The Molloy-verse - The junk drawer for my interwebs

Killing the Past Doesn't Help the Future (or Why I'm Tired)

Why does every article I read lately feature the death of something or the end of another thing? We keep hearing that the past is dead. Murdered by progress.  Good riddance because we'll never need it again. The hipster hordes want to stamp out the imagery and completely remake the world in their image and ideal. Is this the insecurity of my generation coming to the forefront? Or is it a younger generation living entirely in the now and wanting to stamp out nostalgia?

 If it's the end of everything like newspapers, what will happen to those scenes in movies when the spy is sitting on a bench, passing time reading a newspaper. You know the one, the spy is waiting for his next meet up (maybe he never lowers the paper) or is using the newspaper to conceal his identity. If we kill the past, a newspaper might make the spy stand out as suspicious. It's interesting that in fiction, various technologies always look forced or dated. The iPad in someone's hands in a movie today might be this generation's version of the 70's porno mustache. Does our culture really need to move that fast and constantly be up to date?

Can we all agree to stop with the hipster aesthetic? I don't need everything to be the apex of design and functionality. It all makes me tired. Is the need to murder the past borne from the same hell that gave us jumpsuits, disco, and the pet rock? Is it the cousin of the Swatch watch and acid wash jeans?

It's accelerating. Maybe not in the way Douglas Coupland imagined, but things are getting faster and faster. On the one hand we're awash in information. It's delivered to us in both raw and curated forms: Information Democracy. On the other hand, the zombies haven't vanished. They're still here cycling through meaningless trends and the need to be first (at a much quicker pace). Instead of raising the discourse, the fad-hogs are just hungrier. The rest of us? We're just more tired. While we never worked to keep up, it's become more of an arduous task to fight it off.

So as I hear more often that I'm weird for not liking soccer or NASCAR, for continuing to read paper (instead of digital or nothing at all), for desiring open solutions to technology and information gathering (instead of choosing design or a fear of technology witchery), I'll just wish it would all slow down again. Just a little.

What do I want/believe in?
  • Not being available 24 hours a day
  • Apple is just another big tech company and is sometimes not the best option
  • Physical books and newspapers
  • Big companies should be regulated but individuals should be left alone to make (sometimes poor) decisions for themselves
  • Children should be kept out of bars but smoking should not
  • Baseball doesn't need replay but football does
  • The 1980s were the worst decade known to man and should never be celebrated
  • There is nothing wrong with a healthy does of cynicism
  • Everyone is too worried about being productive all the time

Live in Your Living Room: Revolution!

There's something afoot in Kyrgyzstan. The reports are that the Prime Minister has stepped down, the President is hiding on the US base (a base he kept threatening to close), and there are mobs of protesters in the streets.

I remember when the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc fell the coverage was spotty. We were treated to live shots of the goings on at the Berlin Wall, but Moscow was a mystery. It took some time for the news and video to escape and come back to us. Oh, they had live shots, but they always seemed to be of a skyline or a row of windows. Nothing happened. The only narrative was a news anchor like Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather speculating along with the men in the control room. Sometimes they didn't even know exactly what the camera was showing.

That's one of the coolest things about now. Everyone can be a journalist. I could wander into a local news event with my Flip Video camera and share video minutes after anything. The Foreign Policy blog (which is a great read) has several videos of the protests here. I know it's well established that news travels fast these days, but what's more interesting is what is gained and lost. I feel much closer to this story having been able to watch video. I get a sense of the emotions involved, the odd mixture of joy and frustration and restlessness emanating from the video. At the same time I still feel a strong need to read about the situation in the New York Times because I feel adrift. 

So the news is now more democratic. I'm closer to the action, can pick viable sources to get well rounded on the story, and feel smarter. However, I worry too because how many people are expending the energy to do so? Television news has descended into a weird mixture of gossip, talking (and yelling) heads, opinion, infotainment, and personalities. The anchor as the voice of God seems to have gone away. There isn't an attempt to cover a story like this live, even with 24 hours to fill. I applaud the new way while lamenting the masses getting their fill of missing children, highway chases, and celebrity sex tapes.