You Can Shape Reality
Thoughts on the artist's role in cultural change.
Hi,
I should warn you that I’m starting this with a rant. But why else do you make a newsletter, if not to rant?
This morning I took my dog for a walk around the block. She’s a slow, sniffy little dog who likes to take her time examining every piece of grass on a lawn, so walks typically last a long time without going very far. During these walks, I usually listen to a podcast or listen to some music, but sometimes I’ll just raw-dog life and enjoy the ambient sounds of my quaint neighbourhood.
Other times, I’ll just get super pissed off about trucks. Like today.
I hate trucks. I hate cars, car culture in North America, the lack of viable public transit in cities with more than enough resources to build it... I hate it all so much that just the sight of the average huge pickup truck can whip me up into an internal frothing rage. Today, walking my small, excruciatingly slow dog around the block, I let that happen.
On a ten minute walk around the block, I was confronted with three different pickup trucks pulling typical truck bullshit for no reason and without consequence. One truck was parked in front of a house, completely unoccupied, idling away for no reason. Some idiot wanted to keep their oversized air-hauler warm and decided that everyone else would be happy to huff exhaust for that to happen. When I finished my walk, the truck was still there. Still unoccupied. Still idling.
Meanwhile, around the corner, another truck pulled up into the bike lane, in front of a no stopping sign, and parked. Nothing too surprising here, since it seems like most trucks in our city have an unofficial permit granted by default to just whip up anywhere with their hazards on and park without consequence. Why do we even waste money putting up no stopping signs at this point?
And to top it all off, around the next corner, another pickup truck was parked up on the sidewalk, blocking it off completely. The owner of the truck wasn’t pulled up on the sidewalk to unload building materials or block pedestrians from entering a dangerous construction project, though. They were just having a chat with someone... in their empty driveway.
Witnessing all this I was made so frustrated by how typical all this behaviour is. Seeing pointless polluting, blocking bike paths and hogging the sidewalk all in a ten-minute span is not a rare occurrence in Ontario, let alone the rest of North America. This is just how things seem to work here. It’s part of the culture that people get to own giant, dangerous, wasteful machines and put them in everyone else’s way. Pointing it out to most people will make you seem like a crank. Where else are these guys supposed to put their huge empty trucks?
Whew. Deep breath. Anyone else’s blood pressure feeling high?
After writing to my city counselor, begging for any city staff’s email address that I can bother with these rants, I calmed down and I started to think about the cultural side of things. The reality is that so much of this behaviour comes from things being seen as “normal.” It’s fine to pull your truck up on the sidewalk. We all do it! Why is your face so red, Simon?
Our social order becomes normalized in lots of ways, but a big one is through being seen in our media. We stop noticing how insane the giant cars filling our roads are because, to an extent, it’s all we see. Cars are just one example, and they aren’t alone. Family structures, social behaviour, norms around food, dating, humour, home design... all of this is shaped not only by our individual lives but, arguably more often, by the cultural products we produce. Now more than ever, we see the state of the world through movies, TV, and social media.
The idea that artists could play an active role in how these norms are established really first became clear to me when I listened to this episode of The War on Cars (do you see a theme to my values here?). In it they point out how, in Hollywood, bikes are almost always portrayed as the domain of fools and children. You typically only see bikes in movies when they’re ridden by kids, nerds, or asshole “vehicular cyclists” in lycra. As cool as Pee-Wee’s bike is to weirdos like me, the fact that he’s so attached to his bike is part of what reinforces his adult-man-child character. Adding all this up, is it any wonder so many people in North America give up riding a bike after they get their driver’s licence? In Hollywood, bikes are for fools, and cars are for action heroes, heist dudes, sexy people and, basically anyone you might generally see as “cool.”
It wasn’t until this was pointed out to me in this context that I realized how artists (in this case, screenwriters) play such an active role in upholding and even shaping cultural norms. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it took that long to realize, but something about the mundanity of cycling advocacy took the more obvious social activism out of it (obviously plenty of art pushes norms in positive directions by increasing diversity, challenging the status-quo and telling marginalized stories) and helped me see all the smaller ways artists have a say in how we see the world.
Now, Hollywood is a juggernaut of shaping culture. The artists working on film and TV are usually making art seen by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. There is so much money invested in these projects that obviously artists aren’t the only ones steering the ship. Product placement and advertising play a role, too. This is likely the only reason anyone ever bought a Sony VAIO product in the 2000s, after they saw James Bond using one in the latest James Bond movie brought to you by Sony Pictures. But I don’t think this is the only way culture can be influenced.
