Shopping Carts in Ravines

This is an essay on post-irony that I wrote, with my peers as intended audience, in November of 2005. I was just rereading old stuff and decided to repost it since the link to the oldest archive is now gone. This predates this blog and most of what I’ve observed/understood/thought/said about post-irony, so deal with that. I may have made a few very slight changes to update it.

November 14, 2005

keep quips quiet no dissent unless commodified irony’s

Chris Orbz - [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
im getting really sick of irony
everything is a joke to everyone
including everyone else dying and themselves dying
they dismiss everything with a wisecrack with no humour value and immense horror value, and then everyone laughs and waits for the next joke

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
i think this is the point we’ve gotten to yes
a tv show

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
yeah
like i was in the king david at york today and heard half a conversation

guy: how unhealthy?
girl: pretty unhealthy
guy: compared to diet pepsi
girl: okay, not THAT unhealthy
guy: jeez, that sure doesn’t make me feel good about the diet pepsi. but i got a bottle the size of the ones in the machines for a dollar, so at least im getting a discount in exchange for my health, hahahahaha

i wanted to smack him and yell don’t you see how moronic that is? are you really that fucking stupid?
and that’s everyone’s reaction to everything
i love when people use the ‘clever’ retort of ‘well, everything gives you cancer’
i’ve gotta say i think television has outdone the nuclear bomb as the worst invention of all time

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
is it the invention itself, or the way it’s used
because the nuclear bomb can only be used for mass destruction
television could have been used for anything

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
i dont buy this crap about tv being potentially good

i guess it could’ve been used for education
but i dont know about that
a computer does everything good a tv could much better
tv is continuous and one-way

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
not anymore with rogers digital cable
now you own your tv
and you can bring it on to the subway and stuff
and in your car
i think not all irony is a negative thing
although maybe it goes beyond irony what i’m thinking of
i guess it’s a positive thing if it provokes positive change
not just tells people EVERYTHING’S FUCKED!

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:

it doesnt do that any more though
people find it satisfying in itself
they go huhuhuhuhuh
and they’re done

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
sort of the fact that they know it satisfies i guess
makes people think they’re on the winning side because they get it

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
liking supersize me while having the mcdeals memorized

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:

yah that happens a lot
and now mcdonalds is putting health information on the boxes

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
ha ha ha look my lungs look like this picture
im gonna die ha ha hacking cough

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
do you believe that maybe for every 100 people who do see it even a few of them change?
because like Will quit cigarettes because of that sort of thing
and however innaffective it might be if it gets to some people it might be worthwhile. The same way as the negative is true.
For example like sprite releases an ad right and everyone talks about how crappy and gimicky the product is, and they feel they win because they haven’t bought into it. But this is missing the point of the ad. Because that one time or those one or two times that you do buy it is directly because of the ad because you now recognize the brand.
but you think you’ve won because you’re conscious of it

Chris Orbz ~ [Insert cleverly self-referencing post-modern statement here] says:
thats on every cigarette package though, that doesnt work for most things

that’s an issue of 100% meme saturation

if 99 cigarette packs say MMMM DELICIOUS and 1 says cancer, no one will notice the cancer one
although the ratio when you’re dealing with issues and things is way beyond that

if you can’t afford to wrap an entire subway station in ads its barely worth it to even try to advertise

that which describes the essence of my being at the moment says:
yah true i suppose

in the past, i’ve already tried to outline the post-irony bit in the following way:
- modernism is writing something clever and subversive on a billboard.
- postmodernism is writing the text “something clever and subversive” on a billboard.
…what’s the next step beyond that?

it’s hard to put clearly into thoughts and words, since what has
developed of postirony is only becoming clear over time, and much of it
has not even developed yet. this is still far from the popular state of
mind at this point. do you still find ‘internet humour’ funny? or are
you one of us who think that maybe there’s only so much stuff that can
be cranked out on automatic, and that it’s getting rather boring?
i no longer find comedic pieces of culture funny - but i find the whole culture unbelievably hilarious… i can barely stand to be in the room when other people are watching television, but i could spend an hour flipping through 5 cropped seconds of everything and wish i had it recorded afterwards.
the stuff online that is intended to be funny, i don’t really find all that funny. but a google image search for any random word can have me rolling on the floor from the results.

i can maybe convey, if not explain, a facet of postirony through art. this won’t be a comprehensive philosophical outline, but perhaps this will help extend one part of your mind into it so that you can begin trying to feel your way around it that way i’m trying to do.

first and foremost, although moving away from the as-weird-as-possible, “weird for weird’s sake” nature of postmodernism must inherently be a move towards some sort of normalcy (alex shakar might not necessarily agree), this can’t simply be a reversion to previous modes of thought. it has to come out of extending postmodernism until you reach the point of breaking away from it significantly enough that it is something classifiable different.

