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The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier
- hondo77 3y agoA couple of gems here: > The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art. > Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.
- rubin55 3y agoHeh, that one about the states resonated with me as well, even more generally instead of specifically the US, but I guess to my own consumerism.. I have 1200+ music albums, 800+ games, 400+ books.. Too much of everything! A blessing and a curse at once.
- ricardobayes 3y agoPeople had thousands of books and hundreds of music records back in Soviet times too.
- maharajatever 3y ago[dead]
- maharajatever 3y ago[dead]
- foobarian 3y agoWhat's funny is that nobody steals any more. My apartment got burgled in the 90s and they stole a DVD player, some CDs, and a pile of change. Nowadays you have to pay someone to take your junk away.
- Pet_Ant 3y agoCrime rates have gone down, but I think it's because there is nothing worth stealing anymore. I even looked at Craig's List and found a bunch of legit used older laptops for $100. What has happened is that the only thing worth anything anymore is property... and the prices of that have gone through the roof!
- crq-yml 3y agoThe decline of consumer goods theft is actually a strong signal that the project of consumerism has run its course - part of "making it" in the late 20th century was having the toys, but the toys are now prolific, and that's happened in the most literal sense too, when you look at the pricing of children's toys and how many families now feel inundated with them. "Unboxing" is just an influencer ritual now. The recurring themes now are all nuts-and-bolts concerns: housing, transport, employment, the environment, public spaces. These are things that aren't solved well with our existing coordination structures, since they tend to result in win/lose or lose/lose game-theoretic outcomes.
- klipt 3y agoIceland seems to have done well with creating community centers to reduce drug use among youth. Isn't that a win-win situation?
- Goodroo 3y agoWestern consumerism was actually one of the main reasons why Eastern Europeans stopped believing in communism. Seeing people in the West spoilt of choice for basic goods and affording them made communism a dead ideology.
- throwup238 3y agoMany quickly got disillusioned when they immigrated though. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- simonblack 3y agoThe States felt like an old place, .. I always felt that the States was "tatty", more "run down" than old. Public places were considered to 'belong to nobody', so were often dirty or defaced because nobody took pride in them. Subway trains were covered in graffiti. In many countries overseas, public places are always well looked-after because they 'belonged to all of us' rather than 'belonged to nobody'. It's just a difference in national cultures.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dimitar 3y agoYet in many places in Europe public spaces are also run down.
- baud147258 3y ago> public places are always well looked-after because they 'belonged to all of us' Or mostly the local govs have the will and means to look after them. I don't really think people's attitudes regarding public places is that different in Europe compared to the US
- bongodongobob 3y agoI agree. For way to many people in the US "muh taxes" is their single voting issue and they wonder why infra is crumbling. Obviously you don't want to be overtaxed but people will vote for the guy who wants to reduce school funding so their property taxes go down 0.1%. It's insane.
- weregiraffe 3y agoI thought this was going to be an article about the Byzantine border with the Bulgars, and now I'm disappointed...
- iddan 3y agoGreat writing piece, thank you for submitting!
- lostlogin 3y agoThe advert for Philips ‘Lets make it better’ that somehow beat my adblocker had me checking if it was part of the story.
- Symbiote 3y agoIt is part of the story. It's presumably from the Bulgarian Visual Archive, so it's unfortunate the author hasn't cited the images properly. https://visualarchive.bg/en/ https://visualarchive.bg/en/
- bjord 3y agoright at the top of the essay it is the following: "All illustrations featured in this essay are part of the Bulgarian Visual Archive, a digital project that curates thousands of found and donated photographs. BVA aims to narrate the history of 20th-century Bulgaria through the visual record of both private and public events that have usually been pushed to the margins of official narratives. As part of its mission, BVA offers all of its photographs for download free of charge, for both personal and commercial purposes."
- Symbiote 3y agoA proper citation credits the author of the image as well as the source, and ideally a direct link.
