Daniel Coffeen

I just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time in over 30 years with my son of seven. Throughout the film, as is his way, the boy kept leaping to conclusions of what would happen next: the army guys are gonna try to kill that guy; the army guys are gonna try and kill the aliens; the aliens are gonna try and kill the army.

The hit, every hit, is explosive in its turn, setting the engine in motion.  The game hums along and then: BAM!  Everyone adjusts, everything shifts, affording the game this odd, syncopated, disjunctive rhythm.

The dramatic arc of the film is built around what appears to be an irony: the guy incapable of friendship builds the most successful social networking site built on “friends.” Indeed, there is an undercurrent of critique of social media, that it is alienating, that the friendships are false, that all those Facebook “friends” are built on the misanthropy of one man.

The world is folded in upon itself. As Marshal McLuhan noted ages ago, the electronic age ushers in the global village. And MyFreeCams.com is a global village. As night falls and I ready for bed, women in the Philippines are just rising. I see the early sun pouring through their windows; I hear roosters crowing; I see her eat her Philippine breakfast.

When we get home, things are no better. Both husband and wife must work now: more more more more. So both are exhausted and dehydrated from their day. The kids are wiped out from being abused at school — made to sit in chairs and memorize nonsense. It is not a pleasant scene.

The show never succumbs to the reigning model of parenting in which parents sacrifice their lives, their desires, individuality, their sexuality in order to provide their children with an anesthetized existence. Nancy doesn’t Purell her kids.

Let’s talk about alarm clocks. I understand the need for them. But to have to wake up five mornings a week to the shrill scream of an alarm is downright tortuous. I mean, if we need to set alarms every morning in order to wake up in time to get to work, then aren’t we doing something wrong? Doesn’t this seem obvious?

Let me be clear.  I am not talking about pleasure.  Capitalism offers all sorts of pleasure.  That is its promise: the pleasure of the hamburger, new shoes, leather interiors, better handling, a larger screen, the Big Gulp, sharper focus, pill induced sleep, the weekend, arugula.  This is the genius of capitalism — it creates the desire and the gratification.

To me, it was like everyone around me suddenly went totally nuts.  Here were all these people going to absurd jobs for 50, 60, 70 hours a week — just to make their rent.  Nobody looked very happy.  But they did look, well, possesed.  I mean here, in San Francisco, everybody went from being a psychedelic artist slacker to all of a sudden talking about brand engagement, apps and back ends, driving traffic and conversion rates; everyone had a goddamn business plan and a crackberry.

The federal government should have its own news voice — a newspaper, blog, TV and radio show.  They can relate all the so-called news.  This will put an end to the press conference and the news industry will have to actually find news, actually do some investigating, some thinking, some reporting.

But Craisglist is so Web 1.0. It’s the Web 2.0 of online sex shopping that gets interesting. There are sites — MyRedbook and The Erotic Review are two of the better known ones — where not only do women advertise their services in templated format that lays out age, race, breast size, and status of pubic hair but where customers review said women in exacting detail.

And soon you have 20 browser windows open, each with its own promise, each satisfying this or that component of your manifold desire — a man being penetrated with a strap-on by a lovely co-ed; a Japanese AV star performing a nuru massage, a seaweed based lotion she covers the man in before licking every, and I mean every, part of his body; a homemade clip of a college couple enjoying oral copulation…