our+culture?+the+research+of+gerore+teskat

our culture? An insight into modern american culture In my dealings with the amazingness of the United States of America I have found that there is one overarching and deeply involved problem of this country that plagues all of us and has and will probably forever diminish the modern american being; that is the crisis of Modern American Culture. In our present state we have diminished the truly artistic and beautiful to a mere side note on the page of history and thusly started the total annihilation and all out war against all that originally made this country a thriving nation full of something for everyone. We have become a society of sheep. We are who Nietzsche was postulating would exist when he decided to pen Beyond Good and Evil. We are the herd. In this paper I will attempt to discuss this crisis offering a fuller and more in depth analysis into the problem and giving it a philosophical once over by adding in the arguments of such people as Marx, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill in an attempt to discover how we may help ourselves out of the hole we have dug thus far. In the book Free Culture Lawrence Lessig talks about the idea of copyright as being a deformed vision of what it was originally supposed to be. In the Constitution originally a copyrighted work was to stay protected for twenty years after which it would fall into the public domain. The idea was that after twenty years on the market the value of a work would have depreciated to the point where allowing it to drift into the public domain would in essence give the work a new life; one where it would be free to be molded, changed, reformed, and refitted, to best allow other people to get some use out of it. In the public domain all would benefit from the work and could transform it until it best suited their needs and became something a little more that what it was originally. Ideas and their products would flow like beer and hot dogs. They would be available to anyone who could get access to them on even the most basic of levels and even more they would be able to be broken down, dissected, and metamorphisized into a wholly new entity. It would look a lot like what Mill had in mind when he was first envisioned the marketplace of ideas. People would be able to pick and choose what it was they wanted to have, they would take from this give to that and exchange with others. It would be not a society, but a community; A community of people not a society of entities. Those involved in the community would benefit from their own work and the work of others. It is often said that the best way to learn how something works is to take it apart. In a community where ideas and culture are freely shared and no one entity or group of phantom giants assumes ownership, and in turn makes it impossible for us to "take apart" the pieces of our culture to discover just how it works. This "taking apart" of culture is an essential part to experiential learning. It is learning by doing. How better are you to grasp abstract concepts than by seeing them enacted before your very eyes? One can sit and ponder all day about the inner workings of an automobile, but until he takes a closer look and experiences how it works through taking it apart he really has no idea what it is that makes a car go. He is simply an observer allowed to look, but not to touch, forever a child in the world. This is much like the common man of Modern America. A being eternally locked in the infancy of culture not allowed to explore or go outside the lines, but forever trapped and encapsulated by the architecture, norms, laws, and market which rule his everyday life. The reason for man's devolution is simple. The growth of his culture has been forever stunted by those who saw a value in something and snatched it up. Much like those who Rousseau would have imagined come out from the state of nature as the rich. In the state of nature man was free and equal to do whatever he wished and he did such things. But then over time certain people began to accumulate more goods than others through thriftiness and other characteristics. Those people then began to desire what the others had and in doing such lured them into a contract of sorts in which they set the terms so that it seemed to benefit all parties involved, but this was not the case. The rich exploited the poor and used them simply as means to an end. Much like the media giants of today use the consumer to their advantage. They see each individual not as such, but as no more than another past, present, or future customer for them to exploit until their needs are met. This exploitation is what drives the almost schizophrenic nature of modern capitalist/consumerist society. Man can no longer separate what he is, from what he does. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels foreshadow this exact occurrence that is at present happening in America. "In bourgeois society capital is and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." It is the items in their pristine wrappers, and individual sizes that have become just that, individual; while the worker becomes another cog in a machine. He has become the means of production. His individuality has been lost. It was forfeit for his capital, for his nest egg, for his living room straight out of an IKEA catalogue. But this is what everybody wants is it not? To have, to own, to be comfortable in life. But as Palahniuk said "The things you own, end up owning you." This is the crisis of modern american man: our culture is not ours. We did not come up with it instead it has been forced on us from above. Those who are in control and endlessly in search of the blank slate of man have pushed a culture that suits them onto us. They have understood all too well that the key to controlling those you have power over is to control their culture. When they were given power in Chile and other parts or the world they told people that being autonomous was great and that to really be free they should be individuals and put themselves above the rest. And they did not only become autonomous, but