[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”CN8b3Y5FZAeQMTZTsTtc0tupQqcwaJ9l”]
WHAT do recent changes in technology, economics and social norms mean for the art, culture and the creative class? These are the topics that drive my book, Culture Crash, and they’re subjects I discussed with the Jeff Schnechtman, the Napa, CA-based radio host whose show is called Specific Gravity. Here it is.
I may never get such a good batch of questions that engage with the key questions of my book. I tend to be groggy early in the morning, but this may be good listening for those who think and read about these themes.
Overall, I was especially impressed with his efforts to put today’s crisis in historical perspective. It’s impossible to understand without that.
I enjoyed the broadcast. I wonder if there is a propensity for every generation to assume it is facing the most radical technological changes in history. Are we facing such vast changes, or is this mostly the self-absorbed propaganda of Silicon Valley and its historically myopic reception by the general public?
We might consider the earth shattering effects of the printing press, how it later empowered Lutheranism and the decimation of Europe through the Thirty Years War. Think of the rise of rail and telegraph systems and the role they played in the cultural values of Manifest Destiny. Think of the industrial scale slaughter of the Civil War and its fruition in the cataclysm of WWI. Think of the rise of cinema and the demise of tens of thousands of small stage theaters and the loss of work for hundreds of thousands of stage performers. Think of the rise of radio and its use by people like Adolf Hitler to mobilize slaughter on a scale unprecedented in human history. Think of the rise of radio and the recording industry, and later television on shaping the world’s psyche. Think of the pall nuclear war cast upon the world’s psyche. Think of how the advent of synthesizers reduced the musician’s union membership in LA by 75% within two decades. Think of the rise of jet travel and the ready availability of international communications on creating the global village.
The rise of global corporatism, its Internet technologies, surveillance, social engineering, and neoliberal economic systems are a continuation of these developments. Do they seem like the most radical changes in history merely because they are the ones we are closest too? Or are they part of a relatively steady continuum that evolved throughout the 20th century?