If you look at any of the kind of countercultural theorists that came out of the '60s at the
Berkeley, the Neil Postman's, the Theodore Roszak's, they kind of fundamentally, even
into the talking heads, they kind of fundamentally they meant something to me when I was studying
French literature at Vanderbilt, Renaissance literature, which really was the period of
literature that emerged after the invention of the printing press.
And at first it was pornography and comedy and then it went into more secular literature,
you know, stories, drama, et cetera, but it was always kind of the first to colonize is
pornography and comedy.
And then I started getting really into these kind of counter cultural theorists that were
looking at the time at mass communications like television and radio as these everything
from big brother to numbing us to selling desire in America to creating this kind of
religion of capitalism.
Twitchell wrote this amazing book called Adcult where he equated modern advertising capitalism
to a religion and it had its iconography and it had its dogma and it had its if you do
this then this will happen and if you use the American Express card then you too will
have three percent body fat walking down the beach with this beautiful person on your arm.
And so those were all these I think precursors to what we're experiencing now because I think
we were really trained a set of values and capitalism that meant that money ruled all.
We're talking about a troll president on Twitter now but at the end of the day a majority of
people think that a person that has a billion dollars is smarter than everyone else.
And so at a fundamental level if that's our religion then this guy won.
He's a winner.
He's got his billions of dollars and his airplanes and his Twitter account and he can speak directly
to the masses.
So what I think is fascinating, you never heard Donald Trump Facebook this because that's
not a raw feed anymore.
That's controlled by algorithms.
So he saw that Donald Trump tweets this because it's still a raw fire hose and so it's still
a direct connection.
And so we're constantly seeing these arbitrages of these new characters that emerge.
I've represented 6,500 kids that had no fame whatsoever in the world four years ago and
then suddenly Vine came along and six seconds lead to fame and Instagram came along and
Acacia Brinley took the perfect selfie and at 17 had a million followers on Instagram
and so our value system changed overnight.
All the things that we held valuable now we suddenly saw, and maybe it was always that
way, but now we just had camera phones recording it.
So when people make the comment about police brutality, like well it's always been there
it's just now we're recording it, now we're seeing it.
And so I think that we're going through this really interesting phase, especially after
this election where we now have a majority of people connected in these systems and we
can now see a lot of different aspects of the world that we might not have been privy
to because of this top down media.
The idea that the media was astonished that 60 million people in America voted a different
way is kind of a joke.
Like you weren't listening?
You were in such an echo chamber - so they're a victim of algorithmic, they're a victim
of social segregation, of algorithmic segregation.
And so I think that we're now starting to see everything for what it is.
I think that we're actually starting to reabsorb our society and we're starting to see it and
now we have these individual decisions to make at a very granule level that I don't
think we ever thought of before and I don't think that we saw ramifications so vividly
portrayed in real quantitative analysis.
I mean we're all getting data on ourselves now that we didn't have before.
Maybe we mouthed off in class and said something to another person and somebody said oh you're
a jerk or whatever, but we didn't have large scale lynchings like we have now in social
media when you put something out there.
I mean think about the polarization that happened in this last election where people are like
I'm unfriending you, I'm blocking you, that just created a bigger schism in our society
except we're seeing it now.
And I think that's the fascinating thing that's happening.
And that's why I keep going back to this idea of evolution.
Evolution is not necessarily progress, it's one of the biggest themes of the book that
I hope that people understand because they're very nuanced ideas but just because something
is evolving and changing doesn't mean that it's moving forward in a progressive manner.
It doesn't mean that it's getting better necessarily.
We have evolutionary moments throughout living history where things kind of went this way
and oh it didn't work out so well and they've died off.
And so hopefully a lot of these directions where we're kind of seeing hate for what it
is.
In immunology there's a great example of this if you look at the HIV virus, we've now been
grappling with this for over 30 years now and scientists have gotten really good at
containing it.
You can take a combination of drug cocktail, of heart treatment and you can go in and you
can basically eliminate the virus from the bloodstream.
But the virus is tricky in that it hides itself in dendritic cells and very deep kind of in
stem cell layer of our bodies and it can hide out for seven, ten, 15 years.
And so the second you stop suppressing HIV it pops back up, it mutates, it becomes more
virulent, et cetera.
And so there are two big theories right now in modern kind of treatment for that.
One is ferreting it out, trying to cause the body to trigger, to release the kind of stored
HIV by kind of shocking it and ferreting it out.
I look at that a lot like what's going on with the hate that's buried inside of these
people.
We suddenly had a catalyst that's ferreting out these hate emotions in our society.
And then the other thing and the other way to really cure it if you look at the Berlin
patient, for instance, or the Delta, I believe it's Delta 32 variant, was six percent of
living northern Europeans that have a immunity to HIV or to the most popular strain of HIV.
And so what we're doing is in science we're now taking stem cells from those people and
trying to rewrite a person that's infected with HIV's body so that they can recognize
the antigen of HIV and so that they can use their own immune system to either protect
against it or to get rid of it, to either inoculate yourself against HIV and change
the actual T cells floating around in your bloodstream or to actually teach it how to
recognize that as a virus, as a foreign antigen and to then rid itself by using the own body's
machinery.
So you're really re-teaching your body that this is bad.
I look at our culture right now as the exact same analogy because we have to teach ourselves
at a cellular level that this is bad.
I start the book off with the confederate flag, for instance.
It took 150 years and a mass shooting in South Carolina and a guy draped in the confederate
flag saying he wanted to create a race riot for us to suddenly realize that maybe that
flag is racist.
Maybe it's a symbol of hate.
Maybe it's a symbol that we need to get rid of in our culture.
And so it then takes us as individuals to learn that and to change ourselves and to
not propagate that or to learn how to squash it out at a local level.
And so I think the exact same thing that we're learning now with immunotherapy for HIV, for
cancer, for all those things about teaching our body that this is bad, I think we're now
learning that in our society of maybe the hail Trump is a pretty terrible thing that
we should squash out pretty quickly in our society and not let it happen.
But had he not been there that would stay underground and would it fester?
Would it get worse?
I think there's a good moment that we're seeing this for what it is so that we can act upon
it in a very organic natural way and hopefully get rid of this in our society as fast as
possible without letting it rise up and fester.
And the notion that our media or us we're surprised that 60 million people around us
felt differently is a big warning sign.
Who would be surprised that 60 million people thought differently if you were aware of what
they were thinking and you weren't living in a bubble?
So that's what I think is the biggest opportunity right now with what we're seeing in the new
social culture emerging.