There's something I wish to unsay

In a word, I was wrong about Occupy. And I was wrong because I'd failed to see what was staring me in the face, everyday: the most egregious example of corporate takeover of the minds and psyches of an entire generation of the young  and impressionable. The young walking, alone or in groups, texting, face stupidly glued to a screen too small to read properly, almost oblivious to the surrounding dangers of pedestrian and car traffic, engaged in communication that consists of nothing more than digitized grunts and groans. I wish to say that the makers of Android, iPhone, BlackBerry handhelds have perpetrated the greatest business hoax probably in business history. The 1% do indeed get richer and more technically savvy and more influential almost daily, and the result is the manufacture of a generation of zombie youth. It does trouble me to see it.

At first I thought it was an amusing anomaly or, at worst, a self-correcting social nuisance or, even more optimistically, a product that's soon to reach saturation point and grow obsolete. But as with most things in a globalized world economy obsolescence and even potential market declines seem built into the very production processes that cause global Capital to grow even longer tentacles.Searching for potential markets if not in undeveloped economies then at least in undeveloped minds has been its post-industrial mandate at least for the past forty years or so.

That texting is even becoming a new literacy has not gone unnoticed either, especially by writing class academics eager to swell class sizes. Tweeting has even been touted recently as a legitimate source of literary output("useful media for poetry"). Where there is classroom space and an all but corporatized campus and a rich resource in the undeveloped cerebral cortex of impressionable and unsuspecting young people, there will be the zombie-teen texting in hordes or alone, the benumbed & bemused strutting aimlessly in a thick noxious 'cloud' of textspeak.

I see the need for Occupy now. I detest the corporate harpies who've battened on the fresh flesh of developing brains and pocketed profits from this absurd spectacle of walking adverts afflicted with what I see as a ghoulish societal schizophrenia that a mass-produced handheld device has brought into being. Never til now has Marx's prophecy of the "appendage to the machine" hit me with its terrors.

I walk with protesters now.