The official postmodern year – 1964.
The official postmodern technology – the television.

1964 is the hinge year when Baby-Boom teenagers, satellite relays, colour tubes and mass marketing all reach critical density; the date also hand-shakes with Chapter 7’s timeline, where railways and radio had previously collapsed space-time.

The modern era is defined by its static black-and-white pictures, while the post-modern era is defined by coloured moving images. The peak year of the post-modern era is 1969. For those serious about life, we witnessed the moon landing and the advent of the first two-way variable image machine – the computer. Meanwhile, the hippies celebrated Woodstock.

Post-modernity is a natural by-product of an information-technology explosion that occurred after World War Two, with the commercialisation of the variable image machine known as the television. This change in information technology took time to be reflected in the Geist. It can be defined, in information-theoretical terms, as the moment in time when people paid more attention to their shared imagination, through these information technologies, than the reality they lived in.

The delineating boundary between the post-modern and the modern state is the nature of information technologies. The centralised nature of information technologies of the modern state (cinema, radio, the newspaper) led to the ability to centralise attention. The post-modern state made this task all the more difficult. The Russian state had to jam Radio Free Europe, making mass brain-washing all the more challenging. All the information technologies of the early 20th century became cheaper, thus becoming accessible to the individual. The Polaroid, along with the handheld camera, made image capture more ubiquitous.

Cost curves being downward sloping the cheaper it is to make symbols the more people will do so. We can repeat Chapter 6’s printing-press logic: slash symbol costs, shrink the minimum viable “attention cluster,” multiply niches.

9.1 Post-modern Philosophical Thought

Post-modernism is a point in history, not a political philosophy. After all, what does Baudrillard have to do with Foucault (the philosophical equivalent of a mosquito)? I categorise Foucault among people whom I call the post-truth philosophers. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? The original father of this movement is Hegel. His theories of culture and temporal relativism have long since been stretched past their breaking point.

Are there things which transcend time and culture? The answer is yes: Mathematics. Is mathematics invented or discovered? Its symbolic mapping is invented, the rest discovered. Every culture has a language, and this language changes. Have you tried listening to Shakespeare of late? However, modern mathematics is the Hindu-Arabic number system, Greek geometry, Arabic algebra, French algebraic geometry, English/German calculus, etc. All cultures share the same mathematics that gets incremented through time. If a thought gets abandoned, it is because the culture that produced it has died.

“Twice two makes four without my free will,
As if free will meant that!”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

9.2 Television — The Variable-Image Machine

Television could first represent images in black and white, without sound. In future, the television would be able to represent these images with increasing precision, over a larger screen with increasingly salient colour and vibrant sound. The cost of creating these images would decrease, giving us a greater variety to choose from.

Each quality upgrade increases the Simulacra and Simulation.

9.2.1 Satellite to Cable — How Information Is Distributed

The media landscape is a function of the cost of symbolising information. Satellite or cable are just a means to interface with the consumer. The greater the cost of symbolising information, the greater the minimum necessary scale needed to fund the content. Cable, with its lower cost of communication, was able to out-compete network television. The shift from satellite to cable represented a fundamental shift in the cost structure of the content wars. The means of transporting these variable images shifted from broadcasting via electromagnetic waves via satellite, to sending the very same information via fibre-optic cables.

Notice the pattern: every drop in marginal transmission cost—printing press, telegraph, cable—spawns new symbolic ecosystems; forthcoming Chapter 11 will show the Internet taking that to zero.

9.3 The Consumer Society

Edward Bernays, nephew of one Sigmund Freud, is the man who introduced psychology to the field of economics by getting firms to interface with the ego of the consumer. Consumers would identify with the products they purchase. Mass consumerism, thus, became an act of self-expression.

Prior to pre-packaged manufacturing, products had no labels. If you wanted butter from the grocer, the grocer would literally cut out exactly how much butter from a slab of the yellow goo. Same applied to anything else in the store. A branded good is an economic object. The number of products increased in the modularity of manufacturing.

9.4 From Modernity to Post-modernity — The Commercialisation of Culture

The commercialisation of culture is directly related to the decay of Western civilisation.

9.4.1 The Disneyfication of Myth

In a market economy, it’s not the most adaptable myths that propagate; instead, it’s those that appeal to the largest number of people. Storytelling has shifted from being a means of conveying information, to a method for generating liquid capital. This leads to the loss of the original narratives and the information they are trying to convey. Consequently, the incentive structures that once supported society’s shared myths are distorted. People used to tell stories to survive; now we tell stories for fun.

9.4.2 Culture and Counter-culture

Fundamentally, the notion of a counter-culture is a loose one. Do we consider the Protestant Revolution a countercultural movement? How is counter-culture different from a culture war? Specifically, in this case, I am talking about a difference in generation as being the difference between culture and counterculture. Punctuation Improvement: Firstly, the difference between a counter-culture and a culture war comes down to an evangelical factor: members of the counter-culture do not care to convert members of the culture. Therefore, the Protestant revolution would be part of a culture war. Secondly, in a culture war, the two cultures can live on their own merits, but the counter-culture is directly in reference to a culture.

