(via supersonicelectronic)

We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives.  The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of  human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level.  American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns.

I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention:  post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit.  From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city.

In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen.

This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace.

The dream becomes reality.

(no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”)

Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…