CULTUROPATHIC REIGNS

1.

Culturopathy is a sickness of the Right -- & of that Right which even calls itself the Left. Who are these? Racists-once-removed who denounce America or Empire with the same snide tone that once, and still, accuses the Jews. Soft sadists who empower facist regimes with their demand for non-judgement and non-interference. Intellectual sentimentalists who reject their "gut" as if it were the same monster of powers which the simple conservative imagines it to be...

2.

Right-winged culturopathy is hysterial & psychotic -- given to theatrical accusation and periodic public murder. Their politics has the form of the poorly trained small-town guard dog who knows its place only when it barks widly at intrusive foes and friends alike. Beliefs, loudly held, are tools with which to denounce. Wonderment is voiced without curiousity. Meaningless and shallow discrepancies are constantly "uncovered" in the speech of those with complex and extra-local instincts.

Left-winged culturopathy is neurotic, emotionally shallow, given to an empty mixture of pessimism and humanistic idealism. Typically it rejects human beings in favour of History & Society and it weilds self-destruction in its affirmation of toothless ideals... whose actual reign would be an open invitation to all of culture's enemies both human and non-human. Here is a vapidity masquerading as openness, a sorrow becoming weakness rather than depth, a life-thwarting cynicism which always says that "they, The Powers" work inevitably against "us, the sane & sensitive" -- a paranoia against the Gut rather than from the Gut.

HOW TO CHANGE

When we look, i mean really look, at our world, we quickly see that very little of it actually works at anything near an optimal level. The vast majority of the solutions we have devised to make our lives better have been burdened with unintended consequences that decades after their inception threaten to undo any of the supposed gains we claimed.
Too often tradition is our guide, even as the concrete realities that undergirded those traditions have shifted, usually in radical ways.
Those who agitate for a return to the old ways embody most clearly this tension towards the notion of progress, but we must tread a fine line here between what is useful from the past and what is an impediment.
Progressives all too readily fall into the trap of dismissing aspects of our shared cultural heritage simply because they percieve them to have been superceeded by new and technologically superior methods. Afterall, no one listens to music on a grammaphone, or tunes in to the radio as their primary source of news and entertainment. And yet, in our rush to become modern we have recoiled with embarrasment from many of the concepts that we will have to revive if we are to successfully navigate the coming global storms.
We need to take stock of our past, and examine it thoroughly, sifting it for ideas and techniques that above all demonstrate their functionality. If we use our newly created values map, it will help us in determining what is useful and what is merely an artifact of a less enlightened time.
In some areas, such as agriculture, we will need a return to a more traditional structure, one that does not rely on massively energy-intensive monocultures, but instead incorporates smaller, local, organic and permaculture based solutions.
At the other end of the spectrum, we can and must take advantage of technical innovations in the field of manufacturing, by applying digital fabrication-on-demand methods to the creation of the physical objects we need.
In the most fundamental instance however, we have recourse neither to advanced technology nor tradition to guide our way. This of course is the series of questions directly at the heart of the human experience- what is the purpose and meaning of our lives? The choices presented us so far have been found severely wanting: either the denial of the self beneath blind obedience to religious dogma, or the dead-end selfish persuit of material pleasure and comfort at the expense of all else.
Both of these narratives are pathological, both of them extremely non-functional, and invariably stand as the root of all our current problems and struggles.
But the changes that will need to happen cannot be imposed from outside, by the state, for this is the road which leads to tyranny, paved as always with good intentions and broken bodies.
Quite frankly, human beings must evolve. The real revolution takes place within the awareness of each of us, as we learn how to be more. If this sounds trite it is only because we have become so corrupted within ourselves that anything presented to us as genuine seems like a cruel joke.
We have become debased, the currency of our humanness devalued to the point where the making of a profit can justify the sacrifice of millions of lives and the literal destruction of the natural world.
We are told constantly to consume more, buy more, do more, spend more, eat more, indulge more, travel more, relax more, watch tv more.
I say no.
Consume less, buy less, do less, spend less, eat less, indulge less, travel less, relax less, watch tv less, but...
BE MORE.
We are now at a point where for the first time in history we can consciously decide what the future will be like. This is our power- we need to use it wisely.

THE SOCIAL ENGINE ROOM

Social engineering is an ugly phrase -- heavy, non-dancing, useless by its lack of poetry and invisible become of its omnipresence. We are all constant social engineers for society is nothing but a massive swaying of All by each, informed by understanding (such as it is) and empowered by technology (such as it is).

We are doing it, so let us do it well.

Let us have the courage for Truths along with the stomach for contingency, the living ethics which can against deploy creative Truths, legislative Truths whose origins are in the harmonics of natural complexity, the commonality of the human and the terrestrial templates, and who are brought to life again and again, over aeons, by the acuteness of the philosopher and the effectiveness of the social conversation. The effectiveness of its protocols...

The Breaking Point

The coming global civil war is coming between those who want a truly progressive society based on sustainable values of freedom and respect, and those who want to rule through fear, deception, greed, and power.
There are no such things as unbiased facts, disinterested politics, or neutral applications of the law. Human beings are not capable of functioning as discreet abstract systems, impartially acting according to some noble-sounding set of principles. This is a peculiar psychological holdover from the enlightenment era which neither reflects nor embodies the concrete psychological and biosocial realities of our being. There is no ethics apart from actions, no justice apart from circumstances, and no proper decisions can be made in the absence of information. There is a direct correlation between the amount of information available and the quality of decisions based upon it.
Every one of our social systems and institutions are careening towards non-functionality, and need to be reprogrammed. We are burdened by the legacy of structures predicated on poor quality information. We must bring to our broader social structures the same rigour that we have established in the realm of engineering. We need to discern the rules for a healthy civilization and apply them relentlessly.

Education
Law
Business
Government
Transportation
Communication
Economics

We need new models for all of them, new experimental programs for an open-source society.

Violate copyright
Refuse to work
Live as a scrounger
Become a tinkerer/maker
Collect, process, and distribute information
Build the network.

