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We often dislike the creators of cultural artifacts we enjoy, such as disdaining hippies or baristas while appreciating the Beatles or a well-made espresso.
This contradiction can provoke an openness that can change biases.
The gap between the distasteful interactions and tasteful consumption, harbors compelling evidence that we are socially conservative and desiringly decadent.
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The difference between public and private is the difference between the scene and the obscene.
The obscene is an excessively close-up intimacy beyond the discriminating distance of theatrics or mirrors. The disgust stems from a breaking of moral limits, where the private is made known to the public beyond request, beyond intimacy, beyond imagining.
At this point, the obscene collapses the imaginary with too much reality. The scene is quaffed for the public, while the ob-scene moves into the private, and then through it.
An implication: The media’s functional role is to expose, to move beyond the public/scene into the private/obscene, which takes it beyond pornographic. The willingness to capture is not titillation but a function swollen by the technology: with a zoom lens and access, the imperative to forensically reveal is undeniable.
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Masculinity has become excessive and performative. To be “masculine” is to be in drag, commanding attention through a ritualized, traditional set of affectations.
This only occurs when there is no place for actual masculinity: there is no longer anything for masculinity to do.
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We emit capturable data such as writing, but any AI (artificial intelligence) mimicking you is drawing from your emissions, not you.
We speak differently than we write and act differently in various contexts (code-switching).
There is still a tremendous gap between what we emit and who we are, also seen as actions versus intent judged one-dimensionally.
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If we lived in a society of radical responsibility (rather than explanatory, justified victimization) would responsibility lead to abusive tyranny, or a culture of vulnerability refocusing effort on the impacts of the present?
Are we inculturated to avoid difficulties for temporary reprieve?
Would sustained pressure today be a strengthening blessing later, while the today’s deferment becomes tomorrow’s trauma?
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Our attempt for surety (or fixity) is a draw to stable descriptors of the world by which we may navigate.
We may push off from these mythologies and extend ourselves further.
This leap is the creative impulse: to rebel directly against the foundation on which we stand.
To cling desperately to the foundation without jumping is not life. Adhering to tradition as salvation is death.
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Technology moves rapidly forward, providing new options through speed and extended agency.
Culture (religion and tradition) remains slow, providing stability and attempting to secure identity against the void of meaninglessness.
When a culture uses technology, it adopts asymmetrical aims: to stabilize through speed. The problem manifests when converts leave rapidly: the speed of adoption is directly proportional to stabilization.
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To make something onerous on purpose is to grant it value.
To have the music streaming is easy, but the devotee transcends backward. They take pleasure in the obeisance to vinyl; investing in the cumbersome physicality and lavishing more attention until the “music” is a ritual.
The soft, easy has become a caring, hard.
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Obviously. This is known as a tautophrase: a circular (reinforcing) definition that says the same thing twice.
This phrase pretends to stoic wisdom through acceptance: "it is" beyond control therefore we should move along instead of continuing to consider "it."
The most annoying (and detrimental) aspect is the evasion of communal reflection, and subsequent deferral of responsibility, by claiming fixity through redundancy.
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Before the theory of evolution, everything must have been created whole. Now we believe it gradually changes and tests itself out over time.
Now we have memetic evolution: the spread and growth of ideas, testing themselves for supreme virulence and spread. Humans seem to be not only the creators, but the hosts and carriers for ideas.
There will be a next step.
