Mashup Culture
Although most science fiction (the so called "Space Opera" stuff) doesn't work for me, I've always been a big fan of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, whose aims in writing are as much about the future as where we're going today. In Gibson's Neuromancer, a post-national culture manifests itself from the beginning. The world is where eastern Europeans, Japanese, Africans, Chinese, Americans - every possible mix you can think of - collide together. Stephenson's Snowcrash is similar in the sense that it shows no regard for a national sensibility; society is organized in suburban gated communites and we have characters like Hiro Protagonist, loosely Japanese and American, Vitaly Chernobyl, Russian post-rocker, Ng, Vietnamese, and Raven, the first and last Aleutian you would probably ever read about.
I was listening to a mashup the other day and thinking that if anything our music tells us about that post-national, post-homogeneous future that Gibson and Stephenson wrote about as it creeps towards us. A mashup, if you haven't heard one, is music from different styles overlayed, the result of which is a novel, stimulating, dancable mix. If you'd like an actual listen, grab one from Sean McColgan's podcasts.
When I hear the music coming together it makes me think about our world and how the barriers, definitions, and rules we've built are being turned upside down. I don't think they are being overthrown or broken, they are just becoming irrelevent. Even where I live, on the edge of the universe, I nod in greeting to the Bosnian who lives next door, have a casual discussion with my Lebanese coworker, and try to explain to people that I'm Ugandan but never lived there, lived in Kenya, but the American accent comes from Oregon and California, and...
I should tell them I'm a mashup.
Like the American cars sold in Europe but designed by Germans, which make me think of the German ensemble Kruder & Dorfmeister, whose confluence of jazz and Brazilian samba make them so hard to explain and so good to listen to, the world we live in today is not a melting pot or a salad bowl, it's a mashup.
7:34:18 PM 
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