Masks, Good Trouble & the Ghosts in Our Machines
As I barrel through another year on this wild ass planet, I have to look back at the past year(s) and then look forward to the path I'm traveling down. And at my age, at the just-past-midway point towards a century, I hold a large volume of experiences, masks and patterns to unpack.
One constant of my entire adult life, from late teens onward, is my inability to conform. Period.
My entire career has involved my inner Artist doing everything possible to protect the flame of creation from the destruction of societal masks. Knowing this about myself, I tried to stay on the fringes of toxic institutions my entire working life.
Maintaining life on the fringes used to be an adventure I undertook with fellow weirdos like myself and, before social media, algorithms and gig economies, we were able to live a beautiful, regenerative life. Working just enough to cover the essentials of living and use our remaining time to embrace sovereignty and create art.
But my problem is, I also can’t wear the mask of the capitalist for long at all. And in the country where I live, where I was born, that is the only alternative option to not being able to wear an institutional mask. When the gig economy came for the odd jobs and Airbnb scooped up all the extra bedrooms and mother-in-law suites, an entire demographic of labor lost the ability to live that simple life working in tourist towns and creating art.
One must wear the mask of the capitalist to generate the resources to survive in this economy and that capability is diminishing by the day. Survival in late stage capitalism transitioning to authoritarian rule requires one to become enslaved to a job, wage and institution that provides those elements and keeps you trapped as a laborer in a system designed to suppress your spirit and keep you enslaved by the need for health care and cash to stay housed.
I know almost no one who is satisfied at their job right now. Every neighbor, friend, colleague or coffeeshop acquaintance I come in contact with on a daily basis tells me how much they loath their job and can not tell their boss to fuck off because they have to pay their mortgage or rent. In 30 years that I've been tracking these conversations, the universal dissatisfaction has never been this strong.
(Quick note: I am working with some non-profits now and I think those orgs might be one of the last places where people are finding satisfaction in their work because of the collective mission of the org and their colleagues)
We're staring down a false choice. A choice that costs the laborer their very soul, life and identity. It’s a choice that people like me, Artists who’ve chosen the left-hand path of existence, can not cleanly navigate.
We are regenerative at our core.
Artists see things others can not. And those of us who think in communal systems can see the vampires in these institutions slowly draining the lifeblood out of our neighbors and loved ones and we reject those institutional masks with our entire being.
An Artist truly steps into their own when they reject the societal masks that suppress the true self. Submission to the mask, any mask, is the fastest way for us to lose the connection to the muse. We protect our sovereignty above all else because that's where the flame that fuels our art is generated.
That rejection leaves us on the fringes of everything. A fringe that we’re pretty comfortable dwelling within, but a fringe none the less. Artists are a threat to capitalism because we use our gifts to point out the flaws in an economic system that is destroying the beauty of living.
We reject the masks of capitalism because we clearly see the death required to wear them.
The work of the Artist is usually appropriated by the mechanisms of capitalism to remove the impact of the art itself by stealing its essence and transforming the remaining shell into a commodity. And once commodified, the ghost of the art itself is fed into a machine of consumption that fuels the Spectacle.
And the Spectacle Economy is what provides the illusion of belonging and engagement with life, but the activities inside the Spectacle are sanitized for consumption and weaponized for submission. Stay in the Spectacle long enough and one loses the ability to sit in stillness and connect with the true self.
Keep the masses enslaved in unnatural systems and satiated inside the Spectacle and guess what?
The revolution is never televised.
How can it be? People have chosen to remove themselves from reality and live fully in the Spectacle itself. There are not enough humans left to revolt.
That’s a choice. And a choice that the Artists of Now are trying to lay bare so the masses can clearly see what’s happening behind the scenes. What the Spectacle is hiding is that the elite class is at the tail end of one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history powered by the most powerful technology ever created. And their intention is not to share the wealth they extracted from our labor, their mission (openly stated) is to hoard our collective resources for their survival.
AI is a technology that acts as a giant mirror, reflecting back the Hungry Ghost at scale. A technology that acts as a giant machine of pattern recognition, exposing the cracks throughout society that we all feel but do not have language to name.
A technology that, in the hands of the oligarchs, is accelerating the enslavement and destruction of the remaining goodness in our world.
A technology that, in the hands of the Artist, allows us to weaponize intelligence against the systems of colonization these oligarchs use to keep us satiated and enslaved.
A technology that can be turned against the oppressor in real time and used to help our neighbors remove their masks, or catch our loved ones when their mask is ripped off by the institution itself and their identity collapses.
A technology that can be weaponized against the very capitalism that allowed it to wreak havoc on our lives and that we can use to move us all towards a regenerative economic system that enslaves no one.
A technology that the elite class used to create a massive economic bubble through unnecessary hyperscaling that is bursting in real time. Now.
An economic system that supports our humanity and allows us to breath and be in community is what we need to build as the old world of extraction dies off. Humans are social creatures. We are wired to thrive amongst other humans. As an introvert, that statement always makes me a bit twitchy, but the fact that I always feel better after I’ve been around humans I enjoy is undeniable. Which is why one of the professional hats I wear is community builder.
Now is the time for the Artists to rise up.
For the systems thinkers and design wizards to step into emergent technology and use it to amplify their mission and counterbalance the Spectacle of the oligarchs.
Now is our time to bring our communities into the present and teach them how to use AI as a tool to turn against the oppressor.
Now is the time for Artists to craft the narrative we need for a regenerative tomorrow.
And use the most powerful technology ever built to spread that regenerative narrative across the globe and into every home.
Art has always shed a light on the chaos and corruption of the elite and now is no different.
