From Point A to 6 in Two Hours (Why are downloaded songs all lowercase?)

Joel Arken
Fellow Joseph Plourde
Freshman Seminar
5 October 2009
The New School Reader: The Vices and 1964
Post-Modernism is dead. It started off dead and here we are, 2009. It’s still dead. Erich Fromm’s “Our Way of Life Makes Us Miserable” was a quick, concise accusation of modern man. It echoes Walter Benjamin’s theses of distraction from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation.” We are a diverted, disturbed people. Fromm’s piece was written in the beginning of an overhaul of commodity and consumerism. He weathered the ‘50s, but if he only knew what was to come.
That is to say, Fromm didn’t know how right he was. He wrote that “our present way of life leads to increasing anxiety, helplessness and, eventually, to the disintegration of our culture.” Most negative aspects that plagued “This Modern Era” of the sixties, the overabundance, the use and abuse of toxic intoxicants, and the alienation of man through technology, have all grown to newfound, extraordinary versions of their previous selves.
We have become the fattest and most grotesque nation because of the overabundance of food, and poverty has stricken the poorest of us with the least healthy food, leading to obesity in the ones who can fight it least. We have an abundance of medicine, but only those working, and Not even All of those, have access. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 30,000 suicides occurred in 2006. I myself bore witness to two in my high school, within a year. We have abundance of therapy, self-help books, life coaches, but the amount of those identified with neuroses and disorders is growing.
Physical abuse is still common. Drug abuse is more prevalent than it has ever been. Meth has replaced heroin in the war on drugs. Pharmaceuticals have replaced cocaine as the drug of the affluent. Marijuana and alcohol begin to be abused in middle elementary schools. Culture-bound syndromes of eating disorders, shopping disorders, attention disorders and the like are finding their place in the American lexicon.

Anything can be found online. Books can be sold, bought, downloaded, ripped, stored, stolen, and read all without thinking about stepping near a library. Information is everywhere. Where the internet was a military operation, it is now a poorly-sourced book of all information one could ever need. Advertisements are on every medium, save public broadcasting.
Machines that once were used and implemented by man have made some jobs, careers, futures obsolete. Computers buy, sell, steal, or give. Automation is the new feature in supermarkets, in theatres, in workplaces for security. Everything is faster; everything is more efficient.
Maybe it’s that nothing has changed that bothers us nostalgic types. The symptoms are worse, the diagnosis, more severe, but if I know one thing, it’s that cynicism is dead, too. Hope is the new black. We are the new “I.” Community is coming back in a new way. Thousands want to dedicate themselves to enrichment of life, to art, to ‘super-lienation.’ We are becoming constant and perpetual machines of interest, of power, of influence and interest. Testimony is the invention of this new century. I’m no Buddhist, but there is balance out there, it’s the duty to find it, share it (for free, of course), exploit it, gain it, and become it.

We have inherited death and dying and internalized it, externalizing hate and greed and doubt, but so self-consciously. We are the new dead, but we don’t know otherwise.