The 1960s, like the 1990s, were both anti-commercial for different reasons. In the 1960s, the culture-industrial complex had not yet materialized, although the fundamental information technologies were there, and their effects on society were increasing. The 1970s marked the start of the machine. The 1980s were characterized by the formalization of the culture machine. The 90s, as Chuck Klosterman pointed out, saw the rise of grunge culture, where it paradoxically became cooler to be less commercial-the formalisation of counter culture. Nirvana the biggest rock group on earth, did not want to be the biggest rock group of earth.

However, unlike the 60s, the 90s counterculture movement was just a derivative, not against the consumer society. Kurt Cobain made his wife return a Lexus so they could keep their old Volvo. Cobain, like his nemesis (commercial culture), both defined themselves as a function of materialism. The Volvo is a statement of Cobain’s personality. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, would be proud!

9.4.3 Postmodern Clothing-Distressed Denim

Denim was originally contrived to be worn by gold prospectors. The rugged nature of the fabric makes it resistant to tears. Tears, later,  purposely tourn for stylistic purposes. This transformed the nature of clothing from utensils to acts of self expression.

9.4.4 Postmodern Food-The Chicken Nugget

The chicken nugget is one of the great abominations of western civilization. The definition of postmodern food stems from the shift of emphasis between calorically dense foods, which were most necessary the closer one is to the level of subsistence, to nutrition dense food.

9.4.5 The Rise of postmodern space-Disneyland

Disneyland is the first place-in-space of the simulacra and simulation. It is the first brick and mortar manifestation of man’s imagination. Disneyland is squarely a postmodern phenomenon. With the concept premiering first as a TV show, not an amusement park.

9.4.6 Postmodern sports:

1964 was also the year the first televised World Series. Also known as the death of baseball. Baseball is best experienced in person, or on radio. American football is the postmodern sport. In the sense that people would rather watch the NFL on TV than in person. Televising sports also increased the money in the industry with the money received from through advertising which ,long surpassed the income from ticket sales. This increase in money made its way to players and created a divide between players and fans. Newspaper reporters soon began to share that players cared more about their wardrobe than they did about winning.

9.4.7 Yankee Dominance

The Yankees, prior to the explosion in information communication technologies, had a much better time scouting talent. Their extensive networks of scouts, given the scant information medium of the time,  proved more useful than the accumulation of word of mouth and better distributed at cheaper costs.

9.5 The baby boomers

During the postmodernist time, there was a concurrent explosion in population in the chief postmodern state, the USA. this population explosion is the much discussed, often maligned-baby boomers. These boomers are set to be the first ever teenagers. As the information typography of the time allowed children to spend more time with mass culture than their parents. These first teenagers were born after World War Two which ended in September 1945. They Would officially become adults in 1964. The first postmodernist generation came of age in 1964.

9.6 Postmodern music-Rock and Roll

Bob Dylan’s last acoustic set at the Newport Folk Festival was in 1964. The set started with the times they are changing. Did the older pianists think that young whippersnapper Ludwig Beethoven sucked? Or was he considered a prodigy? It was the latter.

Music is habit forming. You like the music that you’ve listened to before. Intra-generational differential in habit formation begets intra-generational conflict. So when did the time start to really change?

If one understands rock and roll as the electrification of classical instruments, then one understands that a generational gaslamp might have some qualms because it’s nothing like anything they have ever heard before. Have you seen/heard a Led Zeppelin concert?But it wasn’t Led Zeppelin who bore the brunt of this change. Ironically it came from the man who told us that the times were, in fact, a changing-Bobby Dylan. It is precisely because Dylan noticed the change in the times- did he in fact change. A third of the Newport Folk Festival booed him when he transitioned from acoustic to electronic instruments.

9.7 The Star Wars Generation-A variable image explosion

9.7.1 New Hollywood-The American New Wave

Jaws, may have been the first blockbuster. Star Wars was the first phenomena. Movies officially became mass culture with the introduction of Luke Skywalker. Star Wars was meant to capture the color and excitement of comics on the silver screen. A longer, Flash Gordon strip.  In 1977, there was nothing that looked like Star Wars. Much like there was nothing that looked like the comics that came before.

9.7.2 More Cameras, more movies

Although information technology, known as cinema, began in the early 20th century, it did not peak as a medium until the later half of the same century with the American New Wave. There were a lot of factors which played into the supposedly  “new wave” of American cinema. With a decrease in the cost of the ability to symbolize information, Demand curves being downward sloping, more people could shoot a video. Consequently, more things became a video. This was evident by the creation of a new genre- music videos. The more videos there were, the better people got at making them.