in addition became automatons; Drones whose sole reason for existence was to provide for those above them. We must rise up against the culture that has been handed down to us from on high, and that we have almost willingly accepted as our own. Those in control of the culture that we are fed on a daily basis would tell us that it is bad to go against them. That the culture we have daily been exposed to is what it really means to be American and that to abandon it would be a loss to the society as a whole. But to them Marx and Engels have already replied saying "[t]hat culture, the loss of which he laments, is for the enormous majority a mere training to act as a machine." We the people are machines, and can and will be replaced by better ones when the time comes and they are developed. This disconnection of humans from their work is something that has been a long time coming. We have slowly been pushed farther from the Renaissance men we once were and into a society that is full of experts. Each person has become something smaller and part of an indescribable whole. We have gone from being people who could do a multitude of varying things to becoming unitaskers. Now there are people who know how to make a wheel, others who build axles, still others who build this part and that part, but no one knows how to build a car. We have become separate from our work and in doing so we have become separate from each other. But as I had said this transition did not occur overnight, there was a starting point. It started when the culture that we had once embraced became changed forever. When we stopped valuing community and started prizing individuality. When we became enamored by one stop shopping. When you could pick up apples, diapers, televisions, and new clothes at the exact same place and at the same time your car was getting an oil change, and you were cashing your check without going to more than one building. The day there were more Walmart's in a town than schools. That's when the culture that was truly american became the hollow shell it is now. But why is this bad? The average person loves the convenience that this type of experience affords. They love the ability to get everything all at once. They love not moving, but instead standing in place while everything comes to them. But what most people fail to recognize is the disconnect that this produces and the harm that comes with it. It may seem as though the Walmartization of America could produce the highest good for the highest number of people as Mill wishes would happen in a utilitarian state, but the really fact is that it harms more than it produces good. It separates the person from themselves and from their place. When everything looks the same then how can you tell what's real? The artificial good that is produced comes from the harm that is placed on those who are buying, and those who produce what is bought. For we must buy to survive, and we must survive to produce, and we must produce so that we may buy. Life becomes a cycle of sweat, shop, sleep, repeat. Man becomes disconnected from the means of production in a real sense and instead simply becomes the means of production. He toils away at no end, and no avail, for reasons unbeknownst to him. He is disconnected from the land that he once cared for so it would in turn care for him. Instead of caring and tending the land we lock away small parts of what we call nature in hopes of preserving it instead of living in and with it as we once did. We strive to make nature yet another commodity that we can buy and sell. We vacation, and go RVing to get back to nature. But in reality we go to look at a postcard and then turn away to the comforts that we bring from home. Instead of enjoying nature we sit in RV camps and watch tv with the people next door. We swim in the pre-approved chlorinated, filtered pools instead of the lake one hundred yards away. We sleep on our fold out beds instead of on the luscious fields of grass right outside. We lie at night and stare at the peeling crème paint on the ceiling instead of the thousands of stars speckling the night sky. We have taken the nature out of nature and made it too a convenient and easy weekend getaway. This idea is not wasted on the real world either. Everyday millions of people log on and link up to some of the largest "vacations" imaginable. They do it in search of one of the most primitive things that we could ever want: simple human interaction. We are forgoing our real lives and immersing ourselves in our second one's there we are free from most of the things that constrain us in the real world. We are willing, able, allowed, and even encouraged to do things we' not even dream of doing in the real world. Visiting the Louvre or Yankee Stadium is just a click away. If we are unhappy with who we are or how we look we can simply become someone, or something that we may never have had the possibility of being before. We are free to explore and do things that are otherwise illegal. We can finally let loose and enjoy ourselves in unprecedented ways. We become disentangled from the web of norms and can explore ourselves sexually as well. In this virtual world we attain a new sense and kind of freedom that was not possible a few short years ago. We are free to be the unique snowflakes that we once posited we should be. We rebel silently with the taps of a keyboard and clicks of a mouse. We are allowed to finally attain a level of culture that is our own and that we revel in every second of it. The culture that is mass produced and shipped out all across the seas daily by huge multimedia corporations is not ours, we find in our virtual world an outlet that allows us to create and control any and everything we could have ever wanted to. Culture is allowed to us and we soak it up we immerse ourselves in the sea of vast possibilities. We create property of our own, or do we? Some people in Second Life create items and clothing that is an exact or near exact replica of items that are found in the real world. They simply copy those images that they have seen day in and day out and port them into the virtual world