Art has the obvious ability to make big statements about society. Some might argue that this is art’s greatest strength. But when we create art, and especially when we tell stories, we can also make statements that are subtler by showing things as being entirely normal. Think of how gun culture goes mostly unquestioned in American movies - where someone owning a gun doesn’t really need an explanation because it’s just totally normal. The more we see that reflected back at us, the more we normalize it. Imagine someone randomly having a gun in a movie set in basically any other country and you’ll realize how odd it is to see guns so fucking much in movies.
Part of the power artists have in shaping our culture is through normalizing things, and understanding that means we can consciously work these ideas into the mundane parts of art. Why not set a scene in your story on a bus instead of in a car? Why not imagine a world where everyone doesn’t have a gun tucked in their dresser drawer? Your art doesn’t have to be about these things for it to have an impact.
In a way, artists have a chance to do something most politicians can only dream of: we can make people want the things we want. We can show the world how things could be, and help people see value in things by making them cool, exciting, or even just normal. But to do that, we need to be aware of it, and we need to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and harmful ideas that reinforce the status-quo.
After I listened to that War on Cars podcast episode, I had this sense that artists had more of a chance of normalizing cycling than almost anyone else. Until people could see how fun, cool and normal cycling could be, the only way to push for cycling in your city would be through going to your city council, demanding safer infrastructure, trying to teach people about the merits of protected bike lanes... anyone else feeling bored?
Activism is important, but it can also be exhausting. If progressive politics face any challenges right now (a big “if,” I know), the largest one is probably just how much work it all seems to be. People may want things to be better, but if even learning how to improve things is work, I don’t know how many converts we’ll get to the cause. But what if you could convince people to get on your side by having fun? That’s where the artists come in.
Staying on theme, not long ago I played the game Wheel World, which takes the structure of your typical racing game but just replaces the supped-up cars and nitro with tricked out bikes and magical bike boost. It’s a fun, beautiful little game and it feels like a direct response to the problem of bikes in media typically being seen as lame. You can’t play this game and not want to go out for a spin on your bike after, and the biggest hazard in the game are cars, which you’ll start to wish weren’t there after they plow into you for the dozenth time.
Obviously a niche little video game like Wheel World isn’t going to change the culture overnight, but since when has the culture changed overnight? The point isn’t that artists have mind-control powers and can make people believe things they otherwise wouldn’t (that power is reserved for the oil lobbyists). The point is that we can push things in the right direction by showing people new ideas and letting them embrace them on their own. You can’t convince someone you’re cool through logic and sound rational principles... you just go out and be cool and people will notice that and follow along.
Right now I think a lot of people feel powerless and tired. There’s a ton of important work being done by activists and progressives to fight the powers that be and make things better for all of us. All of us artists have a part to play in that, beyond just designing sick branding for Zohran Mamdani (though that’s also a useful pursuit). Artists have to show up to help inspire us all into action by showing us more than just how bad things are, but also how great things could be. Artists can help reveal the absurdity of the status-quo, and can offer new ideas for people to rally behind. Ultimately, when people are jaded about the system and feel like they can’t make a difference, artists are potentially the only people who can turn that around. We can offer people a new perspective, and help change what we all think of as normal.
So when I see the giant awful trucks in my neighbourhood, while I may want to scream at the politicians to do something about it, I think I also need to work on helping people imagine something better, too. The sooner we all realize how fucking stupid these trucks are (or any other important message you may want to share), the sooner we can take action and make my boring dog walks a little less unbearable make the world a little nicer to live in.
Love,
Simon 🐒
P.S. I didn’t really know how to fit this into the main text, but when I wanted to make my “I Hate Trucks” artwork, I ripped a PNG of one of these stupid trucks off of the Ford website and found it at this URL:
https://www.ford.ca/cmslibs/content/dam/na/ford/en_ca/images/f-150/2025/jellybeans/F150_Jelly_Raptor.png
What’s up with “2025/jellybeans/F150_Jelly_Raptor”??? Do these big tough trucks secretly have cute little candy-themed code names??? Is there a line of Ford “Cotton Candy” trucks? Are the 2026 models all “jujubes?”
I just think that’s funny cause they make these things look like military vehicles, so calling them “jellybeans” feels like someone working on the site is secretly listening to The War on Cars with me. Aww, cute little jellybean truck, you tough little boy!
K. Have a nice day!