The BDO, The Future

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It is 11:59 pm, November 1st and I have wrentched myself from my local to be sitting right here in front of a PC.   I am feverishly logging into bigdayout.com in an effort to buy two tickets. The Big Day Out may be the most important festival event on Australia's summer music calender.

The shape-shifting, spirit of the times is now becoming cut and defined like the stench of gunpowder in cold dawn air.  In the year that faster broadband speeds became an election issue and the year Australian political parties waged a crucial component of their war on youtube and facebook.com. There are countless voices, screaming the same slogan, "I'm desperate to connect!"

Through the creation of cold, hard, digital, hypertechology we have, as a community, become anonomysly cookie-cuttered, disconnected, disallusioned, atomised and isolated. Conversations, connections and meaningful exchanges may have been the first casualties to AOL chats, applications, messengers, superpokes and ubiquous dating-site 'winks'.

Not long ago I wandered into a city McDonalds. Behind the barren counters were a stack of written pages in an open folder and I've never been able to resist being a stickybeak...

Written on these pages was information not for public consumption: for about 30 seconds I scanned over pages like I've never scanned. And what I saw, I saw in a kind of newness. Like a child seeing their first butterfly.

These words seemed different and in that moment I realised what made them different: What was written was nothing more than some internal memo about water levels or temperatures but a moment or two in I was jolted into kind of satori: Instantly it was clear; virtually everything I had read, heard, seen, consumed (or rehashed into my own expression) was like a kind of marketing, sometimes it was blatent, othertimes it was subtle but we were surrounded almost completely by it 24/7.

The words I was typically reading were like forces competing to win me over; Be it pure advertising or pure entertainment there were cultural, governmental, socialising forces from TV, magazines, radio, people, whatever, a thought war of ideas being played out constantly in competition for mine and everyone elses mind. Even if the message seemed benine, at every corner a worldview was competing for attention.

Much the same way what I am writing now is doing. The words I was scanning that day at Maccas did none of this.

In that moment I felt like my eyes had been opened. I wanted the truth, bone crushing truth: no more ads, no more spin. More than a spring clean, I wanted to taste, smell, experience the world is it, not as vested intrests wanted me to. What ever I had been doing hadn't worked, I was fat, boring, nearly broke with a university education that did nothing for me except keep me in an almost perpetual state of pissed-offness and one of the things I was most pissed off with was the media. Except nothing in the media was real, it was all spin.

I moved to a new home, didn't bother with internet or TV, the CD player broke down, I conveniently lost an Ipod on a trip and stopped reading papers. All I had left was classic 70's & 80's vinyl, a phone-line and focus.

I wanted focus.

I didn't want to be tugged in a thousand different directions. I said, "So what" about policies in Iraq and other places that I'd never know the real truth about and I also said "So be it."

I slowed down to examine this condition, my mind unaccustomed to laser sharp focus without coffee(s). I started to get myself comfortable with nothing: Nothing with a capital N. And what I became present to was emptyness: An emptyness that had been frosted over with public relations and marketing copy.

My life became exclusively travel, work, swim, sleep, travel, work, swim, sleep. Without any commerical or beer breaks.

One day some months later I zoned-out on the job into a two or three minute daydream and I had idea. This was not someone else's idea; through tearing myself away from the teat of spin, I felt instinctively that this was an idea that was given to me and yet authentically born of me.

On the way into the city, I notice grown men without the willingness or socialisation to offer their bus seat to older less able passengers; it seems insignificant yet it is the tip of the iceberg. Living in London during broadcast of the final season of The Office, I'd watch the TV-show and the next day watch suits desperately trying to connect over watercoolers waxing about last night's episode. For the most part, from where I stood, developed countries the world over were becoming littered with 25,35,45+ year old children, existing without mission or purpose, as souless critics, living a half-life in the cold haze of cyberspace.

The ancient rites of passage for close knit tribes and communities ensured the transfer of social knowledge to those who desired adulthood and ensure a tribe's social sustainablity. We've spent eons in tribes and packs; hunting, fishing, nurturing, growing, telling stories and feeling that charged response from the tribe when the story is shared.

What happens when this natural social apprenticeship, downgraded, and defunct?

My life started to fill up again. But this time I chose what I furnished it with: time with good friends, seminars, yoga, volunteering and the creation of charity- based project. The project that had begun with the idea.

Suddenly slowing down meant speeding up, with more purpose and meaning than ever before.

Over socialized and underempowered, programmed to 'can't, shouldn't and don't. '

I challenged Sarah (19) to consider saying 'Hi.' to a stranger.

"Oh, I'd die." she gushed.

Protected to the point of suffocation, how could she not?

That was it. The idea!

The charity project I founded challenged sponsored-participants to physically connect with people outside of workplace and mutual friends. The project stretched them to the point that they could walk into any room on the planet and enjoy the company.

In the fully realised project, participants were saying 'Hi" to 150 groups of intimidating strangers over 28 days, purely on the strength of their own personality. As the coup-de-grace, If they didn't give it everything, they'd be risking the life of an underprivilaged orphan.

Consider the world has no internet or tv on thursdays, what would you do with them? Imagine a dark, messy bedroom, a flickering blue screen chattering with code, and a lone school-kid, with no alliegnences, responsibilities or obligations, and not appeased with the connection they get from 1-4 days year at musical mega-events. With one deft keystroke, they inititate a virus so brilliant it brings the net down like David versus Goliath.

The endangered art of emotionally risking one's self, and authentically putting ourselves on the line to positivetly impact others, beyond jokes, beyond chain-email, beyond 'biting chumps' is in danger of dissapearing and in some places extinct.

So here's my piece:

Say your piece, borrow sugar from your neighbour's neighbour. Take that chance and fuck it up. I don't know how to end this. So I can only say, I encourage you to end it.

I read this week in The Herald's Icon liftout; one writer seriously perportrate 'One's behaviour on the web was a reflection of this life' as their own original thought?!

What's yours?