Haoyan: A lot of times when societies and cultures exist in relative peace and luxury, the bad things are the ones that stand out, and they get a lot of attention.  In the media landscape we currently exist in, those things get highlighted quite a lot more than all the other things happening.  I like to remind people who get caught up in the political turmoil of our times that, all this is happening, and at the same time, for instance, we have people in the private sector who have developed rocket ships that can go into space and come back, in unison.  And land in the ocean!  You know?  This has already happened. This is 2019; it’s happened for a couple of years.  And most people in the mainstream, if they have an inkling of that happening, they’re not really attuned to the possibilities there. To them, it’s a singular event.  It’s a spectacle.  But they’re not realizing, that’s the doorway to a whole other future that people in decades past were already imagining.

What do you attribute that to though, the lack of awareness?  Is it that media incentivizes other content?

Mmm-hmm.  They talk about this in a lot of internet design, as far as social media goes. Because of advertising models, all the systems currently are basically designed to get as many short term “eyeballs,” or clicks, as possible.  And, therefore, that system itself is just designed for things that, coupled with human nature and what we know to work, that get an outburst, or a laugh, or whatever they call it.  A dopamine rush, and then onto the next thing.  These systems are designed to do that, as opposed to thinking more long term.

Do you feel any responsibility as an artist or a communicator to work against that tendency?

For me, it’s not really a matter of working against. I do see value in subverting those systems. But I also think that you can work within the system itself.

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