Monday, April 19, 2010

Ke$ha, Alex Jones and the Laws of Robotics


At first glance, this post looks like nothing more than a surefire way to bait Byron Crawford into sharing it on Google Reader. But it’s more than that. For reals.

If you’ve ever read, listened to, or watched Alex Jones, you may have learned a thing or two about desensitization and dehumanization in the digital age. He ties it all up quite nicely in a new video, in which he “tortures” an iPad, employing the same “interrogation techniques” that the U.S. army uses against “terrorists” in the Middle East. It’s worth watching:


Another video worth watching is Ke$ha’s retawded performance on SNL a few nights ago where, along with singing in front of a backing band dressed in astronaut suits, she posed the question: “Did anyone ever stop to think maybe we are the aliens?” Check the YouTube clip below, looped for ROFL enhancement:


I don’t know what it is about pop culture’s fixation on the anti-human and robots (and the inevitable extermination of the human race by our metallic overlords), but it’s kind of off-putting for me. The fact that nearly all of the music we hear on the radio is artificially processed by voice vocoders and thus not really sung by human beings is something to worry about. If Jay-Z can’t kill it, who can?