…as opposed to some synthe-knit. (To go with the synthe-hol, of course.)
I just watched the new Star Trek movie. And note that the ‘rebel’ James T. Kirk defines his rebelness by:
a) driving an old Corvette
b) listening to something that sounds like 1992 Rage Against The Machine on something that looks a lot like a ‘car stereo’
c) Wears Levi’s jeans.
I pray to God that the 24th century is not really like that. I hope like heck that the future has something new and different in store. But I worry that we are actually encouraging our own demise by cultivating a culture that recycles when it should be burying and making new things.
Back in my day, a ‘rebel’ rejected the past. Kids wore Levi’s specifically because it pissed off the parents. And the parents listened to Glenn Miller. Nowadays, there is this unholy amalgam of generations. The parents still don’t understand the kids, but the problem is, we think we do because we all can share the same icons and totems. We can be a bald guy in his 50’s and a kid in his teens and both think a Corvette is cool. We can both sorta kinda think the Beatles are great. This is soooooo wrong. It’s delusional. And it impedes progress.
Why? First off, it convinces ‘adults’ that they ‘get’ youth or can remain young. WRONG. You can’t go back. You can never go back. You can only learn to appreciate things you were too stupid, impatient or destructive to dig as a kid. If you try? You just look pathetic trying to log roll on the perpetual wheel of fashion.
And for kids? It keeps them in a state of arrested development. By being able to recycle materials over and over, and thinking this is ‘creative’ it prevents them from discovering something really new. That’s the problem. Old people? Fuck ’em (…er. ‘us’.) But young people? They are the future. And they must create new things for culture to thrive. The must reject the old instead of co-opting it…or more accurately, being co-opted by some corporate psychologist/marketer at Saachi.
Listen: Collage art is not new. Dada was joking! It was all meant as a mockery. But now? The joke has become the mainstream. Everything is recycled.
My wish is that the 24th century will not contain Levi’s or Corvettes or pretty much anything we now recognise. My hope is that the 24th century is as different from the 21st century as the 21st was from the 18th.
My fear is that this will not happen. My fear is that, at the rate things are going, the 24th century will be as much like the 21st as the 10th century was the 7th. Ya know what they called that period in human history?
The Dark Ages.
