Financial crisis and trash of western civilisation

Financial crisis, lay offs, it is everywhere here and much more in America. Vladimír Kokolia (major Czech painter) for his exhibition of trash writes on his blog (bloguje.kokolia.eu :) that western civilisation is the biggest exporter of trash and the financial crisis is a trash which crashed into pieces after fast and reckless driving. "If mighty financial institutions go on their knees like at conveyor belt, it's a clear cock-up -- but their trash culminated in the times before, when they looked glamorous, with the succesful aura to eternity! By other words, we should be able to recognize trash in the fast, easy and reckless driving rather than ex-post when served like a pile of crash."

And automotive industry follows financial institutions. Car companies are in debt, interrupting the production and i'm happy. When I open window I cannot hear my own words, I go out of the house, often with my little daughter, there is one car after another, almost permanently the whole year and time of day jams. I call those people constipators. They must have soe urgent need to go into fleets of standing constipators and stink. Pedestrians are poor men, they stand five minutes waiting for green light on the semaphore while the owners of cars roll along and then the have five seconds to cross while other owher of cars run against them from the side street. Crossings, semaphores, all is set up best for the owners of cars and discriminating walkers. It is silent social caste system. I'm not against using cars, but against abusing them and abusing them in a mass scale. Two thirds of the cars are seated by one person. The problems of car companies make me happy and higher the price of oil, the better.

Don't know if it's only a temporary mania, could be, the blow-out of internet bubble several years before also did not destruct information and communication technologies. But if the crisis continues it will be a problem because to get rid of this industrial complex and related thinking won't be easy. It's interesting to think about how it all started. Before like 80 years the automobiles were something new and progressive, people employed in these fields were bringing some change into society and driving a car meant new style, freedom, future. Today, we are suffocated by pollution, noise and industrial-petroleum complex. It's also interesting to think about what will happen in near future with ICT or new media (different words in technological and human science dictionaries for the same), today progressive and solving a lot of problems of the past by new ways and possibilities, but later maybe problematic.

And i should not forget - the crisis begins to affect media also in CR. Magazines, internet servers, all addicted to advertising demand. In America film studios and also MTV lay off. So the question is how it will be with cultural financing heh?

I've been mentioning before some negative phenomena in new media art and perhaps i will be mentioning again :), for further joy of someone... but now i'd like to think about something different. Financial system nowadays is not about real values. Money are virtual and it's only a system of numbers somewhere in computers. If you give money to bank and they add several ones and zeros to number which represents your savings and disponible amount, it's just a social construction, a complex social contract of many levels of abstraction and trust. For the system to function, the value allways has to disappear somewhere, in longer term most of the people loose their money on this system, every 10 or 15 years some crisis comes, social change and we are starting again. Nor the contemporary crisis is not the end of the world as we know it and havenless catastrophe. It's a sign of transformation, social and cultural flows are changing, thinking is adapting to new situation, the structure of the market and industrial sectors is changing. And we need this change.

It's winter solstice, the dark time of the year, when a lot is hidden under the surface and i remember a year before by this time i had feelings that the people's relations are tearing and transforming, that existing networks could not work anymore and connect new tendencies and the process of reconfiguration had begun... and that i am the element, which is part of the interconnection changes... and so on, i was depressed a bit maybe..

I cannot say what does the nature of changes mean exactly, i look forward to something pleasant and interesting and we'll see when the sun begins to approach the spring.