Welcome to Hypermodernity, or a Patch of It, at Least.
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First modernity.
Then post modernity.
Now, welcome to hypermodernity.
Quite a ways below follows a quote and a link to an interesting commentary that characterizes culture migrating through the above phases.
It is an interesting staging. It carries with it a vantage point that millions cannot climb high enough to share in, but it probably applies to just enough of us to make it worth a read.
I recommend reading the commentary the following quote is from at the link supplied. i don’t know anything about the author.
As preface, “signs” in the quote and the commentary refer to memes and images that are not necessarily connected to a reality with a wide consensus, and take much of their meaning not as symbols of reality being operated on with human logic, but rather as signs untethered from reality and operated on by human logic largely in terms of their relational meanings. For example, the battle between Trump and ALL his opponents is fought not in the trenches of reality, for at the limit there is no discernible reality, just signs of a reality beyond all but our digitized experience. These signs behave as fungible items in a market–like stock in a stock market. There are some fundamentals, but there are also a lot technicals and beliefs shaping stock value. Even the fundamentals are suspect, because inflation and unemployment are so misleadingly measured and expressed. Hence stock values become disconnected from the underlying values of the corporation’s enterprise performance. Similarly, in hypermodernity, where nothing can be known with high confidence, because of the high probability of untraceable digital mischaracterization of the most basic drivers of apparent events, signs not symbols take over, and the signs begin to take on the characteristics of sign markets without verifiable fundamentals, if you will. Trump can be falsely accused of collusion with Putin for a year with skillfully chosen allegations beyond the realm of verification for all manner of reasons. And in the end, Trump can be found not guilty, but because of the very unverifiability of the claims, no one ever has to give up the relational sign value of the charges–and so those that dislike Trump still dislike him, and those that like Trump still like him. Signs exist only in a realm of relational demand and supply dynamics. Symbols tied to verifiable objects and operated on with logic, from which humanity’s cultural realm arose, are no longer driving outcomes, but merely feeding into sign markets that largely ignore them as fundamentals in stock markets are ignored and technicals and emotions are defaulted to.
The memes and images the Deep State’s apparently controlled media feeds us largely without connection to reality leave us in a predicament. Whatever meaning one’s mind attempts to wring from the images and memes is largely relational between, or among, the signs consumed and not reliable indications of reality.
“In Modernity, civilizations with their own sign regimes clashed with one another; in Postmodernity, terrorist groups as social formations clashed; but in Hypermodernity each individual is a nation state unto himself armed and equipped with his own electronic sign regime to do battle with other suits of light in cyberspace.”–John David Ebert, poet
http://cultural-discourse.com/on-hypermodernity/
I don’t agree with summarization of the quote above, because, a.) history is not dying, its becoming more complex; and b.) among other reasons, reduction solely to hypemodernity fails to address the patchiness of hypermodernity’s emergence. I see a world that is something of a quilt of legacy functionalism (neo functionalism), legacy Modernity (neo modern), increasingly legacy Post Modernity (neo post modernism), AND Hypermodernity. Maybe a better and more accessible metaphor is a front yard of blue grass, and crab grass, with patches of invading bermuda grass and some plugged zoysia grass emerging and spreading. A lot of what is going to happen to our yard is tied up in both emergent complexity and in choices we make about what we encourage and what we discourage and what we simply overlook, or throw up you hands in frustration at.
But the commentary is still a useful hypothesis that makes us think about what has happened to our world in large part as a product of digitalization and the crisis of verifiable truth it has enabled.
(Note: Modernism, Post Modernism, and Hypermodernism are simply three concepts referring to complex constellations of observable cultural behaviors with a bewildering array of dynamics operating within each. Try NEVER to lose sight of, or be reductive about, the rich ecology of activity that each refers to. Doing that reduces the three concepts to signs with only relational meanings to each other and no objective referents; i.e., to hypermodernity. For example, never reduce these with bromides like this is just dazzling them with bull shit. To be reductive is a form of intellectual cowardice under conditions of modernity, post modernity, and hypermodernity. We’re in this mess of largely unverifiable sign reality, interplaying problematically with more conventional legacy cultural function, and reductions that don’t acknowledge the ascent of significant unverifiability, persistence of intermittent verifiable realities and the emerging complexity these trigger are pointless. We are sailors on a sea of signs and symbols and rocky outcroppings of objective reality in need of good shit detectors, reliable depth finders, AND good compasses.)
Rock Chalk!
