collective effervescence

In the face of isolation, what we get is a lust for  collective effervescence.  Trend.  Counter-trend.  Cause . Effect.

One thing is certain: the authenticity aesthetic served as a cohesive for all of these developments. It tied the spectrum of consumable items, spaces, and identities into a single unified visual experience.

This is a good time to discuss the demand for authenticity and where it comes from. As I hinted at previously, there’s a personal dimension to a... See more

I thought the real pleasure of mass experience was disappearing into a crowd and blending in.

chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

We’re in a constant battle to find our own sense of identity within the overarching internal values of the scene we want to belong to, and on that journey we’re incentivized to continuously prove our allegiance (“fanship”) and how we’re ‘in the know’.

So I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got sco... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame... See more

So many people seek this feeling of transcendence. They seek it at sports stadiums, protest marches, Mardi Gras, Burning Man, and homecoming parades—anywhere people come together for a group experience.33 They seek it in sacred ceremony and religious ritual, as French sociologist Émile Durkheim noted, because this feeling is the basis of religion.

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