| Nine Inch Nails – Zero-Sum Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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may 23 thru june 3rd monday 28th giants Yes this post is long but that's good! Take what you want and leave the rest. Or just SKIP IT like that counter on a ball that hooks around your ankle (remember those 90's toy commercials?)... I'm not intending to outline the full meaning of these lyrics but I do feel a few points of resonance when I reflect on it: The zero's and one's bring to mind the concept of the 'digital age/digital society' we now live in. Internet is now our primary seed of community and communication. Even our music and movies are just made of symbols now - there are no real sounds or pictures on the internet or even the 'movie' theaters. When you actually picture that the whole 'world' that has built up on the net and over cell phones is really just made of two alternating digits you see how it has no real substance of it's own. It's not alive. it's not even mechanical. It's just a maze of symbols rushing through our minds. The sky in a basic symbolic sense is the only plane that extends over every single part of the planet while still being part of it. You can talk all day about the vastness of the ocean, but nothing in the sea can access the world on land. Things of the sky can access any where. The 'world wide web' is the first globally accessible 'place' in history. People are no longer forced to leave their homes to obtain information. They are no longer forced to compromise in what kinds of people they talk to or products they buy in person because you can conjure up the exact thing you think of online at any time. Society is shifting and transforming because of this. Closed groups of people are sprouting up all over. When we were limited to physical sources of info (broadcasts, schools, clubs etc) it forced us to be open to others in those places because of how limited we were. We had to interact and hope that we'd discover something that would lead us in a positive direction. This forced interaction resulted in an extremely massive 'open door' physical world. Rather than relate to the 'fuckedupness' of humanity interpretation I see the 'sky opening up'/heavens falling to feel like more of a vague but vast concern. We know about corruption in the general historical sense, but what exactly awaits us in this new age? The /open door/word on the streets/feeling it in the air/ world is over. We used to be able to feel the rhythm of what Big Government was doing from a distance even if we didn't have insider secret knowledge. Who knows now what the hell they are doing? At least before we could sense the gist of it all. And so while the power of the net should be a blessing, I feel the car crash. The isolation and separation from ever really knowing what's going on in the world. With the net we are also learning massive amounts of history and all kinds of things that should have been common knowledge even before the net existed. We (or at least I!) feel like I had been duped in so many ways every time the society collectively did things a certain way while acting as if there was no alternative. This is how I relate to the lines saying we should have done better. Even before I was using the net, as a child there were so many feelings I should have trusted but didn't. There were so many things I should have questioned but didn't. For me the 'consequence by our own hand' is not the physical crime/poverty/propaganda govt/ because that has been around for millennia. This song is about an end and/or a new beginning, not the same old story. In my life the consequence is how much time I've wasted not living according to what was really most important. Zeroes hold no value at all, and one is the smallest concept you can possibly have. All this time we've been working with zeroes and ones. Even after a billion permutations, what does it all add up to? How great do we really feel when we sum up everything we've done in this lifetime? There is a vast world that did so many individual things that still doesn't add up to much. Rather than a strict interp of the phrase "zero sum" I think it's more of a motif. All that tug of war and petty yet violent drama that fits the zero sum game concept applies too I think. Like the whole 'sports' world. By design nothing is gained by sports as an institution (individuals yes but the whole does not gain). In the league Losses are equal and opposite to wins and ties = zeroes. Think how many millions of people spend millions of hours burning time on a high tech system that is just zero sum in the end. My heart is dirty for all the crap I put up with. I'm also not afraid because I see how little the world is worth now. It's hard to fear losing something that is next to worthless (1 or 0) Time is slowing down because life is speeding up. This talk about being together after the transition speaks to me because it reminds me of why I was caught up in the rushing bullshit binary world in the first place. I was caught in the web. The web of everyone grabbing for something and me not knowing why. You automatically feel the survival pressure to know why they all want it. You need to know, there could be an impending disaster or an amazingly good deal. And over the years I should have paid more attention to the quality of the people and not to their overwhelming numbers. I would have amounted to so much more by now without them. |
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| Lacuna Coil – The Game Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| I agree with this interpretation of the lyrics. This is exactly how I feel when listening to the song. | |
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