Deprivation

Feels a bit strange to be writing about this in the midst of all of this turmoil, with Gaza, and people losing jobs, and people committing suicide over losing money and all.

BUT, as I dive into the recesses of the WWW I am getting this overwhelming feeling of deprivation, of being cut off from huge chunks of happenings, cultures and events which we can only feel our way around but never really get the full force of.

Everytime I meet my friends in Brazil and London, everytime I read the profiles of Onion readers in the Onion personals, everytime I look through the reading lists of Faris or Russell, and read them casually mentioning books they may have picked up while browsing, everytime I read the NYT movie reviews I feel deprived. Because with all the vastness of knowledge and openness that Internet is giving us, we still live in an area, in a region, in a country where there are no levers to make things readily available.

We need to call aunts from the US to get movies, to beg there is some nut uploader who thinks of indie movies when snatching that cam in the cinema, that the post office will not mess up if you order from amazon, to look for bootleg copies, to drag on colleagues who travel abroad to bring stuff. We are deprived. We used to be deprived of food, clothes - my mom did people's homework to get money to buy jeans, of basics. But now we have them, and somehow we are stuck at the stage where we enjoy being satisfied with the basics.

We are deprived of movies, books, exhibitions, music, series, posters, socks, boots, bags, stickers. And, OMG, are we deprived of decent TSHIRTS and of the casual discovery of good things. Because it's impossible to browse when you are deprived, discovery is not possible when you do not have the basics. We read memoirs of advertising people who have died a million years back, who speak of coupons and have never even heard of the Internet. We go to conferences to see people to invented marketing back in the 70s. We are catching up with decades of stuff and this prevents us from moving forward. Because we are deprived.
It took me two years before I first heard of them to be able to casually go and buy a gella skin.
Deprivation. It's stupid.