The Celebrity Spark
As many posts in this blog make clear, I believe that the old social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling is on its way out, to be replaced by something more collective. The economic, psychological, and ecological dynamics of our current arrangements are bursting at the seams, and I do not envision any type of return to a the "normal" way life, one coiled around full employment and market-maximized consumption. Of course, we will desperately strain and protest at the passing of this way of life, groping for ways to "stimulate" the markets, green the economy, re-regulate reckless industry, etc. But this entire American Algorithm will end up on the junk pile anyway, since it is deeply unsustainable. Keep in mind that our current difficulties are not just a temporary setback in an overall pattern that was headed in the right direction. As earlier posts highlight, our general trajectories have all been going in the wrong direction since the mid-70s: wealth concentration, wage stagnation, declining savings, rising costs of living, ecological collapse, and cultural zombification. This vast avalanche of rolling catastrophes is not something that will just magically turn around if we can just get the DOW back up a few hundred points, or if we can get some new roads and bridges built. The whole scaffolding of the American suburban-consumer project is coming down around us, and what replaces it will look very different. Collective living will emerge in one way or another, either by choice or by brute necessity, I have no doubt. If we can plan for it in some manner, instead of having it forced upon us, the transition will be that much easier.
So how do we get from the current social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling) to a more collective one? After all, all of the major legal, economic, educational, architectural, and cultural frameworks in America are geared towards the individual and the nuclear family. What would a more collective social form even look like? Like a 60s commune, filled with drum-circle tofu types? No thanks, most would say. That commune thing was tried back in the day, and it failed. It obviously did not work, or it will still be around today.
Certainly, the original communal movement of the 60s and 70s is over. Most of these communities, having no real economic or internal governing strategies, faded away. But in the decades since then, many new community strategies have emerged, and a dynamic movement for collective living is cruising along quite nicely, under the radar. Visit the Intentional Communities website at www.ic.org, and you will see hundreds of new and forming communities all over the country. One of the most popular new collective living strategies is Co-Housing, a general development pattern whereby families usually own their own homes in the traditional sense (albeit much smaller ones), but also contribute to a general fund that maintains a common house for central gathering. Co-Housing communities are usually designed with a dense, clustered layout of small homes in intimate proximity to one another, with parking pushed to the outside of the property. Besides Co-housing, other collective mechanisms are being tried everywhere, from income-pooling to co-ops to internal currency, work-sharing schemes. Whatever the specific form, the general purpose of Intentional Communities of all stripes is to create a larger home-base from which to approach the wider external economy, and a more meaningful interpersonal dynamic on the inside. There is a sense that trying to go it alone is just not working for people, so something different has to be tried.
Now granted, these communities usually find the deck stacked against them. In a world where the skids are greased for individual and family, it is often extremely onerous for larger groups of people to get bank loans, to find developers, to get zoning laws changed, and to find architects with experience building non-traditional structures. As a result, many people of modest means, who would theoretically benefit from collective buying power, are actually shut out of the intentional community process, since so much money is needed on the front end to navigate the complex legal terrain.
So the question is, how can we jumpstart the collective living project? How can some of the processes be changed so that a larger group of people, wanting to try something different in the way of social form, could more easily get a project off the ground without bankrupting themselves?
I really think the major hurdle at the beginning of the process is cultural, conceptual one. People don't have any idea of what community living might look like. They have no visual template or image in their heads, so they cannot get excited or mobilized about it. And as we dealt with in an earlier post on utopia, a concrete image of a future society is absolutely crucial for escaping the ideological straitjacket of the present. The social imagination is not aroused by general ideas or theories. Real, purposeful social change, as opposed to blind, market-driven chaos, requires a definite vision of what we want our future arrangements to look like. If we do not have any meaningful picture of a vibrant, collective community in our heads, we'll never be able to create the necessary infrastructure for such desired outcomes.
