《滋你一脸》
多年来基本没看过几本有意思的书，所以自己写不出来长文，且也不屑老侧引。
然而最近有两篇觉得特别有意思，对口味，不觉想唠叨几句，心存念想，先引一篇其中段落，管中窥豹。
温文尔雅的文字不乏韵味，但写的口诛笔伐却是力量。从天王老子骂到自己，一气呵成，畅快淋漓。
在我看来，刊物之所以称之为喉舌，非歌功颂德，非流水记账，应有引领时尚之功，痛贬时事之能， 不拘小节，不避刀剑，展犀利文风，传不世精神。
于问题，如今现实中的诸多巨大问题（减排，温室，中美，病毒，等等），其实每个人都知道，每个人都有每个人的想法，所以没有固定答案，其实这个问题的问题就是：人类。 人类给这个星球带来的问题，如病毒给人的身体带来的问题是一样的问题：寄生还是灭亡。
于改变，世界永远在变，不变的，尘归尘，土归土；在变的，摇曳风中，忽暗忽明；没有人知道未来将会是什么，但肯定的是，未来源于今日和往日，至少当下的未来早已注定，明日的未来且看你如何对待明日。
如文始末，情绪自然流露，笔锋直攻不避，揭政治黑幕，拔财团钢牙，论时代思潮，求事件真相，用其言为：我们有线性思维，不再摇摆不定。
最终秩序使世界问题百出，地球千疮百孔，其溃败一目了然，不如让混沌盛行。
Toneshift
《ADBUSTERS》 — — V. 29 no 6
“And so it has come to this. We can pull off every Big Idea in radical playbook — invent true-cost markets, rid politics of secrecy, put corporations in their place, defang Big Finance.
But unless we get this next part right, none of it will matter. To survive through the 21st century we must come up with a new turn of mind, a new way to … inhabit this place.
&&&&&&
Every era has a vibe, an ambiance that permeates our experience. It is the stamp of what it feels like to be alive, the pulse of the zeitgeist. It’s an intangible thing, hard to pin down when you’re in it. But its gravitational pull is so strong that it bends history.
The beats gave us permission to be wild and carefree. The situationists taught us to live without dead time. The hippies pushed us back into nature. The punks tuned our radar for hypocrisy and our will to resist. The foot soldiers of Occupy Wall Street made us believe that world revolution is possible — — and set the tone for what’s to come.
More recently, movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have fundamentally changed the way we feel about the most intimate aspects of our daily lives, and what the human contract actually is.
Art and design movements — — from impressionism to Dada, De Stijl to design Anarchy — — come and go, catching the essential spirit of their time.
“Many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are aesthetic,” J.G. Ballard said, and of course he’s right.
But now, at the beginning of the 21st century, something feels ominously different. We find ourselves in a planetary endgame, a “code-red emergency” — — gripped by an existential tension the world has never seen. This calls for wild, urgent, creative, hair-on-fire innovation. Instead, we have …. straight-line thinking.
&&&&&&
……I thought: This is why the word is imploding. This is what straight-line thinking does: it kills everything it touches. It has no clue about the damage it’s doing.
Super-rationality. The master narrative of life on earth. A holdover from the Enlightenment, with no real course correction in 300 years. It is the worst tool imaginable for the job of pulling off a global mindshift. We shuffle into our apocalyptic circumstances with nothing but our buttoned-down executive brains. We speak in corporate jargon and technobites. Our while lives crushed down to probabilities, data points, Bayesian calculations. Run the numbers. Protect your priors. Quant it out. You can’t have enough pixels on your phone camera or memory in the cloud.
We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us. This is where we’ve ended up. The media engines we made have re-made us. We think in algorithms now — some of them sound, some of them unsound, but all of them running by themselves like headless chickens.
Frederick Hunterwasser famously said, “The straight line is godless and immoral,” and at Adbusters we’ve been coming back to that sentiment again and again because it seems to contain a magical aesthetic secret.
The logic freaks have had it their way for a very long time and all they have to offer is more of the same: more technology, more rationality, more consumption, more surveillance, more control.
But now suddenly, up from the greasy boiler room of the heart comes…a toneshift! Hyperationality rolls over and a touch of divine insanity creeps in:
To hell with straight line thinking — — let’s learn to wobble again!
This was the conclusion we came to at Adbusters, after we’d put a couple of issues in the can.
We’d started out as pretty much a clone of other commercial magazines on the newsstands. But we quickly realised that magazines like that were poisoned mindspace, because the ads rule. They disrupt the flow and kill the magic. So our first aesthetic decision was to never run ads.
Breaking rules is deliciously addictive — — you just keep going. Bit by bit over the next few years, we threw out all the conventions of commercial magazine publishing. We killed off the page numbers. (They’re just clumsy interruptions, like pulling out a measuring tape in the middle of sex.) We lost the table of contents, the department hears, the front-of-the book stuff. (On a fiery mind journey, who needs pronouncements?) We killed the letters section and sprinkled the letters throughout — — a very democratic move. We ripped stupid ads out of other magazines and plopped them in, hanging these companies with their own rope. We mucked with punctuation and grammar. (Why be so anal with language?)
Every which way we could, we abandoned the sanitised, soul-destroying modernist look.
What was this thing, tattooed with doodles and coffee spills, jammed with random poems and newspaper headlines snipped with sewing scissors? How do you even read it? From front to back or from both ends at once, colliding in the middle? It was more like a movie than a book. We’d grab our readers by the throat on the cover and never let go. We’d create a jump-cut in the human imagination, break the trance of modernism. You pick up the magazine and out falls a blackspot — — an anti-logo representing people power. Activists started putting them up on the wall. In the cities they replicated like spores, or told, nature reclaiming human minds.
