlined in this piece, & i intend to capture my journey through the neoliberal online world of images & logo-cults throughout my teenage years in a later blog post which will document my history with specifically the effects of living alongside a home computer over my life.
:) :) :) thanks for reading :) :) :)
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