Lurching Towards the New Paradigm
The world heaved under the sudden weight of its own nervous system. Lit up and lashed to the planet in only a few decades, we lost our bearings in the paradox of connectivity: minute detail of every moment yet removed from any tangible presence, our animal bandwidth compressed to sound and vision, crowded and alone.
We got connected and it’s terrifying. Direct confrontation with The Other. Massive social relativism. A fractal collage of affinity networks and sub genres and Things That Seem Really Different. Nature red in tooth and claw, in full glorious monstrosity. And now it’s like “oh shit you mean we’re responsible for all of this??”
What are the new mechanisms for governing the networked global order? Is there a better map for this crazy new world?
The Web is a planetary architecture that compresses and distributes information. There’s only so much bandwidth and the Web is just one modality of acting in the world. The network compresses physical experience from 5 senses to mostly one. The lo-fidelity of text invites us to project our fears and insecurities on vagaries stripped of all the social cues we use to interrogate communication. No tone of voice, no body language, no skin flush or eye contact or simple touch. We get complete vision at the expense of physical connection.
It turns out social media is pretty sociopathic.
We casually act like monsters when online, say terrible things — things we would never say to someone’s face. We’d see their hurt, feel their anger. Yet, such is the new asymmetry of power that dateless trolls can destroy lives from the safety of their parent’s basement. It turns out social media is pretty sociopathic.
But this couch is pretty comfortable and many of us in the developed world enjoy tremendous security, all things being equal. Our relentless sapien modeling no longer frets about saber toothed beasts rumbling in the brush to devour us, but abstracts those same spirits, those hopes and fears, into the characters and dramatic occurrences that enchant our fickle minds. So we sat on the couch and projected ourselves into the astral theater of television.
The Gods we looked to for hope and guidance, for rules and consequences, those gods became priests, then politicians, and then celebrities. The Stars of the Silver Screen. Then we broke open the screen, tore apart the TV and unbundled its business entanglements and made it so we could all walk onto the soundstage and stand beneath those glowing lights, big smile, ready to share ourselves with the masses. On the way to Godhead we are tempted by Stardom.
No doubt surfing on the rogue waves of the Information Age as we do so. Tremendous chaos has arrived here at the confluence of the world’s knowledge of itself. Ideologies unleashed like timbers sent crashing into each other on the raging and roiling currents of post-modernity. Science and craft and mechanics connecting, recombining, and synthesizing at absolutely unprecedented rates in the cambrian waters of digital shorelines. Emotional contagion tearing across affinity networks like nutrients transported on gyres and eddies, feeding diverse populations floating along the dynamic whorls.
We’re socializing through degraded compression protocols fraught with emotional difficulties.
2 billion of us use Facebook daily. There are more mobile phones than humans. There are medical conditions that describe smartphone and internet abuse. We are bathing in media, soaking in information, living remote lives and wearing fragmented masks, constantly socializing through degraded compression protocols fraught with emotional difficulties. The Global Brain has a Global Heart. Both are captivated by shininess and struggle with afflictions.
The disconnect of connectivity, bringing us so closely together we feel too close, like chickens in a small pen pecking at each other, is further agitated by the tremors and quakes of the scraping strata of process: finance is hyper-temporal, tech moves like quicksilver; businesses a bit more slowly. Non-profits are deliberative, like municipalities. Governments and international regulatory institutions are glacial. Stuff is funded, built, and distributed far more quickly than our ability to reckon with its impacts, to guide its adjacencies.
It’s all being forced to submit to rigorous testing.
More and more novelty gets fed into the system without enough oversight or damping mechanisms, driving that mounting feeling of having come unmoored from our expectations of Reality, far adrift in the roiling seas.
