The big black boot

Here's the latest update on Laura Ling and Euna Lee's situation in North Korea. Does not look good even with the US State Department on the case, although i've little doubt this was exactly what Kim Jong-Il craves: Down on your knees, imperialist dogs! When Orwell described the ultimate totalitarian state as a black boot stepping on a human face, i doubt he had the image of a cartoon dictator in mind.

And in Sweden, the fab four of Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to both an enormous fine as well as one year prison terms. They are going to appeal - of course - but as Wired pointed out at the start of their trial, the premises put forth for innocence are weak at best and shameful at an anarchistic worst. Back in the pre-electronic age, non-violent subversives of the system used to throw their defiance into the face of the courts and wear their gags and prison sentences as badges of honor. Nowadays, it seems like subversive movements are all about wacking the system and then trying to escape. My own sympathies have shifted towards this latter approach as the state apparati for contain and control have increased in both scope and offensiveness. Still, if young IT rebels are looking to the pirate bay founders as scions of radicalism, it seems that on that note, the trial's been a major disappointment.

Fully aware i've been avoiding blogging for longer than usual, it's no small irony to be returning here on the same day Adbusters are calling for a week of digital detox. They've even supplied a twitter message: @adbusters I’m celebrating Digital Detox Week! Offline for 7 brain-restoring days. #digitaldetox. At first this struck me as a paradox, but i guess it's no different from putting a message on one's voice mail or email autoreply to inform people not to expect an answer anytime soon. i don't use twitter; my facebook attention span is undergoing a major endurance slump, ergo the option of switching to a condensed facebook experience which would infect not only my computer but also my telephone is simply out of the question.

After watching Ashton Kuchner beat CNN in the rush to reach a million twitterers (tweeters?), it's obvious that Adbusters use of 'detox' is totally on the mark. Receiving constant bite-sized tidbits about celebrities' activities is like hanging out in elevators because you can't live without the monoregisters of muzak: both have the power to make us feel surficially at ease while simultaneously melting our brain capacity. i know that 'aplusk' is using twitter to raise money for a good cause, and i appreciate his analysis of what the new media means for the society blahblahblah but that doesn't change the addiction paradigm.

So here's to detox for a few days, during which i will probably end up spending a fair amount of time writing for this blog - the imprisoned don't get a break, how dare i take an even longer one? Besides, if i've never twittered and continue to not twitter for the coming week, that should work out in my favor in terms of maintaining an nontoxified balance, right? i'd do the math, but that would require using a calculator, which in pure Einsteinian terms would be comparable to twittering the gods and therefore make a pure calculation impossible to pull off since every number keyed in would immediately alter the equation. This is exactly the problem that Fox News has everytime they describe themselves as 'fair and balanced,' which actually speaks in favor of total detoxification so long as one does so with an open mind towards those less almighty than ourselves.