- mgbmtl 3y agoAt least that advert was less cynical than Hilton's huge billboard in Sofia with the slogan "Forget where you are" (in English, of course). (circa 2002-2005)
- dimitar 3y agoI've been abroad and compared to it Bulgaria does feel like a frontier, like a good place for a certain type of nonconformist, especially in terms of career and business. There is no playbook and beaten road for a lot of things. If you try to have your career go the same way as you would expect in Western Europe/USA - go to the best school, get the best internship in the best company and be rewarded for following the rules you'll be infinitely disappointed in this country. There is no shortage of people who feel unrewarded and unappreciated for their qualifications and credentials. But if you try to make your own way - getting a skill by practicing yourself and searching out people who need that skill it might work surprisingly well and take you far. Btw if you enjoy the linked writing you should check out Time Shelter, it won the Booker prize recently.
- svilen_dobrev 3y agoas someone who has done similar thing (~10y older than OP) - go to oz to see how it is, then one day, return back, to see how it is .. and stay since .. yeah, Time Shelter is quite a thing. Although at the end it went rather close-to-real and too dark. Which after all, might as well be. And while i'm not that pessimistic.. the Hydra heads can be seen+felt all around.. covered in various puff.. just watch carefully..
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoIt's not hard to find the frontier. Just go to the cold areas, but that's not what this really is about, it's just finding cheap cool hipster enclaves. I assure the readers that there is ample frontiers in northern canada
- thriftwy 3y agoFrontier is not just a place which is cold and desperate. Frontier is an opposite of that - a place which is undeveloped yet it is at the beginning of strong growth curve. A place where it is dangerous and you will have to break your back, but the payout is nice and allows you to climb societal ladder fast. Vorkuta is an opposite of frontier despite being the reference cold area.
- keiferski 3y agoIt’s interesting how the various post-communist states in Central/Eastern Europe have played out since the 90s. Having lived here for roughly the last ~8 years, it seems to me that the ones succeeding the most are those which have a nearly universal negative appraisal of the communist era. Poland, for example, is on a pretty great trajectory and will probably be in the top 2-3 EU economies in a decade. The Soviet system was forced upon Poland and very few people look upon that era favorably. The break between eras was also fairly clean and without too much internal conflict. Compare that to some other states like Bulgaria or Ex-Yugoslavia, which have a more complicated memory of the communist era, and which also had a lot of conflict during the transition period. There is less of a pre-packaged “social imaginary” of what the country could be/used to be prior to the communist era - unlike Poland, which was occupied and spent a couple centuries building an oppositional identity during the Partitions/occupations.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rightbyte 3y agoWell, if people start missing the Soviet union, you probably got concerning problems. I think there is very little causality the other way around (missing the Soviet leads to problems).
- microtonal 3y agoI think it happens naturally in many places because older people tend to look at their history with rose tinted glasses. You forget the bad parts and treasure the good parts (which is not a bad psychological coping mechanism in itself). Add to that that the current world looks more complex as it becomes harder to keep up with age. We see that even in Western countries, where a sizable set of boomers want to restore the order of the good old 50 or 60ies and vote conservative or right wing populist parties.. The question is what do the younger generations think and what portion of the population they are.
- incompatible 3y ago
- jlangenauer 3y agoI was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and self-inflicted crises, and no obvious direction for the future to guide the decisions taken today. So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It's all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.
- afarrell 3y agoMy purpose is to care for the people I can as I learn to love and be loved. It is not the job of the nation-state to give people a deep sense of purpose. That is a job for a church, temple, or other spiritual community. Governments which try to do that job tend to do badly, sometimes with monstrous results. They ought be separate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neffy 3y agoLet me suggest that the reason you label the church as the body responsible for the deep sense of purpose, is that the Church in all societies used to be, and in some cases still is, the Government. Europe's cathedrals were the middle-ages equivalent of work programs. (All those church tithes had to be spent on something.) It has also done that job spectacularly badly at times.
- arp242 3y agoIt seems to me that historically, "the church, temple, or other spiritual community" filling that role has come with all the same downsides as the nation-state filling that role. And that's not a comment about religion – any organisation is at risk of abuse of that type because that's just how humans and organisations work. And fully agree with "care for the people I can as I learn to love and be loved", but at the same time people do need some sense of "community", "togetherness", and "we're all in it together"-ness, especially in times when things are perhaps not going so well, and I do feel that's rather been lost.
