Thoughts and Ideas
From Wikinovel
If you find something that doesn't quite fit somehwere else (yet), don't delete it. Add it here. Likewise, if you have a scene in your head that doesn't fit into another chapter (yet), then, add it here.
[edit] Moved from title page
Below: sounds good, but can someone put this in the correct section of the novel? Prologue Maybe?
This dispatch doesn’t come from anywhere interesting. It doesn’t come from a city with a vibrant culture like San Francisco or from a place with a rich popular history like Paris or London. Nope, this story comes from the edge, a place where people talk insatiably about going somewhere else. We are on the outer edge of American culture, yet we aren’t even American. Some people from this place have gone on to be famous and to influence popular culture, but they almost always had to leave here to do it. This is a relatively large city where people sit around in the park or at the outdoor patios on nice days. It’s an urban center, not some kind of rural backwater. We get nearly all our media from America. Even local television and radio stations and newspapers pick up content from down there. Up here, we rarely make news down there, unless a massive flood drowns half of us in the Red river. At the border, just south of here, there are little booths on each highway heading south. It’s an international border, but it hardly needs maintenance. Let’s face it, not many people come up here unless they have to for business. We get crowds of American youth coming up here to take advantage of our lower drinking age, but apart from that we’re not great attraction. The people here don’t discovery anything, they don’t innovate, they don’t create much of anything that’s new. Sure there’s the occasional exception, but there isn’t the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that motivates masses of people to take risks and innovate. Besides, we assume that we’re behind in our thinking anyway. We catch onto the trends created elsewhere, but only once they’ve been abandoned there.
I’ve lived here all my life, but I’ve also traveled considerably. I’ve visited just under thirty countries, hundreds of cities, and thousands of neighborhoods. There are worse places then here, that’s for sure, but that’s little consolation. I don’t want to give the impression that this is dreary place, but I want to emphasize its lack of prominence in the cultural sphere. The story that follows would not be nearly as extraordinary if it had taken place in the eye of the storm. It occurs at the outer edges, the unknown, the ignored, the irrelevant, the fringe; where the wind from the massive swirling hurricane of culture can barely be felt. That it happen here is critical, highly unlikely, impossible, unheard of, almost ridiculous. Things like that just don’t happen in places like this and that’s the natural order of things. Yet, the events describe herein prove otherwise, they demonstrate that the system of culture is not nearly as stable and robust as we assume. It proves that a proverbial flap of the wings of a butterfly can in fact change the course of history.
The story takes place during a remarkable moment in history. I won’t dwell on the technological features that make this moment so important because by the time you read this, it’ll all be common knowledge anyway. Let’s just say that the mass media was in decline and nearing death. Those born after its death will not understand the significance of its life. The best we might do to explain it to them is that everything that we knew was a fabrication of a tiny group of people bent on controlling us. Since the spread of the printing press a few hundred years prior, the whole world had been transformed into a mass audience. We were all reading, then listening, and then watching what the tiny elite fed us. The most important message the mass media gave us was one of hope. They showed us a path to wealth and called that path the status quo. Everything other than the status quo was strange or subversive. We believed them because we didn’t have wealth and didn’t understand its limitations. So we forgot about everything else and focused ourselves intently on achieving the dream.
Children born after the death of mass media will not understand this. They will point to the massive undercurrent of mental illnesses that flow from such flawed beliefs and social patterns. They will point to the physical or environmental fallout from this way of life. In many ways, we will never truly understand them. Every generation complains that it doesn’t understand its children, but this change will be truly spectacular. Of course, since it has not yet occurred, I can only speculate about the details of the change. With the death of mass media comes the death of the status quo. A free and vibrant press is one of democracy’s most important underpinnings. However, as the press became so free that each message was customized for each individual, things stopped working. Governments and corporations had for centuries relied on a mass audience to listen to their messages. Mass customization meant that very few people ever heard the same message. There were simply so many opinions, so many perspectives, so many issues, so many stories, that everything about the status quo got drowned out. People stopped listening to the message about the dream and lost their way, and lost their mind.
