the revolution will be aesthetic

welcome to trwba (‘trooba’) a place to soak in cosy aesthetic moods and find uplifting, wholesome remedies to the poisons of modern life.
here we revel in sincerity and beauty.

we also try to tackle the inadequate ideological vocabulary that’s making it near impossible to talk about what’s really amiss in the world and how we can make it better for everyone.

the ever-present top-down corporate media landscape tends to limit this conceptual vocabulary by keeping our minds on simple things they can sell.
so here you’ll also find attempts to analyse the crises of modern life, and tentative suggestions toward resolving them.

what is the revolution?

our culture is in crisis (the fact there’s basically one big international culture we can describe this way is itself pretty drastic).
not the kind of crisis that provides a sudden, urgent catalyst for change, but the kind of slow-burning decay that can go almost unnoticed.

broken families and rootlessness are the norm. despair and suicide are rampant, especially among men, said to have so many advantages in our world.
we’re missing family, and when we aren’t, we’re missing community: people are less a part of a local neighbourhood than ever in the past.
we are disconnected.
so many of us feel we have no meaning and no future, even when all our material needs are met.
to say nothing of all those whose material needs are still unmet, or whose lives are hollowed out by addiction.

our earth, our water, our food, our stomachs, are being slowly filled with plastic trash and hormone disrupting chemicals.
modern ‘lifestyle diseases’ are our biggest killers. our abundance destroys us without even making us happy first.

there is so much wrong that it’s hard to comprehend.
it shouldn’t be this way.
it doesn’t have to.

maybe we won’t get a catalyst, but we need a transformation all the same.
we start by rethinking the assumptions that got us here.
it doesn’t take politicians. doesn’t take legislation. doesn’t take funding. doesn’t take a rally.
we need to look at our culture. our attitudes. our habits. how we live.
the revolution starts with us.

why will it be aesthetic?

because it must be, for us to recover from the onslaught of ugliness and contrarianism that has been the postmodern epoch.
the regeneration we need is beautiful, wholesome, cosy.
true beauty is good: aesthetic appreciation is a positive response to the stimuli we naturally associate with things we value.

humanity is shrinking back from postmodernism. we’re in a moment where we can discard it now, for something better. for good.

anomie, metamodernism + cyberspace

we find ourselves today in a condition of anomie, meaning a lack of shared societal values, and the breakdown of social relations which results.
since the project of postmodernism was to challenge and dethrone society’s existing values, it’s only natural to have found ourselves here in the wake of postmodernism.
but now there has been a great clearing, it’s time to rebuild.

we need to move on from ironic detachment and bitter cynicism to joyful sincerity and constructive (not blind) optimism.
a word that goes some way towards describing this tentative next step is metamodernism.

it’s a pity to be coming together here in cyberspace, where we are (regrettably) so distant from each other.
but here is where we are.
glad you could make it.