- Vektorceraptor 3y agoI am a Bulgarian, born in 1986 and immigrated to Austria in 1997. But it pains and scares me that an exiled Bulgarian now wants to take on the Bulgarian collective with postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas. The cycles he describes exist mostly in the minds of postmodern cosmopolitans. And these arise because cosmopolitans in reality cannot produce anything other than ideology and services. Yet the terrible and boring every day bread still comes from the bakery! And since you can't invent a new ideology or service or produce a new work of art every day (except for journalists of course, who mastered the producing of "nothingness" every single day), at some point you get lost in pondering and start looking for the culprit. Of course, the first scapegoat is politics, society, people - always the others. Just because you can't free yourself from your nihilistic mental wheel, you have to conjure up and condemn the entire collective. Herein lies the birth of all 'structural arguments', I claim, ad hoc. 'My dissatisfaction must have structural reasons, otherwise I wouldn't be dissatisfied.' The eternal lamentation of the upper-urban-class cosmopolitans. No, I know and admire people for whom such complaints are distant, even annoying. People who don't have time for it. And you can just as freely and willingly decide to lead a calm and regulated life. This life is not a danger to humanity, as the postmodernists and cosmopolitans have always wanted to tell us, and I do not want Bulgaria to be 'Americanized' that way. I would rather listen to a Kaba Gaida in the mountains than have to read through a capitalist-cosmopolitan lament. The former gives me power and strength, a connection to the world, the latter just makes me sick and weak. I know Bulgaria has its issues, but losing its uniqueness to solve them, is for me the bigger issue.
- kubanczyk 3y agoHow do you define a "postmodern cosmopolitan"? You must have a very specific definition in mind, but without it your comment seems to lack substance. For example, how do I know if I'm postmodern or not?
- bgrn89 3y agoThe poster is complaining about the city dwelling intelligentsia being out of touch with the everyday values and ambitions of the 'common' man. This is due to liberal Western ideals apparently. To get the same effect for a US context, you could replace 'postmodern cosmopolitan' with 'urban coastal elite'.
- arter 3y agoI have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another. As such I cannot understand the feelings in this article even though I am Bulgarian and know the events by heart. My parents spent 15 years of their life in Spain and hated every second of it. They hated it so much because I wasn't there with them. And they had a horrinle opinion of the culture and daily life there. While in opposite my 2 uncles that went with them and took their own kids with them, like it there and have never went back. I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has. For me political and/or cultural events were just a new conversation topic in my social circles. Something to be part of because well everyone is part of it. All my life I've been told that there is opportunity abroad, there is opportunity in the capital, in X large city. But opportunity isn't somewhere it just arises sometimes. I know for sure that opportunity doesn't come while sitting in one place you don't like. But what I am trying to say is that: cities and countries aren't really colored in a specific way. They aren't dull, closed, eventful and such, they just are places. They have as much effect on an individual as does a single individual on them. Even so undoubtedly some places have a personal color to us - my parents will never again try to work in Spain and it would not end well if they did. I myself will never go back to the town of my high school, but others like it there.
- inglor_cz 3y agoI am a Czech with a Bulgarian father and I understood the feelings in this article perfectly. The 90s were pretty similar all across the former Eastern Bloc, excluding Russia proper; a time of massive change and also hope for a better future. Well, better future is here, but there is nothing more to aspire to anymore. No radical improvement to hope for. All changes are now marginal and usually translate to "more stuff in shops". Also, I would say that countries and cities are plenty colored. There is a world apart between, say, cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. If the mentality of the former held sway in Russia, there probably would be no war. (And yeah, I know that Putin's rise to power happened in Petersburg first, but he didn't really fit into the spirit of the city and now dwells elsewhere.)
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- cstross 3y agoHere, in case you don't want to read the entire piece, here's the conclusion it's all there to lead up to: Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition. (And when the author mentions a Brezhnevian state, bear in mind he actually grew up in one: he knows whereof he speaks.)
- bgrn89 3y agoI think the authors argument is fascinating; the idea that Western capitalism is self-defeating precisely because it is so successful in ensuring political and social stability, thereby stifling the people living under it. However, I wonder if 'Trumpism, Brexit, rising nationalism, etc.' are better explaining within the context of wealth inequality. In other words by capitalism failing to provide benefits to subset of the population while still keeping the status quo.
- foobarian 3y agoI feel that part of the problem is that we kind of ran out of advancements and reached a plateau. It's not capitalism's fault this happened (other than getting us there); but unfortunately it's possible that capitalism with its focus on growth is not compatible with that kind of regime and it will break. Hopefully something else big will come up and unblock more growth for a while (Starship + space colonization?)
