nicely encapsulated. concise. elegant. like a shiv. thanks. :)

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[Holds up lighter in rock-concert tribute]

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On cue, from the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 - The House of Representatives rushed through a $6.1 billion package of hurricane-related tax breaks today, sending the bill to the Senate, whose members also planned to pass it quickly.

[…]

One cut being considered is a delay in the start of the new Medicare prescription drug coverage for one year to save $31 billion and eliminating $25 billion in projects from the newly enacted transportation measure. The list also proposes…ending support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Because a great way to make it up to the poor folk who got their clocks cleaned by the hurricane is to cut Medicaid. And if they hurry up with the elimination of public broadcasting, maybe there won't be as much bad news following Rita.

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"Grim meathook future" sounds a lot like growing up in Anacostia, circa 1979-1982.

And, Fischerspooner sounds like they sniff Giorgio Moroder's jockstrap for inspiration. This doesn't mean I don't like them, somewhat, but...

L.

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since Giogio isn't making records anymore I welcome any record smelling remotely like his jockstrap.

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I'd throw in that Hunter S. Thompson used the phrase "grim meat hook reality" in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, this feels like a reasonable extrapolation of the phrase. Nice little essay.

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Very well put.

While the rest of the world is distracted by all this middle-east hoo-ha, The battle lines for the real opening batttlefields of the 'grim meathook future', eastern africa, are falling quietly into place.

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this is excellent. thank you.

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Thanks! I googled it, but was confused by hits for different people named Ellis. TSOR failed me, but your explanation is great.

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Turkish Society of Rochester?

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It's scary that I recognize the authors and the band. Makes me feel... like... i'm in tune with some sort of culture, God Forbid.

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It's... wow.. I mean.. um.. wow.

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That icon captures the best scene in the movie.

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it's pathetic, but every time i see that phrase i think of this meathook.

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So what's the difference between "grim meathook future" and "doomed"?

[j]

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Well, the "grim meathook future" is a very specific, peak-oil-and-fascism sort of doomed. "Doomed" covers all sorts of upsetting eventualities, like man-made black holes, killdozers, and our new robot overlords.

I don't pretend that my categories are the most concise possible.

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Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it's depressing and not fun and doesn't have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don't know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that -- unless we start paying very serious attention -- it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.


I only wish I could write a response that was as graceful, honest, and insightful.

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"Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it's not very sexy and it won't get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that."

I would say it's very difficult to make money off of poor people, but very easy to make money off of horny Japanese teenagers.

Very well written piece.

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I would say it's very difficult to make money off of poor people,

Citibank does all right.

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Also, of course, poor people do not primarily go hungry through lack of technology.

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What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

The third-world is a technological wasteland. There are *millions* of subsistence farmers who can't grow enough to feed their family, but could if they had access to, say, modern agricultural techniques (which is certainly a form of technology). Millions more die because they don't have clean water -- and wells and purification are sure as hell technology. Browse through ThinkCycle if you need a ton more examples of simple technology which the underprivileged desperately need. Of course, you may not think that low cost eyeglasses, better sand filters, cheap IV drip controls for cholera treatments, or passive incubators are sexy technology, but technology they are, and poor people definitely need it. People don't want to invest in it. But there is plenty of technology which could help.

Even if you mean "email and computers" by your use of technology, I can assure you that these are used and useful in the third world as well. Small farmers can make more money (thus feed their families better) if they know the prices of their crops in surrounding communities. They can't afford to take a week off from tending their crops to walk around and survey the prices. One project here is trying to supply extremely low-cost solar-powered email stations to connect villages so that farmers can know their markets better. These also help get medical aid, etc, to the rural communities when it is needed. When your mother is sick, walking three days to the nearest hospital and then walking three days back with the medicines for your mother is no fun, let me assure you. Most of these projects rely on a sneaker-net/pony-express style of message transfer, since there is no network infrastructure. But store-and-forward email works just fine as long as there are some people making regular rounds of the villages.

It's easy to say, "oh, technology can't help" but it *can*. As a higher-level example, wireless technologies are a godsend to the third world, because they can't afford to install wired infrastructure. (Heck, even MIT can't afford wired infrastructure: they are giving up on trying to upgrade their wires and moving their entire dormitory network to wireless.) The third world has really impressive cell-phone penetration, because the national telcos are corrupt, incompetent, unreliable, and habitually ignore poor areas (because they can't afford to bribe their local bureaucrats). Similarly, email is much more reliable than the national postal services (although it doesn't work so well for packages).

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There are other crazies mostly in bits of the world that the US isn't interested in, but yeah.

