Global Thingy

Today I had occasion to watch Sesame Street.

There was a brief animated sequence called ‘Global Thingy.’

In this we saw a variety of animals wandering around a plain, each one singing in a style vaguely mocking of opera, each one discordant with the others, and eventually they even sang aggressively to out do and cover up the singing of some rival. Then a cartoon character that was a globe with limbs and a face (super-imposed over the Atlantic basin) came and blew one of those little whistles a chorus director uses to get the singers on key (if that is the right term) and they all started to sing complimentary parts of a 1950s style rock song.

What could this mean?

It must mean that the animals were totemic symbols for the various nations and peoples of the world. Each one produced art in its own tradition, competing with each other for critical acceptance and popularity.

But all of that is to be done away with by a homogenized mass pseudo-culture produced for the profit of business concerns in the United States.

The difference between a historian and a lunatic is that one believes that change of this kind happens as the result of ineluctable historical processes, and the other that it is due to a conspiracy. But what do you call it when tradition is being systematically and recklessly destroyed for the sake of the profit of a few individuals (the owners of mass-media companies)? There is nothing mysterious about it. They use wealth to create a product they can control and advertising to drive out ‘products’ (i.e. art) they don’t control, which is why 2 or 3 Billion people could tell you who the Black-eyed peas are (or at least they could a year ago, something new is probably being promoted now; or at least they could tell you who the faces seen in the music videos are—that is quite different from the people who performed the music—mostly electronic now including the voices—and who composed it, for all that we are supposed to believe the myth that this is all done by the same—while the executives who are behind all this remain comfortably anonymous), but perhaps no more than 10 million could tell you who Simon Rattle is.

What were they thinking when they decided to promote this idea to children?

Strange Predictions

Hugo Gernsback, in a story whose name I can’t recall—probably incorporated into New York in 2600—and Isaac Asimov in the first Foundation book, both anticipated the internet, although in ways that seem somewhat strange and naïve to us now.

Gernsback imagined that in the world of the future, one would take mass transit from your high rise apartment complex into the downtown of your city. There you would go into an enormous department store and see samples of merchandise of all kinds. You would tell the sales clerk what you wanted, and an identical item in the warehouse underneath the store would be placed in the system of high speed underground conveyor belts that underlay the entire city and would be mechanically routed to your apartment, where it would be waiting for you, sent up from the basement in a dumbwaiter, by the time you got back.

He couldn’t make the leap from the mechanical to the electronic.

The citizens of Asimov’s galactic Empire at its height carried—to use some of our terminology (I don’t have the book before me)—a palm pilot that held a PDF file of every book and journal ever published. And that was it. He had no conception of connectivity (e-mail, message boards) or that people might want to create specific forms for the electronic medium (web pages). Personally, I would trade the internet that we have for this; though it seems within a few year we might have both.

On a slightly different topic, Verne frequently predicted, from Paris in the Year 1960 onward, that in the future there would be no war because armies would possess such terrible weapons as an electric death ray that could wipe out a whole battalion of cavalry at once, so that the prospect of war would be too terrible to contemplate. Imagine that—a whole battalion! How naieve.