"Put a Dick On It" in Portland-ia

Back in the golden age of this blog -- like 2009 -- this PKD sighting would have made a perfect post. Dick sightings in the public mainstream were rare (or strictly movie related) and social media was not yet aggregating all of our various passions for us, so this blog would have been one of the few places Dick-heads could catch one of these rare sightings.

I like this Seth Myers bit, and his explanation that if you're not familiar with PKD's work, comparisons between our realities and his dystopias is generally a bad sign. But maybe in some other universe, one that falls apart a few days later, there is a Philip K Dick novel titled, "The Robots Took Over and Gave Us Candy."

Nowadays (this word is always a serious red flag when it begins student essays, especially when written "Now a days") all you Dick-heads have probably already seen this, re-posted it, liked it, and made three memes out of it, thanks to your endless foraging on social media. So I'm not sure this kind of content still has the same relevance that it used to. But here we are.

It's full on Minority Report except with really stupid people with no skill or real technology deciding who is going to pre-crime. https://t.co/NNVCBxy1eu

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) July 22, 2020

Actually (another bad sign when it precedes some sentence emanated by a man) there seem to be two different PKD threads going on. The first is that these anonymous, black and camo-clad agents in Portland seem like the secret police from a PKD novel (Radio Free Albemuth, for instance).

The other is that the head of the Department of Homeland Security recently said that some of the arrests being made by the camo/black ops cops are being down in anticipation of future crimes. Which leads me to wonder where they are keeping the bald chicks in goo.

Why do I remember her as bald, and The Berenstein Bears?

So yeah, we're living in a Philip K Dick dystopia (which contributions on setting from JG Ballard and characters from Robert Heinlein). Yay us. I'll talk a little more about why Trump's current ascendancy is especially resonant with Dick's work. The real problem with living in a PKD world is that he wasn't very good at endings.

Tip of the hat to David Agranoff of the DickHeads Podcast for the Myers clip. More about all this new fangled Dick content soon!