On confronting facism

Facism invariably arises as a response to percieved social and economic crises, cynically manipulated by demagogues for their own personal power. Clearly then the best antidote to this kind of thought and action is to begin to eliminate the fertile soil upon which it flourishes. That is to say, we must begin to truly open things up, provide opportunities for the disenfranchised to
improve their lives and circumstances without resorting to scapegoating or demonizing other human beings.
Most of all, we must all constantly work at providing the counterpoint to these outrageous lies and accusations, revealing them to be the baseless bigotry that they are by always appealing to solidly based facts and reason, rather than emotion and opinion.
The silent majority must undertake the burden of its responsibility to guide society in a new, constructive direction. We can longer afford to be complacent, sitting back on the sidelines, watching everything fall apart in the name of some kind of missplaced tolerance or laissez-faire approach to freedom. It does no good to remain silent or apathetic when so much is at stake, when the language of the opposition grows ever more incidiary, and words begin to give way to actions.
What is desperately needed is an integrated strategy, based on common values (as previously outlined), that breaks down both the psychological and actual borders between the various moderate groups of individuals.
The social structure must be defended against the creep of extreme right-wing ideology, that growing spectre of facism that casts its poisonous shadow over the free lands of the earth.
There is no reward in remaining complacent- not when so much is at stake. We should not lull ourselves into believing that this cannot happen in this day and age, after all, one need only look at the headlines to discern the deeper currents of discontent and rage that are simmering just unde the surface, threatening to boil over. And as the economic climate grows ever more precarious these tendencies will only increase, becoming more overt, more tloerated and accepted as legitimate. Add to this the burden of a literal changing climate, and you have a recipie for a distaster of unprecedented enormity.We, the hitherto silent majority, must arm ourselves, not with guns and weapons, but with information, tactics, and strategy, if we are ever to have any hope of deterring this rising tide.

The reign of the culturopaths

Culturopathy is that distinctly anti-intellectual strand of right-wing political expression which is currently dominating most forms of popular media. The truth is, thinking is hard, and critical thinking, beyond the stale idiocy of reactionism, is harder still.
The culturopath is one who elevates a cultural standard while denying or opposing its foundational principles- namely, rationalism and free inquiry. They hold up always a golden ideal, rooted in the past, usually mythic, of a time when all was right, and decry how far we have fallen from that state. It should be no surprise to find that most culturopaths are decidedly of a literal religious bent in their nature, readily identifying with the genesis narrative of a great fall of humankind.
The culturopath thinks with their gut, using emotion as the arbiter of truthfulness. Everything is reduced to opinion whilst being cloaked in a pretext of fact. Naturally, the defense of such vaporous ‘facts’ comes not in the form of well reasoned argumentation, but through a shouting competition- he who yells the loudest is the most correct.
That these bigoted, anti-intellectual voices have come to dominate much of the cultural discourse reveals a great deal about the sorry state we are in.
This is culturopathy- the state when a culture becomes diseased and begins to rot. The real creators of cultural content are under a growing assault by this reactionary contingent, who themselves contribute nothing of substance- only more and more pathological rantings and lashing out.

TWO FORMS OF POPULAR SUPPRESSION

A government that suppresses public uprisings without regard to their harmlessness or righteousness is justly condemned -- but it may at least, cynically, be described as hysterically rational. These regimes themselves are often an outcome of past mass-movements and so are understandably wary of any unexpected popular signs from among the people.

In the attempt to prevent curious citizens from accessing "obscene" sexually suggestive online materials there is no such proven history of danger to the regime. Nor is this form of content control likely to succeed as the basis of a future mechanism of popular control. We are witness here, in all likelihood, to an even more dangerous sign -- hysterical irrationality.

LIBERAL & CONSERVATIVE TASKS

The true conservative task -- to protect and advocate for our ancient imperialistic, regional & animalistic instincts.

The liberal task -- to produce, by activism and critique, many new instincts of superior comprehensiveness, accuracy & moral sensitivity.

Options for engagement on ABORTION DEBATE

...

HUMAN LIFE is not equal to HUMAN BEING.

Recently Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee debated this question. Stewart is assumed to represent a socialist-progressive (Left) position and Huckabee presents a religiously conservative (Right) attitude.

Stewart concludes that both sides "dig in" at certain points in the argument -- the Right unwilling to budge on the value of every human life & the Left pledged to the sovereignty of women over their own bodies and the necessity of freedom from government when making difficult health and well-being decisions.

A very modern phrasing of an old rivalry of political instincts.

Historically, we expect that individual sovereignty as a conservative issue -- while extending human rights to all beings involves liberal sympathies. We know that the Right prefers simplicity to consistency and happily rejects many authentic conservative attitudes (ecology, free choice on use of intoxicants).

So what is left for the Left?

We must not (apparently I have been absorbed into them) concede to the Right wing argument that "a human life IS simply a human life."

Social cooperation to prevent unwanted and unsafe pregnancies is, of course, common to both sides, but the progressive attitude must be to make better and finer distinctions. The superstitious fantasy is that a person becomes itself suddenly, absolutely, all-at-once. Yet the experience of pregnancy demonstrates stages of coming-to-presence which continue as phases of childhood outside the mother's body.

Children are for some time only partial agents who are only progressively entitled to full human citizenship. This is a legal precendent for asserting degrees of humanization.

An embryo, child or adult is always in a variable degree of human being. For safety we relinquish full human status from enemy military personnel and extreme violent criminals. The very reason that we can even debate "pulling the plug" on an extended vegetative coma victim is that we detect some ambiguity about his or her status as a human being.

However there is virtually no ambiguity about "human life." Either is has human DNA and lives -- or it doesn't. The attempt to center the debate around this apparent simplicity is another example of the classic Right wing phobia about ambiguity, its refusal to participate in the negotiated decision making process & its superstitious enslavement to the whim of biology (which it often calls "God").

Without minimizing the difficult involved terminating even a partial human being, we need to carry this debate to:

HUMAN LIFE is not equal to HUMAN BEING.

