Excerpt from: "The Simulacrum of Utopian Decay" (A.Glass 2020)

 

"In 1949, America not only began to imprint itself as a nuclear super power, it also created something very unique for a country that built itself on capitalism as an ideology of production, that occurred after decades of depression and a global war, to which American infrastructure remained intact, but its economy had suffered. A baby boom began in 1947, attributed also throughout the West with an average of 3 babies born per woman, there was of course the stability of post war recovery, particularly in America, where jobs were plentiful. Yet, this hyper consumption, was also referred to as 'Pragmatic Spending', in a period of 1945 to 1949, Americans bought mostly the necessities for family life, refrigerators, stoves and cars. This is, under a modernist template, very much embraced the family values, over any excesses of opulence. There was a fear, very similar in sentiment to what was occurring in Communist Russia at the same time, that over indulgence would lead to a societal decadence. However, the difference was split between the two ideologies, one faith based, via the American Christian ethos, the other as a paranoia, that a society will see itself purely as a commodity based product. This may be simple in its basis of retrospection and observation of consumption, when it is regulated by, either an ideology or moral Christian beliefs, the reality was in the statistics of what was consumed at that time.  So, when the model of 1950s consumption is studied, there is something very curious in its reflection.  A similarity of a society now. 

And as we progress along into the 21st Century.  There has been a reemergence of the nuclear family concept of mass consumption which is also seen in the way our cities have grown, construction and property markets have all synchronized in their boom of the last Two decades. There is however a dispositional spike in birth rates, while the pace of newborns per capita is growing.  Not on par with the 3 babies per couple as it was in light of the 1950s baby boomers. Consumption has mirrored the same everyday products which were bought in earnest all those years ago, rising in its reflective sentiment within this new century at an exponential spike. In the decades that followed the 50s, began the discourse against the modernist lifestyle and nuclear family concept, it in turn gave rise to what we may look now, from a novelty perspective of the counterculture, that simply does not exist on the scale of what was perpetrated from the 1960s to the 1990s, eventually collapsing into a rhetoric of fashionable aesthetics. There is a surreality to all this, on one hand we have this what appears to be cohesive society, within the realms of capitalism, there are free and open markets, on the other hand there is the socialist idealism of central planning and government intervention, that has infused two types of consumers within our cities, what is deemed as the pragmatic middle class consumer of the 1950s ethos and the luxury consumer, that originates from the Chinese engine of consumption. A Communist country. Despite the paradoxical social and political indifferences to the concept of global markets and the cities that have become a centerpiece of integrated collectivism - which is this digital age. We need to look at another part of our history, the 1800s and the concept of a Utopian vision, an interlinked and structured society. That may offer a reflection of what is occurring on a global scale today.  Through these two significant aspects in our history of centering and maintaining a city structure for a society that lies within, we may have ended only creating a structural world that could be deemed as the Simulacrum of Utopian decay."

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Excerpt from:  "The Simulacrum of Utopian Decay" (A.Glass 2020)