What graphic design needs, we figured, is ten years of total turmoil, fuck-it-all anarchy. After that maybe it would mean something again.
In that spirit we hatched the First Things First Design Manifesto 2000.
Thirty years earlier, Uk designer Ken Garland had spear tipped a crusade basically accusing designers of selling our. Now we recreated his manifesto with a vengeance. We said to designers, Look: You are the most powerful people in the world. You are to the information age what engineers were to the age of steam, what scientists were to the age of reason. You set the mood of the mental environment — the look and lure of print, the tone and pull of TV, the knack and smack of the Net. You are the very form of the culture… the typesetters of thought … the editors of sentiment. So for chrissakes, start acting like it! Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand that you move away from just the marketing of products and toward the creation of a new kind of meaning. Instead of using your skills and imagination to sell sneakers, detergents, hair gel, butt toners, credit cards, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles — instead of kissing corporate ass — why not break out of the commercial design box and start playing around with the eco- and psycho-dimensions of the product-in-use. Nudge human behaviour in new directions. Steer us away from the hubris and self- destructive chaos of the planetary endgame. Design things that raise goosebumps on people’s skin.
Become a design anarchist! Create the new wobbly vibe that will save the world.
More than a thousand designers signed our manifesto, including 22 of the biggest names in that world. And as we talked to young designers in the years that followed, we could see their thinking scaling up.
We’ll use recyclable materials.
Nice, but it’s not enough.
We’ll work for nonprofits.
Okay, but what’s the vision?
We’ll work together to co-create the vibe that stirs people’s souls, disrupts their toxic routines and tips this whole human project toward justice.
Now you’re talking.
This is the pivot our whole culture now needs to make.
The aesthetic of our time needs to be kicked out of the orbit of its destructive formalism, its whoring corporate supplication. Dirty it up. Summon the trickster out of the shadows. Scavenge value from the margins, from the stuff we reflexively throw away. Generate an era of tumult that wipes out every remnant of the old vibe.
“Order has failed so let chaos prevail!”
And so, the grand reset begins.
&&&&&&
……As the temperature rises, screws tighten and the doomsday clock approaches midnight, all of us face a moment of reckoning, grappling with the most personal questions there are. Questions like: Would person would my children rather be around? Who’s more at peace? Who’s living more softly on the planet?
People have had it with culture and politics in hyper rational overdrive. They’re done with risk-management software, talking points on teleprompters and expertly concocted carbon-reduction plans that ultimately mean noting. (That is, they sound good but don’t actually make a dent in the problem.) We ache for proof that full-blooded living is still possible out there.
I think this explains why sixty million Americans voted for Donald Trump.
A lot of people were willing to forgive the crazy-ass stuff coming out of his mouth because they were sick of the law school elites running Washington. They were desperate for someone who shoots from the hip and doesn’t give a damn about making a mistake or being cancelled. Trump walked up to a gaggle of journalists every day like a trumpeter ready to play jazz — with no firm idea of what was going to come out of his horn.
Miles Davis once said: “The biggest challenge in jazz improvisation is not to play all the notes you could play, but to wait, hesitate — to play what’s not here.”
Trump did that. And that level of spontaneity was, in his hands, kind of black magic. That’s what made his base so passionate and his rallies so raucous. It’s how he was able to command incredible loyalty and keep his grubby little fingers on the levers of power.
Every one of us needs to learn to live a little more like that. When we Lefties demonise Trump, we lose the lesson: If you’re afraid of what the next note will be you’re not going to be able to play it. Pulling punches and playing defence all the time, like we’ve been doing for the past 20 years, that’s not going to get us anywhere. Sooner or later you have to learn how to play jazz and go for it.
One shot, one life!
&&&&&&
The way forward for humanity may well turn out to be a new mode of guerrilla activism, one that’s less about street fighting and more about spiritual insurrection.
Maybe we will simply let go … cultivate a certain looseness of mind … “Live suddenly without thinking,” as e. e. cummings put it … and fall into whatever comes next.
Which is what?
Nobody knows … but it’s tantalising to speculate.
Maybe we’ll start reversing a lot of things … shed many of the constraints we never asked for and choose their opposite. The stuff of the real world over digital simulacra. Traditions over fads, mystery over certainty pathos over logos, listening over pontificating, child’s play over exegesis, the collective over the individual yin over yang, sharing over consuming, the long-time horizons of the planet over quick payoffs and indulged cravings.
Maybe as the techno-rationalist Western vibe wilts at the task before it, the so-called WEIRD vibe of the rest-of -the -world — -communitarianism, family, tradition, faith — will rise as an alternative.
Maybe the new vibe will be a maker vibe — — more about creating (which makes you powerful) than about consuming (which gives away your power).
Maybe we’ll opt for small rather than imposing things. Muted colours. Understatement. Not the action but that pregnant moment before the action.
Maybe we’ll abandon the spectacle … and revel instead in the intimacies of everyday life: the touch of a lover, a chat with a bright-eyed stranger, a quiet moment in the wild?
Maybe the old American dream about prosperity will morph into a new one about spontaneity?
Maybe we’ll learn to start having ;;; fun again. Just crazy, uninhibited fun. (where did that go?)
Whatever form it ultimately takes one thing is clear:
Nomo is the project of our century. And in its emergence, just maybe, will be the answer to a question that has not yet been answered: Is capitalism with empathy even possible?
”