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI'd say Brexit and the "rising nationalism" is because the system is creating social instability by negating, even denying the existence of, people's desire to belong to a nation and to preserve their own distinct culture and social norms.
- kubanczyk 3y agoI feel like this article could be a lot better, but it stopped in its metaphorical tracks, turned its turrets and started shooting darts at US readers. All for the sake of controversy/publicity. But TFA's points can traverse the cheapness easily, just a small push: > The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art. Many HN readers are probably familiar with how does it feel to start a greenfield project. The magic that happens on a greenfield project is not so much about your beliefs or your open mind, it's more about all the other people mentally unblocking you and not putting spokes in your wheel. So, yeah, if the whole hierarchy crumbles and entire lifetimes of curated opinions, thoughts, social norms become garbage, people let others be. For a time. I'm just pointing out that there is a specific recipe offered here for unblocking "the time", and that recipe has a huge cost. > Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore. Hah, that alone? Roman Empire was falling for hundreds of years (thousand, actually, if you count Byzantium). Actually two factors were needed for Communist downfall. 1. Lack of belief. 2. A better model how to prosper, proven and readily available just across the border (or two borders).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tuzemec 3y agoAs someone who's a bit older than the author and from the same corner of the world - this was a really nice piece. Brought a lot of memories from the early 90s. The blackouts, the queues for bread and fruits, and the empty shelves... I was a kid back then and I didn't had any perspective. But I wander how my parents dealt with all that. I can't recall they complaining too much.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoMy family is from Russia, and we were luckier than most due to some factors (which, again, mostly came from luck.) But yeah - it's odd to go through some of those memories when comparing them to the writings and memories of others, realizing that while I lived through a very strange period of time, I didn't get to experience much of that strangeness due to my age.
- saiya-jin 3y agoSame for other countries in eastern block, Soviet union was very keen to erase individualities of given society and create 'uniform communist people'. Life was simple, even trivial - state gave work, you went straight to jail if you refused. No organized crime, nothing to steal since everything was owned by state. No hard drugs, just endless misery of alcohol and heavy smoking. So even sizeable roma population which now has some 98% unemployment rate were all working, even if in completely meaningless jobs. Government often also gave accommodation in those tolerable-at-the-time concrete flats. I meant allowed people to take a loan for state-built accommodation, you still had to pay it back. Same for cars, my parents waited few years since they were not apparatchiks (just university-educated folks which was already a bad place to be in eyes of regime, they had 1/2 salary of a guy digging ditches and struggled to get by financially), no way to choose color or anything else, take it or bye. Of course if you were known for causing troubles then you were eternally at the end of queue. Same for stupid things like... a couch. I wish I was joking. People were often dangerously naive, that's why when it fell 90s were so brutal - wolves always making part of population stepped from the shadows and stole everything, killed anybody in their way, often in gruesome ways. Sounds familiar? Every single post-soviet and eastern block (aka nuclear battlefield as planned by soviets for WWIII that never came) ended up like that. I still firmly blame soviet union for all this, and lets be honest current Russia is trying to bring back those 'good' old times desperately anyway it can. And for some reason those pesky satellites don't want to lose that stupid freedom so easily. No idea why
- BAHKA 3y agoI can barely understand the logic behind "Hurtling toward a black hole, we seem to be endlessly stuck, horizonless, in the event horizon." and "Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time. " Integrate Ukraine to EU and after that... What? "Hurtling toward a black hole..." again, but this time with Ukraine? ;-)
- woah 3y agoThe hip neighborhoods in western cities are no longer secret and have become expensive and have a lot of tourists. Also, the author is approaching middle age.
- thriftwy 3y ago> Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time. I wonder if Europeans understand these wars around them are not fought for their amusement... Bombing Serbia or ISIS affair is "dangerous, but not too dangerous" for you but it means hundreds to hundreds thousands of dead and hundred thousands to millions losing their homes.
