We have enough snooty elitism and gloomy-doomsday talk already. There's too much pain in the world to take life too seriously. When it's all love, it burns hot, and it f%#$in hurts. Being bummed out can make us feel ambiguous. In the U.S., an overload of freedom can make for a debilitating plethora of choices. Our ambiguity can lead to apathy, complacency, and indifference. But when decisions are made by taste and desire, we connect. Fingers don't have to be pointed to make waves. Truth lies in pure entertainment and simple beauty.
Piggy-backing on a later-20th Century drift from the self-absorbed and high-class individualism of modern art, new media in the 21st Century is more populist in theory. In reality, it may be easier for public access, but most of the substance is garbage. Hollywood, reality TV, and YouTube hacks steal standard art school tricks constantly, while people are being drawn far away from the culture of visual and physical art. Visual material is being excessively used for stupid crap, and 3-D printers will soon put sculptors out of business. Objects made with hardened physical skill still rock. When the visual chops are sharp, the images cut clean to the bone.
Specialized talent, street smarts, common sense, and universal truths can get us back on solid ground. We need a new common ground outside the ancient empires of moral righteousness and apathetic ambiguity. Liberal intellectualism is making a mush of common values. Conservative rhetoric is attaching a bad stigma to Populist philosophies. Too many people make a career of talking constantly, micro-cosmic irrelevence, and middle management. People are disconnecting from physical reality, and thriving solely on conceptual grounds of wealth, fear, and moral conventions.
Terrorism built the Western identity. U.S. domestic racism was rock hard on the Native Americans that apparently threatened security. Western foreign policy was born to fight pirates. Now Walt Disney and Halloween celebrate the alcoholism and bloodshed. Security comes in the fun of playing with a historical terrorism. It also strikes the deepest cords of fear in its contemporary form. Turbans, radical Islamic websites, and YouTube videos are more terrifying than a skull and cross-bones, eye-patches, or Johnny Depp's drunken eye-liner that it seems like a joke.
The epic gap between pirates and terrorists is the most concrete current example of our cultural myths drifting us further and further from "the enemy". Finding common ground with "the enemy" would question the western identity, so it's tailored to look like a cowardly maneuver. Fear is easier to tap than the muddy waters of diplomacy. It takes courage to fight, but it also takes a deeper courage to resist the survival instincts of fighting difference and exacting revenge.
Our hyper-connected world is not bringing us closer together. Our digital identities are swiftly freeing us from facing of our true identities. We have more control, choices, and options to take the easiest path possible. Social networking and reality television are not "social" or "reality" when they hinge on direct interaction with a square box of digital images. People, animals, and nature interact. Technological devices are bought and sold to expedite these interactions, while simultaneously impeding them.
Technology isn't shrinking our planet. We're just running out of space and stuff to consume. The seduction of consumer technology is making human values more extreme. New philosophies, forged and hardened in the raging fires of niche networks, are cutting us apart. Websites, cell phones, and text messaging connect only some in a clique, with the idea that they're connected at the hip.
We're becoming biologically homogeneous. Diversification is not securing our sustainability. Our bodies are becoming more and more alike, but our minds are growing apart. We can't even agree that our environment is damaging our bodies. Our health is suffering, so our minds are detaching from each other, our environment, and from our own bodies.
Yet humans have an untapped backbone of universal similarity. Technology has tuned our survival instincts from food, water and shelter to the needs of social and mental health. Humans have become profoundly similar in one way: we are all personally motivated by the balance of being different or normal. We all constantly negotiate the process of being alone or together, private or public, isolated or accepted, rebellious or conforming, innovative or corny, different or similar, underground or mainstream, challenging or entertaining. Since the power of this balance is unique to human history, our most common similarity is something completely different. As complex as they are, we do have a core set of values that we can re-connect around without being too normal... or different.