The ferocious, full-on backlash against social media has taken hold. Meaning, I don’t want you assholes to know anything about me I don’t want you to know. Capeesh? I don’t want you to know where I am at all times, to know what I love, or know how I’m feeling. I’m a human. Thus, complicated and multi-layered like all other humans. Get over it. We’re done giving into to your rules of the game. Now, you play by ours.
On the Internet
The over-loading feeling of it all. The over-dramatized, over-marketized, over-simplified nature of everything online. It’s everywhere, all over us in all aspects of our lives—communicating, banking, traveling, managing, shopping, organizing—but when will we before over it?
There’s an app for this, an app for that, but I’m wondering more and more if there’s an answer out there for the shine having worn off. Not only are we tired of constant connection, but we’re afraid of it. Afraid of being misled, deceived, robbed, or ruined, whatever our fear is in the world of the digital, the real-world consequences are just that: real.
I used to not be able to imagine a future without the Internet. Now I wish I could. All the ease of access has now given way to an unease of the self:
Who’s watching?
Who’s plotting?
Who’s manipulating?
Who’s after us?
Am I paranoid? You bet your ass I am. You should be, too. The implications for the Internet have been “loading” in our collective conscious for awhile now. The question is, once loaded, will we be able to recognize the true costs in order to implement a true response. If we don’t, there’s a feeling that we’ll just keeping spinning, on and on, in fear and suspicion, forever.
Political Correctness
Maybe we the people of America should not be such jerks. Maybe we should understand that language is power and how that power is used matters. Maybe we should put ourselves in the shoes of other people and try to live our lives that way. Maybe we need to get a grip when it comes to the culture wars and understand we do not have any right to put down anyone for being female, black, Muslim, gay, disabled, or whoever else is typically verbally stomped on by white men who have traditionally held all the power in America. Because what I know for sure, as soon as you criticize white men for anything having to do with their identity they get all bent-out-of-shape real fast. What I’ve seen so many times is that “powerful” white men can’t take any criticism whatsoever.
Now, who wants to talk about identity politics?
The transition to Paul’s Boutique
I still chuckle when I think about listening to Licensed To Ill as a youngster. I certainly wanted to fight for my right to party and was way into girls. But my goodness, that album is ridiculous. Check Your Head and Ill Communication are more my wheelhouse, although I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I liked knowing they were out there doing their thing and I appreciated their music when it came on the radio, but I didn’t own their albums.
I recently bought Paul’s Boutique. Probably the most unfamiliar of all their albums for me. But I had heard so many amazing things about it. It was important. It was groundbreaking. It was epic. And after many listens, I certainly agree.
Even funnier to me is thinking about how that album was received at the time. Imagine, you have all the nonsense, riffs, and silliness of one album, embraced by the types of fans and record execs who love such things and the success that comes with. Imagine all that and then the next album to drop is not that at all. While silly at times, Paul’s Boutique is in a different universe altogether. It’s great hip hop that has stood the test of time. It’s exactly the type of thing people who loved the nonsense, riffs, and silliness would not at all love. Whoops. And it’s awesome, just awesome.
Is being a graphic designer even cool anymore?
Manufacturing a crisis
Barely elected leader who fancies himself an authoritarian boasts hard and bloviates loudly that which he cannot achieve through any democratic arena of ideas and debate thus he turns to bully pulpits of all kinds in preparation for the complete unleashing of brute force in the way only fascists deploy with ends justified by any means necessary in their eyes of vanity and messages of vulgarity with the pitting of side against side aligning with the shameless actions taken throughout history by cowards and fools and murderers in the goal of keeping us all looking for any sort of firm ground to stand on.
How do we approach our time
We all have to deal with time. What we do with the time we’re given and how we approach it. On a news program last week discussing our current political environment, one of the commentators characterized time this way:
Sports Time
Strategic Time
Evolutionary Time
America does the first, and that’s bad. We think in tactics. The fight. The back and forth. And we make our decisions in that time frame while disregarding any larger strategy or big picture evolution, which is where the biggest problems we’re facing (health care, climate change, capitalism) currently reside. Nothing we do in sports time can really address the major factors.
