Low Key Like Loki

Excerpt from Appendix B of Inefficient (and Unorthodox) Usages of Communication for the Purposes of Interstate Commerce:

I will someday be walking in an urban area, but cities will no longer be a useful concept. Urban centers have lost their usefulness when they can hardly be distinguished themselves from the surrounding urban-side. Part of this stems from the numbers after the founding of the people’s republic of Wal-Mart. Everyone will see the Great Wal from their personal satellite in space, but obscure scholars will blog about its origin elsewhere (though these unauthorized rogue scholars will lack state funding and thus, without the graphic potential of their state funded colleagues, few webbies will get this message.) Congressional representation will be determined by annual sales figures of the various corporate branches; voters receive a 10% discount on that day’s sale. Voter registration levels of 97% legitimize the police state; the Supreme Court hears if offering rebates to entice early registration is a violation of the 57th Amendment.

The police states that rule will inevitably fear large crowds and open spaces (following the Cultural Revolution model, not the standard Stalinist urban preference) and thus will prefer to distribute people evenly; efficiency models will perfect the movement of people by a priori product differentiation (all consumer goods preferences will be decrypted/determined at birth, and reinforced by state-subsidized ‘learning programs.’) Handicapped children will be readily embraced by the corporatized orphanages, as these offspring will be essential in the development of alternative marketing approaches.

Terrorism will likewise be more manageable away from urban centers (where it can really hit big numbers) and, by equalizing the danger to all areas, people will be of one harmonious mind against terror. As the terror attacks occur in greater frequency, they get about as much interest as a 2004 Yahoo headline about a suicide bombing (that kills less than a dozen) in Gaza. Detachment will be the ultimate result of the inability to even distinguish good terror attacks (suspected terrorists killed) versus bad terrorist attacks (the innocent people who are killed but not called suspected terrorists). Inundated with advertising, onslaught with complexity, the widely embraced officially recognized political institution will be the Sloganaires, for whom personal style connotes ideology.

The finer institutions of learning will still, though, churn out state-sanctioned apologists. These intellectuals will be essential to maintaining a regions’ comparative advantage vis-à-vis its competitors. Convicts, dissidents, terrorists, (i.e. those who save in excess of their federally mandated ‘purchasing quotient’) will be assigned to mountain duty; mountain duty entails the chipping of mountains to flatten the earth for the purpose of extending land (in areas above sea level) or building dams (in areas below sea level.) Some become dissidents (or eco- apologists*) for the sole sake of getting away from the urban landscape. Travel companies will cleverly market ‘mountain duty’ as a unique getaway as well as reinforcing the notion that mountain duty is a noble gesture in rehabilitation on the part of the state. Oh wait, I am currently engaged in mountain duty, but I’ve been here for so long that I can’t remember through which venue I ended up here.

Hmm...interesting: The Supreme Court just ruled that companies must also use product placement during the work breaks of mountain vacationers. I wonder what effect this newly legislated inability to distinguish between the two mountain groups will have on our total economic output.

*eco-apologists are not a recognized political entity, as per the U.N. Green Earth charter of 2076; parties wishing to register for ‘mountain trips’ must state on application “land distribution apologists”