This is a response to "It's going to get worse before it gets better, an interesting rant from m1k3y over at Grinding. If you haven't read that yet, go do so now. Grinding is a fascinating site, and on top of that, they've been kind enough to link here and to my Coilhouse work on more than one occasion, all of which I deeply appreciate.
We share many of the same goals: in short, a better future with more freedom for the entire planet. We both share a belief that this is going to be a hell of a time, but a far finer tomorrow is there for the taking if humanity has the courage to grasp it. My criticisms, such as they are, are meant to encourage discussion and help better understand what we're all facing.
There's a lot here, so let's go through it bit by bit. The original rant was, in appropriately scientific manner, laid out in exhibits. Being of more right-brained bent, I'll respond on general themes. Here we go:
Fists of the State
At the opening, there's depressing but not unexpected news about the NYPD and other agencies around the world seeking to shut down Twitter/Cell phones/net/the wheel, etc. Ostensibly in response to terrorism, but in reality a dandy excuse to exert more control. This is followed up by the shocking video of a BART cop executing a man in cold blood and news of French police cracking down on the Tarnac group a perfect demonstration of why uncontrolled media, down to the personal level, is utterly necessary to any remotely free society.
This sort of fanatical urge to reflexively control in the face of a changing world, is, in fact, the beginning of the end for an era of civilization, though it is present at all times. It is often forgotten that for all its innovation, the Renaissance also saw a very active Inquisition and the most brutal attempts by oligarchs to put down any threat to the feudal system.
It can be the end, instead of an end. This happens when the current structure clings to power while the rest of society rots from inside: when it fights off the symptoms but does jack shit about the causes.
The result is a hollow shell propped up by armed men. When it goes, having systematically stripped away all competing forces that might have led to a new era, everything goes with it. This was one of the main reasons for Rome's dark age and it could well be a reason for ours.
The good news is that surveillance societies are harder to maintain than both their advocates and foes would like you to believe. Minus a radically powerful AI, the problem still remains that someone has to be there to watch and make sense of all the shit they're raking in. A bureaucracy's reach exceeds its grasp. This why they've failed before, and why, in this regard, they'll always fail.
Similarly, yes, i agree that there will be copycat terrorists. Their impact will also be minimized the day people realize that most of what they can do is simply sow fear. Minus getting ahold of nuclear weapons, the damage terrorists inflict cannot take down a thriving society, but becoming paralyzed or driven mad by the ensuing, well, terror, certainly can.
Flying flags
People, yes, do have a right to separate from mainstream society and live the way they please, it's not something to marvel at when an event like the Tarnac crackdown happens.
The pattern goes like this. An alternative culture gets some radical insight, decides it wants to break out of society and does so in a way that's immediately, easily identifiable.
Again, they have every right to do this. But it shouldn't surprise anyone when the equivalent of shouting to the people and ideas running the show "hey bastards, we're here!" gets a backlash. Well, what do they expect?
Status quo literally means "where things stand." Said dominant cliques and cultural institutions "stand" and clawed to the top in the first place because they're very, very good at handling straight-up, blatant opposition.
If alt cultures put more energy into building political connections or spreading in a manner less separatist and more viral or developing tactics to deal with this kind of response, the future would be closer already.
Monoliths
There's a lot of "The" in this entry. The Fists of the State. The People. The State. Corporate Democracy. Too many, in fact. Let's take these apart.
The top of this blog reads "There is no They." It was originally applied to mass-media driven fear of Them, but let's extend it.
There is no They for cops, for lawyers, for politicians, for business suits, for The People. No They.
Instead there are humans who have been pushed, fell into or chosen their roles for an infinite array of reasons noble, mundane, deluded and atrocious. Just humans.
Do not view them as mere extensions of monoliths. Every social system is a ramshackle because it's made of humans. Parts of it need to be scrapped, parts of it can be adapted, parts of it coopted and other parts can serve as the launching pad for future growth. The perspective I find invigorating about Grinding is the idea that everything can be taken apart and reformed, that bodies and ideas don't come in easy boxes, thus giving us a world of possibility. Grinding's thinking about technology and much of the future is cutting edge, its political thought shouldn't be stuck in the 1960s.
I would wager that no one reading here or at Grinding believes that they (in the small "t" sense) are doing it for the frickin' children. But realize every group that wants to shape tomorrow, every one of them, is going to seek to exert some control. The million dollar question is how they do it and to what end.
There is not The State, however much many want everyone to believe otherwise. There is a system of half-abided/enforced taboos that serves as the exoskeleton for a shifting series of ruling social cliques, garnished on top with the widely accepted power to allocate resources and use force. That's all The State is.
See it that way and openings reveal themselves. Viewed then, one can see that while corporations are "in bed" with just about every industrial nation's government, they're not running the show. Some of them might want to, but they're not, or we'd be living in a very, very different world. Often different factions have competing agendas of their own (no they, remember). There isn't a single room, there isn't a Secret Chief or Number 1 to pull them all together to the master plan.
There is opportunity here.
The State is dead, long live the State & other lessons
The Future has never been more in our hands. Since our species first stopped hunting and settled down to start Agriculture it’s been all about top-down control systems. But, Internet be praised, we are quite possibly positioned for the first time since then to change this. Technology is what defines us as being human; and we increasingly don’t need the Bureaucracy of the State to manage things for us. Instead, we can engineer and maintain solutions that run fine by themselves.
Well, will we? And what do you mean we, pale face? I remember other times dreamers like us swore that the fires of industry would make questions of need, power and hierarchy irrelevant. How did that turn out?
Reality's harsh lesson about states is that they keep coming back. That won't end.
Can it be done with orders of magnitude more justice and freedom? Yes. Yes it can. But even come jubilee there will still be power, there will be some arrangement of authority, there will be some structure to decide between competing agendas and factions in a way that doesn't involve bayonet bloodbaths or least makes them incredibly rare.
I implore you; skip the Corporations and buy from your fellow man as much as you can. Make your own clothes or buy them on etsy at least. Garden! Barter! Hang out at local markets. Cook for your friends. Skip that crappy Hollywood blockbuster and veg out on the Internet instead. Or with people in Real Life.
Good advice every bit of it. Excellent, even. But someone's going to have to deal with knife-wielding maniacs, thieves, rapists, the corrupt and psychotic -- and someone will have to watch whomever gets that job. There will still be resources with all the questions they entail. No one's ever going to live up to Heinlein's ideal of the Competent Man, so there were also continue to be rare skills, something technology makes vastly more important, not less.
The more local you get, the more competing agendas you're going to have to deal with, and in extremis, a dark age can lie that way too.
Because there is no they here either. Because even with my best friends there are plenty of things to disagree about, sometimes bitterly. Because sometimes my peers are assholes. Because, if we were all angels, we'd have no need of such. But we're not and we (in the sense of large groups of humans including all those I don't get along but have to live with) do.
Minus such a structure, humans will create one, and without some sort of blueprint or leadership, people often in desperation resort to models that are as bad or worse as they had before.
No, it's more than technology
It's also words, culture, art, mysticism, economics and society, along with a grand array of other things I'm forgetting. The idea that tech will save us from our sins should itself be a thing of the past. There is no single savior. We need it all.
This time around those who want to build tomorrow need to spend as much time thinking about those old thorny questions of power as new technology. The alternative is that it won't be "worse before it gets better," it will just be worse and worse, down into the dust.
This time, let's get it right.
Comments