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Serial simplicities
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Animatronic dinosaur at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure
Lottery Poster: Be a Double Winner, have two pools
More and more we find archipelagos of intense but simplified and brief identities. Persons take on one simplified role after another. Products are sold to intensify this or that affiliation, and there is always another identity available for the next evening. Simplified places provide intense moments whose order is indifferent one to another. Consider for example someone moving from one game to another along a row of machines in a video arcade, where each game world is self-contained and makes no demands on their neighbors. Playing one game imposes no restrictions on what game I play next.
Our economic system pushes to increase the seriality of our experience and the independence of modules of place one from another. Then more combinations can be consumed, and simple intensities pass quickly and need to be renewed. Yet any series, no matter how simple, still opens a door to complexity because any temporal experience demands some second-level connections beyond seriality. Both the discontinuity and the continuity of the series can provide lures for complexity.