- paganel 3y ago> My mother left her state job (she’d had a leading role in developing Bulgaria’s first information system for traffic control) to run the risk-assessment and anti-fraud management system of a large French bank; my father was promoted, at age 38, to medical director of his hospital. My paternal grandparents transformed their garage in a provincial town into a general store, while my maternal ones started a rabbit farm on the premises of their village property. Almost everybody, regardless of age, wanted to do something bold with their newfound freedom, to risk and experiment. No, they didn't, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the '90s most certainly didn't "want to do something bold with their newfound freedom", they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills. But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they're back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn't have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies. I'm not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I'm also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.
- AntiRemote 3y ago[dead]
- hackandthink 3y agoMy experience in Berlin after the Wall came down also goes in this direction. For me as a young West Berliner, it was a fun time with lots of opportunities. For many people in the former GDR it was a trauma, their lives collapsed. And Bulgaria has not received high transfer payments.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- UncleOxidant 3y agoParts of this essay remind me of the 2020 novel Time Shelter [1] by Georgi Gospodinov (another Bulgarian). Especially this part: My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition. In most cases, these attempts are ridiculous, ersatz, misguided imitations of ideologies borrowed from the past, exposing their own imaginative shortages—they aspire to move the hands of the clock, even if backwards—but it’s hard to deny they represent dissatisfaction and resentment with the way things are. There is, it seems to me, a subconscious craving to be taken out of the boredom of timelessness and be thrown back into the flux of time, even if that means violence or war—anything but the broth! [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58999261-time-shelter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58999261-time-shelter
- lynx23 3y agoTo me, this excerpt reads more like a person standing politically left not willing to accept that the deal with democracy is that they can not have their way every election. Trumpism, Brexit and the rise of nationalism are simply an expression of the democratic pendulum swinging from side to side. Interestingly, a few years back, I could never have seen that in this light But now it is clear as daylight. If one side would always win, it would be a dictatorship.
- biztos 3y agoFor a good long while it seemed like one side was definitely going to use power, if it got power, to stay in power forever -- look at Hungary for a good example -- but lately it seems like the younger generation of the other side wants the same thing, which historically makes sense: totalitarianism has every bit as rich a history on the Left as on the Right. So yeah, it's dangerous to think you will always win because your ideas are the only correct ones. But it's possible to rig the system so the "good guys" (you) always win, and then say it's because your ideas were correct. At which point you might find you have not a dictatorship per se, but merely an illiberal democracy that guarantees continuity of government.
- danidiaz 3y agoThe memoir "Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria" by Kapka Kassabova (2008) covers similar ground. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3808716-street-without-a-name https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3808716-street-without-a...
- dottjt 3y agoI don't know if this comment will be found in the sea of great comments in this thread, but I think this article is the answer to Adam Curtis' film Hypernormalisation. The premise is that humans are currently trapped in an endless cycle and we have no concept of how to break out of it, but I think this might at least provide some context as to why. I highly recommend watching it (along with his other documentaries) if you found this article fascinating. It's like this in video form.
- kouru225 3y agoAdam Curtis is honestly one of the greatest documentarians of our time. I first watched Hypernormalization, but then binged everything he ever made a few months ago. More Adam Curtis recs: the DDT episode and the Kwame Nkrumah episode of Pandora’s Box (the rest are good too), The Way of All Flesh, and The Power of Nightmares. Also, Cant Get You Out Of My Head might be his masterpiece but it’s also not very accessible.
- dottjt 3y agoHis latest documentary on the fall of the soviet union was fascinating, although admittedly very dry and difficult to watch since there was no commentary. I feel that's really only for hardcore Curtis fans, which I'm sure, he knows would be interested in.
- dash2 3y agoCounterpoint: Adam Curtis is a pretentious bore. His films feature massively overegged theses, based on a flimsy evidence base. His ideas are trivial, but he thinks they are deep.
- kouru225 3y agoI used to feel this way, but then I slowly realized that Curtis tends to appear to have more of a thesis than he ever actually does. The movies are less a traditional essay, and more a social history of ideas and their consequences. What the ideas mean isn’t as important to him as how the ideas influence us. By tracing the history of memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense of the word), he’s providing a service that almost no one else is providing.
- rpastuszak 3y agoThis reminded me of a quote from Zygmunt Bauman: Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.
- beebeepka 3y agoIt's easy to agree with this quote but I am writing this response because it made me feel like there's a bit too much repetition, or maybe exposition. First two sentences felt like enough to convey the whole thing to me.
