You know those movies about characters trail-blazing the business of some terrible vice? They’re always set in a not-too-distant past, have trailers full of period-specific songs, and include the words “inspired by a true story” on the poster. There’s the initial meteoric rise to power and wealth, followed by a period of unbridled excess — generally involving use of montage — and, ultimately, the inevitable downfall which was doomed to happen from the start, with, possibly, an epilogue of redemption. It’s a very specific film archetype, wherein the traditional bad guy is, instead, the quintessential American hero: the visionary entrepreneur who possesses the ingenuity and tenacity and just plain balls to seize an opportunity only he can see, and achieve a feat so stupendous — inventing the American cocaine trade, for instance, becoming the first black man to rise above the Italian mafia in the New York heroin business — you’re at once inspired and horrified by his success.

In 2001, Blow kicked off this trend of movies where you’re rooting for the drug dealer. The movie’s based on the life of George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, a Boston guy living in California, who starts off smuggling pot cross-country in the 60’s, and ends up becoming the American connection to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, which, with Jung’s help, would go on to own 85% share of the U.S. cocaine market by the late 70’s / early 80’s:

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Then came 2005’s Lord of War, in which the illicit contraband is weaponry, and Nicolas Cage plays Ukranian-American gun trafficker, Yuri Orlov — a fictional character based on a composite of a number of actual post-soviet arms dealers — whose big break comes as he watches Mikhail Gorbachev give his resignation speech on television, Christmas Day 1991. Like a prospector who’s just struck oil (See also: There Will Be Blood, for a variation on this cinematic theme), he envisions, in this moment, the future of his business expanding with the gush of weapons — even tanks! — he’ll now be able to buy (illegally) from the just-dissolved Soviet Union’s stockpile in the Ukraine:

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2005 was also the year Weeds premiered on Showtime, in which Mary-Louise Parker plays a widowed housewife who becomes a suburban pot dealer, and a few seasons later ends up married to the head of a Mexican drug cartel.

By 2008, when American Gangster came out — which tells the story of Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, who bypassed the entire Italian mafia to become the heroin king-pin of New York in the early 70’s by establishing his own direct supply connection in Asia during the Vietnam war and smuggling the drugs into the U.S. in the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers — rooting for the vice-peddling, psychotically enterprising, imminently doomed outlaw businessman — even though, good god! he’s a fucking heroin drug lord turning all of Harlem into addicted zombies!! — had become a familiar experience:

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Which is how we arrive at Middle Men, due out later this year, a based-on-reality story in which Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, a mainstream businessman who partners with a pair of porn content providers (played by Gabriel Macht and Giovanni Ribisi) to form the first online adult billing company in the mid 1990’s:

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The drug dealer used to ALWAYS be the bad guy. You weren’t supposed to sympathize with him. Now it’s every fuckin’ movie like this. But the story isn’t just about the clever bastard with an idea for a supply to human nature’s demand, it’s about the vice itself. It’s not just George Jung’s story, it’s the history of blow we’re fascinated by — how a chance cell-mate pairing between a California pot smuggler and a member of the Medellín cartel would pave the way for the U.S. cocaine highway. How the Vietnam war became the camouflage for the heroin epidemic Frank Lucas created. How the Soviet Union’s collapse helped the business of illegal arms dealers. Each of these stories has this moment where entrepreneur and zeitgeist collide, and — for better or worse; mostly for worse — it changes the world. In Middle Men the focus of the story could have easily been the porn industry — but it isn’t. Porn is just the side effect. Like the preview voice-over announcer says, it’s the story of the worldwide web.

Finally.

It’s 2010. 20 years since the first web browser, 15 years since the first adult materials became commercially available online, 10 years since the dot com bubble burst, 5 years since MySpace was getting more page-views than Google, a year since Facebook overtook MySpace in unique visitors, and meanwhile, Americans now spend, on average, about as much time on the Internet as watching TV. In fact, if you’re under the age of 45, you spend considerably more time on the Internet than watching TV. Amid a global financial crisis, US online retail managed to grow 11% in 2009 to reach $155.2 billion. Overall online sales are projected to increase almost 200% between 2008 and 2012. 75% of us use social network sites. And the time we spend there is growing at 3 times the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time — every second of which, by the way, 28,258 internet users are viewing porn.

