Category: Culture

“Vertical Video is Here to Stay.” So say the technomedia pundits… since all the 35-and-unders are driving the trend to smartphones five hours and more per day, just like my generation in front of the TV.

We were programmed to retire about now, but our wads disappeared into the banksters’ maw in 2008; so we scramble for a place on the low-income assisted-housing waitlists while the wars funded with our fortunes rage on, in the underside of the global news, seemingly forever. We try to hop the crypto train but get caught in lockdown and uberhacks, and that chimera goes poof like an Instagram sound painting, here today, gone tomorrow.

Where is it all leading? Always away from the woods and into vertical video, swallowed in a trivialized stream of infected data?

Even to say as much, in words, harks me back further to the dank recesses of two centuries past, when English romantics waxed poetical about emotions recollected in Nature’s tranquility. There is indeed no balm like the solitude of Nature, so precious, so sacred, so fast disappearing, that it must now be recapitalized to assert its rightful place in our scheme of importance, next to Government, Youth, and Hollywood. Though it rightfully holds a stature so far surpassing these picayune motes of its identity, it may as well take no name whatsoever.

The mystics know. I deign to speak for them, for us: the Luddites, Amish, Quakers, rebels with and without causes large and small; the dissenters and those who stand aside; the drivers of horses with carts of homegrown strawberries for sale; the wilderness homesteaders and professors of primitive skills; the poets and artists and singers and traveling troubadours of the subways of the global underground; gypsies and outcasts; hippies and hobos; the homeless and unemployed, and the masses dangling on the edge. We are all enjoined to get on Instagram and Snapchat now, to Facebook ourselves to death. To engage in Twitter diplomacy (as if name-calling deserves that ancient art). The new program wants us all to want a piece of the vertical feed, though its makers build in “ephemeral,” the 24-hour kill-switch, or the real-time plug-pull on the names that must not be named (speaking of Walt Whitman and the electrifying embrace of all that is, and all that is to come in his fabled America, and the world made in its image).

I am advised to tout my brand, whatever it is, and I reflect on my lifelong aversion to branding—after all, the mark on the beast that renders it a part of the herd, forever. If I then favor no brand, is that to eschew any identity whatsoever? Does that paint me in the non-dual cave, remote from the world and its myriad attachments? Does it imply I’m a Peter Pan puer, locked in perpetual adolescence? Or does it mean that, by refusing the rigid roles of successful adulthood as defined by my society, I’m actually on the right side of evolution? The Intellectual Dark Web tells me so:

The specific adaptation that made us most fundamentally human might have been the evolved capacity to navigate niche transitions in much faster than biological time. Throughout our species’ developmental history, we found ourselves pushed to the edge of extinction many times. Over and over again, our survival depended on becoming capable of leaving one niche and adapting to a new one. Ultimately, this problem itself *became* our fundamental niche. Evolution finally found a way to create a species whose niche is niche transition.

Evolution did this by moving almost all of our adaptive specialization from the biological (hardware) layer into the cultural (software layer). And it coded (at a very deep level) a capacity to shift from “culture mode,” where we are limited to using the tools in our given cultural toolkit, into a creative “liminal mode,” where we can form collective intelligence to navigate complex reality directly and with remarkable fluidity.

—Jordan Hall, on Culture War 2.0

Adopting, for a lark, the moniker “Chairman Now,” can I hop with my flute Kokopeli style, quoting Eckhart Tolle and Carlos Castaneda and sing for my supper with the tune of the breeze, of the moving moment, forever? This tack brands me, you might say, as a child of the sixties, a devotee of its cultural revolution. My chronic rebellion is not without cause after all, but a cause celebre, and a cause for celebration. This is not a buckling to life’s static forms, nor a sour rejection of such; but a dance with life’s vital force, with whoever feels that spirit and wishes to join me in songs of praise.

Come to think of it, maybe mass culture, even tech culture (if there is such a thing) is coming around, with its ephemeral vertical video, Instagram “stories” that last for 24 hours and then disappear. Ad pundits say what sells now is “authentic” and unrehearsed. Shot in the wild, in the moment, face to face, who I am to who you are, in person, in nature. Here today, gone tomorrow, let us meet in the moving moment, to share and celebrate.

At this rate, we’ll be jammin till the break of day…