The Alpha and the Trap

 

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By Rev Wilbur Witt

When you are in the entertainment business the idea has been to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible. For that you had to have distribution. To get distribution you need connections and to get connections you had to make deals. The trip from conception to customer would dilute whatever you originally produced but the object of the game was bank.

This is the difference between the book and the movie, the song and the release, the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits. And it was carved in stone. Everyone knew that if you could get but a fragment of your original idea out to the public you counted it as a win. And the public had to take whatever was on the plate.

Then the internet came. Not all at once, but occasionally and then more often than not new and sometimes complete ideas made it through. Still, these didn’t last. A song would rise to the top, and then quickly disappear. This happened because the distribution was organic. The kids liked it, but they didn’t have the blessing of the machine which was still in place. Still, the reception of the Alphas made its mark.

The lifespan of such work was brief. Hardly more than a song which was quickly forgotten. “So last week” was the rule. Don’t believe me? What was the song that guy in the woods sang  to his dog? You can’t remember it, can you, and if you did it took a moment. And even then, you found that you weren’t as impressed as you were the first time you heard it. But you remember “Yesterday,” don’t you. Don’t you wanna know why? You remember “Yesterday” because the machine told you to. Over and over and over again for decades. I mean, it was a good song but so was the guy singing to his dog. What was his name?

The machine had to contend with the reversal of society. Back in the day just pressing and shipping a 45 RPM record made of wax was an endeavor. Then came CDs. Then cassettes, then links, and streaming. From conception to consumption at the tip of your fingertips.

Books were the same. Photography, TV! Oh, forget TV. That’s so last century. iPhones will get you a movie. Hell, it’ll get you a girlfriend. Real or imagined. And the kids who were raised in the privacy of their bedrooms with school being taught by unemployed day drinkers because a flu ushered in the end of the wold and as we baby boomers prayed for the second coming the Alphas called, “Bullshit!” They no longer believed. They didn’t need any distribution, they had five internet friends, who had friends who had more friends and they’d handle passing information around. Truth or lies didn’t matter. The world had gone mad.

All the beliefs that we held holy were just full of holes. They didn’t need your reality when they were holding reality in the palm of their hand. And they had no plan. Why plan when a bat in China can take it away tomorrow? And the grey hair on Fauci’s head just told these kids that he was just part of the problem. So what if there was a pandemic? Nothing lasts forever and right now it looks like we may not make next week.

A great upheaval is coming. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Right now the Alpha answer is, “I don’t even care,” as they retreat to their games, but one day, one day pretty soon, a Marcus Aurelius will come along, or a Lincoln or a Hitler. And our little Alphas will be ill equipped to defend themselves against reality because reality is a WiFi signal and one day the lights will go out, and the party will be over.