Hollywood is finally catching on. Up next after Middle Men is the film adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. It comes out just a couple of weeks after Wall Street 2:

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

What neither he nor Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder] had known when they started the damn thing was how addictive Facebook was. You didn’t just visit the site once. You vsited it every day. You came back gain and again, adding to your site, your profile, changing your pictures, your interestes, and most of all, updating your friends.

… Most kids who tried out [Facebook] once tended to come back  — 67 percent every day.

The Internet: It might not be illegal, but it’s unquestionably addictive.

Once considered the province of geeks, the Internet is now where all of us live. It is a huge, enormous thing that is changing how we do practically everything and permeating the very experience of our lives. It is now all of our’s vice. And it’s breeding a whole new generation of vice entrepreneurs. Drug dealers and gunrunners have new company.

In related news, is it just me or does the new poster for The Social Network seem, like, awfully familiar?

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Just sayin’.

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of humanity. Often battling and defeating evil as hyperbolic as his own goodness, his iconic name would become the source of the term for this all-American archetype, the “superhero.” In the decades since Superman’s arrival, innumerable variations on this theme have emerged, but always these characters have struggled under the weight of a concept about who they must be that was invented before television. For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation, as played by Robert Downey Jr., and directed by Jon Favreau in the just released Iron Man 2, is really the first Millennial superhero.

The original Superman prototype possessed a key characteristic, one that his creators, first generation American sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would have known something about, one that this “Man of Tomorrow” would pass on as part of his legacy to future generations of masked heroes: a secret identity. This trait would become an intractable part of the very definition of a superhero, as much a prerequisite for his mythology as extraordinary powers, or at least a flamboyant getup. And yet, in a press conference at the end of 2008’s first installment of the Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark announces to the world that he is Iron Man. This is where the sequel starts off. The need for a secret identity is gone. The entire world knows — and not because some tabloid uncovered the mystery man behind the mask, but because he just straight up told everyone. In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept.

These days, the kind of stuff kids choose to reveal about themselves online is almost beyond comprehension. The latest social platform eroding the boundary between what was once strictly private and is now exposed to the world is Formspring.me, which the New York Times calls, “the online version of the bathroom wall in school“:

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

Social media researcher danah boyd asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago:

This [behavior] has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name. Why? What’s going on?

While this particular trend is definitely a bit baffling, those of us that have grown up in the digital age have pretty much come to expect that the privacy arc of the internet is perpetually bending more and more towards greater disclosure. Privacy, as Facebook’s Millennial founder Mark Zuckerberg insists, is dead:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time… But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting [Facebook] now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Here’s an interesting visualization of the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, indicating how the website has let ever more of our information become increasingly public over the years:

Oh… wait a second, no, that last one is actually the arc reactor implant that’s keeping Tony Stark alive. But, no doubt, Skynet… err.. Facebook is intent on catching up to the full-pie version of the chart soon.

Anyway, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker, they were never prepared for this brave new networked world. Their entire way of being simply doesn’t fit anymore. Neither with Facebook and its social network platform ilk, nor the (*cough* relative) sensibilities of the Millennial youth who use it. For Tony Stark, transparency isn’t just relegated to the subject of his super-powered “alter ego,” it’s a pervasive part of his total personality, his way of being in the world. Stark is as blatant as his id, his mobile touch-screen device is actually, literally, transparent, allowing others to see everything he’s doing on it, every surface in his house seems to be equipped with touch-screen capabilities, his browsing activities public to anyone sitting nearby who cares to look. Zuckerberg himself likely couldn’t have dreamed up a more post-Privacy kind of superhero, one less conflicted about the disparate parts of his identity. With the death of privacy, you cannot be one thing in one context, and something different in another. You cannot be Clark Kent at the Daily Planet desk job, and then Superman on the night shift. You are exactly who you are to everyone at all times. Like no other superhero, Tony Stark’s identity isn’t conflicted. It’s absolute.