^ i would describe this video as a piece of postirony art (in fact,
i’d apply that to much of the here’s my card records library, such as
bodybreakcore)
it seems postmodern in that it comes off as “weird for the sake of
weird,” but (and maybe this is as much perspective as it is the
subject) to me it isn’t really that. for one thing, i submerged myself
so deeply in postmodernism that this doesn’t even seem weird to me any
more, in the same way that breakcore now just sounds like drums to me.
this uses culture in a way that is both similar to and different
from the typical postmodern approach. the difference being the irony.
when postmodernism uses a piece of culture, it chooses a specific piece
of culture which, placed in a new context, creates a specific message
out of the sum total of the original piece of culture and the new
context. if you aren’t familiar with the original piece of culture, you
won’t “get it.” you are required to be familiar with it in order to
understand and appreciate it properly.

postirony use of culture, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily
require that you be familiar with it in order to appreciate it. in the
case of the get crackin’ video, it is jam-packed with snippets of
culture, however they aren’t quite cultural references. rather than
being specific references with which you must be familiar, they are
simply a collage of late 20th century mainstream culture. the impact
that it manages to pull off isn’t based on the viewer being familiar
with the specific video clips that are used and “getting” the
connection, “getting” the irony of the juxtaposition -
instead, it relies on the viewer having spent their life
being overinundated with the medium of television. not simply
the content, but the perception of the medium through life. those of us
who have at least as many hours of television memory as real-life
memory have minds that are very carefully honed to television, along
with all of its patterns and idiosyncracies. far from being a random
collage of television images, these television images are put together
based on how the specific aesthetics of each will instantly and subconsciously impact the overinundated.

do you see how that is a step beyond postmodernism, as it is based
entirely on being exposed and overexposed and hyperoverexposed to
postmodern culture? rather than using wit and irony to appeal to our
conscious minds, nwodtleM realizes that a lifetime of wit and irony
presented to us in repeated patterns have burned certain responses into
our brains, responses that are highly predictable due to the consistent
homogeny of media presentation and the overwhelming way in which it has
surrounded us our entire lives. he then simply pokes and prods at that
subconscious programming and is able to elicit consistent responses in
his viewers.

that’s why it all goes by so quickly. you’ll probably notice missy
elliott and madonna, and hey is that bruce willis? it doesn’t _matter_
if it’s bruce willis, except that when you see that image you have an
immediate reaction. there’s nothing special about madonna except that
when you see those images of madonna you react in a specific way
subconsciously, contributing to your whole reaction to the whole piece.
that’s why some things can be included for only a single frame -
it doesn’t matter if you see it long enough to know what it is, all you
have to do is see it long enough to see it and the necessary reaction
will be produced.

this video accomplishes two things:
one, it is interesting art in a novel contemporary way.
two, when you think as deeply about it as i do, it speaks volumes about the state of the human being at the turn of millennium.

another, much shorter way i can describe that:
i can’t stand watching any tv show whatsoever,
but i could flip channels all day long and never cease to be amused by four random seconds of everything.
it’s not the content of the subject matter, it’s simply the subject matter itself.

perhaps it’s something like this: “if there’s an explanation, i don’t want to hear it.”
i’m sick of the endless whys - can we have some real whats again?
just give me the painting and keep the damn preamble to yourself.
sadly, i’m still postmodern enough to feel the need to overanalyze
and thoroughly explain all of this, to be too self-aware, but i’ve got
my reasons for doing that here and by and large it’s become something i
no longer do. i do prefer to have something accomplish whatever it will
on its own, and leave it at that. talk is cheap (and everything else is
ignored). i could comment deeply on every single advertisement (britney
spears - the perfume) but i realize that if i truly care, it’s time to
move beyond that.

if you’ve gone so far into the deep end of postmodernism that
you’ve reached the bottom and are growing disinterested, or if you’ve
even gone a little further, i hope that those ideas about postirony can
help to draw your mind forward and give you a framework within which to
begin figuring your way around a new headspace… and maybe you’ll reach that point where you can stop framing your whole life as though it takes place within your “headspace”.

the postirony mindset is what comes of having spent your whole life
watching tv, but no longer currently watching it. (that’s kind of a
metonymy for the whole of mainstream, corporate produced “culture.” )

if you’re still able to actually sit and watch tv, you’re not
really there yet. but odds are you’re deep enough that you could be.
try disconnecting from mainstream media for a while - a month, ideally
a few months, a television season would be best. i’ll bet that once
you’ve broken out of the habit of wanting to watch tv in general, you
won’t even be able to watch it. if you find or feel that you need
motivation to or assistance with pulling the plug on your set, i’ll
refer you to www.turnoffyourtv.com

doing this will be a success first in that it’ll help pull you out
of being susceptible to most marketing, which will be a very healthy
move for your subconscious mind. our media culture is like radiation,
and thoughtful exposure to hours of repeated messages will burn them
into your brain just as much as brainless exposure to them would. this
includes self-image, world view, and addiction to and reliance on an
entirely consumption-based lifestyle. they know how to get inside your
head. you can’t outwit them because they’re not relying on outwitting
you in the first place. as well, you will escape the through-a-camera-”wow-this-is-crazy-its-like-a-movie-or-something!” way of seeing life. it will be the crucial first step towards reconnecting with reality and connecting with the future.

