“

We answer our phones when they ring due to invisible waves sent half way around the globe. Then why wouldn’t we answer these signals which come to our bodies and minds?

“

A digressive essay might partake of play, exploration, philosophical investigation, the Freudian free-association game, Surrealist automatic writing, the Situationist dérive, the Web drift, or all of the above.

“

If you think about it, there is actually no way for you to ever see what you truly look like, to see your body in reality.

“

What is critical? It is a will — a desire — to question everything, to root out one’s own assumptions, to ask if this or that feeling is a feeling worth having, whence it comes, if it should be pursued or not.

“

Ah, but the amateur is a lively bloke who pays no heed to inherited categorical distinctions. The amateur reads what he reads, writes what he writes, thinks what he thinks. The amateur makes his way on the fly without regard to official knowledge. He makes connections in surprising ways, traversing domains along trajectories no one could have imagined.

“

Gary Numan, the enigmatic, robotic man behind the hit single “Cars” (’79), might just have been a great visionary during the ’80s and inadvertently predicted things like the internet and Facebook – in the film world, the same might be said of David Cronenberg; his films Scanners (’81) and Videodrome (’83) surely have a special spot in media theory paradise.

“

Where does this leave our pirates of the Caribbean? They are radically individualistic, roaming the last terrestrial frontier, the ocean. As the massive corporate sponsored state navy takes to the sea, each pirate in his or her place stands little chance of survival. This is the way of the modern state: total coverage.

“

The dramatic arc of the film is built around what appears to be an irony: the guy incapable of friendship builds the most successful social networking site built on “friends.” Indeed, there is an undercurrent of critique of social media, that it is alienating, that the friendships are false, that all those Facebook “friends” are built on the misanthropy of one man.