While conversing with a friend about how addictive and clever cell phones have become over the past few years, I sent her (as I often do) a link to a particular Three Panel Soul that I feel really speaks to the heart of the matter. I’ve loved that particular comic (and the work that Matt and Ian do in general) for years. But looking at it this morning, for maybe the hundredth time, I started to think on the deeper implications of those words.

And not in a bad way, either. Some people would look at that comic and lament for how small and introspective the human race has become as a result of technology. They’d conjure up cliche imagery of throngs of people, standing shoulder to shoulder, eyes locked on tiny little screens as the wonder of blah blah blah. You know the rest. A hundred dark horse critics could paint a thousand pictures of dystopian isolationism and I’d have seen it all before.

They’re full of it, by the way. They’re thoroughly missing the point. But I’ll get to that later.

Behind the clever flying-cars trope is a much more meaningful comparison of what we expected the future to be like versus what the future will actually be like. It touches on some of the same themes that Scott Ramsoomair played with recently over at VGCats (where flying cars were also mentioned). But while Scott laments the future that will never be, Ian and Matt suggest that that future was silly anyway. That it was the product of overly simplistic expectations – humanity’s attempt to imagine the future by looking at the present and assuming that the future would just be more of that, only slightly different.

Would we really ever have imagined flying cars without the invention of flying planes? The flying car, my friends, is Put A Clock On It imagination. Take two things that already exist and mush them together. It’s only the prospect of personal freedom (and probably the Back to the Future movies) that makes the idea appealing. And maybe it’d even be totally sweet. But it’s not a brilliant or really, even a clever idea.

Now, you could argue that smart phones are really just the same thing. Take an idea that already exists (the computer) and apply it to another medium. But the difference is far vaster. Because it’s not just the computer aspect, or just the internet aspect of the device that makes it amazing. It’s the information and the connectivity. It is the ability, from almost anywhere on the planet (insert snarky cell phone coverage joke here) to call up any piece of information known to mankind.

That sort of communicative power most certainly is addictive and is amazing. I’ve had what most people would call a modern phone for less than a month. And in that time, I’ve deposited checks right from my camera, arranged and organized airline tickets and rental cars, found obscure eateries, reconnected with two old friends, purchased birthday presents, researched technical specifications (ironically, for an accessory for said phone), recorded moments of hilarity both impromptu and deliberate. . . the list is staggering. More staggering is that I was able to do this from anywhere I happened to be at the very moment those situations arose.

But most staggering of all is that the technology that is going to change the world (hell, is already changing the world) is tiny, portable and more than anything else, is designed to allow one person to talk to another. It isn’t propulsion or destruction that is changing human culture. It’s communication. I tell you, it almost makes my cynical heart flutter.

Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail.

It’s one of those things that we’ve just come to accept in America. That the entire country, hell, the entire world lurched towards complete financial meltdown a few years ago, and apparently it was no one’s fault. No blame was placed (can’t play the blame game), no responsibility was shouldered, no one was prosecuted or even really investigated. It was a collective fraud on a scale too massive and too diffuse for most people to contemplate. But still. Nobody went to jail.

And it’s not like there’s no evidence. Banks were taking junk assets, wrapping them up in a pretty bow and selling them off as good investments. Investments that got passed around like a jacket flask at a senior prom. Everyone traded them and re-traded them, everyone gave them completely bogus ratings, all pretending that they were anything but a steaming bag of bullshit. And no one went to jail for that.

It was recently revealed that Bank of America was intentionally manipulating people’s mortgages to cause them to default. Then they were demanding that their borrowers buy insurance to cover the bank’s liability (from a company either owned by or partnered with BofA). And if their customers couldn’t shoulder the increased burden? Oh well. Free house for the bank. And no one’s going to go to jail for that shit, either. Mark my words.

Now, most of that information came out because of stolen emails. So the government suddenly has a bug up its ass about “cyber security” (someone needs to tell them that no one uses the word “cyber” anymore). But if you’re going to go after the hackers that stole the email, you damn sure better go after the banks that stole people’s homes right out from under them. But they won’t. Someone needs to tell these idiots that there’s no point in making the trains run on time if no one can afford to buy a ticket.

Just about the only guy that went to jail for any of this is Bernie Madoff. And fine, lock the crook up. I don’t disagree. But don’t tell me that was some honest pursuit of justice. Madoff committed the one immutable sin in this world. He stole from the rich. You don’t do that, see. You don’t dick over the folks holding the reigns. Single moms, the elderly, brand new homeowners? Sure, take them to the cleaners. Bleed ‘em dry. But you go after other rich folks and the hammer comes down.

Am I the only one that’s sick and tired of this bullshit? Am I the only person who gets a little vomit backed up in my throat when I see a CEO wearing a suit that costs more than most of his employees clear in a month get up in front of a microphone and talk about impending layoffs? That’s usually right after I’m told that those same CEOs should be running the country because they know a lot about creating jobs. No, they don’t. They know about creating profit. And any decent CEO will tell you that unless your company is already highly profitable, the best way to create profit is to cut jobs. Lay off the pleebs, ship their jobs overseas, and watch that stock price climb, baby.

And for that matter, am I the only person who can actually hear the fabric of the universe tearing whenever one of these Ayn Rand fellating jackoffs says that lowering tax rates will spurn job growth? Really? We’ve had the second lowest tax rate this country has ever seen for over a decade now. Where are the fucking jobs? No one ever asks them that. Not the timid, limp-dick quasi-liberals debating them. Not the journalists who have long since abdicated their responsibility to reality and turned into daytime talk show hosts with over-inflated senses of self worth. Somehow it never actually comes up. Funny, that.

These are the same guys that tell us that we all have to give up some of our Social Security benefits because they borrowed from the fund to pay for other things. That’s one of those tidbits that hardly ever gets mentioned. If you spend an entire day listening to all of these Very Serious Cocksuckers, you’d think that Social Security wasn’t able to cover its own costs. Bullshit. In fact, the program has run a surplus for years. It’s so successful that the government routinely raids the fund to pay for other crap they want to spend money on. Usually tax cuts for the upper 1%. Instead, they leave a great big honking IOU where our retirement money should be. And then they make their Very Serious Cocksucker Faces and tell us that we’re just going to have to retire on less because all of the money is gone. And most journalists report that as fact because, well, most journalists are dumber than a box of hair.

Look, kids. I know I’ve been MIA for a while. And the truth is I spent the winter hibernating, stewing in my own juices. I did the very thing I rail against. I let the bastiches burn me out.

It won’t happen again.

A lot of people ask me what smart phone they should buy, and to be honest, I’m getting tired of answering them individually. Thankfully, I don’t really have to.

Feel free to print that out and hand it to your relatives, neighbors, and cubicle dwellers when they task you with this same inquiry.