that is before them. Many people would call this stealing and would like to see those people in Second life who are creating these items stopped. Those people are for the most part the same ones who quash our culture in the real world every day. They see us, creating as we should be allowed to do, and instantly demonize and criminalize us for doing so. They say it is ours we made it first and you have no right to do with it what you are doing. I would agree, but something in me says that there is something different about what the people in this virtual world are doing. For John Locke property and the right to property comes about through your use, creation, and manipulation of it. In other words something becomes yours through your putting work into it. If you plow a field, and plant corn in it then that field is yours. If you take a stone and carve a statue out of it that statue is yours. So if you took an object and created it anew would it also be yours? To be more specific if you take a Boston Red Sox hat for instance and recreate it out of a few objects that you created in a virtual world, would that hat be yours or would it be the sole property of the person who created it in this, the real, world? These are the problems that plague me and other users of the software. The answer I'd like to say is yes it is yours you created it so it should be yours, but in reality it's much more complicated. Due to the strict enforcement, loose reading, and ridiculous elongation of copyrights and copyright terms. What you have done in the virtual world, though what you created is made completely through your own work, skill, and in essence materials, is stealing. You have stolen the property of the person who originally filed a copyright for the material that you have copied, even though some people would say that you have altered it in a very significant way it is still not yours. This idea starts to bring us full circle. What we had once viewed as our escape as our rebellion against those in charge, has simply become another way for them to suck value out of something we at one time found useful. Just as they always do they will come in and regulate, and change, and manipulate this world until the squeeze every available amount of profit out of it, then continue on to see what other parts of our culture, our world, and our consciousness they can destroy. Rip /Burn /Repeat. This has become the new policy of corporate america. And in turn the Rip /Mix /Burn culture that once flourished in our land has been slowly subjugated to the perverse incentives of a nation of greed and a culture of automatons focused solely on the creation of wealth. The problem is how and when can we hope to escape this cyclical devil that the corporations and their manipulation of copyright have created. When will enough be enough? What will it take for the people in charge to realize that they are suffocating those they said they would protect or that they claim to be helping? I think it just may take something like Project Mayhem to press the reset button on culture. In Fight Club the individuals who build come together in the community of project mayhem take it upon themselves to release us from our consumerist prison cells. Their incessant want to purge consumerism and our fixation with the "correct" form of culture from our minds with their ultimate goal of destroying the bank and the museum; Killing two proverbial birds with one stone. The re-evolution of man may have to come from something charred that rises from the ashes of our prior civilization. The destruction of all that confines us in our expression of culture may be what sets us free. "[T]he liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception." We are in need of a liberator someone who can and will break free of this perception of consumerist culture as the only culture. We need some way to explore and to delve into ourselves and come up with something new and all our own. We don't need the same things repeated day in and day out, but instead a re-evolution of man. We have come to the turning point in our culture where we must look back and say what is this and is it what we want? Do we wish to continue with tradition and keep repeating the indoctrination of consumerist /capitalist culture in ourselves, or do we wish to explore the possibilities of a free culture? Are we to finally have something we can call our culture? The avenue of Second Life is a promising one, but with new rules getting ready to go into effect it will be a chance for some truly experiential learning. As the game comes to the forefront as it promises to do will art imitate life as the saying goes? It seems as though they question may have already been answered for when i look at the research of my fellow classmates it seems as though with all our unlimited resources and choices we tend to lean more towards those that we would make in real life, with some exceptions. From the work of The Untitled Misfits and more specifically that of Garbage Dumpling and his research on Image it seems like some people still can't escape from the consumerist nesting instinct and need to have their virtual mid-life crisis as well as a real one. And from the research of The A Team and their look at Marriage and the family in Second Life it seems as though some people will never be complete unles their virtual side has a soul mate as well. The re-evolution of culture will be interesting to watch for in the coming days and it is my hope that we will finally find something that we can call our own something free of the consumerist /capitalistic nature that so strongly purveys all the culture we have at present created. It seems as though there might possibly be something more to Second Life than meets the eye. In the end here in Second Life it will take a good look at the Modalities of constraint, i.e. the norms, laws, architecture, and market, to decipher the future of this virtual world. Will it be the corporatist dream running rampant, or will we find that the modalities are relaxed just enough to allow some form of transmission of our culture. 3,092 words and counting