I recently heard one of the most horrifying sounds of my life: Neil Young’s power ballad about an electric car called “Fuel Line.”  Young sings, “Her engine’s running and the fuel is clean/She only uses it ’cause she’s a machine/She don’t use much though, just to get around.”  Cowgirl in the Sand, it is not.

To be fair, Young’s song should be given context.  The album—which I’ve only read about thankfully—is imbued with a heavy dose of self-mockery.  At the same time, it seems emblematic of an artlessness that often characterizes crusaders of sustainability.  Everything is emblazoned with the words “green”, “eco” and “sustainability” because we have reduced our lives and their impact on the world to numerical values—creating a company or project that isn’t explicit in its intent is a waste of carbon.  Everything we do must be done deliberately, carefully, artlessly.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with the author Andre Codrescu, who was pushing his book “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin play chess.”  Codrescu used a supposed chess game between Tristan Tzara and Lenin (the respective fathers of Dadaism and Soviet Communism) as a challenge between ideology and art; between that which is easily defined and that which resists definition.

Codrescu then went on to say how we must view this current era—the “post-human era,” an era defined by our ever-increasing dependency on technology—through a Dadaist lens.  How we must resist the definitions imposed upon by an easy-to-define movement like the “information age.”  For when we become defined, we become systematized—inserted in and consumed by an ideology.  I witnessed this at a technology conference I attended last week:  a largely sexless, artless carnival of technological zealotry.

Advocates of sustainability are not much different from the post-human technologists.  Both are searching for “solutions” and “applications” to solve “problems”:  How do we solve the problem of better connectivity, of reduced carbon consumption?  It’s all very mathematical, clinical and systematic.  When you artificially superimpose this mathematical mentality upon art, you create monstrosities like Young’s “Fuel Line.”

But do we need more systems?  Might we, as past Lucid presenter and friend Filip Noterdaeme suggests, need more “mischief”?  Less order, more humanity?

I know we can’t play dumb to the woes of the world.  I know what we’re up against, and I believe these things must be addressed efficiently and directly.  I just don’t think it should come at the expense of our humanity. We are so busy creating new systems.  There is little time to be artful with our lives whilst improving, maintaining and refining these systems.

Moreover, the systems—in a quantitative sense—require more energy, greater carbon footprints.  We build gadgets and webpages and biodegradable pantyhose and it’s great, but it usually means more factories, bigger servers, more shit into the universe.  On the other hand, our humanity, the artfulness by which we live, the conversations we develop, the passions we share—they are carbon neutral or often regenerative, and cost-free.  To trade in the commodity of conversation (the only art form I can lay claim to) was why I created Lucid NYC.

If history is any predictor of the future, there is heartening evidence of art’s victory.  Codrescu contends that the fall of the Soviet Union signified humanity’s resistance to being subsumed by systems.  Hopefully, out of our current orgy of crises, where people are flailing to solve myriad problems with myriad systems, a newfound sense of humanity and artfulness will emerge, where we are not consumed with solutions because we begin to question the nature and existence of the problems.

A few weeks ago I rewatched Network, a perpetually-timely film that centers around an inveterate newscaster named Howard Beale, who looses his shit when told he’s being taken off the air.  He launches into an on-air oratory that details how Americans have come to be defined by their desperate, numb, automotonic lives; their only comfort coming from the narcosis of TV fantasy.  His rant culminates in the catchphrase, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Last night, I had three gentlemen, while not mad in the Bealean sense of the word, who are committed to not taking it anymore:

• Mitch Joachim, who’s posing essential questions and solutions about how to reimagine the urban planning/architectural shit-storm we’re living in today; a storm that is directly and profoundly contributing to the continued slaughter of our environment.

• Filip Noterdaeme, who’s Homeless Museum of Art begs (forgive the pun) museum powers-that-be–and those of us complicit to those powers–to question how their motivation to expand the edifice of the museum obfuscates the museum’s mission and alienates the artist and museum-goer alike.  Through producing HOMU, Noterdaeme both serves as an important countervailing voice to the corporatization of the arts, while being a generator of vital artistic expression in and of itself.

• Finally, Jeremy Kirk, who calls us to question our complicity with Empire–with the forces that kill, destroy and subjugate.  Last night, he asked us to look at the lens through which we see the world–how our privilege as Americans (and most of us are privileged regardless of whether we are American born), is often directly proportionate to others’ suffering.  He challenged us to begin divesting ourselves of our privilege (and don’t worry, you can start small), confident that the liberation from no longer being complicit with violence toward others is greater than the sundry and temporary liberations that privilege affords.

I don’t know if Lucid NYC is subversive per se, but it’s my humble way to create an alternative to the prevailing modalities of social interactions; providing a safe (and audible) environment for people to create conversations that scrutinize and evaluate our assumptions about the way things are and the way things could be; a place, to quote Beale, where people can say, “I’m a human being God dammit.  My life [and voice] has value.”

Thank you for all those who made it out to Brooklyn last night.  A special thanks to Mitch, Al and everyone else at Metropolitan Exchange for hosting.  Until next time, keep questioning, keep human.

David