- mikhael28 3y agoThis reads to me as a somewhat resentful protest of the need to change, when living in a society. Yes, the world changes - yes, you need to adapt to it. What immaturity, to assume that there exists anything like a 'final state of perfection'. Be like water.
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoThis. Quoting: > My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.
- awhitby 3y agoI come from a completely different background but am about the same age as the author. It sounds like many other commenters are in this same general bracket too. So are the sentiments expressed truly a period (or, maybe, cohort, given the post-communist contrast) effect, as suggested, or just an age effect? I suspect that the middle aged in every society feel some closing of the frontier as possibilities seem to collapse and family commitments multiply.
- slibhb 3y ago> Like Communism, capitalism is a teleological system at its root, relying on a narrative of progress, on a forward-moving vector of time, but when that time turns cyclical, repetitive, without a clear direction, the system begins to disintegrate, not under the weight of its own contradictions, as Marx would tell us, but under the weight of its own uniformity. Capitalism is economic freedom and a government to enforce it. It isn't teleological. The apparent telos of capitalism comes from people. It turns out that people, in the presence of freedom, have certain goals which they choose to pursue. Prominent among those goals is the accumulation of wealth. When it becomes excessive, that goal may be worth criticizing but people will choose to pursue it whenever they are free. > Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. Do we need politicians to pick our frontiers? Actually there's plenty of frontiers. Some examples are: eradicating human disease, extending human lifespan, replacing fossil field, exploring the solar system, changing how humans interact on the internet, inventing AGI, etc. It's beyond me that someone can claim with a straight face that there's no inspiring frontier. The problem here is people who find these frontiers too boring. They secretly want a do-over of the 20th century. No thanks.
- dottjt 3y agoBoredom though, is a very valid feeling. A bored species doesn't get very far, and maybe for us humans, feeling like we're getting somewhere is how we operate. When I think about it, I think that's probably why I've been struggling so much, is that I've just felt bored with life. In-spite of all that society is, I think like a lot of people, I just don't really see what the point is. More money? More goals? More experiences? But then what? Maybe the type of frontier is important, because everything you give an example of is really just the one frontier: Figuring out how to continually scale human population. Although rational, how is it inspiring? Or rather, how can you be inspired if you are bored?
- zx10rse 3y agoI find a lot fallacies in this essay. The author accurately captures the overall picture during the 1990's, yet he is talking about a frontier. He perfectly realizes that the political power was just consolidated into another form, so we never had a real frontier after the fall of the communist regime. I am little bit younger than him, and grew up after the fall of communist regime, after 34 years of transition into "democracy", and westernization, nothing really changed now the grandkids of the communist regime,are lecturing us about "democracy" again, because their fathers are getting old. There is also this common comparison during this time era about the west(western culture and capitalism), and soviet union(communism), with the slight little nuance which is actually the elephant in the room that communism comes from the west... So the cycle continues. What exactly is this western culture and values that we are constantly talking about, and being sold on, and advertised 24/7? The Brezhnevian capitalist state global citizen, just wants to offer me a slightly less different totalitarian regime, throw us in a violent war because of his boredom with the flux of time, and call it a day. No thank you. The closing of the Bulgarian frontier was during the April Uprising of 1876, which was the last time Bulgarians decided that are going to unite as a nation and will stood for something, their freedom, they will live free under their own sovereign country. You cannot exclude 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule, which rewired our survival instincts, if you are painting a picture of what and how happened next. Like a fellow commenter said I prefer the kaba gaida to continue to echoes in the Rhodope mountains. Despite growing with predominantly western influence after 1990, it is really hard to explain what happens with my body when I hear Valya Balkanska - Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin, a song that is flying in the space with the Voyager probes. The next frontier is currently happening, but this time information travels differently. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising_of_1876 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising_of_1876 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnxUYsf6GuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnxUYsf6GuU
- anovikov 3y agoWell, in a nutshell, what changed is that the right of the people to own and accumulate property and extract rent from it, is enshrined in the law and enforced. Also, which less important but provides an important safety valve against government misbehaviour, people are free to travel abroad, reside, and work everywhere else in the EU - so a government can't take these freedoms away: bailing from EU means quick end of everything, it's just technically impossible no matter how hard they try, and taken capitalist freedom away means people will vote with their feet. That's a pretty huge difference, no matter which particular group of people is now in power.