I remember hearing something along the lines of, you can tell the soul of a society by the tallest buildings. They talked about how it was once the church spires and then the government domes, and now corporate skyscrapers. Where the money is, there too is what we care most about. Stadiums.
Whoever came up with: He who dies with the most toys wins, nailed it. We are consumers, if nothing else. Consider the McMansion and explosion of storage facilities. We continue to move away from churches, and no one seems to care about good governance nor is willing to happily pay their taxes for the services they provide. Instead, we focus on us (our accounts, our feeds, our playlists, our entertainment, our silos and echo chambers), and better yet, they focus on us.
Consumerism isn’t new; but in about 1995, it was like a teed-up golf ball and the Internet swung in like a 1-wood.
It’s all very obsessive and dizzying, chaotic and endless, and that’s good for the Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like. They control it, and uniquely control each of us – what we see, how often, and all through a Pavlovian rewards system that responds to our every click – a different experience for every man, woman and child who logs in and turns on. And now it’s about you – your likes, your way of thinking, your videos, your music, your beliefs, your followers, your clothes, your hobbies, your culture – and so, as Greg Jackson in “Sources of Life” writes, “we create a culture in line with what we have been told the culture is like.”
The constant reaffirmation of ourselves online makes it easy forget the rest, or ignore them, misunderstand them, demean them, hate them. We’re developing personal cultures that sometimes intersect or overlap with others but mostly not. I’ve got my earbuds and you’ve got yours.
But to be free and alive, healthy and not crazy, we have to curate our own minds – extricate ourselves from the fast flowing feeds. Choose on our own what we want to put in our minds, and really think about it, as whatever we choose becomes us, too. Neuroplasticity, the ability and in fact, simply fact about our minds is that they are changed and altered, even physically, by what we see, hear, feel, taste, experience. The more we see the same product in our feed, the more we’ll remember it and maybe buy it. If you repeat anything over and over and over, you will eventually believe it. Just ask the religions.
Jackson writes, “Defending art or culture for its own sake may seem trivial, even gratuitous, amid our present crises, but our crises have flowered in the soil of its trivialization. The vacant secular despair that sends us searching for a religious politics – that underwrites the allure of racism, nationalism, conspiracy theories such as QAnon, the violent fraternal gangs; that makes us long for the escapism of entertainment, narcotics, video games and for the endless stimulation of the internet and social media – is precisely what culture of this category is meant to address.”
Support the arts. Curate your own mind.
Luke Soiseth 