The Revolution is just a T-shirt away
When I first saw Better Living Through Circuitry a few years ago, I thought it was cute in the way that any scenester would think films about them might be cute. Awww, look at the adorable little raver kids going on about their lollipops. Listen to Frankie Bones and his thick-as-hick Brooklyn accent. Nevermind that it was made after the scene had peaked, and that all of the bold claims of raves as nascent alternative societies were already nearing their shelf life, it still had that naively optimistic attitude that we all had when we first hopped into a car, drove three hours to a warehouse in some desolate ex-urb and danced 'til sunrise. For that it was fun to watch the first time
Last Sunday, I watched the DVD version of the film with silentq, who hadn't seen it yet, and instantly it felt as dated as the primitive 3D graphics that accompanied the late 90s techno soundtrack. There was a hollowness to the idealistic rants, like we all believed that the world was about to change, but knew neither how nor when. Like Communists spending their entire lives waiting for the Great Leap Forward, but instead got Josef Stalin, we were waiting for the paradigm shift and just got the Crystal Method and BMW ads. It seemed significant that Genesis P. Orridge's rants of being on the cusp of a new age were less telling than one kid's admission that "if I wind up spending the rest of my life punching a clock from 9 to 5, at least I can look back at this time and say I had my fun." I imagine that there are a lot of kids saying that now.
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
That's from an e-mail making the rounds from John Perry Barlow, EFF guy and Republican Deadhead ... or rather former Republican deadhead, lambasting the ultimate ineffectuality of Burning Man. To hear him tell it, the ersatz tribes of Burners might talk the new age change agent talk, but at best they're an entertaining sideshow and at worst, they detract from real efforts to effect change wthin the system. While I haven't been to Burning Man, I feel that he does have a point regarding current countercultures as a whole, and therefore could also be extended to ravers. Though I don't think I'd go so far as to believe that walking door-to-door to register voters is necessarily a better alternative, nor is it a mutually exclusive activity, to harnessing the creativity inherent with ravers towards creating political art. Nor would I believe that the social networks formed at raves and Burning Man couldn't be harnessed for political purposes.
Still, there is a certain insularity to raves. They're less about changing the system than escaping it, setting up temporary autonomous zones where you can do your own thing without bothering your neighbors. That's partially inherent to the activity at hand. While there have been ravers who really and truly believe in the floating community idea, there are many others going to parties who are just looking for a distraction, where you can forget about your life to lose yourself in the oblivious harmony of dancing to a perfect beat. Politics just gets in the way. Yet, the uncommon sense of openness and community that accompanies raves tempts one into dreaming of what the world would be like if we were all just nicer to each other. It's a bit of idealism with powerful potential but has never cohered into anything more than an individual whim before it was co-opted into part of the mainstream lexicon and ultimately nullified.
Though, of course, it's worth noting that while the Hippies went through a similar period of growth, expansion and irrelevancy, their values were later incorporated into the Bourgeois Bohemianism that helps fund today's fair trade initiatives and sustains green environmentalism. So, the eventual legacy of the countercultures of the 90s might still take some time to shake out. There was a sense of it in the energy of the dot-com economy, but that's since faded in the post-E morning of the bubble collapse. It might manifest in a genuine social movement founded on the incipient "franchising" of Burning Man through the Burning Man Regional Network, but the emphasis on recompression and mini Burning Man like events within most of those groups makes it seem to be as insular and cult-like as Black Rock City. Or it might find its way into the street theatre and agit-prop media of the current protest movement and John Perry Barlow will get his wish for an activist subculture. Or it might go nowhere and all of that creative vibrancy on the cusp of the 21st century will be for naught but giving mainstream culture another way to party and another tourist venue for their summer excursion, and that would be a greater tragedy and something too horrible to contemplate.
Last Sunday, I watched the DVD version of the film with silentq, who hadn't seen it yet, and instantly it felt as dated as the primitive 3D graphics that accompanied the late 90s techno soundtrack. There was a hollowness to the idealistic rants, like we all believed that the world was about to change, but knew neither how nor when. Like Communists spending their entire lives waiting for the Great Leap Forward, but instead got Josef Stalin, we were waiting for the paradigm shift and just got the Crystal Method and BMW ads. It seemed significant that Genesis P. Orridge's rants of being on the cusp of a new age were less telling than one kid's admission that "if I wind up spending the rest of my life punching a clock from 9 to 5, at least I can look back at this time and say I had my fun." I imagine that there are a lot of kids saying that now.
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
That's from an e-mail making the rounds from John Perry Barlow, EFF guy and Republican Deadhead ... or rather former Republican deadhead, lambasting the ultimate ineffectuality of Burning Man. To hear him tell it, the ersatz tribes of Burners might talk the new age change agent talk, but at best they're an entertaining sideshow and at worst, they detract from real efforts to effect change wthin the system. While I haven't been to Burning Man, I feel that he does have a point regarding current countercultures as a whole, and therefore could also be extended to ravers. Though I don't think I'd go so far as to believe that walking door-to-door to register voters is necessarily a better alternative, nor is it a mutually exclusive activity, to harnessing the creativity inherent with ravers towards creating political art. Nor would I believe that the social networks formed at raves and Burning Man couldn't be harnessed for political purposes.
Still, there is a certain insularity to raves. They're less about changing the system than escaping it, setting up temporary autonomous zones where you can do your own thing without bothering your neighbors. That's partially inherent to the activity at hand. While there have been ravers who really and truly believe in the floating community idea, there are many others going to parties who are just looking for a distraction, where you can forget about your life to lose yourself in the oblivious harmony of dancing to a perfect beat. Politics just gets in the way. Yet, the uncommon sense of openness and community that accompanies raves tempts one into dreaming of what the world would be like if we were all just nicer to each other. It's a bit of idealism with powerful potential but has never cohered into anything more than an individual whim before it was co-opted into part of the mainstream lexicon and ultimately nullified.
Though, of course, it's worth noting that while the Hippies went through a similar period of growth, expansion and irrelevancy, their values were later incorporated into the Bourgeois Bohemianism that helps fund today's fair trade initiatives and sustains green environmentalism. So, the eventual legacy of the countercultures of the 90s might still take some time to shake out. There was a sense of it in the energy of the dot-com economy, but that's since faded in the post-E morning of the bubble collapse. It might manifest in a genuine social movement founded on the incipient "franchising" of Burning Man through the Burning Man Regional Network, but the emphasis on recompression and mini Burning Man like events within most of those groups makes it seem to be as insular and cult-like as Black Rock City. Or it might find its way into the street theatre and agit-prop media of the current protest movement and John Perry Barlow will get his wish for an activist subculture. Or it might go nowhere and all of that creative vibrancy on the cusp of the 21st century will be for naught but giving mainstream culture another way to party and another tourist venue for their summer excursion, and that would be a greater tragedy and something too horrible to contemplate.