Public culture is at this moment, virtual. The politicians, celebrities, talking heads, the people with the international microphones… most of them seem helplessly not actual. When they open their mouths a language comes out that seems programmed at some point in the past, trying to make a future by growing it from a data set. Lately, the sounds of voices cross back and forth in the mediasphere and the echoes have a hard, brittle quality.
The feeling is that the people ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ in the glare of some kind of light – they create a world that is so diseased by Artificial Intelligence that vibrancy, touch, heart – has left the building and the elites are stranded like robots on a red carpet to nowhere. The bright future is made of good chaos, quite beyond stupid simulations. We want to return to the actual, to our friends and neighbors and loved ones. They are more fascinating because they are more surprising, complex, human.
The larger than life celebs need to remember the life they wanted to be larger than. Someday maybe there will be a re-invention of public life and once again we will be drawn to the glowing beauties who pull the focus… but what’s the hurry? The fact is, as a matter of desperate urgency, we need to discover another kind of ‘public’.
The survival of life depends on our carrying the news of the Earth’s storms and fires to everyone. It may be a fool’s errand to generalize about an atmosphere of public culture. It is important, though, to point out how the life and death messages aren’t getting through to the larger population. We don’t need famous actors. We need planet criers. Not enough public people in the United States are forcefully representing the crisis of the physical environment. Well, they should be motivated. They will disappear in the Sixth Extinction like the rest of us.
There is already a better replacement for celebrity culture. It’s a kind of earthy religion, carrying the message of the Earth with our friendships, relationships where we share our bodies, immerse in a common sense-field of sight and sound, smell and taste, memories and touch and the array of intuitions and dreams and feelings we can’t explain or monetize but – we get all this when we return to actual love.
Rev. Billy