Shoe fastenings. We’re still using primitive fucking shoelaces just like all of those grim people in the earliest photographs, standing there in their tall uncomfortable black boots, out in the barnyard next to the well, with the tethered mule standing dumbly by the family, all of whom look angry or like they want to die instead of face yet another brutal day trying to wrestle their sustenance out of the unforgiving ground. The well is gone, the mule is gone, even the barnyard is gone, and we sit in our shiny air-conditioned towers talking to each other across a networked world swarmed with satellites, yet still we wear those same laces. We tried in the 80s with Velcro; every kid had a pair, or at least some hybrid hi-tops. But Big Shoelace crushed it behind the scenes, relegating it to the shoes of wriggling infants and arthritic seniors in the painful twilight of their mobility. So here we are still enslaved, still tethered to Big Shoelace, suckling at its teat as the only means of sustenance within the radius allowed us. We are the mules now. We will never escape. We will never escape. Congress has a golden shoelace around its neck and we will never escape. Perhaps it’s a golden age after all, just not for the many.