Resonant Selections Pt. 1

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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.

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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.

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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. It is not likely that our environment can continue to withstand our primitive technological assault upon it, and our negligence of the basic support systems that give us life.

Part of the new myth that our culture needs to tell about itself, as many thinkers have proposed, is the story of how we became deluded into believing we were separate from the earth, rather than a part of her, and how this led to imbalance and discontent. Another, more controversial element of our new emergent myth, I believe, is the realization that the psychic and physical aspects of our being are not cut off from each other, but inseparable and inextricably meshed.

I began this essay by discussing media distribution, how the extraordinary mobility of creative content today poses challenges that are also amazing opportunities for new ideas to spread rapidly. 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.

"Freemarket" advocate Milton Friedman noted that when there is a major crisis, the ideas that get put into practice are the ones that happen to be "lying around." When the Soviet Union collapsed, neoliberal economists rushed into the void, and managed to institute a "gangsta" capitalism, with public resources sold off to the highest bidder or briber. If we are going to soon see the collapse of our debt-based financial system, it would make sense to plan for this in advance. Can we develop a different foundation, perhaps even a fully functioning prototype, that shows how society can be reorganized to mesh within the limits of the biosphere, while supporting the flourishing of our individual and collective gifts?

If we can create compelling art and media to express this different vision, we now have and are continuing to develop the distribution mechanisms to make a transformative and systemic approach to reinventing society 'pop' to the global level of awareness.