“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”
Says Douglas Coupland in “jPod”. He also keeps making references to himself, and really, it’s pretty annoying. Yeah, yeah, Coupland. You’re some kind of Generation X icon. Sure. You invented the term Generation X. Whatever. It’s still kind of… I don’t know which word I’m looking for. Sleazy is close, but doesn’t feel quite right. Tacky? Cheap? Anyway. I keep sneering at my book. Self referencing sure is… meta… or something. And by “or something”, I mean gay.
Other than that, though… pretty good book so far.