Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam.

A lot of us feel lost.


"Where the hell am I??!!"

We're reaching out to one another, blind, from behind fences and walls and computer screens. Like a West Bank that just never stopped, we inhabit countless gated communities, and if we're to continue this simile, the dangerous world outside is like our own personal Arafat-era Palestine. We're stealing their land to build more cellphone towers and to house acres of servers, and wind-farms. And art galleries.

But what makes this world so dangerous to us? What is it about the world that makes us feel so fake when we're out in the thick of it?

We still go shopping, we still socialise. We're not so scared to go outside really. And yet the trend unfolds, that we increasingly limit our interactions with other people, opting to Myspace or Friendster or online date, or blog. We lie a lot, too.

Like lonely ham radio operators back in 1985, we repeat our callsigns endlessly, hoping a disembodied voice from Siberia will reply, and send us a card in the mail.

It's easier than actually going to Siberia. Or Lithuania, or anywhere else most kids from next door could not point to on a map if you gave them all day.

So what is this fear? And where does it originate from? What are we searching for?


Oh, it's big allright!

From the 60's, to the late 90's, it was common practice to talk about the 'fabric of society', the texture of our culture. We heard the words 'global village', we saw the Benetton ads, and we ran with the term. We embraced it, we liked it.

We saw the advantage to diversity, and reaped the reward of all this fresh culture that came with cosmopolitan living. Thanks to the internet, I have online friends in the Arctic wastes of Alaska, who shop from the same stores you do, and wear what you wear, and probably have the latest album from whoever we all like this week before you have it. They have ultra fast cable connections, and through them, they both share in and are co-opted by, the new melting pot of culture.

But as great as it is to be accepting of other people's ways, and as fresh as it is to eat sushi now, or even remember a time when you couldn't get it anywhere, the downside is this:

This texture of our culture has become so complex and confusing to us, that we don't feel we own it any more.

We are adrift in a sea of other people's food, fashion, music, art, you name it. And they are adrift in ours.

More than ever we know who we are, and what we want.

We want exactly what everyone else has got, only more of it and the latest version. And we are the net result of that neverending search to obtain it all.

We gather as much as we can, and hide it in our iPods and hard drives, and never listen to one one-hundredth of it. We're cultural squirrel/vultures. Compulsive collectors. Hoping one day we'll get what all this stuff is, that we seemingly love so much. We hoard it all away in the hope someone will come along and tell us what it all means, where it came from, how it fits together, and what in the world we can actually do with it.

Frank Zappa said it best.

And yet, how much of it do we understand? How much is real and comfortable to us, as opposed to being novel and "now!"

Why do I know who 'Banksy' is, when Banksy lives in England, and likes throwing up stencils? i don't know my neighbours. Not one of them.


"Mmm! Culture!"

You know what?

It's not us that is lost, it's the culture around us.

We're still standing here, working hard to make sure the Industrial Revolution wasn't all for nothing. We're still 'monkey-see'ing/monkey do-ing' just like we've been trained to since the 50's. We've traded DVD for video, and home theatres for the movie cinema and the intermission (remember those?), but we still have both eyes on the screen, either way.

It's the world that got lost. It lost control and careened headlong into a billboard for pharmaceuticals you don't need, starring a reality tv star that just as easily could have been you.

And what's with that?

What's with the new talent all being people we used to surf with, beat up at school, or whos boyfriend we used to fuck secretly on sundays? it makes the insult of our collective ( and somehow entitled) lack of fame even more injurious, that we missed out by such a close margin.

We all still live on streets, in suburbs, drive cars or ride bikes, go to work, eat out, pick up, and throw down.

But the word from upstairs has suffered a serious case of Chinese Whispers (is it un-p.c. to say that now?), so we don't know who to be in relation to it all. Like the world is a mass of swirling foam, or a crowd disaster, and we're getting swept away in a massive tidal wave of...well...nothing really.

Nothing that we can easily comprehend anyway.

But it sounds great, and it tastes good. And I look amazing wearing it. Even if it is what my Dad wore when he was a struggling painter in Amsterdam in 1967.

Our notion of culture is not only beamed-in from wherever the Hell overseas it came from, it is even exhumed from times in history when we were all either not born, not yet into puberty, or were completely different people in a lot of cases we'd like to forget, or simply leave behind.

We have become the grave robbers of someone else's zeitgeist.

We're getting nostalgic for experiences most of us never even experienced in the first place!

Nostalgia is big business to style merchants, so it's no small wonder a lot of us are feeling a little confused when our televisions and radios regurgitate relics of yesteryear onto us, as if we not only ever got it the first time around, but were even there.

The cultural paradigm we came to expect in the 80's, and rebel against in the 90's, is breaking up, not only through diffusion and redistribution, but through a hole torn through the time/space continuum by Saatchi and Saatchi.

I thought we were all getting rocket cars?

When I saw 'I, Robot', and by "saw", I mean "downloaded from a bit-torrent site", I couldn't understand why it was up on screen, instead of in my actual world. But that's probably just me. Tech like that clearly has to wait until we have developed better weight-loss drugs and fought wars with people who have unpronounceable names.

Beside the point, which is, "So we go ahead and set up our sites, and broadcast to the world that we too, are relevant, and display our talents or our passions, or our depravity (always a crowd-pleaser!), and watch that little blue Gmail notifier icon in the system tray for a sign of incoming responses."

Is this what we are now?

Pure stimulus/response engines?

Is this why we make art or music or whatever mess our predelictions dictate?

So we can be validated by people we may never ever meet?

I will be watching my Gmail notifier icon intently for your responses.




This is knifey, from 'the internet'.