Creativity, meaning and time

Online media fills unlimited hours,
Racing with ever greater speed to postpone an arrival at meaning.
Busyness is the addiction of delusion.

(source)

Anne Lamott expresses the creative process as well as anyone because she recognizes that it grows from a holistic sense of quality. There is no coincidence that she points to the busy-making of the mobile/online world as an antithesis to creativity, quality and meaning. 

Ostensibly, social media promises connectedness and meaning. In practice, it's a self-reinforcing system quantitative overload. Another word for this is distraction. 

As long as there are more people to chat to, more information to pour through, and more media to see and hear, the challenges of life can be safely avoided. Purpose, isolation, uncertainty, and the ultimate finiteness of life can be held safely at bay thanks to hours spent churning through endless quantities of things, forgetting that every measure of meaning is about quality, not quantity. Forgetting that creativity never springs from distraction.

Marshall McLuhan pointed at this when he said that media is an extension of the human nervous system. Usually that's discussed in terms of human senses. Television and video are extensions of vision. Radio and audio are extensions of hearing. But if traditional media is a projection of sensation, the internet is a project of the grasping ego. A fear based reaction always reaching towards an arrival that is just over the horizon. It is a sort of pseudo-meaning that too many people get by on. 

In 1962, McLuhan wrote the following about the electronic age:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian Library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside of us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

"Panic terrors" are what keep people returning to technological distraction at the expense of meaning. It's a disconnect from a genuine sense of self and purpose, and it devolves to the lowest common denominator - the devolution of dialogue from exposition, to tweets, to clicks, to apathy, which rides a wave of endlessly advancing technology that never quite arrives in a form that truly works. 

Like Achilles losing the race to the tortoise, technology captures people in a world of perpetual postponement. But while Achilles never reached the finish line because he only advanced half the remaining distance with each move, we never arrive because the finish keeps shifting further away. It's an ongoing wait for v.2, the new OS, the next iPhone, F8.... Fuck you.

Waiting serves the ego by keeping attention out of the present. Enlightenment is largely a question about our relationship to time, and postponing meaning into a future forever just out of reach is the best method of avoiding presence.

Enjoy the wait. 

The towers' shadow spans an unresolved decade while the blind insist on answers.
We choose safety over growth
Within the narcissist's tales.

Ten year's ago a slim window of opportunity opened while the world's largest buildings fell to the ground. 

Anyone honestly considering those events easily came to the only answer there ever was. 9/11 was a reaction by isolated people to genuine harm being caused by what was the world's largest economy. Instead of the route of self refleciton, the US chose the narcissists way - justifying their own myth at any cause.

Ten year's later the world's economy is balanced on a hair, the United States is debt ridden and failing, and the narcissism that launched a new call to arms has grown like a cancer to hijack the world's political agenda and spawn the most unapologetic shift towards the political right since the first half of the twentieth century.

During the 9/11 anniversary year it is tempting to view the history of that decade through the lens of that one event. Taking another step back, 9/11, the world's reaction to it, and the escalating issues of finanical insolvency and explosive violence are all symptoms of the same root. 

The cost of the war, escalating public and personal debt, and the absence of any tangible solutions to climate change are all results of the culture of narcissism - a cumulative sacrifice towards the propogation and maintenance of the idea that we can have anything we desire, without limit, and without negative consequences. 

Any evidence that runs counter to this is rationalized in terms of the myth of personal selfishness:

Why did the Vancouver hockey riots happen? Answer: those weren't hockey fans, those were hooligans.

Wrong. Those were people reacting to a lie that they were never allowed to participate in - that Vancouver is a bastion of beauty and wealth that can eliminate anything to the contrary with a mantra and a mortgage.

Why did the London riots happen. Answer: those who hooligans bent on selfishness....

The problem with a culture of narcissism is that it's self reinforcing. 

The shadow of participation

Congress chooses chaos over solutions. Who is to blame?
Post modern politics are the shadow side of participation.
Leaders defer to the mob. 

(source)

One reason for 140

Several friends have asked why I've started this project. The simplest answer is, why not?

But a case study says more. Look to London.

For two weeks journalists, politicians and the public have agonized over what happened and why. The media spun circles around one idea, politicians laid blame in one direction, and people searched for meaning through the bifocal of those two views. 

There are two ideas that distort understanding of the London riots. One, the belief in our ability to control outcomes on our own terms. Two, the belief that we can avoid violence, destruction and other results that we deem undesirable.

In London, like any other event, these ideas form the frame that we pull our answers from. The media spins a child's tale about "them" harming "us". Politicians use that frame to bolster their power, and people follow both, so they don't have to stop believing in the fallacy of forever gaining more in their own lives. No one knows what the more is. But that's not important once you see who's taking it away from you. The battle lines are drawn, and the enemy is on the other side. 

Only there isn't an enemy. Looters and the looted are both traveling the same road. One's driving, the other rides shotgun. Both chase uninhibited material gain.

One uses laws, money, and the power of corporations and government. The other, being barred from participating in the former, uses crime and physical force. One approach is subtly feminine, the other pointedly masculine. Neither is better than the other. Rioters are called wrong while the insidious harm of culture, law and passive inaction are accepted as the norm.

More information contributes to the same problem, which is why the extended agonizing over explanations moves the debate further from the point. It distances people from knowing the problems - inequality, unsustainaibility, and meaningless corruption - directly. Life can carry on as it is. At least until the next tragedy inexplicably arrives.

Form challenges people to express in the confines of strong limits. 140 characters is the form used here because of it's relevance as a form of media. It's social relevance is up to others to decide.

riot's twin theives

Law protects theives by robbing the dispossessed. 
The disposed raid stores through holes in conscience. 
Both follow material to destitution. 

(inception)