Woodstock 4.0

Why Woodstock can never happen now?

Maybe we’ve become too individualistic. You ask what is a women in her early twenties know anything about Woodstock, and that you are true, but I will tell you the world that I live in.

Now this is a gross exaggeration, but we are individuals attached to machines. Sleepdealer by Alex Rivera reminded me of this truism. The premise of the movie was workers from Mexico were each attached to a virtual computer where every movement of their body responded to a working robot building buildings in the United States.

In a sense how true is it that we virtually cannot live without our machines in order to be productive. Cell phones, applications, Laptops, and Facebooks, those need to be checked frequently like a newborn infant. At this point roommates are speaking to each other through Facebook chat than face to face (guilty!).

Woodstock was essentially communal. Technology existed back in 69’ but it wasn’t infused with the individual. Yeah they took mind-altering drugs that left a point of twirling magical colored escapism but in the end they had the music, they had each other. The experience was real.

There is a difference between witnessing something yourself and witnessing it recording on your IPhone. Turn your head just a little aside, look past the device and something totally different happens.

Woodstock 69’ was all this collectively, in what it was, in the atmosphere; it existed as nature, not IN nature. Not through huge speakers and paneled televisions; not through corporate sponsorships and overpriced water that should essentially be free. Woodstock 99,’showed just how far we’ve come and the community responded with anger.

Now where does technology come in? We have found a way to capture the music that played so freely on the fields of Bethel, New York and placed it on a playlist. Essentially that’s all we need nowadays. We can sit on a huge grassy knoll by ourselves with our headphones on and feel the music like the hippies of old but yet we keep it to ourselves not because we want too but because music companies force us too.

In the end, in all our individualism we lost each other, we lost our freedom, we lost Woodstock forever, and I have to wonder.. who is to blame?