“The line must be drawn here, and no further!” — Jean Luc Picard
Listen to it. It’s all around you. Take this advertisement for instance. It’s an ad that Spotify uses on their own service. The message here is, listen to your headphones, while sitting in a lovely spot, looking at a skyline. Don’t listen to the low hum the outskirts the city pushes out. Don’t listen to the crickets and beetles settling in the tall grass and weeds on the side of the highway. Don’t let the lack of light pollution cause you to look up, and wonder about the tiny points of light above, and around you.
Be one with your fucking phone. Pay us nine dollars a month. The distraction from the turning Earth is worth it, is what they’re trying to say. Either that, or the backwards message was an accident. You decide.
Personally, I don’t take big shot advertisers for fools. They know what they are doing, and that we either frequently or occasionally do not. Those who will have our attention will have it, at little to no cost.
So, over time, this image begins to look right. It begins to look correct.
No one is saying it isn’t cool to listen to music in the comfort of nature, or that sitting on the back of your car on a quiet highway overlooking a city isn’t a good thing to do, once in a while. Problem is, look around you. The borg are awakening.
When was the last time you saw a cow, or petted a horse–stood on the side of a white hill and watched the flakes fall around you, pretending you were inside a snow globe. There is a difference between enchantment and distraction. We can’t forget where to draw that line.