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?
To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?
America’s consuming love affair with television…
It serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse – news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion – and turns them into entertainment packages.

i say it’s time for a REAL, contemporary perspective on the issues
we’re faced with. the issues we’re all hyperaware of, some brand new,
some several decades old, ones modernism seriously made an attempt at,
but failed because those kind of straightforward, conventional tactics
may have accomplished something in the 60s, but that stopped being true
in progressive steps. first, it stopped being effective in creating a
solution to the problem at hand, and then second, it stopped being an
effective way of reaching people (due initially to their
disillusionment from failures and defeat, and then due to the whole
brainwashing thing i’m trying to call attention to).
so then people got cynical about that, but the truths still
remained true. unfortunately, people could only be reached through
irony… what amounts to the most successful political pieces as far as
our generation is concerned?

adbusters-style “subversion,” basically parody, wherein a marlboro cowboy may have a flaccid cigarette (the effectiveness can be noted in that health canada even copied that one) or an overhead view of an a.a. meeting is pictured with the chairs arranged to form the outline of a bottle of absolut vodka.

if you’ve picked up an adbusters recently, however, you may have
noticed that they now use real discussion about real history, real
issues, real tactics, and real modern lifestyles.
they’ve moved beyond irony.
it’s time you do too.
it’s time to put an end to this mass disconnection from real life, and it must start within each one of us.

every single one of you is among the smartest and most
well-informed beings that have ever lived on this planet.
unfortunately, you were also born into a culture where you’ve been
raised by television, newspapers and advertising, no matter how good
your parents were, and the result is that your phenomenal intelligence,
your record-setting IQ, is diverted to appreciating and
producing creative humour/entertainment while setting aside the most
vital things in the world as “boring.”

it’s time for you to start taking what you know seriously and start
making serious efforts to actually apply that knowledge in everything
that you do.

it’s not a joke any more.

When the Toronto Star says ‘Pressure builds to cut rates‘, what sort of pressure are they talking about?

There’s very limited bottom-up access in our political and economic systems.

They are almost never speaking of grassroots protest (that’s called disruption, not influence), and letter writing and phone-ins to political or media offices aren’t broadly representative.

I see a few answers to the question, “What pressure, exactly? From whom?”

• The traditional: Those who do bother to formally voice themselves in a coordinated way, which can reach from grassroots letter writing campaigns to special interest lobbying, exert a disproportional amount of influence on those in power.
• The neo-era approach: The media uses polling and more recently the blogosphere to judge actual mass opinion. (Technorati, etc)
• The ’90s media cycle: where media outlets need only watch one another to judge the ebb and flow of public opinion, as they were generating it, which is seemingly the most common at this moment. (Fox News reporting on Jon Stewart reporting on Fox News, etc)

When the headlines say “pressure builds”, step outside the mainstream media and judge whether this pressure really exists on the street and/or is felt in the parliament and boardrooms.

If it does not, ask - is this media outlet attempting to manipulate me and others through its position as ‘observer’?

Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine is looking like it’s got a lot more to it than No Logo, which was thick but mostly just a compiled observation of the anti-globalization and anti-capitalist tendencies that were already running pretty strongly through the public.

(When there’s tear gas in the streets of Seattle and Quebec City, a book or movie pointing that out is a little redundant, though in the future it will have historical value.)

This actually seems like it could be pretty valuable information for people to have to counteract this sort of mind control, whereas No Logo was a little bit trendhoppy.

Wonder what she means when she says the war in Iraq is the most privatized in history?

Update Sept 21: From an AlterNet interview with Naomi Klein:

The timing of The Shock Doctrine’s release in Canada is very relevant here because it just hosted a summit with George Bush and Mexican President Calderon to meet with Prime Minister Steven Harper to talk about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) which is basically like NAFTA-plus; NAFTA plus security issues. The SPP is an example of the shock doctrine I outline, in the sense that this was an agenda that would have been unspeakable in terms of integration with the United States before 9/11, and in the panic after — in that shock — the SPP agenda moved forward in technocratic circles, and it was presented as a done deal.

Once Canadians began learning about the SPP they started rejecting it, and then they had this summit, where it was announced that, “don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen here.” But they said in the final press conference at the summit in Montebello, Quebec at the end of August that the one exception that they would push for the SPP to be pushed through is if there’s a disaster — if there’s an avian flu outbreak or a terrorist attack or a natural disaster — then they would implement tightened integration between security forces in all these countries.

In Canada this was front-page news — in the US it wasn’t reported on. When my book came out a week later people saw the connections immediately. They realized that what the Canadian government was saying was, the next time there’s a disaster, we will use it as a moment of opportunity to push through these policies that you’re rejecting where there isn’t a disaster going on.

I know I’m not the only person I know who can relate to this, and the fact that it’s an ’80s take-off makes it that much more relevant today.

I’m a city kid.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada has always been my home and home base, without even a consideration of a question.

Although I’ve had partial / dual homes in other towns and cities, I was born in this city and have always been solidly anchored to it.

All other cities that I’ve visited (except for Brisbane, Australia, though I can’t explain why) felt like simple places, products of architecture and street plans, while this place felt not only like it was alive, but like it was alive within me as much as I within it.

I may spend a lot of time contemplating and discussing topics like the impact of genetic manipulation on global politics and the effect of media oversaturation on contemporary freedom of choice, but everyone’s stereotypes aside, I am actually from the ghetto.

Of course, no one recognizes that side of me at all, and most of my friends are totally unable to relate to some of what I talk about, or laugh if I use some of the slang that seems natural to me. I’m not at all trying to front, but I do feel the same desire to represent as most ghetto kids do, to even wear that piece of me out on my t-shirt.

Living with a single parent in an apartment building and area plagued by violence and drugs at the time when crack cocaine was burning at its worst through urban centres, I did encounter these things firsthand as much as a child could really be able. (The weirdest thing I recall is the parents trying to abandon their 18 month old baby at our door with a loud knock and a mediocre vanishing act.)

I didn’t really notice how bad things were, as I knew no different, but I did acquire plenty of street survival skills.