Differences in the depth of sentience, the complexity of functions, and the degree of presence in the world are constant factors in our real life estimation of how we behave with each other. In fact, disturbingly, many people may observe more "humanity" in an adult dolphin than a human fetus. We mustn't let our own sympathies or even the nation-spirit's impulse to produces as many of its own as possible prevent us from thinking our way through to a comprehensive model of variable sentience and life-value that is applicable to both humans and animals and, perhaps, yet-to-emerge AI.

This is a troubling argument but unless we assert that the value of a human being is a variable quantity distinct from human life, we will continue to lose ground against anti-abortion rights activists. They must not be allowed the false "common sense" security of their "life = life" assertion. Wherever possible its inner conflict must be exposed and contrasted to the liberal "simplicity of real experience."

Options for engaging the WAR ON SHARING

It is obvious that a healthy culture must legally encourage creative individuals. Likewise the role of government must occasionally include intervention in the private sector when failure to act will result in catastrophic social effects. Neither of these concerns apply directly to the debate over "sharing". It is unethical, immoral and illegitimate to craft Laws for the purpose of protecting the sales of a particular industry.

The corporations who thrive on packaging, promoting and arranging commercial sponsorship are not essential to the function of a free society. Their fate rests solely upon the decision of consumers to purchase their products or not. Despite the long history of criminal practices in the motion picture and record industries they deserve our sympathy as stake-holders in the current cultural situation -- but this sympathy cannot be legally extended into the form of special protectionist rights.

Copyright Law does not require a "fundamental rethinking" for the digital age. This school of Copyright Revisionists have long existed with a single aim -- to promote their profits at the expense of public interests. Legitimate laws protecting creators and inventors from the resale of their materials by other parties during their lifetime are fine but this is not an open invitation to a feudalism of intellectual property claims.

It is quite obviously within the rights of all human beings to :

(a) not support an industry through the non-purchasing of their merchandise.

(b) to freely share purchased materials, included information patterns, with whomever they choose provided they do not offer it for "resale without considerable modification."

(c) to freely create sharing systems, in the manner of public libraries, which provide a free alternative for access to information and entertainment.

Options for Challenging Unethical Internet Laws

1. Make the moral and legal case in favor of sharing with people who are not online.
2. Vote for your local chapter of the Pirate Party or their affiliates.
3. Disregard unjust laws and encourage others to increase their reliance on file-sharing.
4. Take advantage of emerging software systems that protect anonymity and elude regulations.
5. Have no fear of outrageous criminal prosecution -- this is the free gift of a podium on which to call out the immoral actions of the government in response to the doctored data and ridiculously self-serving claims of old media promoters.
6. Refer to the pro-sharing population as the mainstream and constantly assert your position as the present, intrinsically-held feeling of the majority.
7. Acknowledge the valid points of the opposition argument before denouncing them.
8. Struggle only succeeds when it is informed by reality. Take time to "let go" of your need to be released from the limitations of the current situations. Attempts to evade the current web of relationships limit our ability to steer into future benevolent arrangements.
9. Print and distribute your opinions on this subject, or those found in congenial resources such as the declaration of principles at http://docs.piratpartiet.se/Principles%203.2.pdf
10. Hold or attend private and public gatherings designed to symbolically demonstrate support and to discuss options for benevolently steering society in the appropriate direction.

Q & A on TERRESTRIAL NATIONALISM, pt. III

Q. Won't people naturally gravitate to old and local nationalistic sympathies?

A. This is a great danger but it describes already the world we are living in -- rather than a possible danger of tomorrow. What we realize is that older nationalities are largely the result of education and cultural experiences -- a fluid a shifting process that is constantly building and dissolving national boundaries. The danger posed by local nationalities IS and WILL BE massively dangerously and virtually un-policable unless it is countermanded by an equally strong set of commonly shared images, ideas, experiences and communications.

Q. Aren't there more pressing problems that establishing a Terran Nationalism?

A. No. Our pressing concerns are biospheric mismanagement, toxic and irresponsible diet, nationalistic militarism between and within countries, global economic mismanagement, human rights horrors, violent disagreements about the custodianship of bioregions and cultural traditions, mass displacement, slum cities, collateral damage from mass-scale habits of industry, the threat of 'redneckery' and fantacism in all nations, etc. All the most pressing problems must postulate solutions at the level of global social organization, holistic ecology and specifically human ethical dilemmas. The vision and motivation with which to solve our most urgent difficulties all depend upon the intensity of widespread feeling for the total 'terrestrial' frame.

Q. But don't people hate each other?

A. The natural and learned patterns of antagonism between disparate and similar human beings must be subsumed in the image of the global commons. Those you cannot stand are still tolerable as long as they are working on the same 'project' as you. The worth of participatory membership is extended and exerts a cooling effect on the normal dislike which arises between strong stylistic and capability discrepancies.

Q. How important is this?

A. In order that we do not perpetually face a destructive divide between those with progressive global/human sympathies and those with nationalistic emotional sympathies we MUST do everything in our power to produce an epidemic of planetary nationalistic sympathy which will align both all levels of political and intellectual complexity in human individuals.

Q. Doesn't this kind of viewpoint come from personal efforts at self-cultivation?

A. No. Individuals who get high inner refinment are lucky enough to have been born with the circumstances that helped them undertake the necessary self-efforts. Cultural and ecological support is necessary to produce even the most autonomous morally elevated individual. It is the duty of higher levels of insight to produce the conditions in which more people will gravitate to such insight.

Personal growth and political action can both promote a vision of the dynamic social well-being of the entire world. And, frankly, the mass-scale dangers are so enormous that we cannot wait for the general population to grow individually into an enlightened disposition. We now need to supplement this an active persuading of their nationalistic instincts.

Q & A on TERRAN NATIONALISM, pt. II

Q. Aren't the ideas of human and planetary just more mental limits?

A. They are important mental tools. We have urgent planetary problems in all domains of society. We need to live up to our duties on the broadest useful political stage where the most massive effects occur.