In her book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes:

It has always been normal for kids to have big dreams, but the dreams of kids today are bigger than ever. By the time kids figure out they’re not going to be celebrities or sports figures, they’re well into adolescence, or even their twenties.

High expectations can be the stuff of inspiration, but more often they set GenMe up for bitter disappointment. [The book] Quarterlife Crisis concludes that twenty-somethings often take a while to realize that the “be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do,” mantra of their childhoods is not attainable.

In the late 90’s, Tyler Durden, himself a sort of Gen X superhero — a transitional alpha version precursor to the Gen Y launch model, if you will — said it like:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Even in the throes of the economic crisis, my generation hasn’t really had a Great Depression either — though we did come this close. And even after 9/11 my generation hasn’t had a Great War. The world is now far too mind-numbingly complicated and complex to even have a clear concept of a single, monolithic Evil to fight. The “heroes” of my generation, the ideals that kids look up to and wish to be like, haven’t been men of steel battling evil for a long time, they are now, like Durden says, millionaires and rock stars. And that is precisely what 21st Century Tony Stark is. After he comes out of the closet (or, more accurately, the basement science lab) as Iron Man, he becomes a worldwide celebrity, a household name. Even the migrant worker he stops to buy strawberries from on the Pacific Coast Highway asks, “Are you Iron Man?” like he’s recognized a movie star.

And unlike Superman or SpiderMan or Batman or any other major superhero before him whose truth the world was not yet ready to handle, Tony Stark answers casually, “Sometimes.”

Perhaps that’s the other side of what allows a 21st century superhero to be transparent. The modern world can accept him as such. Gen Y is a lot more tolerant of lifestyle differences than prior generations, after all. The X-Men didn’t hide that they were different, either, but then again, they COULDN’T hide it — looking like Beast or Nightcrawler, or having Rogue or Cycolps’ particular mutations, you couldn’t just “pass” in normal society — and the humans the X-Men fought to protect could never accept them for being what they are. Not so in the world of Tony Stark. He’s no mutant. No outcast. He’s the most popular kid in school. The late DJ AM even spins at his birthday bash. The 21st century Tony Stark reveals to the world he is Iron Man, and the 21st century world says…. Awesome!

In the past, being a tech entrepreneur-slash-engineer, as Tony Stark is, would have made him a nerd, or otherwise Bruce Wayne, still stuck in the previous millennium, putting on a show of  irresponsible playboy-ness to deflect attention from both his morbidly serious crime-fighting alter ego and his humorless tech geek underbelly. Like, remember when no one would have wanted to sit at the lunch table with kids who talked about stuff like “augmented reality”?

Yeah, not so much, anymore. In the  21st century, being a tech geek no longer detracts from the image of a bad-ass or a dilettante. James Bond and Q have combined into one seamless character. It’s 2010, and geeks are cool! Hell, we’ve even got one as President.

While both Wayne and Stark are surrounded by high tech everything, for the 20th century hero all the gadgetry is just a means to an end. Even the Batmobile is ultimately just a flashy tool. Same could technically be said about the iPhone, but who would? In the post-iPod era we have a very different relationship with our technology. Our favorite tech objects aren’t just for utilitarian application, they’re obsessed over, fetishized, loved. It’s why Gizmodo would pay $10,000 for an exclusive scoop on an in-production, “lost” 4g iPhone, and why an enormous global audience would give a crap. When Stark says in the movie that the Iron Man suit is a part of him, that he and it are one, we all intimately understand exactly what he means even if the rest of us don’t actually literally plug our gadgets into our chest cavities.

After a raucous birthday party in which we see Stark, in full Iron Man gear, getting shitfaced and acting the fool, (he’s dying at the time, and feeling a bit of the nothing-really-matters mortality blues — being dissolute and apathetic, itself, unusually postmodern behavior for a superhero), S.H.I.E.L.D. agency director Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) “grounds” the hungover superhero by sequestering him in his house with all access to communication with the outside world cut off until he solves a theoretical physics problem. This superhero’s punishment is having his phone and internet privileges revoked and being sent up to his room to finish his math homework. There isn’t a single one of the 60 million American Millennials that doesn’t relate to this.

