I just re-read my own post. It struck me that the topics it addressed are only now starting to become a talking point in the mainstream some six years later via stuff like Minecraft, VR Headgear, Pokémon Go, and so on dominating the current discussion on trends in the mobile market.
Gawd! I must've sounded like a lunatic to anybody who read through it when it was written and published here.
I suppose what I'm currently spewing in idle conversations these days is no different. I likely still sound like a raving lunatic (I see you all looking back at me all glassy-eyed ... I notice all the cordial uh-huhs that say, "I have no f@$ing clue what you're talking about, but I do care about *you*," when I can't suppress the impulse to nerdjack the conversation).
For what it's worth, today it's all about stumbling upon the Fujitsu Film Wonder Photo Shop this afternoon near Madison Square Park and soaking in the coffeehouse-like "experience" of the brand:
One small corner in the very back hosting their current offerings of DSLR cameras. They were tucked behind an immaculate hardwood worktable with a cutting board and a "condiment bar" of scrapbooking materials ... chalkboard-styled menu-like writing on various facades of the place, none of which were in direct line of sight to each other ... evenly spaced monitors along the walls -- all showing the same screensaver, but not a single drop of coffee and hardly any variety of merchandise; like the extension of what was chartered by the post-First-Gen-iPod Apple Stores (loitering at the Genius Bar as if *being* at a nightclub without the intendant drugs and alcohol); to have a spacial and sensual engagement with the idea of a thing; the elan of Apple or Fujitsu or Lego bricks or M&Ms unfolded and laid bare as a place one inhabits casually for a short while.
Insidiously, there's nothing there one might be able to truly buy but once every other year (if at that); there's no expectation in you that you might be familiar with anybody one finds there, and, despite appearances, there's nothing to do in the place since, really, all the objects are there, first and foremost, as decorations which serve the purpose of communicating the essence, the soul of the commodified corporation.
Furthermore, !!IMPORTANT: that this type of retail store may someday, just over the horizon of the current zeitgeist, be re-created in a VR space with innumerable instances of the storefront arising and disappearing based on the number of currently logged in customers -- none of which requires any brick and mortar, rents and staff, and other mundane concerns of the prime material realm. Possibly, our presence and freely chosen use of any time spent in that VR world is not buy or be productive as Earth citizens, but to merely contribute at our whim the computational capacity of our human, electro-chemical cognition as a vital component to the overall operation of a self-aware technium (~.cf~) -- an AI whose consciousness operates on a much different order of being, much too sublime for any of us mere mortals to interact with it directly.
Perhaps, the answer to our specie's perplexed observations in reference to The Drake Equation and that we have, bafflingly, yet to encountering any signs of an other intelligence in universe is simply that, like any tree, if it's talking, is unrecognizable to mammals like us, any interstellar intelligence would be actively engaged with Gaia while both it and us would be mutually unaware of each other as something one might be able to say something to; it's like what we might think if someone suggested we hang out with Mike's liver rather than with Mike whom we can actually invite over for a beer and a slice of za.
Insidiously, there's nothing there one might be able to truly buy but once every other year (if at that); there's no expectation in you that you might be familiar with anybody one finds there, and, despite appearances, there's nothing to do in the place since, really, all the objects are there, first and foremost, as decorations which serve the purpose of communicating the essence, the soul of the commodified corporation.
Furthermore, !!IMPORTANT: that this type of retail store may someday, just over the horizon of the current zeitgeist, be re-created in a VR space with innumerable instances of the storefront arising and disappearing based on the number of currently logged in customers -- none of which requires any brick and mortar, rents and staff, and other mundane concerns of the prime material realm. Possibly, our presence and freely chosen use of any time spent in that VR world is not buy or be productive as Earth citizens, but to merely contribute at our whim the computational capacity of our human, electro-chemical cognition as a vital component to the overall operation of a self-aware technium (~.cf~) -- an AI whose consciousness operates on a much different order of being, much too sublime for any of us mere mortals to interact with it directly.
Perhaps, the answer to our specie's perplexed observations in reference to The Drake Equation and that we have, bafflingly, yet to encountering any signs of an other intelligence in universe is simply that, like any tree, if it's talking, is unrecognizable to mammals like us, any interstellar intelligence would be actively engaged with Gaia while both it and us would be mutually unaware of each other as something one might be able to say something to; it's like what we might think if someone suggested we hang out with Mike's liver rather than with Mike whom we can actually invite over for a beer and a slice of za.
POST PUN:
May I have a large, non-fat,At any rate, trust me when I say that I was completely unprepared for how potently visceral the experience would be when I finally got the means to plug my cell phone into a Gear VR headset. It's mad crazy!!, and leave some room in the cup for Milky Way.
Edit 10/21/16: Cleaned up thumb keyboard grammar and rendering of links/images; added block quotes, art and embedded referrences; minor word choice and general style polishing
