Austin Techno-Rant

The Austin, Texas area is growing like some crazy monster from a Japanese horror flick.

The whole area is going to undergo future/culture shock at once. Particularly menacing is the area of North Austin, Pflugerville, and Round Rock.

Massive amounts of medication are going to be required to keep the natives sane or at least numb enough to survive the mutation.

Don’t get me wrong – this transmogrification is probably necessary but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be painless.

I moved away from the Austin area for a couple of months only to realize how much I missed the craziness. Burning summers aren’t good for anyone but they sure are interesting.

Austin – maybe more than any other city in the United States is the pinnacle of a post-modern city. Fragmented. Deranged. Here you have technology pervading everyone’s lives like some invasive probe. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s driving the growth of this place. Drawing such diverse cultures together, like Mexican day workers, Vietnamese restraunteurs, Tibetans escaping the iron rule of China, Chinese escaping the iron rule of China, even Canadians.

There’s no getting away from the technology. No point in trying. The best thing to do is get right in bed with it. After all technology is supposed to make our lives better – who wants it to come around and fuck us over. You can’t even drives down the road without it sneaking up on you. It’s on billboards everywhere.

I was driving up I-35. The Great Wall of Austin, the dividing line between the haves and haves more. You can’t drive for one mile without seeing some sign of new construction. Some new technology company or service industry, or some business designed in some way to support business or devour consumers.

Austin’s been a college town, a hippie town. The capital of Texas. Now it’s turning into a monstrous juggernaut of technology and deconstructionism. Evolutionarily speaking it’s on the edge. A bunch of hopped up technology junkies. Primates who are really pushing the limits of humanity.

The thing about technology in Austin as opposed to say Tokyo or somewhere like that is that it’s so perversely subtle. It sneaks into people’s minds like some psychotic android thief. It gets inside you, gets right in your bones and there’s no turning back. I’ve seen people, I’ve seen me getting the high from using computers. There’s an addiction for you. Heroin you can live without. Technology – computers in particular have so pervaded our lives you can’t get away from it. Go ahead and try and you’ll be living in the sticks with no human company whatsoever. Which might be good for more than a few people. Sure you could move to Mexico or some place like that – but for how long. You’ll start craving the technology again. Technology is a human virus and drug. We get a high from it. We live in a symbiotic relationship with it. Only I’m not sure who is the host and who is the parasite. We better fucking embrace it though or we’re going to collapse in a degenerate heap of twisted psyches.

Already this excess of technology is taking a toll on society. People are cracking left and right from a combination of future and culture shock. The very fabric of society is shifting so quickly that you either have to ignore it or get right on top of it. Ignoring it you put off the inevitable and getting right on top of it is a dicey proposition at best. We’re just not equipped to deal with it. Some handle it better than others. Some lose their minds and run amok. That primitive animal state of super-human destruction.