January 01, 2009By: The Good Doctor Category: afrofuturism
The line of the last four months has been something like the following:
I’d never thought I’d live to see this happen.
Of course those of us in the states, and even outside, know what “this” means.
But what is going on is so much bigger. Hell I didn’t think I’d live to see the day I could hold a phone in my hand with 20,000 times the power of my Apple IIc…but there you have it.
I’ve been trying to bring together seemingly disparate pieces to question our new reality, to question its texture, its sound, its taste, its look. And I’m going to continue to do that.
I never expected to live to see 40. Not because of any Menace II Society like concern with my life. But because I was raised on a steady diet of science fiction novels, and B-movies. I couldn’t see beyond 32, because that was 2001.
And 2001 was the future.
So the very idea of being 40 was foreign to me.
Yet and still here we are.
But the future is still there and waiting to be made. I took the title of this post from a fascinating interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Here’s hoping we’ll all be here over course of 2009 to talk about the future together.
Now this may sound like a doom and gloom story. But it isn’t…necessarily. I choose these stories because they point to the growing reality that “cultural creatives” (writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals, journalists) like the institutions that sponsor them may need to rethink the way they work. With colleges and universities losing their endowments more and more graduate students will need to go outside of the academy for work. People on the tenure track will be placed in a much more tenuous position–assuming that tenure continues to exist. If the days of big advances are gone, then writers are going to have to figure out some other way to make ends meet.
And unlike the New Deal, when FDR created programs for artists…I’m not sure Obama has anything like this coming.
There are a whole set of conversations about the future of publishing, the future of the academy, the future of the music business. Black intellectuals haven’t been significant voices here.
We should be…because our futures are on the line as well, even as our future IS online. For me what I’ve had to realize over the past year is that the model with which we train graduate students, the model we pursue as assistant, associate, full professors, no longer works. And will NOT work. We need to be much more supple, much more entrepreneurial, and much more fluid in the types of questions we ask, the types of projects we undertake, the types of venues we pursue them in.
As an aside by the time you read this I should be on the road to Detroit, for a combination of pleasure (family), and business (collecting data for my next book project).
December 24, 2008By: The Good Doctor Category: Uncategorized
Historians (rightly) rap Obama, arguing his stimulus package is weak.
As students of American history, we are heartened by your commitment to a jobs stimulus program inspired by the New Deal and aimed at helping “Main Street.” We firmly believe that such a strategy not only helps the greatest number in our communities but goes a long way toward correcting longstanding national problems.
For all our admiration of FDR’s reform efforts, we must also point out that the New Deal’s jobs initiative was overwhelmingly directed toward skilled male and mainly white workers. This was a mistake in the 1930s, and it would be a far greater mistake in the 21st century economy, when so many families depend on women’s wages and when our nation is even more racially diverse.
We all know that our country’s infrastructure is literally rusting away. But our social infrastructure is equally important to a vibrant economy and livable society, and it too is crumbling. Investment in education and jobs in health and care work shore up our national welfare as well as our current and future productivity. Revitalizing the economy will require better and more widespread access to education to foster creative approaches and popular participation in responding to the many challenges we face.
More here. I haven’t chimed in on the Rick Warren deal, but taken in sum I’m reminded of something I first heard from my wife. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. But instead of sitting on the sidelines, do something.
December 23, 2008By: The Good Doctor Category: politics
There were riots in Greece last week just four years after Athens hosted the Olympics (and several months after the media started to ask was it worth it? The proximate cause? An incident of police brutality after clashes between police and protesters left one 15-year old teenager dead.
But of course the roots go much deeper.
I asked yesterday for readers to connect the dots for me.
Bringing together youths in their early twenties struggling to survive amid mass youth unemployment and schoolchildren swotting for highly competitive university exams that may not ultimately help them in a treacherous jobs market, the events of the past week could be called the first credit-crunch riots. There have been smaller-scale sympathy attacks from Moscow to Copenhagen, and economists say countries with similarly high youth unemployment problems such as Spain and Italy should prepare for unrest.
“I’ve seen the future and it will be.”
For an interesting meta-analysis, check out Buster, bout to be added to the RSS feed.