When Favreau was looking for a 21st century industrialist corporate executive to use as a model for his and Robert Downey Jr’s interpretation of Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk, co-founder of paypal. Musk even has a cameo in the movie, chatting Tony up about an electric rocket, a concept referencing Musk’s current endeavors, Tesla Motors, which produces fully electric sports cars that rival Porsche in performance, and SpaceX, a private aerospace company working to invent the first reusable rockets, which would dramatically reduce costs and eventually lead to affordable space-travel. This dude is the inspiration for the 21st century version of Stark.

So what’s Tony Stak’s inspiration? Why does he do what he does? There was no childhood trauma that drove him to caped crusading. He wasn’t raised by adoptive Earth parents who imbued him with a strong moral compass during his formative years on a farm in the American Heartland. Sure, ok, he underwent a certain crisis of conscience in his 40s after escaping from a terrorist hostage situation in Afghanistan, shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark Industries and all, but still, why does he take it so much further, going so far as to “privatize world peace.” …. For the thrill of it! As he himself says, he keeps up the good fight at his own pleasure, adding, “and I like to pleasure myself often.” Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to, and most importantly, he GETS what he wants. Sure he has to work for it, but unlike with, say, Peter Parker and Mary Jane or Clark Kent and Lois Lane or even Buffy and Angel, what he wants isn’t perpetually out of his grasp just because he is who he is. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.

You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.

Welcome, 21st Century superhero, my generation has been waiting for you.

Oh boy.

This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience.

Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the Parliament at Versailles with a withering critique of the burqa as an unacceptable symbol of “enslavement.”

“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue. It is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission, of women…. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on our territory.”

Now, I got the link to this article from my cousin, who, it should be pointed out, shares the same history I do. We were not born in the United States, and growing up as first-generation immigrants in America we have spent our whole lives reconciling mixed, often contradictory, cultures. The fact that our families were able to leave the giant labor camp / prison that was the Soviet Union at all, is the result of one of the most successful human rights campaigns in history. So it’s no surprise that our reactions to the news of this French move were resoundingly positive. It was, however, quite surprising (though it retrospect, it shouldn’t have been) to discover many of my American-born friends expressing outright disapproval. I heard everything from straight up calling Sarkozy a “moron,” to the derisive cynicism that “Nothing says freedom like banning the burqa.”

I should hasten to point out here, it’s not that my American-born (liberal) friends are burqa-lovers, by any means, it’s just that freedom of religious expression is a sacrosanct American principle — as well it should be — and messing with it immediately inspires a profound distaste. It would, no doubt, be easier to have the issue of religious expressions be capable of being so black and white, so absolute, so all or nothing. It would certainly be much simpler, clearer, less offensive or culturally insensitive, if the idea that banning anything could actually bolster freedom wasn’t so contradictory. The reality, however, is that pretty much all freedom depends on the banning of something, and that something is the myriad efforts to deny human rights.

Which is precisely the spectrum that the burqa finds itself on. To clear up any confusion — since, in the predisposition for pursuing starkly-defined edges between black and white, it might seem effective to assume I’m just roundly including ALL kinds of modesty coverings, like headscarves, for instance, in this indictment, I’d like to state that I’m definitely not. A headscarf isn’t anywhere in the same vicinity as this:

The burqa is a full-body ghost-like sheet that covers a woman from head to toe, which Sarkozy, in no way inaccurately, likened to an “imprisonment.” The International Society For Human Rights seems to have drawn the very same analogy in the PSA at the top of this post. There is a good deal that has already been said about the legitimate impediments to health and physical safety that come along with these trappings (apt word, indeed, in this instance), but what makes the burqa an outright violation of human rights in my view is the fact that when a group of people is denied the freedom simply have their face be visible, they are deprived of the most fundamental, basic, human capacity to elicit empathy.

In his book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman writes, “Suppressing our natural inclination to feel with another allows us to treat the other as an It…. Empathy is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty.”

