Current TV’s mission has from the beginning been to “democratize” television and provide a platform for younger filmmakers that may have a harder time gaining access to larger media networks. (Check out “Good News in TV Land,” by EnlightenNext contributing editor Maura O’Connor) To that end, Current gathers around 30% of their short films and stories from outside of their studios. But unlike YouTube and the many other user-generated-content platforms on the web, Current TV isn’t just a free-for-all in which the talented is all mixed up with the tedious. They are known as the “HBO of the YouTube generation,” and through editorial selection and a unique voting process, the best and most thought-provoking interviews on Current rise, like cream, to the top. As they say, they’re trying to “raise the conversation” that’s happening online.

The reason for our interview was the fact that Silva and Lugavere’s late night talk show on Current, called Still Up, will be featuring EnlightenNext among a variety of other sources in a July 13th episode dedicated to the evolution of consciousness. Describing the upcoming show as “a televised version of an Alex Grey painting,” the two plan to feature everything from “esoteric techno optimism” and immortalism of Ray Kurzweil (which they’ve also made a short film about) to an interview with Deepak Chopra and a review of the variety of opinions about what if anything will happen in 2012.

Our conversation was a good one. And while I was very interested in hearing what they had to say about the current status and future of media, I was most keen on finding out what they thought about the future of Generation Y, which has caused so many employers, cultural critics, and parents to scratch their heads. As Tom Huston pointed out in his recent column, we’re the dumbest, the most idealistic, the most technologically adept, and the most narcissistic generation ever. . . and no one quite knows whether the future is in capable hands. And so as two budding thought leaders and broad cultural voices for our generation (they think of themselves as Bill Maher for the next generation), I wanted to find out where they stood on the issue.

You can listen to the interview below (18:38):

And to watch their upcoming Still Up episode on the evolution of consciousness, airing at midnight Eastern, 11 Central and 9 Pacific on Current TV, which you can watch on the following channels:

DirecTV 358
Dish Network 196
Comcast 107
Time Warner LA 142
Time Warner NYC 103
Time Warner everywhere else: Check local listings.

And here are some thoughts about the show:

One benefit of our Burlington Radio Show on Friday mornings is that we are starting to bring out and make objective the strands of postmodern culture that shape our ideas, values, and actions, but that we aren’t necessarily aware of. One of these maxims that came out on last Friday’s call was our dependence on balance as a guiding principle–and how diametrically opposed balance and evolution can be.

We spoke about two of the sacred balancing cows of our generation:  the balancing of masculine and feminine energy and the quest to balance humanity with our collective impact on the earth. The all too familiar idea is that the world has gotten out of balance due to our over emphasis on industry, consumerism, masculinity, and other modern sins. Now we need to (continue to) restore the balance by bringing in the opposite of those energies–local economy, living simply, femininity, and others.

That the world is suffering from ecological and cultural disasters is not in doubt. Thank God that movements to protect the environment, bring equality, respect cultures and peoples have become part of our value set! These are all movements that I have been part of, as most of us have, to some degree or another. I remember long nights sorting waste in my college’s Physical Plant to determine how many pounds of recyclables were getting tossed by careless college brats. Ahhh, the crusade against the non-recycling hold-outs was a Holy War and I was Earth’s knight in shining armor. With my Nalgene full of superiority juice, my friends and I would snatch discarded plastic bottles out of the trash cans and pile them into the recycling bins, glaring with contempt at the evil sinners–our dorm room neighbors–who we condemned as consciously plotting to destroy the world.

The desire to push back against the problems created by the previous generation’s stunning scientific, economic, and political development was very strong. But that structure of pushing back against progress, (in its own context, modernism IS progressive, least we forget), is in danger of getting in the way now that we are poised to move into a new stage of creative explosion. In this conversation, we are talking about aligning with the universe’s creative energy, as ourselves, a leap forward that will throw anyone off balance. I wonder if it isn’t the knee-jerk attachment to balance in life that is holding us to our postmodern moorings. Perhaps we need to speak about the fact that moving forward into a new value-sphere doesn’t mean giving up the good postmodern values– they will always be part of us. It means giving up our attachment to them, at the expense of adopting new ones.

We are talking about what comes next. As Diane so aptly put on the show (see audio, above), we are talking about the move from postmodern to an evolutionary worldview, not from modern to postmodern.

Looking forward to more!