Q. What about non-human and extra-planetary situations?

The articulated concern for "all sentient creatures" is so far only a human event. It is by amplifying our humanity and our shared culture that we will increase our power to understand and care for the greatest range of creatures, both on this planet and wherever the sphere of cosmic humanity might expand into relationship. The cosmic embrace of tomorrow depends upon our work today to produce and stabilize the global human environment.

Q. Are humans a common nationality?

A. We share a basic electronic language into which all our natural languages are translated. Additionally we have the historical default language of new English. Also we have a common territory in the Earth and a shared history of globally significant events.

Q. What events are globally significant?

Distant events from general human history like our "witnessing" the total annihilation of the Neanderthal species, the discovery of fire and symbol language, the invention of the city, etc.

Recent mass history such as World Wars, the attempt of global organizational bodies (UN, G20, IMF, Greenpeace, InterPol, Nuclear Treaties), the fall of the Berlin Wall, the World Court, 9/11, 6-4, etc.

Also personalities which have provoked strong international media response such as Princess Diana of Britain, US President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Hadron Collider, Gandhi, Stalin, etc.

Recent humanizing technologies: a/c current, internet, international space stations, human genome project, etc.

Q. Why does global human nationalism require a patriotic emotion?

A. Smart, well-meaning people often don't do what is necessary to prevent the effects of corrupt social systems and to create more effective and benevolent systems. The patriotic feeling is the fuel which builds a potent nationality and drives those who understand to take real ethical action.

Q. Won't people naturally gravitate to old and local nationalistic sympathies?

A. This is a great danger but it describes already the world we are living in -- rather than a possible danger of tomorrow. What we realize is that older nationalities are largely the result of education and cultural experiences -- a fluid a shifting process that is constantly building and dissolving national boundaries. The danger posed by local nationalities IS and WILL BE massively dangerously and virtually un-policable unless it is countermanded by an equally strong set of commonly shared images, ideas, experiences and communications.

Q. Aren't there more pressing problems that establishing a Terran Nationalism?

A. No. Our pressing concerns are biospheric mismanagement, toxic and irresponsible diet, nationalistic militarism between and within countries, global economic mismanagement, human rights horrors, violent disagreements about the custodianship of bioregions and cultural traditions, mass displacement, slum cities, collateral damage from mass-scale habits of industry, the threat of 'redneckery' and fantacism in all nations, etc. All the most pressing problems must postulate solutions at the level of global social organization, holistic ecology and specifically human ethical dilemmas. The vision and motivation with which to solve our most urgent difficulties all depend upon the intensity of widespread feeling for the total 'terrestrial' frame.

Q. But don't people hate each other?

A. The natural and learned patterns of antagonism between disparate and similar human beings must be subsumed in the image of the global commons. Those you cannot stand are still tolerable as long as they are working on the same 'project' as you. The worth of participatory membership is extended and exerts a cooling effect on the normal dislike which arises between strong stylistic and capability discrepancies.

Q. How important is this?

A. In order that we do not perpetually face a destructive divide between those with progressive global/human sympathies and those with nationalistic emotional sympathies we MUST do everything in our power to produce an epidemic of planetary nationalistic sympathy which will align both all levels of political and intellectual complexity in human individuals.

Q. Isn't the development to a "world-centered, humanistic" outlook a function of individual self-cultivation and evolutionary refinement rather than indiscriminate political concerns?

A. No. The natural 'upwards' migration of individual sensibilities, evidenced by many individuals and small groups in the past, does not occur on its own. Rather it is always supported and enabled by the cultural situation in which it emerges in terms of resource surplus, education, moral encouragement, protection from attack, artistic richness, science, etc. Those who have fluked into such a benevolent circumstance are obliged to return the favour by doing everything in their capacity to create such situations for others -- especially by promoting the emotional and symbolic frame out of which to maxime this events. The necessities of the world and the potential for mass effects mean that 'elevated concerns' cannot afford to be the privilege of the most internally sophisticated. There must be an alliance between all levels of sophistication in the human species and a willingness to accept that pro-human stupidity, while not ceasing to be stupid, is superior to sub-human stupidity and reinforces the demand of a higher vision.

Q & A on PLANETARY PATRIOTISM, pt I

Q. What is a nationality?

A. A shared cultivated identity with common speech, history, war, finance & art.

Q. What is patriotism?

A. Natural instinct of loyalty to your land and its families of creatures.

Q. What, thefore, is nationalism?

A. Emotional empowerment of nationality by patriotism.

Q. What is Planetary Nationalism?

A. Political feeling of emotional loyalty to planet Earth, all human beings, and the productive balance of the whole biosphere.

Q. Is there such a thing as Planetary Nationalism?

A. For several centuries people have been having motivated political reactions to the entire "frame" of the World. The impulse of large commercial corporations to move forward through globalization is one example. Another is the wildfire growth of environmentalist causes. Ever time we look in horror and disgust at unethical behaviour perpetrated by agents of one human sub-group against another -- violated their common humanity -- we are being called to a level of planetary political concern.

Q. What are the causes of Planetary Nationalism?

A. One critical contribution comes from electronic technology which presents all of us in a simultaneous world theater and impresses us with a common interest in geo-historical events that affect us all. Conventional electricity is also harnessed in most of the impressive transport vehicles which allow the shipping of people and supplies quickly to distant locations.

Q. Haven't there been humanism & globalism for a long time?

A. Yes and no. Periodically some people have expressed a broader intellect and wider circle of compassion but prior to the last few centuries the "whole world" was mostly a guess for the majority of human beings.

Q. Isn't nationalism a source of trouble?

A. We only can see this trouble because we compare it a senior principle of international human civilization and existential worth. The saintly individuals of history, real or legendary, demonstrate a forceful push-back against sufferings needless inflicted upon human sub-groups.

