From: 5/15/10
Trade Dress Is Trade Dress, Literal Hallucinations Are Creepy
To Health
Strange and stranger companies collect data and spit-it back up in simulacrum, the timing near immediate. The potential is to create unhealthy ego dissolution (meddling with healthy ego boundaries). For example, supposing one friend electronically orders another friend very specific flowers--such as rare violets grown in Quebec--immediately after, the simulacrum, aka information sent and targeted directly and based on this electronic information, introject, remarking on these very same rare violets in Quebec (sometimes and oftentimes more vague appropriations, such as rare seedlings from the border) causing confusion to the ego and literally mimicking a hallucination: A literal hallucination. A literal hallucination might sound contradictory, yet when information comes from outside, disguised and similar to what is inside, and this outside information is not sought through one's own volition, or through the rare coincidence, (or sent by a personal or private friend), the web creates the literal hallucinatory effect via the targeted ad. If one actively seeks out a book, for e.g., based on a friend's recommendation, or through personal interest and/or volition, any temporary hyper-focus or the average dissolution of the ego needed to embrace and absorb into the text, is easily understood by oneself, remaining natural. Strange and stranger companies, after mining private web pages and email accounts, find it suitable to indirectly "discuss" the private methods on rare violets, creating a disturbing, unexpected mimesis of what should be private thought: Instead, the literal hallucinatory effect. The ego does not have the time or natural capabilities and experience to separate the information. The information is also introjected at an unnatural rate of frequency and immediacy than the authentic and occasional coincidence, thus leaving the intellect as all that removes and allows one to understand it was the stranger company sending the information (and not a [literal] hallucination). If one was taking a walk on a warm day, enjoying the world, thinking (just) as a person, when suddenly an unusual visual of Quebec and violets seemed to stand in front at the crossroads--it would be alarming: One might blink and wonder, possibly remembering the violets they ordered over the internet--but most likely the alarming introjection (appearing as interjection) would be reason to visit a doctor.
In most, the intellect thoroughly understands, but leaves the ego struggling into the forced dissolution of itself via the simulacrum, and it certainly delays and creates adjustment problems in natural and healthy ego recognition. Short of not using the internet or email, it seems an individual is powerless to stop unwanted data collecting and mining for free information, particularly when much of it is done "legally" through omission of facts. While certainly some information such as mapping on demand in a car with a GPS is highly commendable when the situation is as the inverse: The lost consumer utilizing the stranger company exactly as the stranger company has chosen to provide--a purposeful tool purchased and/or utilized by consumer demand--and timeliness in this aspect is of utmost importance. Getting lost is part of the drive sometimes; the lost who prefer the GPS will utilize when needed…
Retroactively, strange and stranger companies may even be too kind of an attributive. For the word stranger implies an awareness of others' strangeness. It can be determined there is some satisfaction in assuming the temporary position as lost stranger in a strange town. Moreover (instead of strange company), they function as unwanted phantom; intangible presence, strangely piercing to communicative freedom and incongruent with the health of [flexible] boundaries and true creativity.
*Its important to remember the Ego, as its spoken of in the above terms, is a healthy part of all humans. Without it (its dissolution) everyone would literally be insane.
