The media industry’s current monetary model is somewhere between a gift economy and corporately funded spiritual bloodletting…
The metaphor is mixed, but so is the medium. Indulge me, will you?
The concept of the Fourth Estate has been strong armed into mortgaging its ethical holy ground. Many of these deals were struck with individuals of specious ethical and intellectual credit who thinly mimic the voice of a democratic will. Despite an inability to produce meaningful content, they were encouraged to make bids on even the highest positions of influence. Sometimes they got them. Be wary; true power brokers make sure their deals happen off the books.
These unstable liens were then grouped into informational products by major conglomerates, and pedaled as ‘worldviews’ to unwitting consumers, who in turn invested their bits of collective trust and moved foolhardy into these straw cities. The plumbing was never connected, the lights were never turned on. You might mistake the glow of consolidated resentment and raging sacrificial fires for the hearth of communal exchange; we call this partisanship. It’s a grade school exercise. A color war, mostly.
Leaders became slum lords, who would not relent, and they would not cede.
Meanwhile, amongst those who recognized themselves bankrupted, a separate economy formed. It trades in snark and irony. This is an especially worthless commodity when hoping to purchase absolution. Our payments are inverted; we are upside down, digging for the sky.
Free labor, gift labor, and intellectual honesty are highly leveraged against information as a consumer good. The passing of news is a boardroomed, back allied, byzantine glory hole of mouth-to-genital product pushing. We pass viruses. We mean to. We engineer them.
The balance sheet as societal load stone has inspired a talented conpiracy. The greatest minds of a society have went wild for market based descriptions of the infinite. This calculated godhead with an MBA has resulted in a hallow-eyed zombie republic self sucking its vitality down to the poisoned marrow. It was all predicted and diagnosed and predicted and diagnosed again. We are all complicit, and terrifically over valued. We are faced with insurmountable ethical and moral debt. We are adrift. And yet.
Happiness finds us. In bits and fragments.
Tiny exchange and human contact. Those things to which we cannot assign a value. Each is unique and significant in its novelty and spirit. Each relies on the mutual goodwill of giver and recipient. Each is transient—the ghosts of grace are not restrained to a body. But we hunt them anyway and try to learn their names, take their pictures, paint their homage, build them rooms in our homes, ask them, maybe, would they settle down with us. And fuck and breed.
It’s the goal of the artist to give form to the unknowable. Alchemy. To make land from smoke, and ascend the clouds. Gone to commune with spirits and pin prick points of light in the endless panoply of dark matter. How many will achieve and how many will burn up in the atmosphere depends both on the courage of the travelers, and also the toxicity of the sky.
This artistic sort of space travel is not independently sustainable. It is already compromised by the costs of production and the debts of the individual against his own and society’s resources. This is why each traveler must find his own decent way.
It is true that the most ambitious of spiritual explorers brings along the seeds of their own hypocrisy. Where ideas grow, a harvesting is imminent. But let us not disown our possible children because of their implicit mortality. Let each good producer, and each good idea breathe and flourish, come what may.
For those who can give, let us give. For those who are in need, let us take. Let each of us do both, in right proportion. Let us better cultivate a talent for measuring value, not by economic device, but individuated temporal conscience. Let us not leave out the weighing of our own souls.
Not because we believe in an afterlife, but because in this one we want to feel full and not hollow.
And if a creative caste with secular morality can exist; if we are not divorced before union, and if we can agree by loose semantics that something must divide soul from soulessness–let us work at that–proudly, and unrelenting, to know the difference.
