For a misanthropic dickhead, I am something of an optimist when it comes to the future of music and mankind.
First music, as the power to produce and distribute recorded music leaves the hands of the big business and returns to the hands of the musicians, the musicians lose money but gain control and the audience gains options that have never been near to available before.
If this means, making music becomes a poor career move, so be it. if Miniature Tigers never become rich, I’ll live with it.
But for the consumer? if you want to listen to good music there has never been more or better choices for you. If you are a fifteen year old in Columbus, Ohio, the world of music is a click away and for the musicians, Lennon’s old “Instant Karma” story: “We wrote it in the morning, recorded it in the evening, released it at night” isn’t fast enough.
For the world as a whole?
If we can’t learn from history, what can we learn from? Despite the end day struggles with Islam, and whether or not things haven’t changed the way we might want them to regarding sexism, racism, pick your ism. And it doesn’t mean the US might not head into a depression and lose its ranking as the one world power.
It means: step by step, the world is a better place than it was a hundred or twenty (or God knows, a thousand) years ago.
In every single measurable way, this is a better world for the majority of people than it used to be. Science, health, human right, hunger: it moves forever forward.
Sure, we could all die tomorrow in a nuclear war, or global warming might kill off the species, or, and this is a certainty, if we can’t figure a way to colonize space the human race will absolutely become extinct. And perhaps 5,000 years (from caves to rooftops) is not a large enough sampling to project forward, but all of that notwithstanding, to learn from history is to applaud the future.
These are better days.