Adam Curtis:

L.A.: Towards the beginning of HyperNormalisation you talk about a shift that happened in the ‘70s when artists detached from reality and retreated into themselves to mine content for their work. Your argument is that this kind of individualistic self-expression is antithetical to political change. How so?

“Individualism is the really big thing of our time, and both left and right have been affected by it. It’s this idea that had been growing since the counterculture of the 1960s that really came to fruition in the 1970s—the idea being that what you as an individual feel and desire are the most important things, and that if you followed anyone who told you what to do you were inauthentic. People don’t believe they should give themselves up to the church or trade unions any longer. They want to be themselves.

It was a wonderful shift because it did stop us from needing to be told what to do by elites and old hierarchies. It freed us of that and that’s really great—we are, to a great extent, free individuals. The problem with individualism is that, whilst it is liberating and exciting and beautiful, when things get difficult you are very weak. If you go into the woods at night, by yourself, it’s frightening, isn’t it? You get scared by the slightest noise, the slightest snap of a twig. If you go into the woods with your friends in a group, it’s incredibly exciting and thrilling because you somehow feel stronger. It’s as simple as that. That’s one point.

The other part of that shift in the early 1970s was that more and more people looked to art as a way of expressing their radicalism in an individual way. Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids makes this very clear. People like her and Robert Mapplethorpe didn’t want to be just a part of radical groups, they wanted to be individuals challenging the system. While that may have dropped away with Mapplethorpe, it remained central to Smith’s belief. But what I was trying to say in the film was that the very idea of self-expression might not have had the radical potential they thought.

What rescued the U.S. economy from the economic crisis of the 1970s was a massive wave of consumer capitalism. And behind it were the forces of finance, because they offered credit to millions of people for the first time. In another series I made called The Century of the Self, I tried to show how the other essential component in that wave of consumerism was the idea of self-expression. People were encouraged to buy all kinds of stuff, not to be like each other as they had in the past, but instead to express themselves as individuals. In this way the very idea of self-expression became central to the modern structure of power.

We look back at past ages and see how things people deeply believed in at the time were actually a rigid conformity that prevented them from seeing important changes that were happening elsewhere. And I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins—different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with today’s art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them.

This might be quite a difficult one to get over, but I think this is really important: however radical your message is as an artist, you are doing it through self-expression—the central dominant ideology of modern capitalism. And by doing that, you’re actually far from questioning the monster and pulling the monster down. You’re feeding the monster. Because the more people come to believe that self-expression is the end of everything, is the ultimate goal, the more the modern system of power becomes stronger, not weaker.”

Photo by mark6mauno

The post Individualism cannot lead to political change appeared first on P2P Foundation.

7. Freedom Isn’t Free

PN: Let’s talk about technology. In terms of administering a shared goods-and-services system, the internet might be a good match. But it also seems that the internet, and machines and technology in general, can stand in place of actual relationships, and can be a stumbling block. How do you negotiate between those ideas?

DR: The word that describes digital for me is discrete. For example, take sounds. With an actual sound, no matter how hard we zoom in, it’s still a real thing. There’s still more fidelity, more information to be found. If I scan or sample it, I’ve now translated that sound in the real world into a number. Something that was an event, in nature, in the world, is now a number. It’s a derivative of reality. That number encapsulates as many metrics and as much information about the sound as I’m capable of including, and I can then make copies of the number and manipulate them. So there’s greater choice in that way. But the only things the number can reproduce about that sound are the things I’ve told it to reproduce.

PN: It only knows what it’s supposed to measure.

DR: The reproduction process also involves a sampling rate, which necessarily leaves stuff out. Even if the sampling rate is so good, so super-mp3, that it’s beyond my conscious hearing, there is still space between the samples. Just like a fluorescent light; there’s space between the flashes.

Now the question is, for all intents and purposes, is it the same, or not? I would argue that formany intents and purposes, it is the same, but for all intents and purposes, it is not. It is a re-creation of a thing, and an approximation, and without even getting spiritual and talking about prana and chi and everything else, there is a difference.

In high school when I needed to do a research project, I would go to the library to find a book. I couldn’t help but see the 20 other books on the shelf nearby, I had to read 20 spines before I found mine. And in reading those 20 spines I would see stuff I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and I might get ideas for my paper randomly — not by predetermined choice. I would see them by virtue of the fact that some librarian who was alive before me made a decision, by virtue of legacies and input and real life messiness. Whereas when I’m in the digital realm and I know the book I want, I type it into Google, and it’s there. And nothing else.

PN: This discrete freedom of choice sounds like a very controlled environment.

DR: Right, what are my range of choices? And who’s giving me that range? People are utterly unaware of that. So when I look at technology I say well great, people have the ability to write online, but they don’t, most of them, have the ability to program. In other words we can enter our text into the little blog box, but we aren’t thinking about the biases built into a daily blog structure, which are towards short, daily thoughts, not introspective . . .

