I’ve noticed an interesting tendency amongst contemporary Russians, from reading some of their articles and blogs: their long Soviet nightmare seems to have given them a very deep and very healthy disregard for anything that smells of utopian social experiments, and indeed of activism or politics at all. All those generations of propaganda have made them very, very cynical. Good on them.
I’ve said for years that the American “all-bullshit, all-the-time” system of continuous marketing– global corporate consumer capitalism– is just as doomed as the Soviet system. And that’s caused me to wonder aloud about what post-bullshit America will look like. I think I can guess now what will be its defining quality: a deep and healthy disregard for any kind of sales or marketing, indeed of anything that looks “slick” or attempts to sell. I think all these generations of sales and marketing bullshit and mass-media infotainment are already starting to make at least some of us very, very cynical. This is a very good thing.
In short, I predict that post-bullshit America will look a whole lot like the Free Software and Open Source movement, or the “reality-based” blogosphere.
