2003-07-23

 
Dead Diggers.
We have a large problem on our hands. Society does. There is an ideal of how to engineer a society that works for 100% of humanity (Bucky), but I am not a philosopher, sociologist, politician, leader. I have only seen a glimpse of the way and thus will not elicit the details of a utopia. But the problem on society's hands is that, however this future community might be structured, there is no ground for it to be sown in right now. For certain, we have activists, peaceniks, anarchists, nonprofits... but as a culture we have reverted farther back than we were thirty-five years ago. What has happened?

Besides my new biofuels research job (my small contribution to utopian details), my activities are now taken up by a project to edit and reprint an essay that was handed out in the seventies, documenting the Digger/Free/Hippie movement in the sixties. While much of it is just bringing the facts up to date and excising the time-eroded idiom, there is a certain groundwork that is missing that I would have to rebuild. How can such a classist, capitalist (damn you activists with your CLIF bars and clipboards) people find something tangible in playful, witty, mesmerizing attacks on the system? Do we have to start from scratch? Do we need another Vietnam War, another LSD revolution?
posted by MM 10:02 AM