What does it mean to think for yourself? Even as the seemingly monolithic infrastructure of the post-war world comes crumbling down around our heads, homogeneity continues to spread like some vast, insidious fungus across the cultural terrain of the Western World. We are told that the interactive, five-hundred-channel universe is causing us to break down into ever more insular clans; isolated tribes centered on coincidental collective interests. They tell us we are becoming strangers in our own communities. We ignore our neighbors in order to hold long e-mail discussions about the injustice of Australian gun laws with some invisible digital kid from Singapore, or we go on chat-lines and debate the ethics of Kirk's alteration of the programming for the Kobiashi Maru. Politically, they tell us, we are breaking down into smaller, more aggressive 'special interest' factions, hell-bent on getting the vast, innocent, Norman Rockwell majority to bend over and accept some wild, anarcho-communist-feminist-homosexual-ecoextremist agenda. On the other side of the coin, we have a bunch of illiterate yokels, armed to the gills, burning crosses in barren fields, pumping round after round into dummies dressed like ATF officers. We are, the pundits say, going through a global identity crisis.And yet... take a look around you. On your way to work today, count the corporate coffee boutiques. On your way back home, count the Walmarts. Spend a minute going from station to station on your FM dial. Sameness creeps. The corporate beast sweeps individuality under the carpet, replacing it with vacuum-packed, heat-and-serve, psychometrically-tailored franchise outlets. And we fit so easily into these preordained slots because, since birth, we have been twisted and massaged and compacted in a vast, generation-spanning, collective molestation. We have been told that we don't share enough in common, but the majority of us are as indistinguishable from each other ...