Conveniently for us, then, human brains are actually hard-wired for empathy. In fact, damage or malfunction in the neural systems instrumental in allowing us to understand and resonate with someone else’s emotional state happens to be a basic requirement for psychopathic behavior. Clinical psychopaths are actually incapable of reading emotions; their brains simply do not register the meaning of expressions of fear or anguish, for example. Normal, healthy, functioning brains not only understand others’ emotions, they are actually designed in such a way as to induce the witness to internally experience the same emotional state that he or she is witnessing.

For instance, take a look at this face for, like, two-hundredth of a second:

As you do, Goleman explains:

The amygdala instantly reacts, and the stronger the emotion displayed, the more intense the amygdala’s reaction. When people looked at such pictures while undergoing an fMRI, their own brains looked like they were the frightened ones, though in a more muted range.

When two people interact face to face, [emotional] contagion spreads via multiple neural circuits operating in parallel within each other’s brains. These systems for emotional contagion traffic in the entire range of feeling, from sadness to joy.

Moments of [emotional] contagion represent a remarkable event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies. In systems terms, during this linkup brains “couple,” with the output of one becoming the input to drive the workings of the other, forming what amounts to an interbrain circuit.

Brains loop outside of our awareness, with no special attention or intention demanded. [This] automaticity allows for rapidity. For instance, the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 22 milliseconds, and in some people in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than two-hundredth of a second). This [happens] so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception.

We may not consciously realize how we are syncrhonizing, yet we mesh with remarkable ease.

Giacomo Rizzolatti, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons, the special class of neurons responsible for this kind of social duet, explains that our innate capacity for empathy allows us “to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not thinking.”

If you really stop to consider the significance of this, it’s pretty astounding. Our capacity to communicate through emotions happens entirely outside the realm of conceptual communication i.e. words. We don’t even need to speak the same language, or be able to TALK at all, for that matter, in order to simply look at someone’s face and personally understand what that person is feeling. As Goleman writes, “Mirror neurons ensure that the moment someone sees an emotion expressed on your face, they will at once sense that same feeling within themselves.” Through seeing another person’s face we experience, as instantly as a reflex, a mutually reverberating state that neuroscientists call “empathic resonance.” And empathy, I’ll write it again: is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty.

Sarkozy talked about the burqa as a tool for “depriv[ing women] of identity.” I see it as something more profoundly sinister. It deprives them not just of individual identity, but of shared Humanity. Our fundamental, human neurobiology depends on others to be able to see our face in order to elicit empathy. It is not the only way, of course, and it’s obviously not tamper-resistant, but it is the most instinctive, moreso even than language. Making someone hide their face is, literally, the oldest trick in the book for denying them empathy. When you can’t empathize, as any psychopath case study will show, you quite literally can’t recognize the other person’s Humanity. When you can’t recognize another person’s Humanity, it becomes a lot easier to be cruel. And when an entire population (oh, say, you know, women) is systematically denied their Humanity, their widespread oppression is inevitable. Thus whether or not your cultural sensitivity allows you to consider the burqa a means of oppression unto itself, it is absolutely part of the cycle that breeds it.

Human rights and religious freedom don’t always go hand in hand as neatly as we would like. Perhaps we might all live in a much better world if the two would just coordinate their priorities, but all too often religion seems to like endorsing things like female genital mutilation or child brides (notice a trend here on whom religion likes to shit on?) When the two don’t go hand in hand, the question that comes up for each of us is, how will we navigate the ensuing grayness? From my own experience, as a beneficiary of people around the world having fought against the oppression of others, there is nothing “moronic” or cynical about standing up for those who are being denied a basic human right, especially when it’s the right to empathy.

It first occurred to me as I was watching the trailer for Star Trek: First Contact, back in March. The cast seemed so typical of the racial and ethnic diversity reflected in the TV shows we’ve all been watching for years, like Lost…

and Heroes…

It seemed completely natural for 2009, and yet what occurred to me was that this movie was based on a TV show that  was decades old–I wasn’t even entirely sure how many. Thirty? Forty? When I looked it up, I discovered that the original Star Trek series had first aired in 1966!

