Aphex Twin - Avril 14th

Digital Noise

If twitter were a person, it would be a confused, gender-obsessed, bipolar teenager who is either screeching about the latest outrage du jour or slobbering over the newest K-POP song. I saw The Social Dilemma, a documentary about the evils of social media. You don't need a show to confirm what sane people already know; that social media is the devil. I know that's rich coming from a blog.

There is truth though, that social media is ruining us. Spend some time on the internet and it seems like the world is burning. It's easy to feel angry or afraid. There's plenty of bad news to go around. Just take your pick, you'll find plenty of online articles predicting your apocalypse of choice. But that's no way to live, no? 

If I may be so bold as to offer advice, I say that when the world seems so vast and scary, just shrink it and it will seem less so. When you hear something bad, really stop to think about whether or not it affects you. Why get worked up about wildfires in California when you live in some island in the Philippines? Some guy said a bad thing on the internet? You don't know him and was he even talking about you? Is there some cause you champion or at least, pretend to? Check yourself and think about whether some righteously indignant tweet is really gonna change the world. Even if there is something happening that seems important, are you even in a position to change it? Why give up your soul energy, piss yourself off and put yourself in a bad mood for all that?

We're being played. Man was not meant to live like this. Man was not meant to give a shit about so many things. Throughout most of human history, human beings have only cared about the little podunk village they were born in and no further than that. Scientifically speaking, a man can only give so much of a shit, three rat's asses worth at most. Our ability to give a damn is not infinite, otherwise it would be a mental illness. There is value in not caring, even if it makes you seem mean to other people talking about the latest bowel movements on the trending page. Life is full of irrelevant things aggressively trying to grab your attention with all their digital noise.

It's OK to not care. 

Shrink the world and you'll discover the things you really should care about and the things you can actually do. Why whine about some injustice happening a million miles away when you just had a fight with your loved one and should fix that instead? You know what I mean? All these outrages are just distractions keeping you from seeing the things that really matter.

I know this will sound cruel but I don't care that Chadwick Boseman died. I'm sure he was a fine person and it's a bad thing that he died. Trust me, I know watching someone die of cancer is one of the worst things in the world, but I didn't know him personally. I didn't watch Black Panther and I'm unfamiliar with his body of work. Sure, I might watch one of his movies if I felt like it since everyone says he was a good actor but I don't expect me to tweet "Rest in peace, king..." or go on dishonestly about how he touched my life by putting on a cat-themed costume in a dumb billion dollar comic book movie.

Fucking whatever.

The Dictator's Holiday

Happy Marcos day, everybody. The house recently passed a bill to declare September 11 as Marcos Day in Ilocos Norte, the date being the late dictators birthday, Of course, people got worked up about it, made angry tweets and all that ineffectual nonsense. How nice of congress to find the time to focus on the really important issues during this global pandemic. Why are these people in charge of anything?

Even if the holiday is limited to Ilocos Norte, Marcos' old stomping grounds, this is yet another blow to the people power cinematic universe infesting the national psyche. They allowed Marcos to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani but now there's a holiday in his name too. How will the yellows ever recover? What's next? Marcos ice cream bars?

History is not a bland statement of facts. History is ultimately a narrative. History is story. We're wired to learn through stories. Stories supply the who, where, when, what, and why. The "story" of the Filipino people frames how we see ourselves and what we ought to be. 

As I have written here before, the people power revolution was a bad movie. The people rose up and overthrew the tyrant but the expected utopia never came. Instead of one asshole, we now have a multitude. You know how when you watch a movie or play with an awful third act, you begin to think about the previous acts and then slowly find out how lousy they also were in retrospect? Well, our story has collapsed and people now find themselves questioning the script. What if Ninoy Aquino wasn't a hero? What if Marcos wasn't so bad? Was the revolution really that widespread? Who wrote this crap?

Now the "upstanding" straight-laced people are shaking their heads at the historical revisionists - those hecklers throwing garbage on the stage and ruining the show. They shouldn't blame the revisionists. If anything, it's a collective failure. It doesn't matter now. The narrative will continue to erode until, perhaps, that fateful day in EDSA will be reduced to a footnote.