1.
This is one reason that the developing situation is so extremely threatening and dangerous to the powers that be: through rigorous indoctrination via the media, they have set up unreal expectations in the populace, who may become irate when it finally dawns upon them that these expectations will never be met. Instead, in reality, the little that they have is being inexorably stripped from them. The recent riots in Greece and France, and the volatile student protests in California, reveal the potential for civil unrest on a scale that will, I suspect, ultimately dwarf what we saw in the 60s.
2.
The proposition that only one form of economy, one type of money, is inevitable and innate to our human nature is a story that our culture tells us and constantly repeats and reiterates to compel our belief in it. In many arenas, a fierce battle is taking place for control of the story. A war is being waged to determine what type of cultural conversations are encouraged and what ideas get systematically suppressed, ridiculed, and rejected. Most people are unwitting participants – I am tempted to say victims – in this struggle. Because this battle for control of the stories our culture tells about itself – the myths and beliefs that give form and structure to consensus reality – is so crucial and so intense right now, the new mechanisms for distributing, marketing, and promoting new art, challenging information, and radical content are extraordinarily important, not only because they define the culture in which we live, but for our near-term survival as a species.
3.
The potential is for a real alternative, a substantively different paradigm, to emerge rapidly, as the old myths and accompanying belief structure become increasingly untenable. Right now, we have an opportunity to change the underlying story and operating system that runs global society, that determines its priorities and practices. I propose that there is a relatively short window in which we can bring about this change, for a number of reasons. Most intensely, because we are approaching a threshold of civilizational chaos, leading to authoritarian control and ecological collapse, or a reinvention of our world. Also because the controlling forces are seeking to trap the liberatory potential of the Internet in new static forms. This is what ‘Facebook Connect’ suggests to me, among other ways that the Internet is being homogenized.
The above quotations are from a lengthy and important editorial by Daniel Pinchbeck.
Further excerpts:
“The Internet is a battleground right now, on so many levels. It is ground zero in the global consciousness war, between those entrenched forces that want to control consciousness and manage perception, to maintain their power and market share, and those other constituencies who represent a range of outsider perspectives, from far right to anarchist, spiritually enlightened to blindly enraged. Money is becoming increasingly virtual, vaporous, and abstract. Attention has become the new currency, as those companies able to focus the attention of the masses take the lead in a new intangible realm, redefining the boundaries of identity (what is private and what is public now? What is personal expression and what promotion?), transmuting culture and society at the core, and reaping extraordinary rewards in the process.
Shaped by the struggles of the revolutionary period, the founding fathers made “freedom of the press” and freedom of speech into key principles of the emergent American republic. Corporate dominance – and collusion between the defense complex and the media conglomerates – has eroded these freedoms in many subtle and overt ways. Today, Net neutrality is an issue that needs active support from an engaged citizenry, as the plausible prospect that the telecoms will be given more power to determine what content is available is a truly horrible one. The notion of protecting the “global commons” could become a rallying cry for civil society.
Although many of the major players avoid acknowledging this, the shaping of attention is an inherently political act. While I use Facebook all the time – to take one obvious example – because that’s where the people (400 million of them) are now, I find it extraordinarily frustrating as a tool. Originally designed to fit the short attention spans of college kids, Facebook maintains the feckless ambience of television. It encourages a passively ironic attitude, for the benefit of the “flattered self” that expects all of the attention pointed in its direction, like a baby who knows it’s mother can’t help but coo over its every move. The architecture of Facebook does not allow for deeper discourse, collaboration or critique. Eventually, I believe it will be superseded by a network that encourages critical and analytical thought, that is carefully designed to support a rapid increase in collective intelligence and the evolution of civil society.
While all sorts of news items float aimlessly through it, Facebook has the overall effect of constricting communication to short, narrow, and superficial exchanges. It is a medium made for a culture of self obsession and distraction, where there is no accountability for ideas that trail away into the ether like comic strip thought balloons. Worst of all, Facebook takes a proprietary control over the data of its users, acting like a vast Panopticon. At the same time, the astonishing spread of Facebook reveals the awesome power inherent in this still-so-new, simultaneously silly and profound, communication medium.
The idea that has not yet surfaced in the mass consciousness is that a social network, or a group or ecology of them, could be designed to bring about a conscious evolution of society, a rapid reorganization of humanity’s productive activities. In the next decade, increasingly severe environmental changes and depletion of resources will radically transform human civilization. Many countries may regress into despotism as frightened mobs fight to hold onto their comforts and privileges against increasingly dispossessed masses. We will either degenerate into barbarism or evolve into a radically unfamiliar post-capitalist and post-socialist state, where sharing, collaboration, and empathy become the norm.
We have a viable opportunity to make a nonviolent transition from a hierarchic to a “holarchic” form of social organization, from a social order that is vertically controlled by a manipulative elite to a horizontally distributed orchestration of power and resources for a new planetary culture. This shift will require not only a new set of cultural and societal practices, but the telling, retelling, and eventual imprinting of a new story. In this process, our fundamental concepts of “the good” and “the beautiful,” our basic understanding of the nature of human freedom and the value of life, will be deconstructed and remade.
We can consider the global financial system, which lives in the same virtual and intangible space as other digital media, as a particular type of social network, an immaterial sheathe of connectivity, that uses an abstract metric to tabulate exchanges of goods and quantify other forms of human energy. The inherent problems built into this system – entirely controlled by private banking interests who issue money into circulation as debt, creating artificial scarcity and fostering cut-throat competition that leads automatically to tragic negligence and dire misuse of resources – are becoming increasingly self-evident. Because financiers devised and run the global markets and central banks, the work of a banker, derivatives trader, or currency speculator is valued at an exponentially, one can safely say obscenely, greater level than that of a kindergarten teacher, carpenter, or midwife. Labor that contributes nothing to the real economy, human freedom, or human knowledge and involves speculative movements of nonexistent capital is most prized, and almost all forms of honest and meaningful work are devalued by this system.
Propping up this deception, an entire mass media complex has developed to manage cultural perception and make people believe the current situation is somehow natural and good, and to keep the masses from developing the analytical tools to question it, and work together to create the alternative. As thinkers like Marx and Marcuse have noted, there remains a difference between false and true consciousness, whether or not individuals are aware of it.”