A REVOLUTION IN VALUES, PART III

If i were so inclined as to write a quasi-manifesto on the subject of the new global values, here is how it would look, in bullet-point form:

Freedom (to act without repression)
Agreement (as the basis of equality between free individuals)
Respect (the willingness to treat another as equal)
Sustainable (ceasing exploitation of people and the earth)
Cooperative (an end to the mindless competition for profit)
Open (free sharing of ideas & tech for the benefit of all)
Lawful (the living embodiment of values instead of rules)

These are just a start, but are sufficiently ‘deep’ to accomodate most needs, and could be expanded as necessary. However, there is a good argument to be made for keeping things simple. All social, political, and business systems of the future will be based on these values, but it is up to us right now to begin building institutions according to these principles.

A REVOLUTION IN VALUES, PART II

What is the difference between the christian who quietly professes his faith through charity and works and unconditional love, and the raging fundamentalist who would quote scripture to spitefully condemn those who do not share his views? Which of them is the true christian? Does it even matter?
What is the difference between the muslim who lives his life peacefully in service to allah, respecting all those around him, and the al queda suicide bomber, filled with rage against the infidel? Which of them represents the true teaching of islam? Does it even matter?
The difference between them has nothing to do with belief- beliefs are irrelevant. Everything comes down to values.
It is here in the arena of values that the true battles are fought. And it is here that the new global culture will emerge and harden itself like an insect emerging from its metamorphosis, steadying its wings in anticipation of flight.
For the one thing that will link us all together will be the values we hold in common, arrived at through agreement rather than passed down as the pronouncements of some ideologue. We may hold the greatest diversity of conflicting beliefs, but with a singular vision we will act in unison to achieve our goals.
So just what are these values then that we should all embrace?
Well, for starters, freedom.
And not the watered-down kind of freedom that we are plagued with in our so-called democracies- the ‘freedom’ to consume mindlessly the thousands of different products put out by the six corporations that control everything, the ‘freedom’ to be perpetually in debt just so we can have some place to keep all our stuff.
No, the freedom i speak of is much more intricate than that: won through the hard labour of the self, unwilling to be casually traded in exchange for frivolous entertainments.
This is the kind of freedom that anchors one to the true world, and terrifies the corrupt and decietful, because it cannot be bought or sold like a trinket the self-styled ‘powerful’ bestow upon the unworthy masses as a token of their superior benevolence.
This freedom is the birthright of all human beings who are aware enough to claim it as their own, and act upon it.From this all else will follow.

A REVOLUTION IN VALUES, PART I

What is value?

If we as a global culture are to define ourselves according to a new set of values, should we not at least take a few moments to consider what value actually is?
So, what is value, and how do we create, and relate to, it?
Value is that quality of the self, projected outward, that embeds itself in ideas and objects in order to generate a certain feeling of recognition or connection in us. It is the process of locating ourselves in the tangible materia of the world.
Value is the indefinable residue that remains behind when all other qualities are stripped away from something. It is supremely personal because it is in some real sense already-existing-as ‘us’.
To create value in a thing is to bring more of ourselves into it, through an act of awareness, a kind of devotional ‘noticing’.
Those objects which lack value- the mass-produced detritus of pop culture- do so not because they lack craftsmanship, but because they lack attention. To a child a stuffed bear becomes something treasured precicely because he ‘sees’ it intensely, pouring himself into its form as though its were a pure recepticle for the potency of his emotional being. And when after many years the aesthetics fail and the fabric becomes thin and worn, such an innocent and naive object retains its value. For the adult the process is hardly any different, only differentiated by a matter of degree. The great power we hold is the ability to abstract ourselves into intellectual and political philosophies, wholly divorced from the constant forms of youth. But it is here too that we create value, in the idea of each other as worthy of attention, as deserving to be ‘seen’. This then becomes the basis of empathy and compassion, those strong threads by which we bind ourselves to the world and each other and find the ability to remake society according to that ‘vision’.

A QUICK NOTE ON ‘THE BIG FOUR’ INTERNET BOOGEYMEN

In my last post i mentioned that the recent attempts at internet censorship have as their justification the stated goal of combating terrorism, piracy, child pornography, or hate speech. I would like to make it perfectly clear that while i and all decent people everywhere rightly abhorr such things, i don’t believe that restricting the medium of their expression is either practicle or desirable.
Only a fool thinks that viewing a website makes someone into a terrorist, or that erradicating naked pictures of children will eliminate child sexual abuse.
These are merely online expressions of real-world actions and attitudes, and that is where they must be dealt with.
Censoring or otherwise shutting down these expressions serves only to drive them deeper underground, where they fester and eventually emerge in more virulent forms.
Of course, despite their protestrations to the contrary, governments know this just as well as i do, which is why no one should for a moment believe that all this is anything other than an absurdly transparent sham, a devious ploy to exercise further control over the lives of free human beings.

THE INTERNET WAR HAS BEGUN

It was only a matter of time before legislators’ oppressive tendencies finally caught up with the freedom-enhancing technology of the web.
Perhaps we should be grateful to have had over a decade of truly free internet access- warts and all (alas, such IS the price of true freedom!). Unfortunately, it is only now that this medium is coming into its own, becoming the powerful tool it was always intuited to be, capable of forming the basis of a genuinely participatory decentralized global democratic movement, empowering individuals the globe over to take back their lives and their world from the dominion of corrupt social systems and political regimes.
But now all of that is under threat. The news stroies are showing up more and more frequently. Supposedly ‘democratic’ nations such as germany, australia, canada, and britain, all are in the process of trying to pass (or already have passed) legislation that blocks certain undesirable websites, censors access, restricts what users can or cannot do online, criminalizes the open sharing of information, or makes it legal for the government to monitor your private email or other communications, all in the name of security.
Those on the side of these measures typically trot out the same tired arguments that have been heard and disproven countless times before. Usually they posture with one or all of the Big Four internet boogeymen: Terrorism, Piracy, Child Porn, and Hate Speech (throw Hackers in there for good measure too).
The problem is that methods used to block these vile threats are indiscriminate, easily capable of dampening ANY views or websites the censoring body deems innapropriate.
It’s just another layer of control, an attempt by the government to insert itself into the only genuinely free medium the world has ever known.
Freedom is not a halfway thing, a partial accomodation with repression and tyranny. Freedom is free- unrestrained, but bearing a greater share of responsibility in order to balance that openess. Ultimately, the governments of the world want to act as our parents, making decisions on our behalf as to what we are entitled to see and do with our lives. And for the most part we are more than willing to go along with this, playing the role of children, desperate to be led and told what to do- for our own good, of course.
But this dispicable manoeuvre is bound to fail. It’s simply too late to put the geenie back in the bottle. We have gotten a taste of the possibilities, and are loathe to let them go without a fight. It won’t be long before this technology becomes fully democratized and uncontrollable. ISPs, subject to rules and regulations, threats and intimidation, will be things of the past, vanished in the face of direct user to user networking. Like a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion, the internet will become uncontainable, spreading without limit.