This seemed utterly amazing.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment, had passed just TWO YEARS prior. Bussing (to desegregate schools in reality vs. just in legislation) wouldn’t even begin until 1971. Had it lasted, Star Trek would have been in its 5th season by then. More than a decade after the show premiered, the reality of the social response to racial desegregation all too often still looked like this:

The cultural conflicts that raged in the 1960’s extended beyond racial divides, beyond even national boundaries, into outer space itself. When Star Trek first aired–nine years after the Russians had been the first to launch human beings outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, and still three years before Americans would first land on the moon–the Space Race between the Americans and the Soviets was an integral part of the cultural, technological, and ideological rivalry that defined the Cold War. After all, advanced space technology was more than simply a pissing contest, it had blatant military applications for the two adversarial nations, should the Cold War actually heat up.

But just three years after Martin Luther King had described his dream of a future where blacks and whites, and all races, could coexist harmoniously as equals, Gene Roddenberry’s futuristic vision, that beamed into living rooms all across America, looked like this:

…and it included an American, a Russian, an Asian, a Black woman, and even a biracial (bi-special?) alien all working together for the purpose of scientific exploration and peacekeeping efforts.

To put how insanely revolutionary this really was in 1966 into more perspective–since I’d only seen the episodes as reruns when I was a kid in the 90’s–Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, was one of the first black women featured in a major television series who was not playing a servant EVER. Her prominent supporting role as a female black bridge officer was unprecedented in the history of television at the time. In a recent interview in Hyphen Magazine, John Cho, who plays Sulu in the new Star Trek movie, described the experience of watching George Takei embody the role in the original series: “It was stunning. He was just alone on television as an Asian American.” And as for the idea of a half-human/half-Vulcan hyphenate…. when Star Trek first aired, interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states! It wouldn’t be until a year later, in 1967, that these “Anti-Miscegenation” laws would be declared unconstitutional.

At the end of Star Trek’s first season, Nichelle Nichols says she’d wanted to leave the show. Gene Roddenberry urged her to reconsider, but she told him she was planning to return to theater. That same weekend, at an NAACP event Nichols was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr. He told her he was a fan, and praised the importance of her role in the show as it was part of the first fully integrated cast that portrayed men and women as equals. Star Trek, it turned out, was one of the only shows his children were allowed to watch. When she told him she was planning to leave, he replied, “You can’t do that! Your character is the first non-stereotypical [Black] role on television, and is in a position of authority. People who don’t look like us, see us for the first time as we should be seen: As equals. Don’t you see? Star Trek has changed the face of Television.” Needless to say, Nichols told Roddenberry she would stay on the show.

What’s fascinating to me is that what Star Trek did, with its deliberate emphasis on diversity and equality, was not only change the face of Television, but, in fact, shape a cultural vision of what the future would be expected to look like, in its own image. “I am a first-generation ‘Star Trek’ fan,” declared Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, and co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program, in a recent Salon article entitled, Obama Is Spock: It’s Quite Logical. “And I’ve long argued that many of my deepest political convictions emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights era. In many ways, my commitment to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by ‘Star Trek.’”

Premiering five years before the first pocket calculator, the Star Trek world wasn’t simply a glittering science fiction, it actually primed a whole generation to demand that the future keep its promises.

Here, then, is Durex’s take on how to advertise condoms, courtesy of Fitzgerald & Co:

And I’d actually been planning a more substantial entry to be the first post of 2009, but when I came across this last night, I couldn’t not write about it. I think the ad is brilliant in SO many ways, and the difference between Trojan’s “Evolve” and Durex’s “Get It On” approaches to marketing condoms could not be more glaring.

It’s more than just that the tag-line “Get it on” is a damn clever double entendre (in one smooth maneuver intimating that getting *it* on, and getting a condom on, actually mean the same thing!) whereas “Evolve,” as I’d written before, aligns condoms with a phenomenon that half of Americans are in opposition to (aka: Evolution)…. It’s that this is SERIOUSLY funny!

