Irony Through Time

I sit and write this a day after Russia has invaded Ukraine; the anger and sadness balancing into a sort of strange and somber equilibrium.

In previous posts, I've endeavored to make sense of this whole shooting/shouting match called life, and did my best to remove any ironic distance in speaking it truly, but you know, I’ve come to realize that irony is awesome, even essential in many cases. The more I consider it amid the backdrop of modernity, the more I think we'd be dead on arrival without it.

Growing up as a hippie mountain kid, I never really came to understand culture, especially American culture and its bizarre customs, cliques, and rivalrous rituals. So that's left me in the land of Groucho Marx—desperately wanting to "find my people" and simultaneously never wanting to be a member of a club that would have me. Often, that means my most scathing thoughts and critiques are directed at the communities I'm closest to. Not because I resent them, but because I want/need them to be something more than they often are—almost always much much more.

I've never been able to accept things at face value—a skeptic at heart, and have always driven myself and others relentlessly forward to a perceived higher ground. This has often left people closest to me feeling less than enough—judged and/or lacking, which is utterly ass-backwards; tragic in fact to diminish (intended or not) those I love the most. At the deepest level, simply unconditionally accepting them or the status quo as they are would feel like dying to me. It's the double whammy of 1) feeling like the "default rat race" of fight club space monkeys and truthless suburbia is cartoonishly unsatisfying and 2) knowing that the clarity of transcendent peak states (geographical or psychological) was profound and self-evident all along. 

When you inhale, you embark upon a tale... you set sail. Don't grieve over what you leave behind.

It breaks my fucking heart that the leading edge of transformational cultures (drug-fueled Dead shows, to Silicon Valley techno-utopianism in the 2010s, to Burning Man, blockchains, and the more recent psychedelic renaissance), have so consistently and blithely jumped all the sharks. Whether vapid hippy dippy-ness with no capacity to execute anything hard or practical, to libertarian crypto-tech-bros with no concern for collateral damage, to the money-managers-in-the-temple ego trips of lifestyle coaches and neo-shamans—those who have been blessed with transformative light and possibility seem hell bent on pissing it all away.

It's not that I don't have hope, I do. It's just a post-tragic, radical, intergenerational hope hiding on the other side of profound grief. What Jamie Wheal might refer to as a sort of "for all the fucking marbles at the end of our days" sort of hope. 

So when folks show up in my life or social feed looking to harvest a little starlight, and huff a contact high from blatantly pre-tragic flow-hacking, neo-tantric mysticism, or psychedelic tourism, I'm easy to withdraw. It feels like the only honest thing to do is to drag their assess kicking and screaming into the depths of the tragic or ironic or both—to strip away every last false hope and platitude they may be using to shield themselves from the reality of reality, and if, only if they're still willing to, then share the goods of what might lie on the other side (pithy, but hardly an effective growth strategy for a movement).

I don't often share my unfiltered despair because I'm still out here on the sharp end of the stick looking for routes through the cracks and crevases—trying to find a keyhole that we can all still sneak through to get to higher ground. It doesn't feel fair to share the grim odds with too many people beyond lovers and colleagues who've signed up for the same mission. But make no mistake, it can creep into my tone and show up as frustration or poorly masked grief that I rarely expose or express head-on. Don't forget, the theme here is irony.

Lastly, it's not just an ironic distance that I've been deploying to keep what I cherish safe from the sheep and the haters. It's also gallows humor. The kind that firefighters and ER docs deploy—a seemingly glib shorthand, often devoid of care and compassion on the surface, but shared by those who have already signed up for a long walk towards the end of times. We can be up to our elbows in blood and guts and cracking jokes all the while, but the real reason we're all there is to lend a hand and understand.

As Cornel West reminds us, "having hope is too detached, too spectatorial. We've gotta be hope. Courageously bearing witness to the best of our abilities before the worms get us!"

And that's the thing. In the end, the worms come for us all—they came for everyone before us, and they're coming for me and you too. And that's ok. Because courageously bearing witness to the best of our abilities is the only thing (perhaps the everything) we've ever had. We are little more than evolved compost for consciousness and culture.

Ok, time for the quick (and unapologetically ironic) ride through time...

«Irony: A Rebuttal»

For this portion of the journey, I ask that you imagine you're either immortal or a time traveler (doesn't really matter which). All that does matter is that you can drink in the last five hundred years and make an honest attempt to recollect the ride.

«1500 CE  (~500 years ago)»

You start out living as a simple peasant in the same European village with the festivals, customs and rhythms as everyone in your family had before you. You rose with the sun and slept in the dark. You followed the seasons and worshiped your god(s).

Then (skipping a whole bunch of kings, queens, wars, inventions and cataclysms)...

