(image via flickr user depressionpress)
Goooooooooooooood Morning SuperForest!
Over at wired.com, Robert Capps has an article up about “The Good Enough Revolution.” I found this article fascinating, as it describes the development of one of my favorite gadgets, the Flip digi-camcorder. Mr. Capps describes how the Flip has succeeded because people are willing to sacrifice image quality and functions for ease-of-use and shareability.
The Flip is cheap, insanely easy to use, and makes decent images, and that’s more than good enough for me and the millions of other cats who bought one. With my Flip I can shoot video and upload it painlessly and easily, which is great for me and great for my friends, and anyone who reads my blog, and great for youtube and vimeo.
What I find really interesting about the “Good Enough Revolution” is what it says about the American people’s willingness to sacrifice “quality” for fun and friendly.
For instance; for a birthday a few years back, a friend gave me a Sun Jar, which is a little device that gathers sunlight during the day and uses it to power a little LED at night. I was laying in bed, reading by the light of my Sun Jar, when I realized that I wasn’t using any off the grid power.
My AC was off, my computers shut down and their power strips turned off. All the lights were off, and if the fridge hadn’t been plugged in, I’d have been silent running.
Then I bought a lantern and used it at night for a while, just for mood lighting. I’ve found myself very actively trying to limit my use of the grid, in a way cutting myself off from the “quality American life” I deserve.
You see this everywhere you go these days. Families biking instead of driving. Hipsters composting and recycling instead of uni-trashing everything. All over America, folks are trading “quality” for Good Enough, and they are doing it with smiles on their faces. They’ve been trading what we think of as quality for something new.
But what?
Let’s take a moment to examine the word quality as it has come to mean in our culture. To me, “quality” invokes advertising images of shiny Mercedes hurtling down a road at night, or spinning wildly across a salt flats. A man eats a lobster while reclining in first class on a jumbo jet. A family drives a Hummer through the drive-through, then home to a giant house in the suburbs where the AC is cranked on and every door and window thrown open wide. The traditional “quality American Life”
There’s a problem. This “quality reality” doesn’t really exist. At least, not for many folks I know. This fictitious reality exists only in our minds, put there via marketing and advertising. It is this collective illusion of quality that we’ve conjured together that is rapidly falling apart.
Reality is a used, veggie-oil powered Merc, driving from restaurant to restaurant to collect old grease. A man eating a bento box lunch on a train to the farmer’s market. A family biking home together, past the fast food joint, to work in the garden that they’ve replaced their front lawn with.
That is reality, and that is the new quality.
Luxury and quality used to mean: How far can I distance myself from dirt, toil, and filth?
Luxury and quality now mean: How far can I distance myself from fossil fuels, energy waste, and unwanted isolation.
The hunger for the new quality is expressing itself in our choice of cheap digital camcorders.
I used to have a high-end digital video camera, that only with great hesitation would I lend out. I’d lend my Flip to anyone. So one could argue that having expensive gear (that you don’t feel comfortable sharing) is a way of isolating oneself from your fellow humans. And isolation is no good for humans. Unwanted isolation leads nice people into very dark corners.
The old “quality,” with it’s plastic, energy hungry, myopia was (and is) the perfect recipe for isolation.
Americans are choosing the cheap, functional, and easy-to-share life, over the high-end, isolating, sealed-in life.
What’s really funny about this, is that it’s always been this way. Living cheap and friendly is nothing new. What has happened is that our technology (blogs, social networking, Flips and iPhones) has allowed the truth of American life to come to the forefront, while the false image shatters. The Madison Avenue version of America has been revealed as the naked king it always was, and the truth of our lives is the little boy pointing out His Majesties’ lack of attire.
Americans are a good-hearted, generous, and friendly people. We want the best for strangers and family alike. We help out when asked for it and come together in times of need.
Something, somewhere got in the way of that. Convinced us otherwise. Told us that we were fat, wasteful, arrogant, violent strangers.
It just ain’t true.
It’s a heck of a leap from “the Flip has sold well” to “Americans are good people inside,” but I see signs of this new awakening around me every day.
With every new DIY post I read that someone has posted for free, for all, I think that everything will be okay. Every new flickr set, every new web page, every new idea says to me: It’s all going to be just fine. We’re all going to live through the end of the Industrial Age, the end of fossil fuels. We’ll do it together.
The papers and TV talk about life like the world was coming to an end, and they are partially right. A world is coming to an end. Not THE world, A world.
A false world that held us apart, told us we were separate, inflicted hierarchies and status upon us.
That’s the world that’s coming to an end.
And it’s about damn time.
Love to each and everyone.
-Jackson
p.s. Do you agree? Disagree? Why not make a nice video and send it to me explaining either!
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