TIANANMEN SQUARES, DADDY-O (pt. 2)

lola hiroshima writes:

"[...] any group willing to use armed force has demonstrated itself to be based on an illegitimate kind of power and is not deserving of respect or consideration. Force is coercion, and coercion implies a lack of agreement. And where there is no agreement there is no equality... Any society which professes to be based on equality and nevertheless uses force has betrayed its foundational principles."

Violence is bad.

Anybody'll tell ya that.

And it does make the Other into an inferior or a mere "it" upon whom to discharge force.

But still... sometimes...

I reject the idea that human equality is either the true or even the claimed foundation of civilized societies. It is only an easy one to talk about. The true virtues upon whose shoulders we stand are much more slippery and elusive. General equality before the Law is a hallmark of democratic states but this represents only one partial way in which we try construct the best social system. And which kind is best? Those which functionally deliver the maxim freedom, safety, happiness, meaningful, health, fairness, creativity, love, and intentional self-cultivation (or 'development').

The entrenched force of simplistically corrupted social systems is enormous and it demands different actions from us at different times in intelligent response. When the effect of not acting violence will be a greater violence, then it is entirely justified -- even demanded morally. The rest of the time, however, we must exercise other options.

Violence is an emergency response which is qualified both by the legitimacy with which it comprehends actual danger, distinct from the merely upsetting, and the degree to which it deploys with intelligence, comprehensive coordination & sublime sensitivity.

The fact is that almost all political violence has yet not earned the right to call itself "political." It is too often merely terrorism, vengeance or delinquency. Therefore we must become responsible political agents by ROUTING our intense reaction to the horrors of violence INTO our clear thinking on the subject of what action must be taken at any given moment.

Violence must be smarter than it has hitherto been, and that is most commonly the decision to "not act" but rather to learn, communicate and ignore unjust laws with a good conscience. A smart violence must sanely weighs its effects against the specific structures or people it attacks. It must know well and suffer the repercussions and backlash of its deeds. It must, must, must strive passionately to avoid inflicting injury and humiliation upon the innocent AND it must include, in the category "innocent," even those who have not perpetrated anything more than emotional and intellectual upset.

And it must actively work against the temptation to provide the temporary sadistic outbursts of otherwise "good and obedient folk."

The ethical imperative requires us to place the decisions of harm into the most understanding and sympathetic hands. Such hands will naturally resist this weight but they must be made to bear it.

When the decisions of destruction are not made by the best among us -- they will still be made & so the Best shall bear the guilt of deeds acclaimed by the Worst.

Our bodhisattvas and saints fail us when they turn over the most dangerous forms of resistance into the hands of those lacking intellectual and moral refine, lacking grace of character, lacking nuanced understanding or basic human sympathy, or slaved incomprehendingly to a diabolical and murderous interpretation of some ancient book.

Those with the greatest circle of compassion must become willing to be generals as well as prophets, disobeyers, renunciates & disseminators.validation principle which can be intersubjectively assessed relative to the options for action.

Violence or non-violence for what?

Obedience or disobedience for what?

The shared articulation of Core Virtues, upon which our ethical systems rest and towrads which our creative social action must orient itself, knowledge of core virtue, toward which ethics is trending, upon which social activities must be assessed, is our primary tool. In the urgent battle against corrupt systems everywhere we must share clarity upon the principles which validate, or do not validate, our efforts toward the Free and the Good world that may yet come to pass.

TIANANMEN SQUARES, DADDY-O (pt.1)

The Chinese call it the 6-4 Incident.

In English we say, "Tiananmen Square Massacre."

It was an hysterical mass crackdown on the mourners keeping vigil for the dead communist reform-politician Hu Yaobang. The State-Machine in Beijing perpetrated violence and intimidation whose extent is still unknown to a world scarred by the imagery of unarmed civilians menaced by legions of armored tanks.

Yes, China has proven itself a weak government by its paranoia that any visible public movement (e.g. Fuln Gong, friends of the Dalai Lama, etc.) could spell its imminent sinking into the turbulent irrationality of the Un-Organized China. Not a very "harmonious" way of viewing the world.

It is also very significant to notice that the content of the June 4, 1989 incident was that of mourning.

Contemporary Right Wing forces around the world have shown themselves to be characteristically opposed to the healthy feeling of remorse. Consider the regressive American Republicans who denounce Obama as an "apologist" for the U.S.A. There was French president Nicolas Sarkozy who ran for office promising to avoid the "demagoguery of repentance." And Vladimir Putin in Russia who has consistently been concerning about the danger of "brooding over the past" and responding to "unjustified remorse inflicted upon a Great Nation to serve the purpose of Outside forces who wish to take advantage of its weakness."

Wow. Get those guys on the psychiatric couch, already. The late Russian dissident-novelist Alex Solzhenitszyn spoke in his last interview about the inability of a nation or a social system to advance in strength without adequate mourning and repentance. His own nation fairly recently slaughtered 6 million of its own citizens.

Grieving is a process.

"We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation."

-Solzhenitsyn, The UK Independent News.

