digital fracture

it’s easy to forget the Americas were colonized.

not because the effects have vanished, but because colonization lies just far enough in the past to have slipped from living memory. As attention spans shorten and history itself contracts, even the socio-economic foundations of the Western Hemisphere become harder to recall.

I don’t present this as a political stance; it escapes debate. I introduce it to provide grounding theory for why U.S. culture currently faces an identity crisis.

Spain had reached the Caribbean over 500 years ago. England established its first New World colony around 100 years later.

it wasn’t for another 170 years the U.S. was founded. hey GPT,

United States culture roots itself so recently that it cannot be visualized when measured against other cultures of the world.

so what challenges currently face pan-American society? among others,

• immense technical innovation (AI)

• retreat from globalization

• pivot to conservative ideals

• rapid, steady inflation

• cultural and border dysphoria

these points are illustrated well by the paradox of immigration—a key economic driver not only for the United States, but for Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and also a force of rapid diversification.

immigration has enabled unprecedented growth, which has in turn laid bare the disconnect between these hybrid American nations and the indigenous cultures that preceded them.

the disruptions we face are grounded in that fracture—between the land and its inhabitants, between memory and forgetting. these are not just political or economic events, but symptoms of a culture still searching for grounding.

the way forward is not to recover—or feel guilt for—a past we can’t inhabit, but to build traditions that carry us into the future.

digital platforms have exposed us to incredible global creativity, but the crucial next step has not yet been realized: to reinvest that knowledge in the local and regional systems that support us.

rather than thinking of values and community as fixed structures we plug into, or nature something to be explored, what if we built outward from our own lived experiences?

we start by embodying the lifestyle we hope to model—fueled by the access to knowledge and resources technology provides—and then create networks and connections that support both our own growth and that of those willing to collaborate with us.

tradition is not abstract. It lives in what we choose to carry forward.

for me, that grounding comes through music—folk, jazz, and funk of the 70s and 80s, when live performance reached a peak of raw human expression before technological efficiency began to dominate.

these traditions were still loose enough to carry human-made rhythms: songs written for people gathered in a room, themes born from labor and land, performances that breathed with the same air as their listeners.

before digitization, music carried a pulse that tied humans back to the cycles of nature. consider:

Parliament Funkadelic - Give Up the Funk (1976)

Grateful Dead - Must’ve Been the Roses (1980)

Jorge Ben Jor - Pais Tropical (1982)

our grounding may differ. yours might be a grandmother’s recipe, a unique dance step, or a style of poetry. what matters is not uniformity, but the act of grounding itself: piecing together continuity from what resonates most deeply.

other updates?

album is being mixed—release looking like spring ‘26 once the weather starts to warm up. new music to come sooner than that.

in NYC? stop by Kiki’s Open Mic 6pm tomorrow (wednesday) in TSP. come early for music lessons!

kicked off a new youtube reaction series—YT can be a silly platform but this is a chance for me to get deeper into performance theory. should be fun!

there’s more but we’ll save it. stay in touch!

“there is one rule in the garden; you must give more than you take.” –Alan Chadwick