Modernism

I caught two videos today that express what I perceive as "modernism."

The first is from Mark Rober, who embraces that cheesy youtube-presenter shit-talk drenched with insincerity sauce, so fair warning ... you may have to swallow back your bile at points.  I don't know why this style remains popular.   Note the creator has far less views than he has subscribers.

The video digs into drone technology not used by the military, though of course it could be, and sells hard all the things it's doing for humanity.  Strikes me as terrifically pragmatic, solving enormous logistics problems coming into existence and having an enormous potential for improving millions of lives.

A post-modernist is sure to be filled with fear, then with concern for the jobs of delivery drivers, then panicked at whisper-silent military possibilities, while building an irrational sentiment for why the whole concept is invasive.  None of that matters.  The concept, which I'm deliberately not explaining, took a relatively small number of people to invent; it takes advantage of pre-existing circumstances not covered by the law in order to establish itself as necessary; and it requires knowledge and education to run.  In other words, like everything that's modernist, its existence doesn't rely upon creating some ridiculous grassroots movement or convincing any ignorant person of any thing.

This is key.  If you want to invent something, and at some point in the creation process what you're inventing has to be approved of by one or more ignorant people, you've either misunderstood your process or you're right now inventing something that will never exist.  Trust me.

That may not have been so pre-internet, when you only had to convince a group of people in one room, within a brief span of time, while controlling the dialogue for as long as necessary to gain approval.  But that ship has sailed.  It's not possible to do that now, because people own cellphones.

The other video is very different, from Bushradical.  Here, Dave is completely sincere and authentic.  He makes no effort to sell his accomplishments, which sell themselves.  He just says what he and his wife have done over the last twenty years, step by step, admiringly.  Note that he has far more views than subscribers.

Dave works.  A lot.  I won't say how here, except to say that I should've worked as hard at writing as he has at what he does.  And this is me saying this.  There's a bit of road not taken for me, as a good part of my childhood was actually being the little boy that shows up in some of the pictures.  From the age of 5, I took part in my father building a cabin, and at various points the way that cabin looked and the way Dave's efforts look are exactly the same.  Gets me right ... here.

At 20, had I any interest, I could have used the money my father had put aside for my university and started building my own place in some outback place along the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta.  How much expertise I had wouldn't have mattered, as my father would have been 48 and more than happy, ecstatic even, to walk be through everything I'd ever need to know.  But silly me, I wanted to be a writer, not a housebuilder, so here I am.

Oh, wait ... I'm actually doing all right, aren't I?  I forgot for a moment there.

The lesson is the same that I've been pitching for years now.  Work.  Which is precisely the message in the first video, both for the company that's highlighted for its mechanical acumen and for the annoying content creator posting it today.  Modernism comes down to work.  People who work a job do so because they need food and rent, and are either trapped in the present or the past ... but people who work for themselves know there's a future.  At the beginning, because it's for themselves, it's always work done without a wage; without the certainty there will ever be a wage.  Yet often enough to make it worthwhile, there often is compensation for years of toil and struggle and, it must be said, derision from those who think it's foolish to work at a dream for nothing.

Shows just how little imagination most people have.