in praise of getting lost

In Praise of getting lost
Sooner or later a motorist obsessing about the instructive Global Positioning System affixed to the dashboard/windscreen of their car will drive it off the road and into a tree. This will be the ultimately referential disclosure and we can only hope the encoded textual display will emit the call that the car and perhaps even the driver is fucked. Of course in many ways this declaration was made long before the car left its comfortable garage on its journey. The car and the driver were suitably fucked even before the purchase of the aforementioned virtual road atlas. This is not the Ballard inspired crash of auto porn but just the impotent fury of the post-human committing pinpoint accuracy techno-suicide, the destiny on the GPS leading drivers not to where they need to be but into metaphorical then literal trees.
Sooner or later a tourist armed with their Nokia E90 Communicator will step in front of a London Bus while trying to find Big Ben dying in an ecstatic flurry of geographic confusion as if the portable device barking electronic directions, neglecting to inform of the impending date with destiny in the from of the fatal bus. But as this a philosophical presentation I am obliged to outline my case on what it is to be suitably fucked, to be up a tree or under a bus without a virtual paddle. Or in this case to be up a tree with a virtual paddle, the GPS pinging out instructions to the dead. The only things the deceased may have known nanoseconds before they died was exactly where they were on the earth when they fell from it. This is precise death recorded for posterity and infamy by a satellite, smiling above us not screaming co-ordinates to the geographically bewildered but a soft resonant mantra of “I told you so”
This is a call to arms, in praise of getting lost. The paper will unfold in three seriously considered and logically reasoned steps. The first section is called TURN ON where I will argue that the GPS has corralled and totalized thinking about time and space to the point where it leads to a state which we may describe as more accurate than accurate, the hyper-accuracy of the mentally atrophied. The Second is called TUNE IN where I will argue that the GPS causes cancer of the imagination leading to the banal and irreversible expression of geographic and temporal cliché and the final we will DROP OUT advocating that the totalizing narrative of the whole GPS techno-fascism is promoting an unhelpful and constricted heterogeneity. The call here is to not know, to approximate and to deflate the status of enforced precision, quantification and accuracy in stead for a more passionate attachment to getting lost.
Turn On
The GPS is an ecstatic instrument, a modern marvel calibrating with the use of technology our precise locations on the planet. They are found in most forms of transportation vehicles and are no doubt useful in emergencies. They are also economically expedient for commercial purposes defraying business costs etc etc. But as happens so often in the postmodern, post-human times the device leaps from its symbolic to its semiotic, from its use value to its sign value until we find it affixed to cars and installed into mobile phones that don’t need it. And it is on the word need that we must focus, to tune in as it were.
TBC