Last night I was reading the 1992 article written by Benjamin Barber (later to be turned into a book) known as Jihad vs. McWorld. However, the entire time I was reading it, all I could think of was the following Spider Jerusalem quote:
“We live in a monoculture. What does that mean? Well, go out to your street corner. You’ll probably see a Long Pig stand, SPKF on a screen somwhere, an Angry Boy Dylan’s Gun Store. You’ll go into a record store and see new recordings by the usual suspects, maybe a special Space Culture display rack.
“Go out on a streetcorner in London and you’ll see the same thing. Same in Prague. Same in Silo Paulo. Same in Osaka, and Grozny, and Tehran, and Jo’burg, and Hobart.
“That’s what a monoculture is. It’s everywhere, and it’s all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture. “This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn’t we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it at any time, by not fucking paying for it. “So let’s celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.”
–Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis