B0ilet

In 2008, Apple released the MacBook Air. It could fit inside an envelope. How cool is that. Extraordinary. An envelope. In 2008 DVDs were the way to watch movies but Apple deemed the DVD player portion on the laptop obsolete and archaic, opting to remove it from their product. So it can fit in an envelope. They made an external drive available to purchase to solve this slight inconvenience that they created in order to make way for the much larger convenience of putting your laptop in an envelope. Thank you Apple.

Planned obsolescence is the company practice of designing products to break easily to keep you purchasing (think of how white goods used to be designed to last a lifetime and now you've bought 3 new refrigerators in the last decade). In the Apple way, their phones are not designed to be used, they're designed to be bought. Apple already has the technology needed for their next 20 releases, but why make a phone that does everything now when you can make 20 phones, released a year apart, that only progressively add a new feature?

The latest iPhone this is considered obsolete currently is the iPhone 8+ (which just so happens to be the phone I wrote this on, so clearly it works perfectly fine), meaning that the new updates Apple releases are no longer applied to that phone. The iPhone 8+ was released in 2017, only 7 years ago, and in under a decade this technology has become considered useless and crude to the newest iPhones.

I believe there is something to be said on class in this discussion. It is highly unrealistic to drop upwards of £1000 on a phone every few years. So when this expectation is set, it creates heavy class divides with the phone being a symbol of status. This is a divide created solely by the company as if we look realistically, having a phone is not a choice. In modern day society is is necessary to have a phone in order to function. Your emails, your friends, your family, events, the news, it's all online and if you want to stay in this society you need a phone. So when something so necessary in modern day life is turned into something so performative, how can everyone be expected to keep up? Somebody needs to get left behind.

The reason you look at your art and feel such disgust and disappointment is because you know your potential. Delicacy and taste are a practiced sense that comes with time spent considering creation. Currently your taste is higher and more cultured than your ability which is why you feel able to cast judgement on other peoples work who are arguably more skilled than you.

But knowing you can't yet create that image you have in your head isn't a reason to never try. It's really the opposite. You need to create a thousand bad things to create your one good thing.

Lets say arts value comes from its impact. Bad art would be art that is unimpactful. Art that makes you feel nothing. You may be an elitist dick who hates modern art because it "takes not skill" and "I could've done that so what makes this circle on a blank canvas so special?". But that art make you feel an emotion, albeit anger, you still felt something at the hands of someone else. If your argument for why art is bad is that "you could've done it"... then why didn't you? You may feel something is bad because you feel you could've done it but you never did it. you never put yourself out there and made anything because you were too scared of making something someone found worthless. They did something. You did nothing.

"Make good work. Make interesting work. Make the work you want to see.' - My College Art Teacher.

There's a certain analytical ability that comes with humor. Following on from my last post, I have a want to connect that to some developmental situation; these analytical abilities develop in your childhood perhaps in a need to carefully observe the happenings around you in order to be safe. That analytical ability translates into comedy as a sort of coping mechanism (think of the class clown having an awful home life).

In this coping mechanism, is is theorized that you develop a crude symptom of Schizophrenia: a second voice. I say crude because it's not like you're hearing voices, it's more like your own voice. Like shaking hands with you're intrusive thoughts. You don't necessarily want these thoughts but you are aware of them enough that you can twist them into jokes.

Another symptom developed is called Anhedonia, which is (very simply put) an inability to feel happiness. In this we see the Sad Clown and the Depressed Comedian who are never satisfied (think of all the comedians who are known for doing drugs).

It is also often impossible to get these sorry cases to take their hilarious selves to therapy as they often believe they are smarter than their therapist due to the previously stated analytical abilities they have developed. They have most likely already identified the issues they face and whatever swing hit them in the face at 4 years old to cause it. But they can't fix it. Because if they fix it, what if they stop being funny?

Clowns take off their makeup once they no longer need a mask.