Bottoms Up

A Toast to "The Industry"

Here I sit at the imagined designers table at the imagined Better Duck Inn. My imagined coworkers are all furloughed, as all of us bottom feeders exist, you guessed it, on the bottom of the economic paradigm, where renumeration is no less imagined than Medicare for all. I preferred to call this downstream contracting, but in truth I was only guessing. During daytime, light reaches us through an imagined large picture window with a view of what remains of the estuary and the town of Oceanport’s shoreline, where seagoing vessels arrived before the inlet at Navoo closed.

Before I came back to New Jersey, I spent a decade between SF and LA, after spending five years to learn how professionals write history. In California they call the sum of all the creative crafts packaged for profit via communications technology “The Industry.”

Hearts and Minds, more than the bottom line are what “The Industry” controls more efficiently than any cultural construct in human history. The grooming and gaming of creatives is an Industry specialty, take it from me. The oligarchy depends on low-cost conformity.

Turn-turtle means bottom up, as in mast down. This I practiced that firsthand often mast-less down river from the imagined location of the Better Duck Inn. Call it hell upside down, or simply a 180, vertically. Some vessels are designed “to right” themselves automatically. I am toying with capsizing the RV Bowser, as part of the disaster, but much later than I first imagined.

A mast stuck in the muck of the Shrewsbury, was not going to signal anyone, anywhere of anything, unless someone was watching. Without eyeballs, “The Industry” drowns in the effluent. Who comes to rescue the creatives then?

Not to worry! AI will be there to replace what’s left of them!