Dizzee Rascal says, “Stay ghetto if you must, just remember to get out,” and I have managed to develop and apply my intelligence and abilities quite successfully, and I am now in a position to choose to make my home just about anywhere in the world that I might want… and for the first time, the question is actually coming up.

The building just right of centre in the photo above contained my first home, and then, seven floors above that, my second.

This is less than one city block east of the Jane St / Finch Ave intersection, an area renowned both locally and internationally for its drug gangs and gun violence.

This hydro-electric tower field contained my first garden, in amongst other ghetto apartment dwellers’ plot allotments. I’ve never had as large a garden since, despite moving to better homes in better neighbourhoods.

(You may recognize this from the site banner at the top of this blog’s pages.)

Now, I’m serious about Toronto seeming as alive as any of its components…

A big part of this sense of life is the city’s intensely multi-faceted nature, being a loose interaction of possibly the most diversely-representative array of communities on the planet, rather than a one-piece cultural unit that can be easily controlled from above.

The urban planning and municipal management of Toronto provides absolutely nothing but the most basic framework in which the thriving subcommunities, subcultures and subclasses live, and it is their lives and actions which truly create this city… making this forest as much a living thing as any of its trees, flowers, birds (mostly pigeons) or squirrels.

For the most part, even the independent commercial interests seem to have an appreciation for the organic and noncommercial and respectfully allow space for it, whether consciously or not. Only the elected and corporate suitdummies curl their toes in rage at this unapproved life and culture.

Thankfully, the corporate city can’t come anywhere close to controlling this life, much as it would like to sanitize, homogenize and package it for corporate purposes. One look at a Toronto tourism campaign shows their inability to even comprehend it.

I say thankfully, because blessed experiences like the one below are found in every area at any moment, created by the connection between an openly-left gift and a perfectly-suited recipient.

Other places, friends may try to lift your spirits when you seem down, but my city will do it for me on its own. Feeling low one day, I took a walk by myself down Spadina Ave and got the warmest and most personal hug a cement surface could possibly offer:

Christopher loves you too, Toronto.

And Toronto can be easy to love…

…but lately, I find it’s looking increasingly less familiar.

Areas I used to like, I no longer trust.

Places that never seemed like they could be anything but playgrounds now feel dangerous to be in. In a short span of time, the urban theme park that Toronto had seemed to be has vanished or grown terribly ugly.

For the first time in my life, despite the attachment of ghetto roots and enjoying plenty of middle-class comfort here…

…I find it possible to feel repelled by Toronto.

And it feels healthy every time I do.

Toronto seems most beautiful these days when I view it from a distance, and I find it harder to find the same perspective from within its midst.

Is it just me, is it just the summer heat and the annual surge of crime and pollution?

If it were truly simply a matter of having gone too long without a vacation, then why does this feeling now grow rather than lessen when I take time out of town?

Is it really the city changing - or possibly something even bigger?

I have been finding myself increasingly engaged in the city that I thought I already knew inside-and-out through blogTO, and so perhaps a big part of this really is in the details of where I focus my time, energy and attention. Perhaps I’m seeing my lifestyle as out of line and projecting it on my environment.

The waterfront walking tour, as a random example, sounds like a great way to get out and do something totally healthy and interesting… but increasingly, I find myself not feeling like I want to be out in much of the city, while certainly not feeling like being cooped up inside either.

A vegetarian co-op house that my friend lives in has rooms opening up and it sounded like it might be a very healthy move for me for this school year. Now I’m hearing of recent swarmings occurring around that exact area of Bloor St, spanning blocks in both directions and including Dufferin Grove Park, one of my favourite in the city. It takes more than that to really scare me, I already live off northern Jane St, but it sure does still count. (14 young offenders were arrested in connection to the swarmings.)

Last year at Trinity-Bellwoods park, panhandling meant this:

This year at Trinity-Bellwoods, panhandling apparently means a five-person fight ending with a fatal stabbing (although I do think the ‘panhandler’ label is being misapplied here, this is how it’s mostly been reported).

I don’t know what the actual statistics are for violent crime this year in Toronto, but what ultimately counts for me is whether I see them myself.

As I said, fewer and fewer areas feel safe and comfortable to me, and everywhere seems to be increasingly populated with people I can’t at all relate to and in many cases don’t trust. The parties are all great from one perspective, but these days few parties of any type in this city - from rap music nights in big clubs to hippies frolicking at drum circles in Trinity-Bellwoods - manage to happen without a noticeable invasion of scumbags and infusion of drunken sexism and violence.

(Funny how, before the drum circle permits, I never saw this issue arise yet squad cars would drive right into the park to shut us down… now that we’re official and regulated, the cops don’t appear even though aggressive thugs show up and the police could actually be doing something useful.)

I’m sure Toronto is the thug capital of Canada, but it also used to be so much else. Where have the adamant and organized anarchists gone, who used to stand up to this sort of street-level scum as much as to our overseeing oppressors, those who were previously so quick to show up at neonazis’ doorsteps with a torch-wielding mob when they began harassing and attacking people?

No one should expect NEFAC types to be the counter-balance to the most powerful and organized of the wannabloods and wishwewerecrips, but the random thugs who barely even have friends are just as much a violent threat given their lifestyle commitment to the principles of lacking principles, seeking out violence and destroying as much as possible… I feel like most of the good people have migrated to Splitsville (a lovely sea-side township in BC), but maybe that’s just what it feels like during the smog-fog season in Hogtown.

