We’ve finally taken notice of how safe and boring things are. How our experience of the world has become predominantly digital and life strangely devoid of ground-breaking music, literature and art. How culture is cannibalizing itself, rehashing breakthroughs of the past. How the band-less rockers, broke poets, unwashed artists and geographic trustafarians are no longer hanging out in the bars and cafes, and street crime has disappeared. We’ve finally begun to wonder where the culture has gone.
Out there in the real world, defiance, nonconformity, antiauthoritarianism, eccentricity and spontaneous deviance are at an all-time low. Absent is the weird audacity that would compel a cab driver to join a punk band and go on stage with a Pink Panther doll duct-taped to his junk (true story). It would seem that to die at a hundred on a full stomach is all we want.
But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when our kicks weren’t retrospective. Remember the song “My Generation”?
People try to put us down
Just because we get around
Things they do look awful cold
Hope I die before I get old
No one puts my generation down. We can’t be bothered to get around. Folks back then were way too bold. We’d rather die by getting old. No love, no defiance, no grief, no passion. We’ve given ourselves tacit permission to boor each other stiff for as long as it takes to become a stiff. Our fears and sins are picayune. We thrift on lunch break, drink a cup too much and stay awake doomscrolling and fretting about early retirement. We’re Gen Safe and not afraid to admit it.
Of course, hardcore self-abuse still thrives in our over-the-hill nation. But when we deal with each other, the abuse is somewhere else, in a camp by the river or a motel in Abilene. We cower in dismissive satire and snooty abhorrence at those suicidal lunatics on the fringes of society. Yet there was a time when our suicidal lunatics—our Kerouacs, Pollocks and Morrisons—were mainstream. They took big risks, flipped off longevity and proudly paid their mortal dues. And, however tragic they were, they were not pathetic. They had short lives but were not short-lived. The other day at the airport I saw a young dude reading On the Road, a book so antithetical to the prevailing dullness that I couldn’t believe that he could find it relevant—except by contrast.
So what made us so safe? So risk averse? What cowed us, per the Tao Te Ching, to go the way of water? To flow down the path of least resistance? Was it wisdom? Was it knowing more? Was it an overabundance of information, findings, facts and outcomes? Was it the so-called Information Revolution?
In terms of personal risk, we harm ourselves from overindulgence and excess more than we did before the predominance of digital culture (call it the year 2000). Since then, obesity in adults has risen from 27% to 50%. Drinking has gone up 14% and drinking hard liquor 66%. Drug overdose deaths have dropped in the last two years, but are still four times their 2000 rate. Despite an abundance of available morbidity and mortality data, levels of self-abuse are higher in the Information Age. In other words, more information has not kept us from harming ourselves.
What about harming others? Jeff Asher’s statistical analysis of crime rates from 1960 to 2022 shows that the 2022 rates in every crime category (murder, robbery, property crime, burglary, theft, auto theft, violent crime, rape and aggravated assault) are roughly equal to those in 1960. From 1960 to 2022, crime rates in all categories look roughly the same on a line graph: a mountain ascending from the 1960s to great altitudes in the mid-1990s to early-2000s, then descending rapidly to 1960 levels by 2022. These data suggest that, despite being no safer from ourselves, we’re much safer from others. And the drop in crime from historic highs in the late-1990s to early-2000s coincides nicely with the introduction and spread of digital culture.
Since the online media takeover, people have been less exposed to crime and opportunities to commit crime. Just as musicians have stopped playing out, artists and writers have stopped hanging out and people have stopped going out, criminals have stopped mugging, assaulting and grifting out. Even racketeering is down, which, as any Sopranos fan knows, requires a lot of social savvy.
According to an HHS study on social-connection trends, between 2003 and 2020 per-month social isolation went up 24 hours, family involvement down 5 hours, companionship down 14 hours, social engagement with friends down 20 hours and social engagement with others down 10 hours. It would seem that our sedentary, milquetoast culture has less to do with the prevalence of information than the absence of social interaction.
The 1978 documentary Scared Straight!, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, took a group of youths who were having drug, alcohol and sex problems and made them endure the harangues of a bunch of hardcore but penitent inmates. The condemned deviants were supposed to show these American delinquents—and, by proxy, all Americans—what lay at the end of the highway to hell. Despite the film’s popularity, Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” became a number one hit that year and America’s crime rates rose to historic highs over the next decade.
At the same time, Reagan tried to scare Californians straight by shutting down publicly funded institutions—old folk’s homes, homeless shelters, mental health and drug rehab facilities, etc. He launched his cannabis eradication program, among other tough-on-crime policies that raised the stakes for every kind of social deviancy and criminal offense. Despite the grotesque example of what happens when you flip-off normalcy and the status quo, Californians did not scare straight. Quite the reverse. Major cities became battlefields of the crack cocaine trade and every other corner featured a grimy, booze- and/or drug-addled Vietnam vet asking for sandwich money. Crime and homelessness went through the roof and education went through the floor.
After Reagan won the presidential election in 1980, he similarly pulled the social safety net from under the nation. His free-market fiscal policies led to a weaker dollar (inflation), wage stagnation and wealth stratification. He ushered in the age of the dual-income household, medical bankruptcy, risky lending (the savings and loan crisis), corporate bailouts and government debt. You’d think his pro-recession fiscal policies would have put a damper on extreme behavior. Not at all. Despite the ne’er-do-wells on the streets, violent crime and intrepid music flourished. Shootings and muggings were commonplace, and indie rock burgeoned into a whole new industry.
Nor did the health-consciousness and environmental awareness of the 1970s stymie cultural innovation and crime. Self-help, jogging, yoga, organic food and the crusade for all things natural and hairy seized the nation. There were granola bins in supermarkets, Birkenstocks on teachers’ feet and Surgeon General warnings on cigarette packs. But the ardent positivity, ameliorative sentimentality and pervasiveness of alfalfa sprouts did not dissuade the serial killers and organized crime. And rock-n-roll went satanic. On the pop side were AC/DC and Black Sabbath. On the underground side were The Stooges, The Ramones, The Damned, Dead Boys, Electric Eels, DMZ, New York Dolls and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Despite disco, roller-skating, rainbow colors and the demand for bran, rock-n-roll got demonic, rowdy and loud.
But what about the sixties? If you’ve watched Mad Men, you’ve probably chuckled over the scene where the gynecologist performs an exam with a burning cigarette in his mouth. Over the booze caddy and casting couch in every executive office. Over Draper whipping his picnic trash onto the grass, hopping into his convertible and, without buckling up for safety, speeding into the sunset. Those were the days of guiltless littering, three-martini lunches, dangerous transportation and catchy ad jingles. That was when seatbelts and bicycle helmets were optional. When Sherwin Williams covered the planet in lead paint, General Mills removed roughage from cereal and kids played with mercury. It was an age of high morbidity and mortality rates. Yet the innovations in music, art and literature are too many to list. And the age had something that ours no longer does: a counterculture.
A recent show by Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, satirizes the state we’re in. Infected by an alien virus, the world’s population mentally syncs into a single, benign organism. This selfless, obsequious, homogenous and harmless we exists only to blissfully preserve and spread itself. Ironically, it does so according to the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius and Christ. It’s timely of Gilligan to explore the pathos of benign unity. The elimination of originality, individuality, eccentricity, crime, violence and disparity. Like the virus in Pluribus, the internet has made it safe to go out but deprived us of a reason to go out. It connects and unifies us but only when we are algorithmically mesmerized. For the few like Carol Sturka who are not synced up, the world has become lonely, empty and morbidly safe.