I didn’t even realize it until I saw the Get it On ad, but Evolve is really quite humorless, isn’t it? Granted it’s hard to be funny when you’re dealing with STD’s–and, to be fair, the Evolve radio spots do manage a bit of wit in dealing with the subject. With Durex, though, funny is the key.

Both brands are trying to un-taboo their product. One of the specific goals of the Evolve campaing is, in fact, to get all of us to be more open about the topic of sexual health. But while Trojan stakes out Public Service Announcement territory, Durex is going about it in a way that I guess can be described as tongue-in-cheek porn. Of course, the dire gravity of the sexual health crisis truly cannot be underestimated, and perhaps this is why the feat of being able to position sexual responsibility–which is what condoms stand for, basically–in the context of playfulness and silliness and…..naughty condom-balloon animals, is that much more significant.

Humor makes the subject infinitely less taboo than invoking Evolution, and not only that, but it makes it more resonant too. After all, despite however it is you feel about the process of natural selection, if you get what the naughty balloon animals are up to, then the ad is speaking to you.

(P.S. Whoever did the sound design for this spot should seriously get some kind of award.)

516 Years since Columbus discovered America.
232 Years since the first democratic government was established in the United States of America.
143 Years since slavery was abolished.
138 Years since black people got the right to vote.
54 Years since it was agreed that “separate but equal” was bullshit.
26 Years since the coinage of the Bradley Effect.
3 Days since Barack Obama was elected the next president of the United States of America.

Those Obama posters proclaimed “Change,” but I don’t think it ever really occurred to anyone, not even to his most avid supporters, just how sudden, and overwhelmingly personal this change would feel. In the past three days the most profound change I have witnessed has been in people’s perceptions. Perceptions of their personal identities, of their cultural identities, of their national identities, and their perceptions about the very process of affecting social change, and personal opportunity.

These changes that happened, literally, overnight, are undeniably going to be important in shaping the future of this country, and the world. So as every trend forecaster and futurist gets down to the task of figuring out how the result of this election is going to impact our culture, I offer these three-day old observations.

What Obama’s victory means for:

1. Black People – As Sherri Shepherd summed it up on the View, “People of color, we’ve always had these limitations on us. I remember, somebody in my family said one time, when I said I want to be a comic, and an actor, they said, ‘No, you will get a job at the post office. They don’t let people like us do that.’ And so, to look at my son and say, ‘You don’t have to have limitations’… It is an extraordinary day for me.” Unlike too many examples of black achievement in the past, Obama’s win does not signify an exception, but rather a symbol of opportunity for all people of color. The idea that there is only so far you can go if you are black, or that you can only succeed up to a certain point, has been shattered, and I think it’s possible that something in the very sense of black identity itself has been affected here. This is such a huge deal that it’s pretty impossible to really grasp the full magnitude of what this will mean for the future of the Black community specifically, and race relations in the in the U.S. in general yet.

2. GEN Y - Much like black people, I know, from personal experience, that the general under-30 population is feeling something right now that they’ve never experienced before either. The picture below was taken in the Mission district in San Francisco on election night:

Sean Bonner, who took the photo, later wrote, “19th and Valencia. One of the last places in the country I would expect a crowd of people waving American flags. But sure enough it happened. I talked to people today who said for the first time in their lives they hung flags in and out of their houses and finally understood what patriotism is all about. That’s kind of a big deal if you think about it.” It’s a huge deal. Think about this: The first election that my generation was old enough to vote for was stolen. All the other elections we’ve ever known involved George Bush. Neocons aside, the general population born after 1981 has never known what it’s like to not feel resentment and embarrassment about our country. We’ve never felt like our country reflected US, until now. As with the Black community, I think the impact of Obama’s win on the future of the youth of this country, and the future of our affect ON this country that we can now feel is ours to care for, is still unimaginable.

