The occult technology of the rollercoaster
simonindelicate.substack.com
simonindelicate.substack.com
As someone who appreciates rollercoasters and psychoactive substances, I've made comparisons between them. A good ride will make you feel weightless one moment, four times heavier the next. You'll feel adrenalin, awe, fear, and catharsis, all neatly packaged in under five minutes, usually a good deal shorter than that, and with fewer contraindications.
Rollercoasters and psychedelics can be a great pairing, too, but your mileage may vary, of course.
Reading this sentence made my arms tingle with anxiety.
The weird thing is how you thought it was necessary to talk to other grown ass adults like this about it
As someone with kids. We now know that “senses” aren’t just things that we have that inform us about the world, there are also “sensory needs.”
From proprioception to vestibular and plenty other $5 words. This seems like a new development or at least a new acknowledgement and awareness is still growing.
So I would say that these devices produce sensory experiences.
When i was young my siblings and I were riding a low/mid intensity coaster. My brother and I are smiling and screaming, and we look at momentarily at some point backwards a couple of cars and we see our sister, looking completely unamused, staring indifferently out into the horizon. No smile, no frown. She seems like normal person now. But what does that say about a person!? Maybe it was an 8-10 year old power move.
The waiting in line part was even made fun by all the branded Star Wars animatronics. There was never a dull moment, even if it was two hours before you actually boarded the "ride".
But it was all completely fake, pseudo-futuristic, and based on a fictional universe of characters who don't exist, yet with all those layers of simulation, people paid good money and invested an entire day at the park to be hoodwinked and thereby entertained, and indeed, inspired to bond with friends, family, and significant others.
That is what I remember from decades past, but parks seem different now. With all the complex ticketing and line-bypassing schemes, it now seems more about social signaling than enjoying the ride. Those Disney lines were fun but now it seems that standing in a line is only a signal that you aren't subscribed to whatever scheme allows one to bypass the line on a given day. Airlines are the same. Once upon a time everyone just got onto the plane. Now we all line up and compare each other according to which order we are allowed to board. Disney worked to make the line entertaining. Now they want to upsell and I worry that, like airlines, they now want to make the line experience worse in order to better sell the bypass option.
(Starting in the late 90s, Disney actively tried to reduce lines so that people would spend more time shopping/spending, which is why the parks suddenly felt far more crowded.)
Selling solutions to problems you create is the essence of gamification
It was the abolition of these distinctions and the flattening of the price of admission that took a step forward. Since Disneyland's reputation had been established, they were more willing to let the patrons and fans decide which rides were the best and coolest, and inform future iterations of Imagineering.
By the way, to speak to the article itself, I've been reviewing "classic" Disney films and found significant occultism, a lot of "magick" and such ("Sorceror's Apprentice", "Pinocchio"); everyone knows the fairies and supernatural elements; some say that Disney has changed and Disney has lost moral character and is no longer suitable for children, but I suggest that Walt Disney's morality hasn't altered course since its foundation, when "Alice in Wonderland" was a drug-fueled sex romp written by an ephebophile; when Steamboat Willie was an arrogant bigot who violently pounded other animals into submission...
we ride on our ships, further than most
raiding and pillaging from North to South Coast
We steal only metal, like guns, tanks and toasters
and melt them all down, to make RollarCoasters
--BucketheadAlso, greetings to a fellow Buckethead fan!
So much here to unpack about the author's world view in just two sentences. I think I'll stop reading here.
Play behaviour that carried over from kid to adult life to encourage developing oneself and exploring the environment, all traits that tech today exploit in benign and less benign ways.
A rollercoaster is an adrenaline production machine.
Rollercoaster is one of my favorite answers to the game 20 questions for this reason.
I would venture to say that by that metric, a great deal of human energy and effort is spent on creating things which have no purpose.