extradego

It's hard to see how this is the future without experiencing it in some way personally.

Facebook Groups connected me with fans of a particular kind of fringe art about 4 years ago and made leaving Facebook really difficult. This might seem exceedingly anecdotal, and I get that, but you have to realize that, before Facebook, it would have been impossible for any of us to even know this interest existed; much less that there were others also into it. Nothing in the cultural canon quite sufficed, although some trends in music and literature had come close, none of them quite articulated the thing. Finding the thing was a necessary part of a certain stage of my life, and gave me a psychological grounding that something mainstream might never could have. I think admitting so actually devalues the spectacle in question, but I can't deny it. There was a value in the fact that this small group of people spoke this unique language. We became something like a tribe.

Attention economics are strange and only beginning to define our lives. Younger people will depend on fringe engagements to achieve a sense of self-identity that used to be a given. Life experience is going to take a new shape accordingly.

I think early evidence of this is in music scenes, which is haphazardly often the case with forms of sociocultural influence. No conventional wisdom can explain the proliferation of indie music and things like tape labels but these things are massive forces. They just genuinely don't care what you think. They have an audience and it's up to you to be a part.

Mastadon is strangely ahead of the curve and probably doing a poor job of meeting in the middle. I think it would benefit from shoving everyone into Mastadon.social at signup and letting them learn about instances from there. Finding a home is too difficult as it is. But, eventually, it does look like the future.

But, remember the left chooses the hard road, not because they can but because it is moral.

Regardless, Trump is absolutely a fascist. It seems a bit futile to disagree.

I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.

In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...

I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.

EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?

You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it.

(Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)

Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.

Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.

Even worse. Many people say they “don’t have anything to hide” because they too haven’t considered the vast consequences regardless of having something to hide. For starters, when the data is inaccurate, you might have something to hide that even you didn’t know about, and it could be responsible for all sorts of events and opportunities in your life both public and private without you even knowing. Things that give you an different life experience than your friends to an unknown degree. This sort of lack of knowledge, control, deprivation of explanation or closure etc. would be the lived experience of chaos and it’s one of the most frightening parts.

And of course we can’t make honest claims to democracy until then either.

The topic of discussion here is not “social” but economic mobility. Let’s not mix them up so carelessly. Economic mobility is a measure of ability, or potential, not concrete events. To discuss “downward” economic mobility is to imagine wealth being forced upon these folk.

What is the difference between Bill Gates “philanthropy” and a corporate PR campaign? For example, why is “philanthropy” promoting MasterCard across Africa a great way to address inequality? It appears to have had opposite effects in the US. But even if it were effective: philanthropy?

In case nobody gets the joke: the economic system was the plague.

By profiting on other people’s labor time; not their own.

But it also just happens that, in the US, 30 hours is just the right amount to forgo providing benefits and job security, so your proposal was not that far off.

Corporate corruption is the issue at the root of all of the above, very much including this Facebook mess.