I like the words opulence, and cadillo, evocative for this time.
Gillian Welch has a song called
Everything is Free Now on her
Time-The Revelator album, it's about making a living writing songs (or not) in the Napster era. You can listen to it free on youtube or pay her for it on her
webstore. I really dig Welch's sound, gritty and old, Everything is Free captures a gut level angst about the future of work (singing is work) in the digital, global, A.I. era.
Not long ago, 1994, I started doing print graphics on a computer. I'd been involved in printing and design and marketing for years before and the price of chips was only then coming down into my range. Back then designers kind of sketched and sold an idea, layout people then put together final physical art, pre-press people did a bunch of hand work with galley cameras, film, etc. Finally whatever it was hit the press. On small jobs the setup could be 2 or 3 times the cost of the actual printing and the designer was, many times, a diva. A little pamphlet cold easily be a couple of grand or more and take weeks and months.
Because I could eliminate all those intermediate steps (and careers) with a click on my mouse and do stuff just about impossible in the analog process
and deliver in a fraction of the time, I could easily underbid the traditional folks and still make a couple hundred an hour.
Today there is
Fiver. Freelance sites put what I do up for bid to a global market. There are lots of talented folks in the world and a good number who are happy to make $2 an hour. Karma is a Diva too, LOL
Anyway, I started to say that opulence is our challenge at the moment because things are increasingly free or nearly, crime is lower than it's been in most folks lifetime, no widespread war, low poverty, and at the same time we're told about American Carnage hourly and urged by A.I. to "engage" with the things that push our buttons. I can't imagine my folks having enough time on their hands to get into twitter battles, retweet conspiracy memes let alone march to do away with democracy— or make 20k posts on a PO site for that matter.
Not that I yearn for a difficult life, but I fear we don't know what to do with ourselves already and will have less idea as more of us become redundant,
Idle Hands and all that.
My folks were dirt poor at points in their lives but would literally give a stranger their last dollar. They likely had many old time attitudes about morality, race, public displays, etc but I can't tell you what they were, I never heard them talk trash about any social, political, racial group. Today I see inlaws regularly disavow each other over a meme whose subject neither have any actual experience with and is never going to touch their real life.
I'd like to think there is a place where we all wake up to appreciate the opulence of our built world, the rights of our brothers and sisters, and work to preserve the remains of the natural world...
but I'm a doomer
.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)