Where are we now?
Polytopia is the new black
It’s now public knowledge that the alphabet soup of the Natsec state agencies knows everything about all of us, and that the largest tech companies are complicit in selling us out to the largest (or most coercive) bidders — our governments. All too often, I and my peers on twitter muse about living in the dystopian cyberpunk worlds we thought were object lessons rather than blueprints for a Knave New World. And we do it on the Utopian internet. We communicate directly with each other across geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders, irrelevant to timezones, our age or our gender, or any other social construct — and thanks to Moore’s Law, our online communications are setting the world on fire.
Topos,the greek world for ‘place’, gave us the suffix -topia. When Thomas Moore coined the word Utopia, he was writing about a place that does not exist. And yet, it does. You’re on it — the internet. Post-Snowden it has taken on ominous dystopian qualities. But our virtual world is Polytopian — simultaneously exhibiting the best and the worst of the human character.
Both world views — the paranoid and the optimistic — have roots in California, where i grew up. Home to acid-dropping computer visionaries, and the military industrial complex. California has exported much to the world, indeed it can be said that ‘our culture’ has infected the world, from it’s media and sports to it’s technologies — both military and civilian. My university, the Church of Christ funded Pepperdine, perched on the hills at the end of Malibu Canyon overlooking the Santa Monica Bay, is a conservative bastion in the middle of one of what is arguably one of the most liberal places on earth. Overlooking the university is a large office complex for The Rand Corporation — one of the earliest government Think Tanks influencing american foreign policy. California breeds both innovative free spirits, and those that want to control them. A stones-throw away Gidget and Moondoggie lugged longboards into the famed surf break in front of The Colony of Hollywood’s rich, famous, powerful, and LIBERAL.
You and This Topos
David Bowie recently asked in Berlin, ‘Where Are We Now?’, giving only the answer:
as long as there’s sun,
as long as there’s rain,
as long as there’s you,
as long as there’s me
It was arch-conservative Ronald Reagan who demanded of Glasnost’s Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall”, and it is a ‘liberal’ Obama who is building walls around America. My, how time’s have changed. I’ve never been able to figure out why the Democrats are better than the Republicans at implementing their conservative doctrines. Hope turned into Nope, as this administration widens executive and state power at the cost of the citizenry — whose voice in ‘change’ is shown to be irrelevant. Granted, Obama inherited the majority of policies that have seen implementation under his administration — but he came into office promising to roll them back, not strengthen them. One has to ask if the most secretive executive branch in American history is that way due to institutional will, or the will of one man. I suspect it is the former. Bill Hicks comes to mind, with his bit about a film of the Kennedy assassination from a previously unseen angle shown to every new president by nameless suits, with the comment “Any questions?”
That being said, the struggle between Tyranny and Freedom is as old as history, we witness only the contemporary incarnation. And yet we are not on the sidelines, we are part and parcel of it. We all have blood on our hands, for we, the people, carry the burden of allowing our institutions and leaders to act against our interest. As my mother, god rest her soul always said,
We get the leaders that we deserve.
And yet the Utopian side of the internet and our interconnectivity DOES influence the debate. While it may not be as strong as we would like, it cannot be denied that public opinion as expressed on the internet can and does affect policy makers decisions. What has changed is that there is a GLOBAL public opinion whose home is on the Internet… that bastard child of California’s dysfunctional marriage between dreaming innovators, and the stewards of coercive power — the military industrial complex which Harry Truman warned us against. Indeed, he was not the only one; it is the cyberpunk generation whose speculative fiction was intended to warn us of the dangers lurking behind every bit and byte of the traffic generated by the technological revolution in Silicon Valley which became the well laid plans of Mice and Men seeking to stifle the spirit of freedom that so threatens authority. America’s weapons manufacturers are all based in California, it was inevitable that they would mutate into information warriors. Indeed it is the last ‘industry’ that keeps the American economy running. On an infrastructure dreamed by hippies and free thinkers unburdened by a need to control what they unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Let us not forget that the internet, as we know it was funded by and bound together the ‘military industrial complex’ of the government and private business. It’s a side-effect that we can use it at all.
David Bowie’s message is both one of optimism and pessimism in the human spirit, leaving the listener to make a choice which way to ‘swing’.
And that my friends, is the Topos we are in now: one of our own making, simultaneously exhibiting the best and the worst of what we are. Welcome to Polytopia: black, white and grey hats in an acid-fueled Busby Berkley dance number with a disemboweled body politic wandering zombie-like through a landscape of decaying consumerist infrastructure, obese, ignorant and manipulated by a centralized media power structure owned by the very same military industrial interests who profit by keeping it that way.
Yet we who faunch at the bit and resist the stomping boot are still able to challenge these structures and build networks of trust. The more of us that are on “The List”, the more irrelevant such lists become. Indeed, it is the Price of Omniscience [pdf warning] which blinds those seeking to rule The Panopticon.
Follow @exiledsurfer for shorter bursts on Polytopia, or to engage with me. I welcome all points of view and ignore trolls :-)
If you are interested in Politricks, my gallery of dissenting art is here.
