The Split Society
Through a lot of endeavors in my life that tried to find a group of people working for a common goal I have lost faith that such an approach will ever work again in the future - not only concerning projects orbiting around prototypen but generally in society at large. On the surface it all looks easy you have people rallying around big corporations or big ideas or big ideologies but what worked through the last centuries - people pulling on the same side of the same string in large quantities seems to slowly die out of existence. Its like the individualism of the present and future will change the substance of our existence - a part of our evolutionary past. We came from small hordes of mammals trying to survive in a group and learn inside the group and trying to see our own action in the light of benefit for that group. This survival instinct probably led us through the grassy Savanna of Africa and made us smarter then most other mammals on this earth (well in certain aspects). Now in modern society it seems - especially in western societies - the need for this survival instinct and the idea that only as a group you can advance is vanishing as we think that we can survive on our own just fine and the internet has and will be given us access to about every information there is. This seems to spill down to about any subject there is in society and large governments and small groups feel the impact already. Man was it easy to make a whole nation follow some dictator into stupid wars just a 100 years ago - but even with the modern massmedia reaching millions of people it seems that the more advanced the society is the less people follow any simple thought. Of course the transformation hasnīt taken place completely and there is still time to fuck up the planet with lots of people not having approached the individualism trend - especially those who look back seem to be still having some kind of success - especially with people who also look back - see the Iraqi war. The right wing conservatives that take their ideologies from the past seemed to be a very united front for a long time compared to the fractured "thinking elite" liberals that could never come to a common opinion fighting not only the "enemy" as in the neocons but also the people who seemed ideologic on the same path but had tiny disagreements or would just dissect certain views until they would fall apart. Now even in the last couple of years you could see how these big politics failed to pursue large quantities of people to speak for their cause and a lot of individuals speaking of their own cause that is incompatible with most others.
Its not only visible in the big mass rallying political scene but also on a small scale in small communities down to two persons. A group of people having a genuine interest might find together to pursue this interest further - develop a community around it, share their views but as soon as it goes into more detail a lot of the times today people have completely different visions how to go along the path and as a rule of individuality try to compete with their mates to not loose their own individuality to the mass - making most groups artificial. So communities without common goals or reasons seems to be those who flourish most - communities that underscore individuality. Incorporating speciality into those communities causes the aforementioned friction and breakup or at least loosening of those communities. As a small example I would like to take the "VJ community" as its present on VJCentral. I think we can agree that we are all working towards the goal that the VJ art is accepted as an art and recognized as a real thing (not just something never growing up boys play around with) from the masses (and I am already hearing that might not be the goal of the vj scene from some - just to prove my point above). Now how we get there? There are about as many different opinions as there are vjs and there is not a unified voice at all. The community drinks a beer at some avit festival gets together tells each other how good they are and goes home just to get back to the highly virtual forums to beat the shit out of each other - the only common ground only to be found when talking about hard and software. Now I am not going to say where the VJ scene - as in this example - would be if the 4000 members on VJForums would rally up behind a unified message as a unified body. I am one of the persons there and I think as it stands right now this individualism is not going away and will just get more and more. With the Massmedia loosing even more control over society in the comming years every person will and can be vocal about her/his own thoughts his own visions and people leaders like Che Guevara, Hitler, Stalin, G.W. Bush, Mao and the countless others will be a part of a dark past that is not about to happen again. As you see in my selection of people there is no good and no bad to be found in this individualizing of society the big powers that were will have a hard time coming back in the coming centuries but this comes also at the expense of smaller groups trying to gain momentum or a voice. No bad or evil makes it easy for me trying to accept it as a matter of modern civilization and trying to work with it rather then against it. Empowering the individual and trying to very honestly see were the real common ground is seems to be the way to go - not trying forced communities pulling on the same string rather temporarily, loosely banding together for the small honesty there is between the individuals - a reason why flash mobs might work so good - some people coming together for an event that they think they can agree on and then parting and never see each other again. Maybe life will be a big Flashmob in the future. Current traditional values of large corporations, permanent institutions and opinionated parties might be too inflexible for what is to come. The biggest common thing holding together society as of now is not ideology anymore but only money. I am not alone to suspect that this concept of virtual numbers exchanging hands might fail at some point in the future and then the last bondage in society that really rallies large groups of people together voluntarily and involuntarily might break down the mammal instinct of being in a horde. It is proven that evolution is flexible and faster then one thinks and it might be this kind of evolutionary process that leads us into the individual society - loose but honest.