I think I read somewhere or came to the expectation that values would converge - maybe because of the speed of communication, our increased mobility, our common tongue...

I was wrong.

Society doesn't move backwards or forwards - it moves sideways like a crab. Buckminster Fuller used to hope for that day we could move directly towards our needs, but a man embedded in tetrahedrons and spin should have realized we're always in orbit orthogonal to something we're zipping past.

We were more together in 1970 than we are today. We shared an outlook, a community, an artform, an abstract language of music and dress and movement and color. I read that Janis Joplin didn't just want to be a singer - she wanted to be an artist, including all the intellectual implications and requirements back then. You had to read, think, listen, talk with people man, travel, take the journey... And of course fuck. And commune. And spiritualize. We were cynics and believers, hustlers and the hustled.

We. I want to talk to "us", but I don't even know who "us" is. I've travelled a long way since my youth, physically and mentally and philosophically. I have trouble even reading or listening to this stuff from the past, these archaic runes... Yet these lines, these throwaway lines bubble up... "Giving head on a bed in the Chelsea Hotel"... I'm a hippie, I'm a punk, I'm a goth, I'm a Gen-X'er, a lesbian folkrocker, a psychedelic hiphopper, I'm a grunge artist, I'm a dot-com internet surfer, devOps, anarchic hacker, I'm a post-modern millennial. Oh wait, that last one I am not (yet?).

From Rolling Stone (remember them? Jan Wenner? Hunter Thompson? Almost Famous?), for the first time in 130 years, more 18-34 year olds are living with parents than with partners.

But maybe I am a millennial - maybe we don't distinguish anymore - I'm content with my kids, my kids are content enough (eye roll) with me, unlike days of old it doesn't really matter - "whatever" is the crie de coeur.

Language, ritual, need. I remember an ungodly almost 30 years ago a 13-year-old coming up to me in café pleading for me to explain existentialism to her. Now. It was beautiful, the same way I felt when up all night trying to parse Gödel Escher Bach or El Topo or the first Velvets' album or Beckett or Lovecraft or Autobiography of a Yogi or... I once lived in a flat with "My Art Belongs to Dada" stamped everywhere. My life belonged to Dada.

I don't know where I'm going with this post - I just have a waft of the past and the indifferent present - all the "culture" that's there but not there, significant, monetized, normalized, sometimes weaponized... but not so much inspirized.

I saw a clip of Bowie in a museum recently, where he had taken the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up method and had someone program it to churn out more, effortlessly. It's like speed reading the Bhagavad Gita - it's soul destroying, or not even - it's just soul genericizing, like Soma but now in a no-brand cheaper version with new-and-improved dispenser and matching mobile app.

The psychology, the study of the mind, the epistemology and social behavior I loved is now a bunch of analytics recipes that work not on individualization, but on clumped mass behavior. Someone understands how it works - I with all my education am still struggling. Not because it's beyond me, but because I just don't care. It's like Leary's futuristic stimulus that plugs directly into our mental G-spot, but I'm tired of the mental masturbation, the things that are supposed to intrigue and inspire if you just click here, and more thrilled when I run across an accident off the grid, off the ad banner.

At the fade of "Childhood's End", the new generation starts a slow complex mass dance, oblivious to their surroundings, to pain and suffering, to their forebears, to the other, to the planet, to future.

We've invested a lot in technology - our hopes, dreams, solutions, genius. We like our heroes, but our heroes are an anachronism - we know the solution should come out of the system, out of cooperation and mass action. But somehow those 2 lonely figures are stronger to me than a million likes, a terabyte of data, a Googleplex of instant search.

"Giving head on a bed..." Winston and Julia, finding a small bit of solace in a mechanized, automated world.

I love Big Brother.