What's New In American Culture Probably Isn't Going On In America

I was reading Blood, Bullets and Bandwidth , about the exploits of some ex-Californians running a bandwidth distributing operation in Baghdad and thought that some of the most interesting cultural developments in American culture are really going on in the expat community.

Another interesting example of this new expat culture is The Exile is a wild and bawdy romp of a magazine written by a bunch of guys living in Russia who are from California. They like their sex, drugs, and rock and roll and revel in the strangeness and differentness of post-soviet Russia.

American culture has stagnated to some degree. Popular music hasn't changed much since the early 1990s. In general I see a lot of dissatisfaction and boredom in the lives of the people I know and meet at parties. Expats have broken out of this and have connected with the vibrant modernizing and optimistic cultures of the rest of the world while those in the U.S work harder for less in an environment that could best be described as a very complicated game that is no longer enjoyable.