2021/4/30 #poetry today our society outputs a whole lot of noise a slew of garbage comes out of publishers and creators of all sorts prolific production but minuscule magnificence
digital platforms support massive eructations of word, sound, visual artifacts, “experiments”, remixes, and homework assignments all previously unpublishable now nothing is
we believe that society can sort it for us but it can't, that's a myth, an illusion, and a gamble so much is lost in the noise
the problem is that what's good is about what speaks to you and what speaks to you is about context and our context is all screwed up fractionated and splintered into 7000 shards per capita and marketers and media outlets huff and puff and whip them up into little wind devils cyclones of splinters and pablum
our cultural digestive system has been disemboweled what we are left with are frameworks for creating excitement every movie producer uses the same brand of plot thickener each film gets different flavors but all end up with the same consistency
in the bad old days we all shared One True Culture a different one for every place but each culture held together was cohesive was a culture
now we don't have a culture for society at all we have shared cultures between friends family cultures corporate cultures each siloed and on it's own they can't be shared because letting something out is just dumping it into the ocean of noise
in order to create sanity to bring it all together people must resort to making their own culture by producing their own work they can attract others that have at least that work as common knowledge that this works encourages them to make more work adding to the noise
this is not to say that the drive to create is the problem and this is not to say that the drive to share your work, or work you found meaningful, is the problem nor is it to say that we should all go back to enforced recitation of any particular theological or mythopoeic narrative just that perhaps some structure some order would help a bit
and also that if we did want to have a shared culture we'd have to address a key driver in all this fractionation and agree that copyright can't exist
Sets of sets some order describing as in delineating as in creating an outline a border of definition dividing what is within and without
Sets of sets a holding together of holdings together of elements
Sets of sets containing containers containing things
Sets of sets collections collected
Sets of sets