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Sunday 30 December 2018: A Year In Review

The whole year. All 365 days. Apparently, although I swear time was slowed-down for the first half of the year, July lasted three days, then August to September somehow managed to fit into a single day combined and the remainder of the year seems to have disengaged with the regular march of time completely. So, there may be gaps, and this isn’t in order. But, in contrast, it’s the old style again. Because I can just yell bullshit for ten minutes without fact-checking then move on with my life. You know, like the internet and how it does … the things it does.

Okay, have to start by talking about memes and the continued presence of viral culture at the heart of modern societal existence, so, here goes; Donald Trump continued to be the virus at the heart of modern culture. The administration seems to embody everything it represents (which, at this point, is slowly proving itself to mean ‘absolutely nothing’), as a scheme to detain immigrant children goes wrong (spot the design flaw), a scheme to simultaneously have both high stock prices and high oil prices (maximum benefit to whom, I wonder) goes wrong and causes a relatively significant drop in the US stock market (but again, some careful high-school level thinking would have solved this, so like I don’t feel sorry for the guy so much as for everyone who knows him).

In fact, if I were to kind of vaguely link this year together with a theme of some sort, it would probably be ‘denial’. Climate change and wildfires continued to be a thing, especially during the summers -- despite both rich and famous people (the only acceptable varieties of person, apparently) deciding that climate change wasn’t really a thing to worry about (okay, maybe the theme is denial and stupidity).

This denial and stupidity isn’t even linked only to legal persons. Some corporations found themselves faced with denials no company should ever have to make; and at this point I would like to state for the record that I literally googled ‘tesla 420’ as research for this bit – Tesla, Apple and Facebook were subject to unwanted and unsavoury attention because of breaches of privacy, trust and fiduciary duty, in order – where fiduciary duty is basically just a mix of privacy and trust that applies to shareholders. Because hey, what the people who invest in and use the services a company provides are obviously less important than turning a profit. That level of rejection of human capital creates sustainable business models? Right? Right? No. Obviously, what that creates is dissatisfaction, distrust and ‘dis service that doesn’t misuse our data is better’. But maybe that negotiation is still ongoing, and giving up your data is okay still, but only just.

Brexit negotiations still ongoing, because it turns out no EU governments will agree to the UK’s very ‘we want it to be the way it was but without the relationship’. Like asking your ex for a hookup, then leaving a note. In local news, Winston Peters found himself flirting with power as the result of a pregnancy, which isn’t how that normally works. And then he did surprisingly little with it, which … is probably wise? At least he can be trusted not to fuck up the economy when given it to carefully cup in his hand like the breast of an ex he’ll have to give up eventually …

Short post, short year. Mostly because I’m tired and news cycles do exactly that, they cycle. In general terms, we just go around in circles with each new story that’s actually just a rehash of an old story. Like se- I’ll stop.

Maybe it’ll get better eventually, or just slowly become harder and harder to use, like a performance-throttled iPhone 3.