What is the Laser Age?

Wow. What a question...

About two years ago, while Jamie McMorrow was writing most of the Year of Fear and I was inking The Abortion, we were communicating regularly (almost daily in fact) by email, and occasionally meeting up in the real world to have pints and talk shite. Some of that nonsense would, on reflection, actually be quite interesting, and would escape the withering gaze of our own self-reflection, and survive into further discussion.

One such topic was Jamie's idea of the Laser Age. This was born from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and many other things, including the Thelemic idea of the Aeon of Horus approaching (or already having arrived), but it was more than that. It was a direct reflection on the actual world around us at the time. In the words of the man himself:

"In all honesty, it seems to me that modern pop culture really is eating itself, y'know? What was the best track I heard last week? Justin Bieber's Baby slowed down 800%. The Fantastic Four movie franchise is getting rebooted about half an hour after the last movie came out. Pride, Prejudice And Zombies is a big, big seller. And after this culture has completely cannibalised itself, what's left? That's the time for the Laser Age, cleansing all with its unholy light and giving us a fresh, empty page to write on."


The Justin Bieber song wasn't 'Baby', by the way, it was some shite called "U Smile". Urgh. But the 800% slower version is a thing of sublime beauty, comparable in a way to the slowed down crickets thing. And not only is FF apparently being rebooted, but the Spiderman reboot is on its way and there's even discussion in the media about who will take over from Nolan once he's finished his Batman trilogy... The DC Universe is very publicly about to undergo a widespread reboot, and everything is referencing itself, and everything else...


We're approaching a time where the economic crisis engulfing the globe makes a lie of Globalism, and increasing climate change, regardless of what the detractors say, continues to wipe out Pacific islands and force mass migration from the coasts inland. While this happens, we're being saturated with media that is increasingly based on "reality", where anyone can be famous for five minutes then crash ingloriously when the same papers that made them break them on the shores of ignominy.


Yet as Morrison posited in The Invisible Kingdom, the final chapter of his epic series 'The Invisibles', there is a democratisation at work here too. If capitalism is in its final throes, it will be ugly, but there will be a new kind of beauty emerging to dance in its corpse. If capitalism, also, is willingly transmogrifying religion in order to vivify its dying frame, there is every chance that religion will go with it. And what is left then? 


Lady Gaga creates herself from nothing, flirting with occultism and the beauty of ugliness and sin and goes on to become the biggest and most important pop star in decades - and all in the space of a few years. She's Shae Fox, dudes. On a 70-foot screen. And we're scaling that wall. She's just one of the entities that comes before the emergence of the new. Look at her reliance on Outer Church imagery - the meat dress, poison, toxicity. Yet she still manifests the ideal of emergent libertarianism through modern media. She's legit, whatever you think of her. You may think she peddles dross, but it's her dross. I for one think there's something very interesting in her hyper-pop-recycling-and-repackaging. I mean, rather that than most of the other stuff out there that calls itself modern music, and I'm not just talking about pop.


Then there's Janelle Monae, the Lady Yet To Emerge, who is undoubtedly the Invisible College to Gaga's Outer Church. Having had the privilege of catching (half) of her live show, I've been prey to her voodoo charms. Using lyrics and imagery borrowed from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, she's the invert of Lady Gaga's blank-eyed assimilation: she's the vacuous robot come to magical life, emerging from a shell of metal into a world populated by weird, oppressive mirror-faced men straight out of Doom Patrol (there's Morrison again...) and she leads the rallying call with hot dance moves and sweet, seductive music... Trust me, this chick cast a spell on her audience at the end of the gig with a decreasing tempo, slow burning sexuality and a hypnotising hand gesture that lead us all  to end up sitting on the floor of the venue swaying gently. Opium for the masses...


And then. Then we have Rebecca Black and Arc Music... This little lady was a rich kid whose parents did what any parent would do with their impressionable young girl and paid to make her into a popstar. Never mind that it was only really for personal consumption but got posted on YouTube, making her fair game for an entire nation's worth of trolls, slagging her off for her Autotuned voice and patently ridiculous and childish lyrics. The video has now been taken down due to a copyright disagreement: damn right, I bet her parents want a cut of that rental action. 


Never mind the ribbing though, Black (and a horrible, ghastly slew of little divas) has proven that anyone can be an overnight "success" - it's just that now we're watching the rise to fame and the crash and burn happen so much quicker. Pop will eat itself. Pop culture will cannibalise itself. And what happens when time catches up with us and says "Whoa. We can't go any faster"? That's when the Laser Age emerges. When this crass, meaningless pop world transforms into a beautiful, consciousness-raising-beast of a million colours, prismatic and glorious, the light from the Solar Child tripping in fantastic rays in the sky.


When media, that bastardised word/whore, is broken along with its Capitalist father, and we go back to producing beauty and art for its own sake. To enliven. To make each other think. To raise us up beyond the status of consumers/producers, master/serfs, and to become immanent in our own power to create. The Laser Age is what emerges from the charred meat of this hulking society, the spirit that rises from the flesh, mobile, malleable, mercurial. Quick enough to shift this way and that, to move with our desires, and to be unchainable by old laws.


The Venus Movement, the real movement behind the Zeitgeist films, and the cause for which they are merely the banner, heralds a new age of the Resource Economy, where we make proper and efficient use of the boundless renewable resources of the Earth, and the great technology that our intelligence allows, to remove the need for labour. This is only possible when profit is removed from the system. When technology is allowed to increase, unbound by built-in obsolescence and the drive for monetary gain, when things are built to last and not be replaced, when plastic is removed from our lives and natural resources used and shared appropriately. It's a strong political stance, one which ultimately requires the death of Capitalism, but it also gives us the first glimmers of hope, of something after. 


And in a world where automation works for us, and the majority no longer has to break its back for the profiteering minority, we will become freed to think again, to create.


In the Laser Age, we can once again begin to dream of the stars - we can imagine and hope for a world without war - we can explore joy, passion, sexuality, beauty, experience, knowledge, art, all without the threat of the cosh hanging over us. 


The Laser Age is a ridiculous term, for a ridiculously optimistic future. It's time we started dreaming again, you and I.