The Queen, The King and Our Utterly Fractured Kingdom
Some reflections on the world such as it is.
What did you do last Wednesday night?
I know thousands of you attended the Beyoncé show in Philadelphia.
And millions of you commented on Queen Bey online.
My wife and I and a few hundred others saw Elvis Costello at the Beacon Theater in NY.
Nowhere near as many commented on the “King of America” online.
That same night several other million folks were streaming The Bear or watching the Espys or falling into rabbit holes on You Tube.
A lot of you were watching, listening to and discussing Taylor Swift.
Some of you were on Threads, the new rival chat platform to Twitter.
A billion of you were on TikTok.
That was Wednesday.
The next day marked the 38th anniversary of LiveAid.
LiveAid was a brilliant and ambitious idea: Create a “single” concert on the same day in two separate locations, London and Philadelphia.
Two slates of the greatest musicians of the day all with a quest to raise money for famine-relief in Africa. (And, indeed, some $127 million in 1980s dollars was raised.)
The whole world watched.
That was then.
This is now.
Two very different worlds.
It has all got me thinking about how to connect in a world that is utterly separated, fragmented and scattered into billions of tiny pieces and places?
We are not one audience anymore. We are barely one country in our given countries.
Yet as humans our ability to connect and collaborate is our evolutionary super-power.
To paraphrase from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," the author, professor Yuval Noah Harari, lays out how early humans formed small-scale social structures and engaged in collective hunting and gathering. These people relied on each other to survive in the challenging environments of the jungle or forest. After all, humans were not the biggest animals, or the strongest, nor did they possess the sharpest teeth.
But humans won out because humans connected.
Speaking of connecting, there’s a disconnect today.
But I’m finding that the only answer is that micro is greater than macro.
In other words, one-on-one connection.
Of course 1:1 can grow into a group that can become a community. And these communities, as wide or as narrow as they are, seem to be the only way for us to enjoy life — and overcome our myriad challenges.
It requires that we come to terms with the notion that “mass culture” no longer exists.
I grew up on MTV. I loved the idea that you could immediately connect with someone because you both saw the Run-DMC “Walk This Way” video.
And if I asked, “Who do you think shot JR?” you’d have a theory.
Today, we connect on the T’s: Txting, TikTok, Twitter, and now Threads.
It’s not what it was. But it is what it is.
Who will you connect with today?
How will you do it?
Where?