I have always been weary of being served “decaf” at cafes. Tonight, I think I find mysef caffeinated for the first time in a long while. My friend Jason recently told me, “you know, caffeine does not wake you up but gives you some really good ideas, they just come one after another….” Well, as I sat watching Ikiru at the Music Box, ideas came racing through my head (I drank the supposed decaf before the movie).

The movie was stunning, which was confirmed at the end when Marshall Sahlins who was sitting in front of me broke out clapping at the end. Seriously, it was a moving movie about regaining life and the conditions that sap it away from you which are at once psychological and social. The main character led an intert life for 30 years as a faceless beaurocrat working in a mind numbing position. Time ceased to be important and was essentially robbed from him. He was busy all day stamping papers and evading life in whatever guise and doing so in the name of a son he had no connection with… All of this changed when he got the diagnosis of cancer and he started to feel again and creep into the vicissitude of life. He found meaning fighting for the “right thing,” (I don’t want to ruin the movie) and basically he took control of time in his life again.

Among other things, the brilliance of Ikiru is capturing the relationship between time, meaning, and modern beaurocracies. Think about it… Every time you are running some errand, going to the doctor, trying to figure out your goddam taxes, trying to make a positive change in your neighborhood, working two jobs to make the bills meets, etc, you usually encounter a faceless entity (health insurance company, the government, American high school system, your employers, the IRS) in total frustration and you are robbed literally of time and eventually for many, their will. Many people don’t find themselves as in an extreme of a situation as that of the protaginist in Ikiru yet his state is what many people world over find themselves in a less virulent form. But once you have like a good portion of society in a state where they are without time, the status quo is easy to stay as the… status quo.

Unfortunately the brilliance of American political hegemony is the fact that 1. People are given freedom of speech although basically the message is ignored and/or drowned out 2. Many folks are scraping away just enough that they are not in a terrible socio-economic state but are left with little time to do anything else but make sure to keep etch a living 3. There is such a strong ethic of individualism that if you aren’t “making it” in whatever capacity, it is well the individuals fault… There is little room for an ethic of social welfare and responsibility

This movie actually speaks to some of these elements such as muting information, the myth of individual self-sustainability in a powerful way… It also gave me some good ideas for my dissertation on the relationship between free software (by the way, GNU sort of turned 20 today!) and rerouting around bureaucracy. The philisophical and cultural elements of free software culture empahsize everything that is antithetical to bueaucractic culture and this is captured even in technical architectures and expressed in the anxiety over keeping everything “open” and having control ove everything. I do think this is very much a response to the deep seated bureaucratic ways (the Iron Cage perhaps in Weberian terms) of our social state. But perhaps I just had too much caffeine.