Of course, the street shitheads are only a small part of the ‘con’ category. NEFAC’s traditional enemies are a much larger part, and while I see plenty of small-town kids rocking System Of A Down hoodies, unless System has some Factory Farming song that I’ve never heard, you guys don’t get it ’cause you can’t possibly really understand what it’s like to be subjected to the intense corporate brainwashing shitstorm that airs 24 hours a day in a city like Toronto, from every digital device, on every frequency, over every surface and in every environment. A quick look around this site will give you an idea what I mean - at the cottage, I dream about the cottage. In the city, I dream in product advertisements.

The worst I’ve seen in rural areas is that, though the capitalist propaganda machine doesn’t pay you personal dream visits, most of the people around you buy into the neocon wars wholesale and will loudly proclaim their importance and even hold support parades without ever offering any actual explanation for how domestic conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan could possibly be considered to be in the reasonable domain of control of Canada or the United States without white supremacy and global control being underlying principles. That’s awful, but that’s just ignorance, that won’t make you crazy like breathing Toronto airwaves does, where people are so consistently hit with brainwashing messages that they unthinkingly dedicate their entire lives to the addiction of acquiring and consuming the products that actually lie at the root of these capital-driven conflicts.

I’ve also noticed in my time outside the city that, although certain days the air may be so clogged as to actually be unbreathable (medically speaking), our tap water seems relatively superior. In Toronto, I’d never drink unfiltered tap water except when faced with absolutely no other choice (especially with the rundown my inside source Anton gave me on our minimalistic lake-to-tap purification procedures), but outside Toronto a bottle of T.O. Tap tastes like spring water in comparison to the weird-smelling stuff coming out the faucets in other cities and towns. Our local bodies of water are, of course, another story. A Stephen King story, to be exact.

Let me take this to a broader level for a minute.

I’ve wondered for some time if I’d be able to judge - unlike the frog being proverbially boiled alive - if my urban environment and place in this society were making the transition from thriving and progressing while being dangerously exciting to being simply dangerous, depraved and regressive in terms of one’s health (on all levels).

At times, I’ve phrased this as whether I’ll be able to judge when it happens, but high-tech/neo-philosophical hopes for sustainability and the elimination of the roots of social ills (such as poverty) have encouraged - or tantalized - the side of me that places trust in distributed sensible and scientific progress, most especially with the increasing inclusion of synergy and holism in realms of thought and discussion (both deliberately and, I’m even more excited to see, unconsciously).

There is an appeal to the rural commune, the back-to-the-land hippie concept (some such attempts having managed to outlast the ’60s by a good deal, surviving to this day), however there is also a great emptiness that I find I feel when placed in such a closed context. Even in smaller cities around Ontario, I feel a strong emptiness, not inside myself but in the environment. Totally silent night time streets bewilder me, and draw my attention to the key difference between somewhere like Kitchener/Waterloo and Toronto… K/W seems to me to be a set of defined city limits with a collection of buildings and people within them. Toronto feels alive unto itself, to the extent that it is thriving out of control, that it can’t come even close to being shut down by anything from nightfall to blackouts.

I’m very much a product and element of that living urban creature, of one of the ultimate locations of the new, developed world in terms of being able to succeed in manifesting anything one can imagine - and having started with essentially nothing, I’ve already managed to do pretty well (on my own terms) without having even really started trying. When I’m in a rural environment it becomes that much more obvious to me that whether I’m trying or not, my mind has a high-bandwidth connection to the world around it and while I may choose to relax at times, I am functioning most properly when making efficient and dense use of my time. (If you thought calling my input “bandwidth” was weird, be glad I didn’t go with calling my time “my cycles.”)

Obviously, though, the Big City Dream needs to be ruled out as insane when it goes inherently hand-in-hand with destruction of the local and global ecosystem, homogenization of individuals beyond the point of being capable of free thought, and every other thing I see happening around me to varying degrees in my current-day urban environment.

The first question is whether these are happening to increasing or decreasing degrees.

The second question is whether those trends are headed towards the breaking point of reaching permanent problems or solutions.

The third question is the number of times I need to re-evaluate my concept of where that breaking point actually lies in order to decide whether to sacrifice the benefits and theoretical possibilities of the modern urban lifestyle in favour of preserving myself, my knowledge, my resources and my social networks (as happen to be relevant) to switch to a lifestyle that is driven primarily by sustainability, survival and maintenance of true cultural value and places all other concerns second.

Well, I can immediately answer the third question - re-evaluation ought to be a perpetual process up to and likely even beyond the point that the time to make a decision has presented itself and passed behind. That’s a rule of the scientific approach that I apply to everything as much as I’m capable of doing.

I can already answer the first one, too, and the answer is “both.” I’m witnessing the collapse of global systems, both natural and artificial, in nearly every area I care to check into. Simultaneously, I’m watching scientific understanding and technological application race forward towards a point that may not only solve the commonly-considered problems that have typically burdened humanity, but also bring us forward into a new era the likes of which is ineffable in many ways to us now. And, futurist nanobabble aside, there is some reason to think that Toronto can hold a place far superior to somewhere like Detroit in a post-industrial, tech-innovation-based meta-economy (existing as a layer above the now internationally-distributed manufacturers, committing us very permanently to globalization).

