Let's Get Solid...

Over a long period of time, the human race has accrued to it some stable, solid achievements. When there are solid achievements in the high sectors or disciplines— science, philosophy, and high art— the processes by which the achievements are recognized and assimilated happen, always, slowly and incrementally. Solid human progress, in fact, is always slow. What I want to argue is that the Internet has created a new kind of Solid World context. Here, the seeds planted are free to grow incrementally, and thus establish and consolidate a solid basis for progress on high levels. This Solid World is angled specifically against what I call the Regular World, which is bound by laws which make human progress impossible— newspapers which must come out every day, magazines and journals which must be released month by month, and especially (for the high disciplines) prizes, grants, and fellowships which must be awarded at regular intervals. Whenever anything must be repeated at regular intervals in high-discipline sectors, with no leeway given to lulls and fertile periods, human progress is being arrested. Regularity is essentially corporate, and bureaucratic. It is also not constructed to withstands major changes, when and if they happen— why Solid World material takes a long time to be assimilated. The 2015 Solid World online pile-up is thus a profoundly disruptive force. It is also one of the key reasons I am still alive and working steadily. That Solid World schedule— what appears online happens in its own time, at regularly irregular junctures— is demonstrating for the public what human life can be at its best, and most creative. Militaristic regularity does not have to disrupt or corrupt serious creativity— organic devotion to an interior life can be the name of the game, and serious individuality cultivated.

Regularity (as has been spotted) is also a game to destroy individuals— but the new 2015 thinking populace are allowed to no longer be fooled by the corporate and the bureaucratic. Furthermore, what is Solid online now manifests the promise of growing more Solid as time passes; so that the corruption of the Regular will continue to be exposed at all points. Individuality will be cultivated in more sectors, and respect and toleration for individuals will have to be learned. The abrasiveness of the corporate and the bureaucratic, and its machine-like Regularity, towards individuals, is one reason the twentieth century was a partial charnel ground; animated by clowns and dummies. Because Regularity must pretend that human progress happens at regular intervals, which it very much does not, clowns and dummies must be created to fill in the corporate blanks or dossiers, while the Solid must happen elsewhere. Trash has to be generated to fill media vats— Regularity demands it— but now, we live in an America which is developing a sense of balance about such issues. As the public develops tastes for organic irregularity, its superior, progress-oriented righteousness, confusion may have to reign for many decades to come. What was a hands-down victory for the corporate and the bureaucratic in the twentieth century may become a hotly contested, high-stakes battle for hegemonous power and influence in the twenty-first.