SOCIETY SUICIDE by Job Karma

CD : KLANGGALERIE 2014 (6 panel digipack)
LP : REQUIEM REC 2014 (double gatefold)


"SOCIETY SUICIDE"

The world as you know it is coming to an end. The good times are over. It's not just the hours, the days and all the years behind you. Nor is it about nostalgia that makes you turn to the past, brooding over all the chances you have not taken and will never be able to take.

It's the demise of the order that seemed permanent and paced the life of several generations of the wealthy North. Everybody desired the same thing: a house, preferably in the suburbs; a new car every few years; an exotic holiday; a permanent job and a substantial pension. All those attributes of a prosperous life, tailored to bourgeoise ambitions, have always been available only to the few. The global majority have always lived in want, suffering humiliation due to injustice they have experienced. Their aspirations for normality are only natural and logical. But can we imagine a 21st century society of billions of people living in prosperity, a global middle class? Satisfied consumers who can relax after work in nice cottages on the city outskirts?

This vision seems banally utopian. Whatever goes on around us ridicules this utopia. Think about the African refugees for a moment – with their mobile phones, they run from their machete-wielding torturers only to drown just before reaching the European coast.

The future is not bright: it is an abyss, into which the whole world might fall. Instead of an international cooperation, there is a more and more violent competition for the access to natural resources; national and religious particularism destroys whole countries and societies; millions of people go into exile in search of a better life. The consumerist fulfilment of the wealthy North is akin to parasitism as it is based on the exploitation of cheap labour from the poor South. The smaller the wages of the Asian workers, the fuller the shelves in American and European supermarkets. The global economy is governed by the unpredictability of speculative stock trading, which can infect and slay any economy like an epidemic. Crisis has become a value in itself as the war on terror yields revenue to arms manufacturers and sustains whole divisions of contract mercenaries. Well-paid experts on management and extinction of economic and social fires travel from one continent to another. All around the world, temp agencies are doing well. Value lies in mobility, flexibility, temporariness. For something to be valuable, it must be in perpetual movement, as during military manoeuvres.

What remains constant and universal is the illusion that this state of affairs is only temporary. If a shadow of doubt arises, you just reach for the newest electronic gadgets that make you feel as if this progress were perpetual, pushing us all towards a better future. Maybe the truth about the inevitability of the looming demise will flash by like a TV commercial? As it appears, you just go to the kitchen to make yourself some coffee. And then you're back in front of the screen. The show goes on.

Audiovisual team based in Wrocław, formed in 1997.
music: Maciej Frett & Aureliusz Pisarzewski
video art: Arek Bagiński

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