3. America’s perception in the rest of the world – A friend of mine who’s leaving for a tour in Europe next week said to me, “It’s going to be SO different traveling abroad now.” At first I wasn’t completely convinced. My dad has a joke. He says, “Anywhere in the world, Russians and Americans walk into a bar the same way. Loud and obnoxious. Americans do it because they think they own the bar. Russians do it cuz they think they can beat up anyone in the bar.” And it’s not like the way Americans walk into a bar changed with Obama’s acceptance speech. But something definitely did change. “I travel a lot,” Sean Bonner also wrote, “And I’m constantly faced with people from other countries saying ‘Well, you are cool enough but obviously you are the exception, the rest of your country must be idiots to have voted for that Bush guy.’ When I try to tell people that not everyone voted for him, and even people who did vote for him aren’t 100% down with his actions over the last several years, they usually scoff and point out if the country didn’t like him he’d get kicked out, so clearly people are behind him. That’s not something I heard from one person in one country, it’s a feeling I got repeatedly all over the world. The US electing Obama over McCain is a clear message to everyone else on this planet that the US isn’t happy with the leadership we’ve had and we want something to change. This is good for all of us.”

4. Politics – Politics–and I do mean the political process itself, not simply “being political”–is not just for your conservative, older uncle-in-law anymore. Politics is YOURS. Something really remarkable about the Obama campaign is that it offered an outlet for channelling that political youth energy that since the 60’s has been expended on efforts “outside the system,” INTO the system. (Counterculture is dead, after all). I think having felt cheated and ignored by the political process for so long made the prospect of trying to affect institutional change seem impossible. The low-hanging fruit of “personal growth” has all but replaced institutional change as the means for solving society’s problems. But at the end of the day, institutional change, is, in fact, the change we need. So will this new experience of feeling that the political process CAN be ours to affect motivate more of the activists of my generation to give it a rest with the protests-slash-street festivals, and instead put on a suit and tie and do the work it takes to create institutional change? Man, I would really fucking like to hope so.

5. Government – Have you seen this www.change.gov?? Government has NEVER looked like this before. Not just American government. Not ANY government. Fucking amazing! Yesterday, in a cafe, I was watching as CNN announced that Barack Obama had appointed his chief of staff, and I was riveted! Everyone else in the cafe was watching it too. It was the kind of scene that makes you think something terrible is happening on TV, but it wasn’t terrible at all, it was just the new president forming the new government…and it was fascinating! Maybe it’s just cuz it was day 2, maybe this interest in our government that we all seem to suddenly be possessed by will wane, but I’ve gotta say, before, I NEVER used to be interested. Not on ANY day. I think the initiative to run the government in a more transparent, responsive, open way will help to sustain our feeling of personal connection to and investment in the government, and help prevent all of us from slipping back into the general detachment we’d had from it up till now. Consider how a focus on a shared, mutual government vs. on self-segregated communities might affect the dismayingly polarized American landscape we’ve come to know.

6. The American Dream – In Generation Me, Jean Twenge suggests that my generation is too full narcissism and entitlement, that we’ve got massively unrealistic expectations, and we need to be made to face reality, and realize that our dreams are just that. Even for many who did not vote for Obama, there is an undeniable sense of something profoundly impossible having been achieved in his victory. It’s the kind of profoundly impossible achievement that is, and has always been, the hallmark of America, and Obama himself said as much in his victory speech. For those whose dream has been to become Britney Spears, perhaps you might want to take a cue from Twenge’s book. But for those of us whose dream has been about succeeding at doing what we believe in, at doing things our own way, about succeeding at doing the thing that brings us joy and fulfillment, Barack Obama’s victory is a testament to its possibility. The “American Idols” we have had to look up to for too long have either been utterly disposable, recast every season to feed the celebrity tabloid industrial complex, or otherwise icons of unattainable privilege and luxury (think: Paris Hilton). Barack Obama has worked his whole life for everything he has accomplished, and what he’s earned now is the responsibility to do yet more work. I really cannot remember the last time someone like this was an icon of the American Dream, and I can’t wait for a generation of kids who will grow up wanting to become like Barack Obama.

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.

The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.

In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (”How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”

“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:

While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”

“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”

Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.

“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:

I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.

Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”

A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”

Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?

Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”

In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)

As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”

As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.

And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)

“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?

Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!

(CRAP!)

In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)

Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.

Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?

The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.