The Golden Age of the Sequel

And the revenge of the Remix

I started writing about culture and technology because I was involved in both industries. I taught hundreds of people how to use their software and I also studied and made art. Before that, I worked on Madison Avenue. I left. Screaming. Now that we have my credentials out of the way, let’s talk about sequels and remixes, because this outlier has something you might need to know.

The golden dawn of a new age or whatever has been promised to the American people is nothing new. It’s a sequel. Within this narrative sequel are all the trappings we have come to know: heroes (all male), damsels in distress (all deeply and only hetero), and a version of ultimate goodness and universal order — one that depends on fealty to a Sun-king kind of God. Now, none of the original story elements are bad. We like God and all that they hath wrought. We like women and we like men. So, how exactly does the sequel get it all wrong?

The problem with trying to make people live in an old story is that it does not keep up with the timelines. The sequel of returning to the 1800’s doesn’t fit our geo-technology paradigm, and it only results in a toxic level of cosplay.

This cosplay takes over daily normalcy and natural evolution and replaces it with despotism. It replaces variety and spectrums, things found in nature and tries to annihilate them. This attempt to destroy the basic foundations of physics, of all life, results in what we have going on now in the United States and around other countries all across the globe.

The sequel itself is a product of globalism, but one that is only focused on narrow horizons. The growth of sequels in the movie industry was due to the fact that moviegoers outside the USA were more easily able to follow the storylines. So for profits and the motives they create we the moviegoers noticed more and more sequels in cinema. That sequel move didn’t actually save the traditional movie industry from streaming platforms, now did it? It didn’t stop a decentralization either since we know that Bollywood and Hollywood both do well.

Similarly, the sequel playing out now in our governing system will not save the existing order that the tech bros want to perpetuate. They want to negate the evolution of culture but keep all the technology. That only results in cognitive dissonance and in dissonant systems. We know what dissonance does if it overtakes a system, now don’t we.

What we term as “woke” can be annoying and a bit out of control, but the quality of being awake is akin to being alive. We can not live in the past, nor can we revive the old awareness to fit today. Musk is annoyed he has a trans daughter and so you have to suffer. Donald wants to make money through constant exploitation, well the icebergs in Greenland might have more to say about that than the people even do.

The remix has always existed, because it’s what viruses do to reinvigorate themselves. The remix is adaptation. The remix is everything from our mitochondria deciding to no longer live outside us, and it’s the strength of our DNA and its many recombinant features. Without the remix we would all be amoeba.

The remix now is vividly tied to technology. The remix comes from music, from turntablism. It comes from security guards who saw angry people throwing away disco records. Those guys turned scraps into the basis for the dominant types of music in the world today.

The remix creates new variations from existing technologies and from existing cultures. The remix is what gives a self-made man a chance at all, since it allows him to achieve beyond the station to which he was born. The remix also allows a woman to mix up her abilities, to educate herself and be both mother and boss. The remix doesn’t care if you’re mostly straight but sometimes gay. It doesn’t care if you smoke weed on the weekend but get your job done all week like a proper adult. The remix is not a binge, it’s reality.

The remix is an imperative to keep moving, experiencing and sampling life. The sequel is what happens in between the remix, and it provides the materials. The remix provides freshness and sequel provides a nostalgic glow that nurtures our sense of history.

Have too much remix and you might get chaos, but have too much sequel and you will also get chaos. Chaos is what is happening now because people who know that we are approaching an entirely new horizon in technology want our society to remain exactly the same. You can’t update the OS on one side of this equation but not the other, not if youwant it to be compatible with the other modules of the system. Too much “again” creates chaos.

In 2016 I predicted (and maybe you did too), that sequel and remix would make strange bedfellows out of those who only want to advance their own agenda. I also stated that they would ask people, in fact manipulate them to become regressive. Asking me to go back to thinking I’m stupid just because I’m a woman would be like asking you to go back to Windows 2000. Asking a brown person to drink apart from the whites would be grotesque for all. Considering how many families now are mixed race and ethnicity that last scenario would also be quasi impossible.

People talk fair economics and social justice and making this all “Great Again,” but none of it is based on fact if it doesn’t allow for resonance, spectrums and the remix. Ask poor dead Carl Sagan if you can still find his books somewhere, the universe is nothing like the tech bros and the real estate bros want you to believe. Authoritarianism is dead, but it wants to die an ugly death.

So, now that we are clear, you may want to ask yourself if you’re alive in your mind — are you dedicated to reviving the sequel like some catatonic zombie or are you excited by the idea of moving the dial on what is truly alive in the world? Are you interested in being a hero or a damsel or somewhere in between? Do you reserve the right to change your cosplay based on your desires? With cyberbodies and robot intelligence the sky might soon be the limit. Do you want those nascent expressions to be narrowed for someone else’s dreams?

I reserve the right to love my God and myself and to not impose that view on anyone. I also reserve the right to remix myself according to my whims. I believe that free will, no matter how fraught that idea truly is, is part of my right to mess around and find out. It’s not some guy in a suit’s right to curtail this. That guy didn’t birth me and he didn’t design my DNA. That guy trying to define all this for me and for you, he didn’t design your DNA either.

You should reserve the right to reject a king or his lackeys who ask you to never think outside the sequel. The reason I say this is not because it’s convenient but because you’ll never succeed. Ask the people in North Korea how it feels if you do succeed in negating your very own interiority. Better yet, ask yourself what gets those people to negate themselves from the inside if it’s not the intense poverty and violence that permeates their lives under their self-loving king-god.

The sequel is one thing when it is an expression of loving the past and treasuring some of its aspects. Nostalgia for the past is natural and to some extent it is good as long as it doesn’t come at the cost of what is living now. Yes life was simpler in the 1800s, but it was also quite brutal. And do you want to go back to those toilets? How about the tuberculosis?

There are only two cultures right now and although gender, race, and sexuality are being used to hide this, there is no hiding the truth that it isn’t about those issues at all.

Does bucking the sequel make you feel nervous? That’s how you can tell if you’re living under it. If someone asks you to identify with fear to the point that you stick your head in the sand or you scream at your children or your family because they should simply fall in line, then it’s time for you to breathe and ask yourself, Am I the sequel or am I the remix? Am I the hero or am I the lackey of the villain? Am I doing God’s work or am I actually imposing my ideology, not God’s love, on others?

Be the remix. It’s just you being you and allowing others to be themselves, right here and right now. You don’t have to change how you live, but you can’t ask others to change living in a way that displays their own interests and truths.

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Note if you don’t like how I used “they” pronouns for God then remind yourself that God is actually a trinity (at the very least) in every single religion. We can argue that another time, but you’ll have to pay me if we do. Otherwise buy my book, The Digital Nomad Manifesto on Kindle and help me fund the newer, better, slimmer print edition coming soon. I’m tired of giving things away to a culture that wants my erasure.