ARE WE NOT MEN? Do you remember that song from DEVO? Gosh I loved that wild band back in the day. Remember their yellow outfits and red cone-hats and the way they moved like robots? As a kid, I’m sure I had no idea what they meant. The band name came as part of the word “De-evolution”. Their thought, way back in the mid-1970’s, was that “mankind had begun to regress”.
But I ask you, has there even been progress? I mean, we thought we were progressing, we had the industrial revolution where we got boxes filled with blobs of sugar and wheat, known as cereal. For a mere $10 you too can have Honey Nut whatevers, fantastic! (I’m not gonna lie, they are delicious.)
After so many years have flown by, we are supposedly in “Contemporary” times now. When we have had war after war, and a mind-boggling expansion of technology. The so-called “Digital Revolution”, a name unbeknownst to many of us because the internet is just part of the fabric of our lives, like an air fryer.
People started getting distracted during the Clinton years, his affair alone distracted us from the matter at hand, how do we stay sane in an insane timeline. We were knowing too much.
And now? We have reality shows, where we can watch humans fight with each other and show real emotion (maybe?), like a soap opera, but different. But, can we just step back in time to the days of Jerry Springer or Maury Povich? Now THAT was wild.
But people got bored, which is not a bad thing. And they became so creative they didn’t even sleep that much, inventing even more technology. And that should scare the bejesus out of all of us. Dr. Evil from the Austin Power movies had nothing on the creators of what we have now, which is so deeply defined, it is taking work away from people, and for what? So, they will no longer be distracted?
We have not advanced, we have regressed. We have become people without that divine spark, becoming more and more DEVO like, teachers and critics. Even the Pope is trying to protect us from A.I. He called artificial intelligence, “human dignity threatened by new forms of dehumanization”, saying we all had a duty to “remain profoundly human”. He does not lie.
I read a column on LinkedIn, as one does, and it broke down how we can save our beloved art medium of radio, but it will be hard work. In my experience managing humans, hard work is not for everyone. Less work, and more money, now you’re talking. I believe we need to hear humans inform us about what’s happening in our world. What of our communities?
We need other humans to help us remember our humanity. There is no emotion coming out of the de-evolution taking jobs from people. Just last week one of the bigger broadcasting companies took a job from a long-time employee going through Cancer treatment.
Are we not men?
