rambling notes, subject to revision
July 30, 2003 – 1:07 am1. The end of the American dream.
The "American dream," whatever the hell it happens to be, necessarily (d)evolved in the last century or so from an immaterial system of acceptable pursuits to a material system of consumption and exchange. At its core is a fundamental tension between Western optimistic belief in individual potential and Western xenophobic and class-based anxiety. The material tension is a conflict between what is owned and what is owed. The goal of the American dream is to own without owing, to gather and enjoy possessions "in the black," debt free.
In its classical form, the American dream is a dream of expansion and stability in which Americans may fully express their individual potential. Families grew, jobs were created, industries rose, and greater space and resources were required to comfortably provide Americans with the opportunity to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Underlying this need was an anxiety over peoples and societies occupying territories outside of the Union; hence, Manifest Destiny was born. Manifest Destiny was driven forward both by the need for greater resources coupled with a rampant Western xenophobia, and the American dream was an idealized representation of the complex supply and demand structures of the period.
As the continent was stabilized and moved quickly into the industrial age, this anxiety of otherness gradually transformed from typical xenophobia (the Japanese and Blacks are stealing our jobs, etc) to an anti-institutional resentment (the bank/IRS/government/lawyer is screwing me again). It is ironic that many of our traditional American institutions are now seen as obstacles to the realization of the American dream — it seems nearly impossible to expand one's financial and social borders while being kept in check by all these institutions. It seems unlikely that we can own anything without owing everyone.
The American dream is manipulated and perpetuated by the media, one of our most important institutions. The great power of the media lies in becoming transparent; television, newspapers, radio, digital signals, transmissions querying our phones and portable devices, over time become so commonplace that we have difficulty separating the media image from our localized and immediate reality. We are in the habit of consuming news, advertisements and the rest of it, and unquestionably treating it as real. This, by definition, is the hyperreal. The American dream, therefore, changes every fall and spring with the new clothing and kitchenware lines, and every eighteen months with a newer and faster microprocessor, and every summer with a new line of sports cars and off-road vehicles, and every week with a new pop song climbing the charts and dragging an exquisite boob job and tight abs along with it. We consume and conform to the dream, and the country has a high economic growth rate and impressive stability while maintaining a vital and globally dominant industrial/information sector. But are we happy?
We are great dreamers, but we may be drowning in the wrong dream.
2. The dream frontier.
Western consumerism is a cultural neurosis. It is not a choice between the satisfaction of status and the sadness of dispossession; rather, it is a choice between the great unhappiness of wealth and the great unhappiness of poverty. The neurosis of consumerism drives the material component of the American dream — no matter how much we own, there is always more to consume; no matter how little we owe, there is always something to pay off. No one ever achieves an acceptable balance, a social homeostasis, because no one is ever content.
The neurosis deepens upon the encroachment of foreigness, otherness. A war looms, and consumer optimism begins to soar. Large segments of the world are destabilized, past power vacuums become present ruins and refugees, and we purchase everything in sight for the same reason some smoke like chimneys or eat whole buckets of ice cream — we have an irrepressible desire to feel better by over-indulging. This is the current product of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — we have all realized our individual potential to buy useless stuff and to go into debt. It is precisely this neurotic cycle of indulgence and desire that makes the United States almost unanimously hated by the developing world.
Consumerism is far more rampant than it was ten years ago. This is because we have become a post-industrial society — so much of what we buy and sell consists of services and information, and much of those services and information involve buying and selling. We are quickly becoming a culture that buys and sells tools for buying and selling.
The internet is a prime example. Originally conceived as an information exchange and communications resource, commercialization of the network combined with fine-grained market saturation of network access have caused the internet to rapidly grow; the primary areas of growth, however, are all areas of consumerism and trade — for-pay entertainment, gambling, online auctions, etc. The academic segment of the internet, while certainly still prominent, receives less than a tenth of the traffic of AOL alone.
This digital commercialization is a decidedly Western phenomenon, however. Individuals scrambling to get online in Nairobi and Estonia are not scrambling to buy junk on eBay. In developing nations, where there are often fewer than a hundred computers to every thousand people, the internet remains an exciting and increasingly important source of information. Many of these countries (most notably China) are moving into the computer industry, producing hardware, operating systems and experts in computing. Inevitably, we will see an explosion of linguistic and cultural diversity online due to the increased number of non-English speakers establishing a digital presence. Inevitably, the very structure of digital media will be substantially altered by new and converging/conflicting worldviews. Over time, the nation-state itself will decline and change, and perhaps even go the way of the pterosaur and the dodo.
If the nation state is to lose intellectual and economic relevance (we must assume it will continue to have some physical relevance, as long as our armies are prancing into every disagreeable nation on the planet committing our shallow little acts of questionable justice), then the American dream must decline with it. We need a new dream, one that effectively extends beyond the physical borders that we, with our antiquated minds awkwardly situated between the pre-network age and the digital age, have been so long conditioned to respect and obey.
Perhaps we should regress to our original model of the cultural dream, an immaterial system indicating the pursuits and desires that define us as a people. The people we are now, however, must be less defined by Americanness than by globalness, and thus we have to establish at least some tenuous concensus on what we value about our humanity. The global dream must be about the species and the planet, and not about our small and ultimately doomed nation.
3. The network.
This is the power of the global network, the digital network of networks in its entirety — the internet, cellular communications, television, radio. As technology becomes cheaper and more sophisticated, more and more of us are able to exploit these technologies on an individual level. This is to say that an increasing number of us are capable of gaining access to the institution of the media. The global network and the media are important because they are potentially the only global line of defense against a pervasive governmental/corporate conglomerate. The global network gives us the power to form smart mobs, empowered by text messaging, live-time communication, automation, wide and instantaneous distribution of our message. The global network is more than the toy or massive shopping mall that we Americans have made it out to be — it is a human right, uniting the fundamental human rights of free expression, right to protest and right to dissent.
It is important to remember this fundamental rule, however: reality is information. Everything we know, from our immediately apprehendable local reality to the distant realities of media and the internet, consists of data that our brains parse into information. When a network is constructed, it essentially gives reality a new shape, creating channels through which information flows and reaches its consumers. If a network is owned, reality is controlled by the network's owners. The reality that comes to us through the network of news media is controlled and restricted by the owners of NBC, CBS, CNN, Reuters, AP and the like. The reality that comes to us through the global network is controlled by whoever owns the computers that drive the network, and those computers are mostly owned by American corporations.
In a manner of speaking, the universal right of access to the global network is controlled and metered by proponents of the American dream.
4. The artist in the digital age.
Great art is about having a fine level of control over the reality you represent in your work. Being an artist in the digital age with access to the global network means having the potential to finely control the global reality, the new post-American dream. If we as artists have any moral obligation at all, it is the obligation to tell the truth as best as we can. In the digital age, this means we have an obligation to tell larger and more diverse truths, truths that resonate with anyone accessing the network, and that defend those too poor and oppressed to establish a presence at the global level. It is certain that the global network is our one defense against massive control by a monolithic corporate-sponsored government; it is possible that art is our strongest point of resistance to corporate and governmental control of the network. The government and corporations are here to make the network profit; we are here to make the network worthwhile.
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