20 Years after Tiananmen Square

The recent twenthieth anniversary of Tiananmen square serves to highlight the extreme difficulties that reform movements, whether political, economic, or social, face when confronted by the entrenched power of state and corporate opposition. Invariably these standoffs result in a massacre, as the ruling elites have few compunctions against using violence to maintain control. Throughout history those who have sought change through peaceful means have encountered the violent resistence of the status quo. Of course, one can always uncover a few seeming success stories amongst the carnage- the overthrow of british rule in india, the civil rights movement in america, the fall of the berlin wall- but these examples represent a conflux of unique social and historical circumstances and do not reflect the general pattern. The truth is that most reform movements end in failure, or else accomplish their aims either too slowly or too partially to ever be considered as truly successful.
Unfortunately, the problems now confronting us are of such grave magnitude that we cannot afford these compromises, and yet the options available to us are seemingly limited. Are we to respond to force with armed resistence, as the majority of 20th century revolutionary movements did? No, for any group willing to use armed force has demonstrated itself to be based on an illegitimate kind of power and is not deserving of respect or consideration. Force is coercion, and coercion implies a lack of agreement. And where there is no agreement there is no equality. This moral standard is just as valid when applied to us as it is to them.
The ability of one group to exercise power over another group, or of one individual to exercise power over another individual, represents the ultimate failure of human equality. Any society which professes to be based on equality and nevertheless uses force has betrayed its foundational principles.
So how is a movement to counter these effects?
DISOBEY.Stop following the rules- rules which you have had no part in crafting and which do not serve human intrests or values. We need to stop participating in our own enslavement, by becoming educated and revealing the system for what it really is- a corrupt tool used to supress human freedom.

THE GOBLIN COMMONS

Public streets are host at dawn to the many cracked windows

& shattered public lamps of night.Goblins have been out and about. Their liberating acts of defilement are valid but tiny, tepid and insignificant.

Truly, it is a meager joy that leaves the world uglier in its wake.

The Insane People's Republic of North Korea (IPR of NK) announced publicly (June 2009) that its anticipated nuclear arsenal will only be used for legitimate national defense and, of course, a totally justified "merciless offensive" against whomever disturbs their "dignity and sovereignty even a bit."

They will massacre everyone if anyone dares to make them feel upset? This sounds almost like they are begging to be destroyed. It will certainly turn the major powers of the world even more strongly against them. Who does that? Probably, despite its better elements, a suicidal state crying out for help...

Systems which diagnose themselves as corrupt will initiate self-abnegation procedures. Consider: Nazi Imperial Germany. You couldn't find a more clear attempt by a people to nullify themselves. Sending all your best and brightest to die in futile, mismanaged wars that even the army opposes, rounding up whole segments of the population and slaughtering them, smearing history, chasing out good business and scientists, destroying cultural vitality everywhere and finally suicide in a bunker after killing your loved ones? These people we not amoral geniuses -- they were a disease attempting to eliminate itself.

In Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons," we are asked to observe the commons-destroying effect of self-interested, rational herdsmen trying to share resources. Yet the problem is not the rational individuals whose self interest, as every ancient Greek philosopher new, was only a incomplete ethical perspective which true rationality would produce. The real trouble is goblins.

Goblins: Biopathic, culturopathic, emotionally and vitally conflicted agents & communities, or quasi-conscious parts thereof.

Although Hardin's insightful subtitle for his essay is, "The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality" he focuses too greatly on the problem of ethical naivete on the part of quasi-rational men instead of the much greater threat posed by willfully, if often unconsciously, destructive individuals (or parts of individuals).

Why did our species not simply learn its lesson from the first wasted commons?

1. Ineffective means of recollecting and collectively interpreting data.

2. The ongoing effect of individuals and masses of individuals who do not realize their own nihilistic and self-destructive instincts.

The problem is not the decision between an unregulated commons and privatized ownership. Huge numbers of people exist who will point out what is obviously wrong with both options. Only a hybrid alternative has any credibility at all.

The Dalai Lama, an open Marxist, has long called for the eco-cultural autonomy of Tibet within the military-political and economic nationhood of China. Whether this can succeed or not we see in it at least an attempted hybrid solution worthy of our interest as we endeavour to define the commons upon which our future thought depends.

The threat, however, lies precisely in the same two factors which have doomed every other Utopian politics --

Poor intelligence exchanging practices

And goblins.

WELCOME TO UN-CORP

Washed up the Coasts of Capital

It is easy to demonize so-called "corporations." These public bodies are not solely defined by their structural primitivism & the history of their misuse since the time of Queen Elizabeth the First of England. Just like every other kind of human group, these chartered webs of intelligence-sharing can be characterized as more or less intelligent, more or less efficient & variably healthy in bodies, emotionalities and psyches of its participating members.

Consider the "incorporated" ant colony that I observed the other day in a wooded field. As I watched these little black-and-red critters moving bugs, grubs and crumbs, hither and yon among the grass blades & sticks, it began to astonish me how really haphazard was all their activity.

This was not the well-organized, efficient hive-mind army that I am always hearing people discuss. These beasts were chaotic. Wandering up and down along pheromone-trails, apparently at random, hoping to bump into something delicious and end up luckily back at the entrance to the colony. Tasty morsels were moved a few inches, dropped, forgotten, moved in another digression by another ant or two or three. All in all I would have supposed their were aesthetic landscapers, just slightly modifying the location of objects until it "feels right." Then wandering off.

As I pondered their goals I began to realize that my "them" was a problem. There is no law which says all the ants have to have a steady level of intelligence shared by all of them. Was their behaviour constant or varied? I watched longer and observed that periodically a few ants would join together, "quickening" their intelligence, working out a protocol and then intently moving the object back towards the hive. As long as this little tornado of a "field" stayed active they were moving on task. The rest of the time they were exploratory bunglers who -- as it well documented scientificially -- will sometimes follow each other in a vast circle until they die. Self-destructive stupidity with occasional arisings into trans-personal intelligence.