Of course, this story had to take place on the fringe for an important reason. Those of us on the fringes of mass culture spend more time being told what to do and think. Instead of actually doing anything, we just eat up what other people have done. It had to happen on the fringe because we are mass culture’s most profitable consumers. We generally don’t participate in the real action. We don’t compete for our share of the spoils, but we are very willing to extract our resources in order to consume. We work hard and allow ourselves to be trampled on by mighty corporations in exchange for brands that mass culture tells us we want. Vast swaths of virgin forest are clear-cut in our backyard, but we don’t care because the dream is urban and manufactured goods are worth it.
The fact that we are such pushovers is a key part of the story. If we really believed and behaved as if we were part of the game, none of the events that follow would have occurred. It is exactly because we are not active participants in mass culture that we were in a unique position to be exploited by it. It is also exactly the reason we lost so much more when it disappeared. Without our daily dose of status quo maintaining commercialism, we just didn’t have anything to get out of bed for. None of us were really doing anything interesting with our lives. We were so completely programmed to act for the benefit of status quo, that we did not know how to live without it. It’s as if we awoke one day and didn’t feel a need to compete with our neighbors. We no longer desired the myriad of products that littered our homes. We no longer liked the monotonous design of our neighborhoods. We no longer felt compelled to go to work.
Of course, things still had to get done, but somehow they just continued to get done without us. Enough people still tuned into to their favorites to keep the economy running, despite the sudden non-participation of the rest of us. At first, the change started as a contagious depression. Since we weren’t innovators, we didn’t have the programming required to know what to do with our new freedom. We were so used to being workers of some sort that we didn’t understand how to be entrepreneurs. It was clear in our minds that institutions were on their way out. The future would be about large numbers of small producers operating in a global market. We all wanted to be small producers but we didn’t know what to produce. It’s as if all of the craftiness that used to be part of us was whittled away by all those years of routine. Most of us hadn’t had an original thought in decades. Our everyday conversations were already so completely contaminated by messages from the popular culture that we could no longer communicate. We had nothing in common except the knowledge that something had changed. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves.
Children born after the death of mass media had the benefit of never being indoctrinated by mass culture. They say reality for what it was and were sickened by the empty shells they saw in their parents. Unlike the rest of us, they won’t desire for things they’ve been told to desire. They feel no inclination to go shopping or to renovate the basement. Instead they look outdoors for possibilities. They actively create their own reality instead of letting news anchors patronize them. The difference between the new generation and the old is vital to the story. It makes it easier to think of those born before the end of mass media as the memers because that’s what we essentially did. Memes are infective ideas that spread throughout a population. The memer generation was being fed by the mass media, which could dispatch a meme to a critical mass of people who would repeat the meme to each other until it became legitimized. Memers have similar thoughts and similar mental conditioning to each other.
Children born after the death of mass media aren’t easy fodder for memes because they are immune. Without a mass media to tell them what to think, they pick up ideas from the infinite variation they find on the Internet. Since memes rarely, if ever, infect a critical mass of immuners, they fail to become legitimized. Immuners repeat memes to each other but they rarely hear the same thing told to them from different members of their social network. Without repetition, the memes don’t stick; they don’t become transformed into beliefs. In a way, this is the story of the first immuner that ever lived, or rather, the story of a memer who became immune. This isn’t a story with characters to be developed, intertwined and climaxed. There are people in this story, but they aren’t really important to the plot. It doesn’t really matter who they are, where they are, or what they did. The only thing that really matters for the story is that the first immuners was born on the fringes of mass culture, and was aware it that fact.
Like any generational divide, there are those who are inevitably stuck in the middle. This is their story. They aren’t really completely memer or immuner, which is probably what makes them most interesting. Sure they have a particular personality that could be described, but the description would be too generic or too specific, depending on whether you are a memer or an immuner. Instead of trying to describe the character it might be more fruitful to give an analogy that illuminates their unique psychological state. It’s an old analogy that presents a logical puzzle that has no known solution. But first it may be useful to mention that the signs of change were all around.
For the first time in its history, Walmart, the world’s largest employer, stopped growing. The executive gave their excuses, but it was clear to nearly everyone what the problem was. With every house overflowing with inexpensive clutter made in Chinese sweat shops, there simply wasn’t any room to put things. There had been a massive housing boom during to the low inflation period before the second war in Iraq. Large deficits due to war expenditures bust the housing bubble with higher interest rates. People stopped building bigger houses and simply ran out of room to put more things. To get yet another piece of “pleather” furniture into the house required the removal of some other thing. We’d reached the point of material saturation.