Which happens first? Will we see solar energy systems built from technology that places them at a price cheaper than coal, solving the world’s energy crisis and encouraging every Western nation to get the hell out of the Middle East and only go back under properly negotiated, mutually beneficial terms? Or will the dirty nukes hit the still-operating nuclear plants that humanity’s collective blindspot has somehow allowed to be constructed all over the place?

Well, that’s the final (second) question, in a sense… we’re in first place and we’ve nearly won the race, but it doesn’t change the fact that our horse is on fire and we too are about to be engulfed in the flames that have scorched the track and killed everything left in our (flaming equestrian) wake.

It’s up to each informed and free-thinking individual to make a decision for themselves. The decision before us is whether we commit to holding onto the reigns of this lifestyle regardless of how likely a disastrous outcome appears at any given time, placing faith in society/technology/knowledge or even the precedent of erroneous human pessimism, or whether we instead establish a personal danger limit at which we’ll jump the sinking ship no matter what assurances we may receive that rescue is just over the horizon.

And what would jumping ship even mean? Does it really count all that much where your house is in the face of global collapse? Perhaps it means things more like a Wobbliesque general labour strike, or the more recent call, promoted by Adbusters, of a general consumption strike (a little more topical in a culture with no real jobs and too much spending power).

Expanding both sides of the sinking-ship-awaiting-rescue metaphor reveals that the difference between the two greatly parallels the difference between faith in technology and attachment to our natural instinct for self-preservation. The decision may in fact be the same as the choice between our knowledge and our instinct, and while it may seem foolish to ever side with the widely-known-to-be-ignorant human being over the accumulated nature of wisdom… our airplanes _do_ actually work, most of the time, and no one operating on pure instinct would dare set foot in one of those actualizations of insanity.

Might we actually have reached the point in our species’ development where our libraries, schools and information networks can consistently provide us with more accurate and detailed accumulated information than our evolution has left us? Or will it only appear that way long enough for the law of the minimum to come into effect when we slip up and mismanage a single key element, putting us permanently in our place and out of the picture?

Far more than in the past, I’ve been feeling like I’ve got one foot in the nuclear-powered boat and one on old-fashioned dry land - something that might seem like a neutral position to many people, but is definitely a conscious decision for someone born in the ghetto and it’s not at all my default.

I do know where I stand on the question of committing unthinkingly to this society - whether the plane’s engines are still running or not - and that’s “I’m capable of reading the reports and interpreting the stats for myself, and will most definitely be using my own brain’s capacity for logic to decide if the rest of you are totally off your heads and I’d be better off switching from veganism to wild deer.”

I’m deeply concerned by things like the NAU/SPP and our southern neighbours’ elite’s rampant globalized nu-fascist behaviour, but those are pretty hard to simply run from anyway. It seems better to me to be involved in the information streams, spitting back into their “out” tubes.

That aspect of global/continental politics aside, these days Toronto is the issue that’s coming in my eyes and ears and tightening up my stomach. My spidey sense only tingles in spurts, and most of those are tied specifically to Toronto (Driftwood gangsters firing guns at random, serial arsonist, Queen W going downhill). I do also know, in a much more detached and vague way, that things are not necessarily peachy-keen in other urban centres. American cities are struggling with being in America (a chronic condition), many of Europe’s major centres face problems that are unheard of around here, and Australia’s got its own upside-down issues.

Leaving Canada is very low on the likely-list for me, at least for a good while, and leaving Toronto is very low on the list too given that I’m attached to it in some very solid ways in terms of my social networks, my pastimes and, most especially and importantly, my education. All the same, in contemplating whether Toronto is still somewhere that feels like a healthy home to me (I grew up by Jane & Finch with crack dealers in the stairwells of my building, so feel free to be confused about this sentence) my mind naturally wanders to wondering about the other Canadian cities that have touched me enough to feel they could host me beyond a brief visit.

Crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad, but Vancouver’s never been my destination of choice in BC anyway because, well, crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad. I’ve heard similar things about Victoria lately, but I just can’t picture that in my head. Maybe I should go find out or something, considering my looong term plans have been aiming for the island for some time now, something I’m still holding on paper but reconsidering as I reconsider the entire scope of this location and lifestyle issue.

Calgary is apparently facing a rise in serious crime right now and finding itself short on police officers. I always thought there were enough cowboys to make that up, but maybe Albertans aren’t slangin’ as many guns as everyone makes out. Whatever, moot point, Cowtown is not my type of town - they are not nice to the cows, despite the name, and an organized recycling program is still a complex issue for them - and Canada’s right-wing heaven throwing its overflowing budget resources into filling the streets with cops does not sound pleasant.

Oh, and before you take this as a snowglobed Torontonian viewing Alberta through nothing but Toronto Star headlines, I’ll tell you that I’ve spent plenty of time there, have family there, and effectively lived there for more than one block of time when younger. I got my first driver’s license out there, I watched an oil storage tank explosion scar the sky with a massive plume of black smoke for the rest of the day, I went to indie band and hardcore punk shows, I subscribed to a local street zine thing that flopped after the 3rd issue… I am genuinely familiar. Oh yeah, and the Stampede, I try to repress that though.

Now Winnipeg on the other hand… I’ll admit that writing it off is just pure old-fashioned arbitrary Canuck domestic bigotry (well, and Venetian Snares’ very convincing audio essay).