Your world started changing. Villages became towns became cities became nations. Trade routes blossomed, cottage industries emerged, farms became factories, and factories became sweatshops. It got harder and harder to remember the rhythms and rituals of your village living in a time-soured slum, but you were just too tired and busy to notice.

«1600-1800»

Meanwhile...

The nation states and joint stock companies (and their armies and navies) that increasingly took command of your life also took charge of exploring/exploiting the rest of the world.

They were running out of their own shit (like furs, timbers and fish), and wanted even more shit (like gold, sugar and tobacco). So they went and "discovered" other people and cultures and took their shit too. Oh, by the way, they also took their customs, rhythms, reasons and gods, just like they'd tayken yours.

«1750-1850 & 1955-1975»

By now, you kinda knew something was wrong, even if you couldn't quite put your finger on it. You nursed a sneaking suspicion that all of this extra "stuff" and hecticness couldn't replace the nostalgic simple things that used to fill your days. But you were having a harder and harder time remembering what they all were. The way they smelled, sounded, and felt was too distant to care.

So from time to time, in the lulls of an ever more frantic world, you looked back longingly on those folks you'd recently colonized—the noble savages in far away lands who somehow still seemed happier than you'd ever been. From Rousseau to Ginsberg in a hop, skip, and a merciless jump.

But...

That moment passed, and instead of renouncing the cities, factories, and diversity of stuff and going back to the basics, you pivoted...

You ramped up an ingenious circular economy to comfort yourself with even more, ever shinier stuff (somewhere in here, pronouns collapse and you get implicated too).

Sure, you'd still take all the global south's raw resources…but you wouldn't stop there. Anyone in your country who was still making useful shit from all that raw materials wasn't needed anymore. All the guilds, artisans and craftspeople got the boot—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for good.

You'd get the global southerners to make shittier finished stuff out of all of their own raw stuff, and then you'd put your logos on it and sell it to the former craftspeople you'd fired just long ago enough for the tragedy to be forgotten!

And when those former craftspeople absolutely positively couldn't buy (let alone use) any more shitty cheap stuff, you started selling it back to the people who'd made it in the first place. You even convinced them those logos of yours actually meant something. Modern marketing (aka psychological manipulation)...genius!

Now this clearly wasn't working for everyone.

From time to time, people on the short end of this arrangement—women, slaves, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and workers—rallied. They would protest, march in the street, and occasionally fight (kinetically) for their "god given" rights. And in fits and (re)starts, this kind of insistent change helped to reduce the gap between the world as it could be and what it actually was. It was proof positive you could demand a seat at the table.

«1870-1970»

This kind of civic action picked up steam with abolition, suffrage, temperance, unions, environmental and civil rights, and reached its rough peak in the summer of '68. Revolution was in the air and a new world seemed like it was just about to blossom. Riots across Europe and American cities..slogans, platforms, votes. Positive possibility.

But then...nothing changed.

Inspiring leaders got killed (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, etc.), protests got crushed, and the once smoldering fires quenched. The counter culture disappeared from the streets, went back to the land and up into their heads. This would happen in cycles again and again...and again.

From now on, change would come from within.

Which was super convenient because the powers that were did not want the boat so boisterously rocked. When the change was without, after all, it had nearly capsized them.

«1980-1995»

A bit later on those powers came up with a bookend deal to the whole "change comes from within" thing. All of the radical change-the-world folks who hadn't disappeared into self absorbed spirituality could get everything they ever wanted too! If only they promised to set aside their grievances and ideals and peacefully wait in line at the magical mystery machine of new-age Neoliberalism. 

You load into the mystery machine people, raw stuff, opaque financing and global supply chains and out pops...prosperity, literacy, sustainability, democracy and peace for ALL!!!

It was all going to be so fucking amazing.
Move fast. Break things. Make the world a better place!
Oh, and give a TED talk for good measure (and your ego) before the wheels come off.

But then sometime between the financial collapse of 2008, the subsequent untethering of currencies and prosperity, the climate bill coming due for the carbon coke-bender we've been on for the last century, plus inept Covid quarantines—well, we collectively started to get the picture.

We'd been sold a complete fucking bill of goods. None of it penciled out when considered with measured reason and a little historical perspective. And the same generation who was in power that whole time knew exactly what was at stake, and did nothing to guide us.

We were seduced into buying the deregulated NAFTA/IMF/WEF mystery machine of Neoliberalism and allowed ourselves to be soothed by pseudo-Eastern mystical power-of-now philosophies. And what did we get?  A bunch of self-absorbed narcissists and snake oil salesmen as our "spiritual leaders." Not to mention the smoldering husk of an over-extended Pale Blue Dot.