So how do we create those concrete images of community, the embodied utopias necessary to really activate wider social change? Well, the answer seems remarkably banal at first glance: harness the power of celebrities. On its face, it seems absurd, especially considering the vast, interlocking sets of problems that are facing us. How could celebrities solve the deep-seated, systemic flaws we talk about so much in this blog? Celebrities are obviously already making yeoman efforts to eradicate war, disease, oppression, and all manner of social ills, but our overall trajectories still tilt downwards. How much more can they do?
The key here is not how much they do, but what they do. High profile individuals like celebrities should actively be sponsoring, funding, promoting, and publicizing actual communities, places with collective living strategies and structures. These communities need to be in the public eye, especially on television, as concrete models for a different way of organizing life. If collective living is made visible as green, hip, and socially innovative, this widespread attention will immediately create a reservoir of public desire for the institutions and instruments needed to create communities on a wider scale. Just consider the possibility of Oprah bankrolling a new community, and highlighting the travails and triumphs of the residents through regular segments on her show, or even on a stand-alone show. Tell me that would not ignite a spark of interest in collective living overnight.
Consider how much of the current entertainment milieu is already devoted to quasi-communal themes. There are reams of reality shows that either throw groups of people together for some contrived competition, or document the collective shenanigans of the Kardashians or Playboy Mansion residents. We also tune in to our extended families on ER or Lost, vicariously involving ourselves in their group struggles and victories. Even the success of a show like Cheers had as much to do with the rosy nostalgia of a warm, welcoming group as it did with the actual jokes and plot. It could be said that most of the entertainment landscape, especially television, is an electronic substitute for the collapse of more real forms of togetherness. It is a medium ripe for promotion of actual community.
The true power of mass media is its ability to drive public perceptions and desires in an incredibly rapid manner. Trends, phrases, behaviors, and images can be burned into the collective mind almost instantaneously. Right now, collective living arrangements are not widespread, partly because people have no vision of what that might look like. But infuse the media landscape with models of actually-functioning communities, and a sea change could begin. Public interest and desire could then be leveraged to promote government policies and accompanying private sector instruments.
Obviously, celebrity-funded prototype communities would be partly entertainment. But it could be a vibrant, interesting, new form of entertainment, a kind of fusion of This Old House meets Victory Garden meets Big Brother meets Extreme Home Makeover. Instead of contrived competition or ginned-up soap opera drama ("Oh no, she didn't?!?!"), which gets old pretty fast, these new communities would be showcases for green architecture, collective living strategies, and the drama that comes with real human cohabitation. And like many longstanding shows on PBS, they could provide real instruction for people on how to create, maintain, and improve their physical spaces. New opportunities in advertising would open up, with green companies able to showcase their services and products. And the higher internal-activity, lower-consumption behavior of communities could drive an alternative model relationship between individuals, the workplace, and the wider marketplace. Different attitudes could go on display, mature attitudes towards buying and working that are essentially absent from the current culture-scape.
Another key thing to remember is that the primary driver of many of our interlocking problems, from ecological collapse to the housing bubble, is our basic social form itself, the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling arrangement. It is this fundamental sociocultural building block that has overconsumed and undersocialized us into multiple messes. If we can plug in a more collective social form as the base, and start a move towards that way of living, then much of the negative energy that fuels our current dilemma will just dry up. The social and economic space opened up for people who create more self-sufficient and efficient living arrangements can, conversely, drive many other positive social trends at once.
So while it does sound banal, celebrity-sponsored prototype communities could provide the cultural spark that ignites a more collective future, one that happens by choice instead of force of (dire) circumstance. High profile forms of community-qua-entertainment may seem fleeting and insufficient for generating the major social changes that needs to happen, but just think of them as catalysts that can unleash the unparalleled cultural power of the mass media. For people to want the right things for our future, they need to be able to see what those things would look like, in an integrated, actual form. The embodied utopias of high-profile communities, injected into our popular media culture, might just be the most promising pressure points for getting us where we need to go.
Comments