E-rubble and the new patriotism
Our best hope at regaining confidence in our identity as pioneering, gracious and powerful Americans rests on proving (accepting?) that the Russian government conspired with Donald Trump & Friends to impact the 2016 presidential election.
This process will require us to acknowledge that we lost a new World War to the Russians. Unlike the rubble of Dresden after World War II, our loss is not so obvious to the naked eye. The bombs dropped on us were largely silent — spyware, secret debts and disinformation. Our loss is marked by electronic breadcrumbs and server logs, not fallen bricks and gun shells.
This new post-War landscape is noisy, riddled with fake news, filter bubbles, and government propaganda. It has provided fertile soil for Bannon’s perverted, American Talibanesque regime. No matter what happens in the coming weeks to connect the dots between the president, his past, his campaign, the current administration, and the Russians, it will take years to dig out from this rubble and realign our country’s regulatory framework with its founding principles of truth, dignity and inclusiveness.
This is where the new patriotism has a chance to emerge, after most of the critical bugs in our democratic software have been surfaced and addressed. As much as I am disgusted by Wikileaks’ selective, Russian-biased disclosures, I still think that we benefit from access to more information, not less. The tools we are now developing to better sort through data, to analyze its veracity, and to distinguish signal from noise, these will I hope provide the foundation for a new kind of American exceptionalism; one based on humility, innovation, and partnership instead of pride, dogma and expansion.
July 4th will feel different this year. It won’t be so simple to wear red, white and blue and wave an American flag. Our identity as a country has been co-opted by a foreign government led by a murderous dictator, and a corrupt American real estate buffoon tycoon deep in his debt. It’s hard to “go back” to the things that we have always associated with being a patriot, when we aren’t sure which of these might have led us to our our recent defeat.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so tolerant?
Maybe we shouldn’t protect free speech?
Maybe we shouldn’t give everybody equal access to the same tools?
I am not sure where our new, post-Trump American patriotism will come from. It will likely have something to do with autonomous agents and artificial intelligence, at least given the pace of technological change and the scope of today’s venture funding cycle. Beyond that, I guess we will have to wait for more of this e-rubble to settle so that we can sort through the damage and begin rebuilding on solid ground.
