More than happy to be a part of it myself…. ;^)
the choice of a nude generation | The Agonist
there is a conspiracy, of which i am a professed member, to dismantle the petroleum society. the petroleum society introduced a host of concepts, including the nuclear family, in its drive to make labor mobile to the convenient places of production.
the conspiracy is to move production into forms that people can do where and when they want, even stark naked in their own bedroom.
the social forms and norms which came with the mechanized world have not been successes by and large. the divorce rate is high, it has torn apart the african american community entirely – moynihan had it exactly wrong, it wasn’t that african-americans were failing at marriage, it is that nuclear marriage was failing them. one major reason that immigrant communities do better than indigenous african-american ones, is that the immigrants keep the nuclear norm. the parents come over when needed, or the children are shipped back.
the nuclear norm is also one that is lividly more bigotted than the extended one. this is because each partner is the sole source of emotional support for the other. it has lead, directly, to a rise in the consumption of video pornography and use of sex aids, including bondage-discipline and sado-masochism, as ways of keeping the sexual passion alive in the the nuclear couple. it is also why “defense of marriage” becomes more an obsession of the right wing. the nuclear marriage, as more fragile and stressed, needs it.
at the same time, the economic realities which allowed and encouraged the nuclear family are being crushed from both sides – young people are failing to launch, and old people are collapsing back into the home to be cared for. often both at once.
the nude generation enters this reality without an attachment to the nuclear family, without a job picture that encourages the nuclear family, that is moving to someplace and having a long residence there in the employ of one company. the nude generation therefore, neither respects the norms of that system, nor do they have any force impelling them too.
instead, as people who find people by craigslist, facebook, linkedin, friendster, myspace, and even more exotic tools, they are impelled to build networks that are polymorphous, polyamorous in many cases, and polyvalent. multi is the word of the past, poly the word that the nude generation falls upon. the polytropic has become polyagenous, a society made out of things which are indefinite in their form and structure. we don’t buy things as much as we buy things that make things. computers, smartphones, internet service, sites that link us to new content we didn’t know about, websites and so on.
this conspiracy to overturn the past is driven my many things, it make sense because the past really has robbed the nude generation blind. in the last 30 years the end of the GI generation, and the beginning of the baby boom, has spent the money that the second half of the baby boom, the baby bust and the echo boom assumed would be there. they have eaten the air, fouled the economy, spent the credit, burned the oil, used up the land to build, largely, parking lots.
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