This is an obvious fact that is so obvious that it is no longer obvious. So we have to make it re-obvious by re-saying it. Here re-we re-go: Every fucking thing is made of plastic. Look around you. Count the number of items within ten feet that include plastic in some way. Go ahead. Count. Now, plastic comes from petroleum. Oil. Plastic equals oil. I am not talking about SUV’s here. I am not talking about the rising cost of gasoline because of the iRaq/iPod war. I am talking about plastic and how it is all around you. Let’s say you “own” a bunch of trees. If everything everyone builds is made out of wood and you’re the only place to get wood, what kind of position does that put you in? A pretty good one. A powerful one. You are determining the media format and you are the sole owner. Now flash back to plastics (but try not to melt them with your mind). If everything is made of plastic and you control the source of plastic, you are now super-awesomely powerful. What happens when you get that big in your britches? You keep going. You find ways to consolidate your strangle-hold. You invent new markets.

Enter World War II. Did mass production ramp up in the United States as a result of the war or did the war act as a necessary product roll-out and testing environment for the ramping up of mass production? Industry bought the government by selling it products. Bought by selling? What? Think of a drug dealer. Think of the only drug dealer in town. He owns you even though you give him money for what you get. It seems like a fair trade but it’s not. You’re bought. Find your taste and lose your mind:

Flash back to plastics, but try not to re-melt them with your re-mind. After the war, companies turned this scheme onto the American people: buy us by selling to us. Create their need in our loinMinds. Plastics. Plastics are made of oil. Everything is made of plastic. Plastics are good because they hold their shape, are durable and malleable and lightweight. A recording medium is a “physical material that records or holds recorded information.” That is, it takes the shape you give it. Matter is plastic in the face of mind. (One by one he draws us out of the world.) Plastic is memory. Plastic remembers the shape you give it. Plastic is media. Oil is media. Oil is everywhere. Plastic surrounds you and remembers. Why don’t we remember like plastic does?

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a “shill”) would often “attest” the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The “doctor” would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called “grifting” and its practitioners “grifters”.

Snake oil salesmen were the beginning of modern advertising. They sold fake products that didn’t work that nobody needed using manipulative techniques and their products were made out of what: oil. They created a demand by teaching people how to want and need their products: leveraging open their mindspace by manipulating the monkeySocial mind. World War II. The 1950’s. Consumerist culture. The Military-Industrial Complex. Buying by selling. Plastic remembers. Everyone else has forgotten. (Call them faultless stars of fashion)

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I wanted to contact you, because we have an opening for an experienced manager who would be coordinating marketing strategies and print production for a local non-profit. This position would be assisting with preparation for a big gala in June. Must have great organization and writing skills, and work with little direction. Are you interested?

No, I am not. “Are Casual Games the New Soap Operas? RealNetworks hope to snag the housewives with free downloadable games—complete with ‘commercial breaks’.” I have too much other shit on my mind.

They even sell you useless pieces of plastic which you have to plug back into their electrical power sources to make use of. They even sell you useless pieces of plastic which you can ride around in but only if you pour gallons of their petroleum power source in. They even sell you records and compact discs and eight-tracks and betamax and mp3 players and DVD’s and VHS tapes and photo film - all of which require external power sources to reify their value. They are all made of plastic. My laptop is a piece of licensed plastic sent to me by an oil company representative called “Circuit City.” It seems that adding information into plastic increases its value. Plastic remembers, they quickly found out. Plastic can also tell storie when brought to life by external power sources. Plastic can trap our souls inside it. Plastic can remember us longer and more accurately than we can remember ourselves. Oil is media. The next step is to create plastic people who eat only plastic foods: robots. And here’s an unpaid advertisement from the robotics-oil industry (when cold weather fun leads to chest cold discomfort):

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What they want (another “they” but re-related to the above), long-term, is this: to harvest animal intelligences in order to streamline business processes. Did you see the video where the cockroach controls the robotic device? Here’s what I’m talking about, bitches! Milk, the vitality drink!

Boy, I sure need a fresh ice cold oilCoke after watching that, don’t you!!! So yeah, do you remember that part in Men In Black where they killed that one guy or something and then his face popped off and inside you found out that there was just this puny little roach-type alien thing which was the actual living being and the human-seeming body was just an android shell vehicle? Well, we’re obviously a few years off from that (or are we?), but what this video says to me is that we’ll never need to go in that direction. Because there are plenty of better uses to which we could put animal intelligences such as this. Imagine a fleet of large vehicles all controlled by ants. You could have a colony of ant-controlled vehicles which run a warehouse a thousand times more efficiently (and happily) than humans. You could have a fleet of honey bees or wasps that you use to control large aircraft that will zoom around the city and drop UPS targets with 100% accuracy onto your geo-location. We are about to see a renaissance of interest in animals, their behavior, their gifts, what makes them special. Whose brain do you think will be better at piloting a submarine (or spaceship): yours or a sharks? Hint: not yours.

In Dune, there is only one source of melange: the sands of the planet Arrakis, colloquially known as Dune. Melange is a geriatric drug that gives the user a longer lifespan, greater vitality, and heightened awareness; it can also unlock prescience in some subjects, depending upon the dosage and the consumer’s physiology.

Pre-spice mass is the precursor of melange. The pre-spice mass is formed by the chemical alterations induced in water collected underground by sandtrout, the haploid forms of sandworms. These chemical processes produce gases, which build up until the mass explodes. This explosion kills most of the larvae and releases the valuable melange onto the surface of the desert, as well as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Collecting the melange is hazardous in the extreme, since rhythmic activity on the desert surface of Arrakis attracts the worms, which are four hundred meters in length on average, and very dangerous, capable of swallowing a mining crawler whole. Thus, the mining operation essentially consists of vacuuming it off the surface with a harvesting machine until a worm comes, at which time a carry-all aircraft lifts the mining vehicle to safety. The Fremen, who have learned to co-exist with the sandworms in the desert, harvest the spice manually for their own use and for smuggling off-planet.

Spice is in general use all over the universe, and is a sign of wealth. To ingest it is the ultimate display of conspicuous consumption. The planet Arrakis is central to the inhabited worlds of the universe because it is the sole source of spice.

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The Navigators of the Spacing Guild depend upon melange for the heightened awareness and the prescient ability to see safe paths through space-time, allowing them to navigate the gigantic Guild Heighliners between planets. They exist literally within a cloud of melange in a tank; this extended exposure warps their bodies into a grotesque parody of a human fish.

Why do you think there is so much interest in autism lately? In altered states of consciousness? Hint: it has nothing to do with hippies, with “consciousness expansion” or with “raising planetary vibrations.” People peddling that are advanced salesmen for the intelligence harvesters who will one day isolate what makes each one of us unique and turn it into a streamlined self-perpetuating business process for greater productivity. (After all, you are the navigator) If each one of us exists and is indeed unique in any meaningful sense at all, of course. But maybe that’s the thing: they make us unique simply by virtue of painting us into a corner so that we become unique. Their hunting us becomes our quest for eternal life. And on and on and on until the break of dawn and you don’t stop. Plastic remembers. Everything else seems to be forgetting.

media, mind, oil, plastic