We cannot make them do it, but if we focussed our efforts, we would have every prospect of luring them into it.
What is culturally required at the dawn of the new millennium is a genuine avant-garde, in the sense of a cultural elite with an advanced sensibility not yet shared by most people, who are creating a new awareness requiring a new mode of life. The task of this avant-garde is to design a stable and sustainable physical economy in which the wealthy and powerful will prefer to live. Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian agenda. Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can literally save people's lives. We have to gratify people's desires much better than the current system does. We have to reveal to people the many desires they have that the current system is not fulfilling. Rather than marshalling themselves for inhuman effort and grim sacrifice, people have to sink into our twenty-first century with a sigh of profound relief.
Allow me to speak hypothetically now, as if this avant-garde actually existed, although, as we all know, it cannot possibly come into being until January 3, 2000. Let's discuss our tactics. I have a few cogent suggestions to offer.
We can increase our chances of success by rapidly developing and expanding the postmodern culture industry. Genuine "Culture" has "art" and "thought," while the Culture Industry merely peddles images and information.
I know this. I am fully aware of the many troubling drawbacks of this situation, but on mature consideration, I think that the Culture Industry has many profound advantages over the twentieth century's physically poisonous smokestack industries. Also, as digital technologists, thinkers, writers,