Montreal, I don’t have a clue how they’re doing. Funny what a little language barrier will do, I hardly even hear about them in the big newspapers that most definitely employ translators of every stripe and have offices in every city. I’m very unhappily missing the anti-SPP protests as I type this, and thus missed the brief trip I’d planned to Montreal. Don’t know when I’ll be going next, and I haven’t been in a while and saw very little of the city the times I did. It certainly does have an appeal for me, though. I admit my firsthand inexperience, but I perceive it to be more similar to Toronto than the rest of Canada’s cities, while having a stronger European influence than an American one. If that’s even a little true, that’s not a difficult deal to talk me into. I bet I’d even get back the fluency that was progressively drained out of me from the time I was removed from French immersion and dumped into the pathetic-rote-memorization-excuse-for-a-French-language-education of the English streams.

As I’ve said, for now, I’m not going anywhere and these are all questions and thoughts towards decisions that can only be made some while into the future… but previously when I left the city to visit another place, whether far away or within the province, I would position myself relative to the 416 rather than simply in that other place, relative to it and myself.

For the first time in my life I’m able to conceive of myself as being independent from Toronto, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to contemplate my position not just in relation to Yonge & Bloor, but to the intersection of the equator and the international date line, or simply to the sun and the moon.

It’s a funny thing now that I think of it, although I’ve been thinking about the “jumping ship” question for years now and debating urban vs natural-communal, the “which urban” question posing Toronto vs X has never really been present in my mind. It’s not wise to let your first breakup change your sexual orientation, and perhaps I should play the urban field before giving up on society entirely, eh?

Well, not that I haven’t already “given up on society” in the lifestyle-anarchist, Crimethinc sense as it is. But that doesn’t determine my course from here, that’s just cultural existentialism, recognizing that by my own declaration I’m free to interact with the world on my own terms, rather than strictly and entirely within the confines of the lose-a-dollar-gain-a-dollar property acquisition system.

And that might just be the final answer I’m missing here, as it makes moot the premise of the second question.

Why put myself in the position of being a victim in the confines of urban society, or victimized by feeling forced to live in a tree on days I’d rather ride an elevator?

Why feel like I ever need to choose between such false dichotomies as The Kingdom Of Western Capitalist Life vs nature’s whimpering and wheezing temples of reality?

I’ve long rejected the ego-trip notion that humanity is anything that can be considered separate from nature, and I now reject the idea of choosing between nature’s evolutionary development and our own cultural/psychological development, as one is derivative of the other. A synthesis of ideas and abilities gained from all sides - along with a healthy round of rejections - is the only logical way to move from here and actually be moving forward.

As for me personally, where I’m at can be permanently described as ‘in my shoes, on our Earth.’ For those who I want to stay in touch with, it’ll pretty much always be possible to locate/contact me and see what’s up… anyone else, well, I’ll write things down and maybe you’ll read about it afterwards.

—

Alright, so all of the above I wrote while at the cottage, where I spent the last bit of my nearly a month out of the city in various places around the province.

Now, having had a chance to return to the city and re-imerse myself in it, this time selectively, I’m feeling far more comfortable and at home again. I feel alright in the sketchy places, and actually feel more comfortable around street kids and people… despite having been pretty deep into street culture in the first place, my time out of town being able to hitchhike and feel safe and being able to trust everyone around me openly has helped me to approach people here with less prejudice.

I’ve been specifically choosing to be around people who I know I care about and who care about me, and all of us seem to be working harder on living healthier lifestyles in our own various ways, addressing our own various problems and vices.

I think the lesson I learned about Toronto is that it’s exactly what you make of it, Toronto has just about everything and you not only can but must select specifically what parts of it you want to observe and engage in, in terms of your social networks, environment and behaviour/lifestyle.

This determines almost entirely whether the place is a very bad one, or a very good one, and I think my perception of it as a very bad thing was directly related to how messed up my lifestyle had gotten and how awful some of the people I was interacting with were.

Labour Day has felt like New Years Eve for me this year…
I’m pretty sure that - once again - I’ve never felt better.
It’s taken a lot of wrestling to integrate everything I learned at Om, but I think I’ve nearly got it under control… and for one of the first times since leaving my teens, I feel happiest being this age and at this place in my life.

Update: this Star article on how rural areas actually have higher homicide rates.

Here’s one for the history books: The Perrier battle.
No casualties, but definitely a new level in culture conflict.

Now that’s subvertisement… if it came down to an all-out media war, the corporations would definitely lose. They move and think slower than individuals, and by the time a memo about new technology bubbles up to top, something even better is already being tested underground.

Unfortunately, the meme war has already been underway for some time as a one-sided battle, and we’re only really catching up now. We have all the tools we need at our disposal to fight the mindfuck head-on, though, and it’s about time things really crack.

Digital street culture combined with politics opens a new door on the other side of the playing field. Well, it’s not super-new, it’s the Black Spot concept of using grassroots power to beat the system on its own terms.

Culture jamming already existed, but if the marketting teams are getting all hyped up about technology the rest of us better be ready to meet them on that level too. Of course, like I said, we’ve already been there and done that… sounds like some fat wallets just walked into a war they can’t win.

Except, of course, through the imposition of political controls carried out by an aggressive police force. But I’m sure they wouldn’t do that.

Kill irony or it will kill you.

