As we head towards Halloween again, and with the new e-book in circulation, I am left to reflect on what it means to live/work through a transitional time. Some home truths seem to be both stark and Halloween-ish; television, print media, popular culture are all bottoming out on an atrocious level of thoughtlessness and mediocrity. The vacuity of what's "around," in all these contexts, is breathtaking. Meanwhile, the world created from, and out of, the Internet, while it has to have some of the earmarks on the century XX world, has set in place the possibility that those with the brains and gumption to do so can forge their own worlds, universes, contexts. Is it that stark in 2017: the Internet set against the rest of America, or the rest of the world? I am given to wonder because, as the Halloween skull you see here being flown at 1521 Fayette Street in Conshohocken, Plymouth-Whitemarsh, the contrasts are so stark, so deathly. If we are moving towards an era in which online universes win more of the time against the hollowed-out stuff, you can bet the plebeian sector of humanity won't be particularly happy about it; they'd gladly stay in century XX forever. It was a show-biz (Disneyland, as Baudrillard had it) century. But the individualistic portion of humanity, who dare to live beneath the surface and develop their cognitive capacities, will have a much easier time finding outlets for creative self-expression. That seems to me to be more important; even if the "skull" hovering around the endeavor, which suggests rancor and even physical violence, has to be flown, because between those of my kith and kin and the plebes it must, it seems, be never-the-twain.
