SONG OF THE DAY: I Only

Your Ol’ Droog is a rapper from a futuristic dystopian era of post-empire America where people carry handheld computing devices which monitor and share all their activities with the corporate authorities, who exchange data with the military industrial police state. The corporate authorities maintain revenue streams, all the while advertising the majority of their services as “free”, because the people have been enculturated to fetishize freedom without critical thinking. Thus the mere mention of “freedom” or “free” triggers positive chemical releases in the brains of the people, thus supplicating them, and also pulling them further into the mechanisms in place. Most humans in this futuristic dystopia actually openly snitch on themselves, revealing publicly info that would better be kept concealed, under the guise of being “woke”, and that revealing as much as possible is empowering, when in actuality it only further narrowed down their own potential outcomes, as well as being used to microfilter the neurological advertising directed to them individually.

Your Ol’ Droog’s offering here, thus ironically refrains, “I only play the games that I win at,” which performatively acts in control of the rapper’s larger life, which works to give dystopian era inhabitants the momentary dopamine release of denying reality, pretending that choice is still a possibility in an increasingly engineered everyday world. While seemingly an exercise in independent thought, it actually works as an affirmation of the mechanisms in place, and keeps individual inhabitants off their oddy knocky. All of our Gullivers seem to us to be traveling a worldwide web of various places, when in actuality we are prisoners in our own metaphysical pens, suffering from solitary confinement of the heart, and numbing ourselves to the pain through as much digital fog as we can ingest, each and every day.