Every opportunity that I get to map out contemporary consciousness (in particular post-irony), I like to take and explore as much as I’m able. A few hours after reading the Wikipedia entry on the History of feminism, I realized part of it might be applicable to Post-irony in a more general way. That was this very short description of the state of contemporary Post-feminism:

Third wave
There is also third wave, but feminists disagree as to its necessity, its benefits, and its ideas. Often also called “Post-Feminist,” it can possibly be considered to be the advancement of a female discourse in a world where the equality of women is something that can be assumed—rather than fought for.

The cultural obsession with irony might’ve grown out of a society where media inundation was increasingly gaining ground in people’s lives, but in that society media was still handled in reference to the real world and applied towards it. The Simpsons was about the world, whereas Family Guy was self-contained and about nothing but itself and related content. When we reached a certain point - perhaps a certain number of people perceiving a certain amount of their daily content via artificial media, from birth - we started to roll over and went past the point of saturation. (Early South Park had the Family Guy disease, but I think they joined us on the ride out of irony.)

Whereas I think before culture was something that people strived for, it has now become something that can be assumed. I’m not sure I agree with the notion that female equality can be automatically assumed in this era and doesn’t need to be actively pursued, though there’s a lot of men with inflated salaries who appreciate that being a common notion.

But we can accept both to be true, not as rules of thumb but as observations of how people feel today. Unless I’m at a meeting of a bunch of activists or walking into a women’s studies class, very few of the girls that I meet of my approximate age have any connection to feminist ideas at all. They definitely mostly behave under a post-feminist set of assumptions about the world - that it is inherently open to them - and unfortunately most do this without realizing that the simple fact that they can assume that is the result of a history of backbreaking fighting to free them.

The interrelation between gender and sex is unfortunately a very exploitable one, and for every one woman who sincerely decided to move in the direction of increased personal sexual liberation, there seem to be five who’ve been turned into these freaky corporate wet dreams of girls who don’t do much else beyond going around screwing anyone they can use to get consumer goods and money for consumer goods - nothing but taking the mid-century shopping-obsessed wife and replacing marriage with promiscuity, herded straight from one cage into a new, slightly larger one. In this way, I’ve been feeling like post-feminism has started to incorporate a self-destructive tendency and is being used as a way to control women through telling them that they’re completely in control.

General culture and awareness is, I hope, a little less prone to such exploitation. In fact, if there was such a self-destructive, nihilistic tendency in our general memetic environment, it would be the vicious combination of irony and apathy that has allowed us to see a world going wrong in the ’80s and ignore it or laugh it off the whole time since. I hope that post-irony represents a break away from this trap, and I think it does.

Currently, in any field of cultural interest that I can think of, there’s pretty much far too much information available, most updated at a ridiculously frequent rate. The blogosphere, web2.0 sphere at large, broader web and television are all infinitely beyond the level anyone could perceive. Print news media, tabloids, books, music, film, and even theatre are perpetually flooding us. Obviously, many have been for some time, but nowadays it’s always everything and it never lets up.

Then, and I’d have to say worst of all, on top of all of this hypercontent is a whole second layer of marketting content that is both integrated into those mediums, surrounds them, and also enters into areas of the world that were otherwise devoid of artificial content (floor/ceiling ads, projection ads, street furniture, viral marketting).

This is too much piled on too much mixed with too much bordered by too much in competition with far too many other piles of overinundation. Thankfully, there seems to be some sort of psychological fuse box and after a certain point we started to learn how to tune ourselves out, becoming what marketting teams would refer to as “the unreachables.” I’ll never stop being proud of that, my generation disabling the marketting arsenal without anything more than a roll of the eyes… even if it did just lead them to create the new, horrible stuff they’re trying to use to get through to people now.

So, that’s not some detailed analysis of post-irony, but I think that does get us to the basis of it. Poisonned by content and nauseated by too many years of laughing at everything, we found ourselves in a world where culture was hardly something to seek out or strive for but instead something that could be assumed and then ignored or chosen from selectively.

This perspective grants two things:

• One, the sense of a blank slate that was also presented to women once they felt sufficiently equal in society. The true heart of post-feminism was the idea that women now had their own imaginations restricting what they could do with their lives, rather than an external construct of limitations… this same blank slate can now be applied to us culturally, both in the sense of artistic culture and in the broader sense of psychological and community design and function.
  The post-ironist realizes that they are in a place where the total freedom that existentialism granted in theory is now in almost every way tangibly realizable. Any information content that we wish to perceive or (better yet) create and distribute, we can now do so in a way so smoothly as to make the word “easily” inappropriate, and the list of ways in which such information can wind up manifest as something of genuine, tangible significance in the real world is rapidly expanding every day.
• Two, an outside perspective of the entire media system that is in place and a realization that we have been in a one-way memetic war for quite some time now. Groups like Adbusters are now actively trying to encourage counterattacks using meme-warfare techniques, developing tightly-packed mindbombs that can be conveyed in half a soundbite but still wind up having an impact on the receiver. In addition to this, of course, Adbusters has worked for a long time on using subvertisements and “TV Turn-Off Week” to try to pull people up out of the media foray and let them see the broader picture. (The Adbusters TV Turn-Off page hasn’t been updated since last year, but this other TV TurnOff group is calling it for April 23-29, 2007.)

To unpack that second point a little more, or maybe just state it more succinctly, our step up out of the media/content piranha-gangbang allowed us to gather our wits together and we now pick and choose our battles within it, diverting the rest around us like light through an invisiblity cloak. I hope that makes sense, please don’t make me phrase it in terms of Matrix references.