"It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage."

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Alt Text: New Cult Spares Members From Early Adopters’ Pain | Underwire | Wired.com : The whole scheme is to keep us buying things we do not need yet make us believe we do. It’s a natural side effect of modern technology and capitalism as I see it. Keeping up with the Jones’ is harder than ever.

As a result, our culture suffers from overstimulation—there’s more out there than we can possibly ever read, watch, listen to, play, see, or experience. The world has, in a sense, gotten small enough to be even more overwhelming than ever before. Just because we can fly from one end of the earth to the other doesn’t mean we can see everything, the same way that having the ability to visit any website instantaneously means we can see every website on the Internet. It’s the ultimate post-modern catch-22.

Tags: culture technology capitalism society