This is what’s shaking off the governance models that carried us this far. Bretton Woods institutions and the rule-based geopolitical order. Market economics, capitalism, neoliberalism. Possibly even the older Westphalian models of sovereignty. It’s all being forced to submit to rigorous testing by the modern environment and the naked legions of self-appointed experts on everything. Our maps are old, the territory is hella shifty, and our weathered captains are tarred with the mark of failure to get on top of it all.
This same pattern amplifies the reach and impact of intentional actors from PewDiePie to Breitbart and Daesh. Savvy media manipulators, whether through gut or study, aggregate and accumulate enormous global audiences feeding on their every tweet, post, snap, and video. While Old Media continued using its outdated maps, the landscape changed radically. Like, you’re trying to navigate Hong Kong with a map of Pangaea. But a bunch of folks were quick to figure that shit out.
The first thing you do when you take a new territory is seize control of their media.
See, when there’s so much networked information it’s easy to inject mis-information and amplify dis-information. If you’re really sharp, you use your critic’s cries of “lies!” to drive more emotional contagion for your own counter-truths. Then you’ve basically gaslit entire distributed populations to believe nothing at all is true so why not just tear everything down and start over (and be sure to place the abusers in control of the new paradigm).
This deft and intentional manipulation of our ubiquitous media landscape has been so effective that it got Donald Fucking Trump elected to the Presidency of the United States, a man who has shared his vanity and misogyny and cruelty with us for decades and who is already setting the rules to contain any attempts at legitimate journalism about his many, many, oh so many mis-dealings. After all, the first thing you do when you take a new territory is seize control of their media.
The Vladimir understands the new information warfare.
And the only other person who could have been Time’s Man of the Year 2016, the only other media master as successful as The Donald, is Vladimir Putin, ex-head of the KGB and a man who has institutionalized modern information warfare — at global scale, mind you. A man with a heavy hand in America’s presidential disruption and the impending break-up of the European Union. The Vladimir understands the new information warfare.
Infiltrate and manipulate your target’s media to build up sympathy for the change you intend to inflict. Identify a suitable scapegoat while you’re at it. Fire up those warehouses full of hungry Macedonian punks to troll Facebook, geeky foot soldiers in the InfoWars. Manipulate 4Chan and the darker corners of Reddit into amplifying your hate, maybe even give Stormfront a poke. Although now Breitbart will do it for you publicly with a smile. It turns out that Stardom is full of Assholes.
It’s 2017 and one of them is Leader of the Free World. And btw, partisan politics is a distraction. Like a football game, it’s devolved into sensational stories and an Us vs Them simplicity that doesn’t map to reality very well at all. We attack each other over imagined and instigated differences rather than organizing to confront the real Powers That Be. Same as it ever was, I suppose.
Kings often think they’re gods, but within a few generations their bloodlines thin and become unfit to rule.
The world is undergoing a revival of anti-authoritarianism. And the authoritarians are leading it. It’s a dangerous time. We are served well by questioning authority and holding firmly to account all those with the will to power. Because what the world is trying to figure out is what are the new mechanisms for more effectively governing the networked global order? Is there a better map for this crazy new world? And are we going to make it through dismantling the old order?
Democracy is an attempt to engineer virtue into power.
But there are a lot of empowered interests that want to go backwards or make sure the new order suits their ambitions, their will to power. There is now a very real nostalgia for kings. But kings often think they’re gods, and within a few generations their bloodlines thin and become unfit to rule. When virtue is self-directed, when morality and ethics are subjective, then you find yourself excusing all kinds of atrocities on the basis of cultural relativism and the Right of Kings.
Democracy is an attempt to engineer virtue into power. It should never be taken for granted or assumed as a fundamental given. Sure, it’s also another ideology but its DNA, its prime directive, is about equality and the Golden Rule.
Democracy is now tenuous and may likely be a stepping stone onto the next big paradigm but let’s be sure to keep virtue and morality at the center, else we slip back into a conveniently-amnesiac nostalgia for savagery, adrift on the digital seas eager to embrace any shabby captain that claims to see the shore.