I always thought Goodnight Lover was Fluke's pitch for doing a Bond soundtrack.

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right song:
The Cure - "Meathook" from "Three Imaginary Boys", 1979

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...where can you get one of those phones?

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This "grim meathook future" is just shorthand for what has consistently been the human experience, in all its ups and downs and all its successes and failures, since the dawn of time?

Sounds like a pretty unrealistic (and pessimistic) view of a process that has brought more polio vaccines to more people with every passing decade.

And a greater percentage of people today are part of the wealthy elite, by historical standards, than in the middle ages, or in slave-powered ancient Egypt? Oh noes! Teh grim meathooke future si upon us!!etc.

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You know what, though? That which has consistently been the human experience has been endless toil, disease, and early death under the boot of a dictator. This is, in fact, still the case in most of the world today. I hope that the last hundred years or so of industrialized society are not just a blip, but that's far from assured.

The Past Sucks. Call it "business as usual" all you like, it still sucks and I don't want to go there.

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I've seen other people reference "grim meathook x", and I always assumed it was a reference to this bit of Fear & Loathing. That doesn't make it any less fitting, but I just thought I'd point it out.

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The "longer version" link is 404ing...

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Longer version's now at this URL, evidently.

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So let me get this straight: sometime around WWII we passed an "event horizon". (I assume you know an event horizon is a point where events occurring beyond the horizon *cannot* affect the observer, which is exactly what history is *not*. The present I suppose is sort of one-way event horizon, where things in the future can't affect the past (aside from Marty McFly) but things in the past certainly affect the future!)

Anyway, this "event horizon" made futures possible that previously were not possible. Huh? So you just claimed that a future impossible in 1937 then in 1946 became a possible future? Perhaps you think 1946 was not actually a future of 1937? All possible futures in our present time were possible futures from any point in our history. Actually, we have fewer possible futures today than we did at any point in our past. These futures now have a greater *probability* than they did previously, due to the elimination of other futures (such as the one where Kennedy was not assassinated).

Consider this. Two people: P1 and P2, at two times: T1 and T2, where T2 is in the future of T1. P1 time travels forward to T2, meeting P2, who is down a probability path of the T1. P1 takes P2 back to T1, which is in the history path of T2. However, once back at T1, time begins progressing forward. The actual future path of P1 from T1 may not lie in the history of T2, in which case P2 now becomes a paradox because T1 has more potential futures than T2, unless the presence of P2 forces T1 into the exact set of potential futures that will cause T2.

So your Grim Meathook Future is a nice Sprockets vision of how self-absorbed gloom, and about as humorous and worthy of serious consideration.

As far are you view of current events, you write of it as:
"a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another."

Wow, do you honestly believe this? You view the American forces as no different than an Al Queda terror cell, both trying to turn the world into a fascist nightmare?

First off, it's quite incredible that you would believe that there is a faith requirement to be a member of the American military. Do you have friends or family who have served or are currently? I do. My family is not religious, and neither are most of my friends. And you throw out a racial insult, too, believing that the army is full of "rednecks". You may not think "redneck" is racist, but any discrimination on race is racism. But consider: haven't special interest group been hammering the argument that the military is disproportionately composed of blacks and hispanics? Now both those populations have a high penetration of religion. Perhaps you should correct that comment with some more suitable black & brown racial slurs? As a hispanic, my family members who served I'm certain feel left out from your analysis.

Meanwhile, you believe this American war machine is pushing for a "fascist nightmare" (please, labeling everything fascist or Nazi when you don't agree with it is such a lazy political epithet) and not out there defending the current American way of life. Do you not understand that the American military exists to preserve your ability to post a rant like this without consequence? Or do you think America is a "fascist nightmare"? If you lived under a caliphate like the Islamic terrorists seek, you would not be allowed to criticize their religion (witness what happens to those who do: Theo van Gogh) and would probably have a wall dropped on you for calling them "crazy...motherfuckers".

And I do hope you realize the hilarious irony of posting your catchy, empty, MTV-grade theories mocking "blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population" on the LiveJournal virtual community. ROFL.

Before you start criticizing the world of dangling from a grim meathook, you should take a good look at yourself, and consider how your bigoted, narrow, hateful, pessimistic worldview is shaping our future.

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Ok, first of all, I didn't write that; here in the future, we click the link.

And second, way to reply to a two year old post.

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The link broke again; apparently, Ellis suffered a catastrophic disk failure. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine remembers.

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Oh jesus, what a tool.

If the guy doesn't even know how to make backups of the single culturally relevant thing he's ever written, i can't be bothered to edit the URL. Welcome to the memory hole, doof.

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