1 July 2009: "Do music festivals help u connect with ‘the human spirit’?"

This post is about Malthus. Its title has a reference to geist or spirit, which may prompt some of Carles's interpreters to read this post in light of Hegel and his magisterial Phänomonogie des Geistes, which traces the destiny of the human spirit as history unfolds itself. And such an interpretation would not be strictly wrong or misguided. That dimension is definitely present, part of the palimpsest of meaning Carles has designed for his disciples. But in this exegete's view, Carles's main concern is with the potential but largely discredited threat of overpopulation most memorably advanced by Malthus in the 18th century. Malthus suspected human beings would run out of food, but Carles, confronted by the sheer mass of humanity attracted to entertainment-industry spectacles, is worried we will run out of something even more scarce: human sympathy.

Feel ‘overwhelmed’ to imagine a ‘live music experience’ with s000 many ppl. Wonder if I really want to ‘rally around music’ and ‘bask in the human spirit’ in that type of environment.

Mass production of "art", Carles suspects, leads to a mass diminishing of spirit, with crowds snuffing out the possibility of a genuine aesthetic experience. The human spirit suffocates in such close quarters, the dialectic has no room to move.

Carles makes an obligatory nod toward Malthusianism -- "Seems like an event that would ‘raise enough money’ to ‘end hunger’" -- reminding us that it remains difficult to conceive of crowds without conjuring the specter of famine. And he evokes the supposed rebuttal to Malthus, the belief that economic growth can trump apparent ecological limitations.

But his main concern is with the proletarianization the inevitably results wherever there is huddled masses. He fears that memes and trends are not being used as a debased or counterfeit currency to dupe unattached youths into thankless labor, channeling them toward a future of having no future. He reports that the music festival actually functions as a kind of recruiting venture for unpaid unskilled labor:

I wonder if a company could offer their workforce non-monetary ‘compensation’ for an entire fiscal year. Like a company that ‘pays workers’ with ‘kewl bands performing’/meaningful experiences, instead of ‘having a payroll.’ Feel like there is a ‘genre of people’ who would do that, as long as you gave them a tent and a community shower, or something.

That genre of people that works for subsistence wages without the opportunity for capital accumulation are known as proletarians, and they have nothing to lose but their chains.

So music festivals reveal themselves as postmodern slums for the slave laborers of the future. Carles has a modest proposal: "Feel like possibly building some sort of music festival that incorporates ‘actual slums.’... What if we had some sort of ’super authentic’ music festival in ’slums’...?" This would streamline the whole process of turning the future into a cashless economy where consumer-drones toil to recycle their own waste products for the privilege of being recognized as authentic.