Or look at online communities. I’m going to become friends with another person who owns a 2004 red Mini with a sunroof, like mine, rather than with my neighbor who happens to have a different car; I’m going to look for that perfect affinity. But that’s not a real relationship, that’s my digital relationship, which is discrete! Discrete communities end up groping towards conformity of behavior really quickly.

That’s why it’s a consumer paradise, because it really does celebrate the idea of increasingly granular affinity groups, increasingly granular product choices.

8. The Derivative Life, An (Un)Reality Show

PN: An over-arching theme I found in the book is how the common-sense stuff of our reality, the economy and money and shopping and working, is really science fiction; we don’t live inside a “natural” economic structure — we made it up.

DR: It gets very much like Baudrillard in a way. We lived in a real world where we created value, and understood the value that we created as individuals and groups for one another. Then we systematically disconnected from the real world: from ourselves, from one another, and from the value we create, and reconnected to an artificial landscape of derivative value of working for corporations and false gods and all that. It is in some sense Baudrillard’s three steps of life in the simulacra.

So by now, as Borges would say, we’ve mistaken the map for the territory. We’ve mistaken our jobs for work. We’ve mistaken our bank accounts for savings. We’ve mistaken our 401k investments for our future. We’ve mistaken our property for assets, and our assets for the world. We have these places where we live, then they become property that we own, then they become mortgages that we owe, then they become mortgage-backed loans that our pensions finance, then they become packages of debt, and so on and so on.

We’ve been living in a world where the further up the chain of abstraction you operate, the wealthier you are.

9. The Way Out

PN: So since this is a system we created, can we create something else?

DR: Right, that’s what open-source was supposed to be about. I believe that every realm of human experience and design is ultimately open-source if we choose for it to be. That’s why I got interested in religion and money, because those seemed to be the two areas that people would not accept an open-source premise. Religion — of course it isn’t, those are sacred truths! But I would argue that Judaism was actually intended as an open-source religion. I’ve written a book about that, called Nothing Sacred, which was and still is controversial. Because if the Torah is open for interpretation, if it’s this beautiful, myriad, hypertextual, hyperdimensional document that it is, then the whole thing is up for grabs: what happens to the real estate, the Israeli state?

Money of course is the other big area, it’s still the one thing they won’t let you print.

PN: You’ve seen the dual currency idea from the Middle Ages coming back in certain places?

DR: We’ve seen it coming back for 10 or 20 years now in places like Ithaca, New York, and Portland, Oregon; little places with alternative communities and hippies and weirdos and Grateful Dead parking lots and things like that. They could try local currency because people were weird enough to go for it.

More recently, after the economic downturn in Japan, dual currencies started to take hold in the non-”alternative” community. Everyone had time, but no one had money. Everyone was willing to work, but there were no companies they could work for. And since the only way we know how to work is to outsource our employment to a company, things looked bad.

One of the main needs people had was getting health care to their grandparents and great-grandparents who lived in towns far away. No one could afford home health care for them — people to bathe them, walk them around, give them their shots, their IVs, their bedpans. So if you can’t afford the service what can you do? What they did was set up a non-local complementary currency system where you would volunteer a certain number of hours of work to take care of an old person where you lived. You would acquire credits, and then someone who lived near your grandparents would take care of them for the credits you paid. There was no money involved! The currency was literally worked into existence. Even after the economy improved and people got their health insurance back, old people preferred the health care workers who were coming from the real people rather than the ones that came from the companies.

Now it’s starting to hit places in the US where things are especially bad — Detroit, Lansing, Cleveland — these are towns that have resources in people, land, old factories. They have time, they have energy, but they don’t have money and they don’t have any corporate interest. So what can they do? Make a local currency, start doing things for each other. I’ll fix your car, and you do something for me.

Promoting bank-lent businesses is basically saying that you don’t believe in sustainable business models yet. Any business that started with the bank is not a sustainable business model, because it’s already in the debt/interest track. This is where Obama is still confused. He should say,“Look, I realize the economic crisis is real, there are mortgages and loans and we’re going to work on that. But the more important thing right now is, rather than spending $5 trillion of your great-grandchildren’s money on these bankers that screwed up, let’s see how can we spend a teeny bit of money and reeducate communities about real economic development and sustainability.”

And it’s easy! When I talk to economists, or when I talk to bankers, they all say, “well that doesn’t work, you need a bank to go in and invest in a community for it to happen.”

Actually — you don’t. You don’t need the bank.

Read more recent Douglas Rushkoff:
Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it.
Occupy Wall Street beta tests a new way of living.
Are Jobs Obsolete?

Read related essays on HiLobrow:
Rushkoff on HiLobrow.
#longreads on HiLobrow.

Additional resources:
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money
Adam Curtis, watch All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace on the Internet Archive

The post Douglas Rushkoff on the space between samples, derivatives and the way out appeared first on P2P Foundation.