PINK FLOYD, GEN Z AND SHADES OF MODERN MADNESS
Feeling the repercussions of the pop culture and Fourth Turning vibes, which are reverberating fast and furiously.
Into the weird…
British rock band Pink Floyd has reportedly sold its recorded music catalog, along with its name and likeness rights, to Sony for $400 million. Just "another brick in the wall" and another coup for a music colossus.
Pink Floyd
Speaking of Pink Floyd...
It was too early in the day for all the tenants in my head to start an unsanctioned thought session, delving into my rebellious teenage years fueled by Pink Floyd's psychedelic/anti-establishment oeuvre. Too late — ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ was already on at full pitch, drowning out the cultural confusion, angst, and worry, while cosmic questions concerning human existence loomed large.
I was born at the intersection of Gen X / Y as a hysterical wave of 'balkanization' washed over me during Yugoslavia’s twilight years. Confronting a range of existential hardships – inflation, sanctions and tribal politics in what has been dubbed one of the dirtiest conflicts in modern history. My teen years were turbulent, if not downright jarring, but it was all enlightening, too, giving me epiphanies and insights into today’s polycrisis.
Music and art were windows to the world. Pink Floyd was a must in my social mosaic. I loved the band’s sonic energy and countercultural ethos. Being anti-establishment and anti-regime defined me and my country’s youth culture; it was our way of rebelling and agitating against the status quo. The technology was not advanced back then — we didn't have snazzy cell phones, apps or social media to organize resistance. But we had a super-sensitive antenna for detecting regime propaganda and BS. We raged against the machine in both overt and covert ways. Growing up there armed me with a sense of skepticism, lizard skin and made me ‘anti-fragile’ to some degree.
Civil protests in Serbia were one of the the biggest and the most interesting political and cultural events at the time. This triggered the rise of the independant media and anti-regime reporting expressed in outlets like B92, Blic, Telegraf etc.
In that way, I feel sorry (and worried!) for adolescents and the youth of today. They are hopelessly addicted to social media and incubate mind-viruses as they grow up. Their phones are surgically fused to their hands and heads as they measure their success/self-esteem by the number of likes and followers. They live in one big meme matrix – a meme of a meme of a meme, perpetually comparing the value of life to someone else's projection. They are like proto cyborgs awash in a voodoo trance of manipulative and capricious AI. And the music has gotten just as weird, too. Swifties, Nymphs, Harry Styles, Bad Bunny, drill, k-trap and everything else. Yikes. Talk about false consciousness.
Mark Zuckeberg’s Meta stake has boosted his fortune to $201 billion.
In a time when advertisers/political censors are colonizing our consciousness and hijacking every second of our existence, organized confusion becomes the defining characteristic of the times. Society metabolizes, memory holes and normalizes all the deception and distortion while limiting the scope of critical thought. Clear and rational thinking is clearly in decline. Reality has been twisted and distorted at scale, with ‘info czars’ constantly crafting the narrative. Civilized, informed dialogue is almost nil. Kids definitely don’t indulge in any rational thinking.
Informational weirdness and meme madness - JD Vance and Tim Walz
People couldn't even agree on the surprisingly civilized nature of the VP debate and the weight of that polemic. The aftermath of that exchange inspired a tsunami wave of informational weirdness and meme madness. Why focus on facts or logic? That takes time and effort, and the human attention span is shrinking exponentially, accelerated by sly tech, the political cycle and the Fourth Turning, in which we find ourselves perilously enveloped. Viral-ness craves shock, anger and awe. TikTok's crack algo/ "silver lining" hits the spot somewhere between JD Vance's goth eyeliner and Walz's revelation about his friendship with various school shooters. Seriously, WTF?! It’s all crazed.
Paris Hillton and Kim Kardashian attended P.Diddy’s White Parties
Honest and objective journalism is long gone (thank gawd for X!), but some signs of critical thinking appeared in the recent reporting around P. Diddy’s pedo multiverse ‘White parties’ and Eric Adams’ Turkish-Chinese shenanigans. The fetishes of Hollywood, Epstein-Clinton-Gates nexus, the rich hypocrisy of celebrity culture and globalism are all being identified, questioned and field-stripped. The Freudian circus is starting to burn itself out.
Unity doesn't work anymore, not even in the face of a catastrophe.
Tell that to the devastated people of North Carolina and Tennessee, whose lives were wiped out by the indiscriminate Hurricane Helene, while our wannabe Potus Kamala Harris participated in a juvenile podcast. But it's not like she operates a ‘weather machine’ or anything, as she cozied up with Gen Z influencer Alex Cooper of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. It was very surreal and ridiculous per usual. Out of curiosity, we tuned in to this podcast – all bad optics, mindless theatrics and drab fashion, punctuated with the usual feminist bromides, abortion exuberance, and Freudian projection. It felt like a David Lynch production with Twin Peaks vibes and script: "This is like some kind of miracle. Phenomenon.” The significance of the passage of time. But hey, daddies aren’t allowed, right? It's all about ‘fem energy’ and GRL power.
Damage from hurricane Helene.
GRL Power: Alex Cooper and Kamala Harris.
And that bubbly, exuberant amount of power boomeranged back to haunt them both. The Daddy Gang fanbase got divided and polarized, and even moderate listeners got converted to extremists. The online backlash ranged from relevant to absurd and manifested itself as a critique against the interview's insensitive timing of a GRL sesh during a disaster with real people suffering, to the podcaster's sloppy wardrobe choice (a hoodie) for a sit-down with the potential Madam President. The podcaster's outfit/style was pitiful even without Harris and the disaster unfolding.
Oh well…no one is perfect.
The Dark Side of the Moon was still playing. Talk about a great album and clever subversion on many levels. At least the band finally agreed on something after years of internal feuding and management friction. But it's not just the members of Pink Floyd who got paid bucket loads of cash. The nerdy AF, sickly-looking tech goof turned buff libertarian bro, Mark Zuckerberg, has now displaced Jeff Bezos as the world's second-richest dude. His Meta stake has boosted his fortune to $201 billion. Which reminded me of Roger Waters, former Pink Floyd frontman, when he famously snapped/shut down Zuckerberg's request to use one of his tracks for an Instagram promo: "You think, how did this little p****, who started off going, 'She's pretty, we'll give her a 4 out of 5, she's ugly, we'll give her a 1.' How the f*** did he get any power in anything? And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world."
Hopefully the next few months will facilitate a socio-cultural awakening/pivot from the dark side of the moon to something brighter, with a revived cultural consciousness and an end to this crisis/long emergency that has been plaguing pretty much everything lately. Fingers crossed!! 🫠😊