So who's made out here? Not some badass conquerors of yore like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, or Alexander the Great. No emperors or even pirates that would at least add some dignity to this defeat. People like Steve fucking Mnuchin (the hedge fund manager on Trump’s cabinet). Robbing us blind while he and his cronies cynically stoke the culture wars to keep us fighting over scraps.

And this is where we get close to the conclusion of this time bending thought experiment...

Because when you slow the tape, and scroll backwards to that blip in time between 1968 and 2008, you see how, right there on the frothy edge of real change, we blew it. We knew the stakes, we had all the facts (on tobacco, oil, roundup, oxycontin, social media, etc.). We were this close to a time-bending tipping point and then collectively lost the plot. 

Instead, we were offered a few meatless bones to chew on to keep us distracted:

Crawl up your own ass and call it spirituality—and don't bother with social responsibility—your own inner work is the most important thing you could possibly do! Just trust us as we stripmine, clearcut, privatize and offshore everything. It's for everyone's good and the only way real change can happen anymore.

So yeah, about that irony...

Right about now, you're coming to the massively hungover realization that some key parts of the last five hundred years have not matched the slick FDA-approved promises on the side of the bottle, nor the heady rush of the first few captivating swigs.

And you realize that the world is now drowning in all the cheap shit we made, our cultures are bankrupt shells of impulsive consumerism, the oceans and forests are on fire, and the jackals of finance have slipped off with the collection plate.

This makes us anxious, and depressed, and all too often angry, but those are hard emotions to know where to channel anywhere besides our phone these days...and the magical mystery machine has churned out plenty of apps for that—conveniently engineered to, you guessed it, sell us even more useless shit (Carlin had it right decades ago).

You yearn to go back to living in the same village with the festivals, customs and rhythms as everyone in your family before you. Where you rose with the sun and slept in the dark. Where you followed the seasons and worshiped your god(s). But memories of your own are too far gone to recover, so you look to your noble and conveniently less savage neighbors, and you go and visit them. You take their customs, clothing, and rituals and try to make them your own. Airbnb their beaches, extract their imagery, greedily drink their sacraments. Trying desperately to remember a time that once was.

Because you realize that in the end, they didn't need more stuff. And neither did you. What you really needed were your customs, rituals, and gods. The sun and the seasons. The fish and the forests. Only now, even if you wanted to go back to the way things had always been, you couldn't. Too many people living on a massively degraded planet earth.

We had everything we needed—clean air, clean water and clean soil—connection, community, and culture.

And it got pissed away by the adults who should've been in charge. The ones who told us not to worry and trust them. The ones who pretended to know what they were doing, and assured us that it was all gonna work out.

So the only sane response, the only appropriate response to this hog tied cluster fuck of a situation, where you simultaneously realize we've all been irrevocably duped with promises of the American Dreamᵀᴹ, and that the boats are burned behind us with no plausible way back to simpler living, and that the rats have left the ship and are offshoring their trillions, and we're left bailing with broken buckets economies and ecologies that are on life support.

If you're not going to collapse into grief, but you haven't yet wrapped your head around rage, let alone equanimity...that's where irony is a one-way (maybe only way) ticket home. 

It gives us space to ask, in plausibly deniable earnestness...are you fucking kidding me? I mean seriously (not seriously). War? You have got to be fucking kidding me.

There is no way, no way in hell that this can actually be happening the way it seems to be happening! In our own lifetimes? In 2022?

So as solace, consider irony to be the first sensation after the numbness of the last five hundred years wears off.

That vomit-inducing combination of neoliberal prosperity gospel mixed with much-too-sweet spiritual narcissism that let us all off the hook and kept us all expectantly waiting for our slice of the never-gonna-run-out infinity pie! (which is apparently farmed unsustainably in the Blue Oceans and White Spaces of FreeMarketLandia).

Now, you can't just hide out in irony forever. If you do, you end up with Oscar Wilde, knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. As an ironist, it's too easy to forever point out the hypocrisy and contradictions but always pull up short of actually staking your claim and taking a stand. Great for sounding clever on podcasts, but next to useless for actually forging our way ahead as a species.

So consider irony a vital and necessary transitional emotion, that takes us from a blind and trusting childhood, to a wary and skeptical adolescence. A place from which we can ask are you fucking kidding me? And expect a credible answer.

If not from the powers that be, then at least from each other.

Irony. The bill is coming due. And we're 100% responsible, even if it really wasn't our fault. And that is at least a little bit ironic, don't you think?

Ok, on to the good stuff...

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• Do Your Part: UkraineDAO 

• Web3 Inspiration: Kernel + The Green Pill 

• Novel Non-fungibility: Invisible College

• DAOs + Governance: The DAO Moment (Jordan Hall)

• SingySongs: Medicine (Dayglow) / Never Ending (Bob Moses) / The Hustle (Kiltro)

I love hearing back (and always reply), so don't hesitate.