Jordon Cooper: The Cult of Cool
Somehow I think we think that cool technology equates with cutting edge culture and this comes from a weird understanding of culture.
Culture and coolness is local. It’s all local. When I am in rural Saskatchewan, a leather John Deere ball cap is cool and a very important part of culture. Yet when I hear people in the church talk about culture, we talk about “emerging culture” (there is no such thing), or global culture (sorry, culture is awfully localized). The thinking is what is cool in San Francisco or New York is going to be cool in Saskatoon or Calgary is incorrect. I always cringe when I read my blog as being listed as an important blog to read for understanding culture. That is totally incorrect, you don’t understand culture by reading a blog about culture…
I’m working on the third installment of my Antipocalypse series for Movement magazine. The first two can be found at the writing section of my website. The first two are fictional. The third is not; it is a description of what I was shooting at with the first two, “Documentation.” It comes closer to some conclusions on the subject:
About half my clinical obsession with web technologies is driven by an ADD-fueled love of all things new and shiny. The other half comes from a fascination with how the technology allows a boolean-packet level quantification of not new behaviors, but ways-of-being that predate history.
…The technologies we employ to facilitate these social transactions, they so often seem to be built with the intention of removing deceit, but…
I’m still working on what comes after that but…I just re-worked something from a semi-recent blog entry:
The tools communicating meaning have replaced actual meaningfulness. And without actual meaningfulness we lose context. And without context we become vapid. We become an un-unified theory of everything…we will continue to make attempts at tools that will give agency to what essentially amounts to some vaguely aesthetic abstraction of our desires.
All this on the day I’m missing startupcamp in Austin. I’m in a forced get-what-you-can-get-done-while-you-can-do-it mode, which today has been this (writing work), flexing the vocal chords a little (haven’t played guitar or sang hardly at all in months) and thinking about the next record (back in the studio in 5 weeks), and now…work stuff, because this week was > 50% fail in that department.