So to was history -- with many peaks of culture and few sustained or protected. So it is also with the Corporations. Unfortunately their constant shifting of managers and dominant coporate "pragmatic wisdom" has too often left the vulnerably weak in the face of toxic emotionality (subliminal nihilism, cynicism, sadism, etc), imbalanced skill sets (cogntive, ethical, etc.) and archaic habits of decision making (one person in charge, consensus, majority vote, etc.).

Both the re-tooling of existing corporate protocols and the potential establishment of alternative models of public corporation require an in-depth understanding of how to select people, how to train people, how to effectively interface them with each other and how to ensure vigorous and responsive action following intelligent decisions.

We need to produce and reinforce the 'smart ant' vortecies.

Finding Common Ground

The tragedy of the commons holds that “multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen.”
There is a crucial difference however between the notion of the commons as a wide open free for all, and that of it as a managed, albeit communal resource. The problem is fundamentally one of human behaviour, rather than a deficiency in the idea of the commons as the shared heritage of any particular group.
And yet the advocates who propose greater private property rights as a solution to the tragedy of the commons always neglect to answer a basic question of access- just who should own that resource, and under what rights. In other words, how are we to avoid disparities in access from becoming tools of opression, as they clearly have throughout history?
Obviously, once privatized, a commons is no longer common.
If we accept the basic tenents of the problem (which some do not), is the only antidote really the restrictive effects of private ownership? Afterall, under what basis can someone claim a right of ownership that is not merely a financial stake? And does this stake serve any better to protect the resource, which should be the penultimate concern, or simply hasten its final exploitation?
Are we as a species really that incapable of acting in mutual self-interest? Surely we can come up with alternative arrangements that satisfy both the requirements of individual users, and the need to preserve the resource.
More importantly, we come face to face with the question of what exactly constitues the commons in the first place. What is its role in the future of human survival?
How far do we extend the reality of a commons: to the biosphere, outerspace, culture, genes?
It is in the formulation of these questions of limits that the battle between corporate intrests and human intrests are thrown most sharply into relief.The ongoing struggles for the creative commons, open technology, and the free flow of information will come to define the next decade, and will determine how much of the world and its content remains accessible to everyone.

Their Business should be our Business

People are in general beginning to wake up to the fact that they have forfeited control over their lives to transnational corporations, however, few have any real ideas what to do about this situation. There seems to be several approaches taken, with varying levels of success- none of which can fundamentally solve the problem. Primarily there is the spreading of consumer awareness, educating the public about the consequences of their choices as buyers. After this comes a period of increasing ‘media literacy’, where individuals learn to see through corporate propaganda and the misuse of media in its effort to draw attention away from these critical issues. The next stage usually involves some form of direct action- boycotting, protesting, internet activism, etc.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much where things leave off, with a growing popular awareness but little impact. Percieving and defining the problem and its sources is significantly easier than constructing a satisfying alternative. Indeed, this is often the very taunt of the global capitalist- our system may be terrible, but what alternative do you propose? Activists must retreat into silence, or else repeat the litany of globalism’s excesses, as though this would be sufficient to produce lasting change.
For this project to continue forward, and create significant results, we must first of all come to grips with some uncomfortable truths, ones which we would often like to ignore. The major one of these is that both business and globalism are instrumental in bringing nations out of poverty and increasing the standard of living for much of the world. We do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. Of course, none of this mitigates the grotesque excesses which are threatening the fabric of our social and natural ecology, but only serves to point out that there are structures and tools utilized by global capitalism which are extremely effective at producing results.
Any truly sustainable revolution will have to be comprised of both a shift in values, and a shift in technique, with the former driving the latter.
Trying to fight corporations is untenable because we lack the tools needed to do so. Legislation primarily serves the interests of corporations, so turning to the government is no help either. What we need is to create our own structures, our own anti-corporate corporations which can exert as much leverage as their counterparts but in a beneficial direction. We need to become the producers of the sustainable products and technologies we wish to consume. We need to approach business not as the enemy of freedom and democracy, but as its most effective expression. Natually, this will require a complete rethinking of what business means- what ist purpose is, how it operates, the nature and role of profit. All of these things are feasible, for one simple reason: there are more of us than them. Corporations, unlike governments, cannot survive without our consent. And while a government can coerce its people into obediance, no corporation yet has the power to force someone to buy its products. We can abstain. Obviously, they can and do engage in manipulative and decietful practices to get us to consume, and work hard to narrow the range of true options available to us in an effort to dominate our lives, but they will always remain critically dependent on our dollars. This is the lifeblood that must ceaselessly flow through their corporate bodies if they are to survive, and we have the choice regarding what to do with this money. A modestly sized network of ten million people, each contributing twenty dollars, can easily create a fund worth two-hundred million dollars. This capital can be used to fund sustainable businesses completely outside the sphere of traditional financial and corporate institutions. They would have the freedom to define their own terms, to compete against corporations through innovative, sustainable products driven by an appeal to the higher values of consumer-citizens.

Here is an interesting essay on the nature and history of corporate metabolism.

LOYAL MINISTERS APPEAR

role for governance in massively decentralized futures

"When the great Tao is forgotten,

Kindness and morality arise.

When there is no peace within the family,

Filial piety and devotion arise.

When the country is confused and in chaos,

Loyal ministers appear."

New technologies effect our thinking in new ways. The appearance in the 20th century of distributed electronic networks has impressed us with new suppositions regarding the most effective and righteous methods of running a society. And in the process we have come to see the enormous role that decentralized networks have played through human history.

The view through this new lens is provocative but also tells a cautionary tale -- in which organic networks of individuals have contributed to the creation of surplus vital and cultural energies, only to have circumstance and corruption set us back into tension, depression & savagery. Too often we have seen toxic and small-minded social forces generate the oppression and dissolution of humanity's achievements.

Many good people have dwelled upon this historical problem, and many more still suffer today in diseased, calcified and starving cultural zones. It has become a very significant problem to envision a better tomorrow but our philosophies have revealed only the general contours and abstract necessities of what must come to pass for the good of all people. The specific steps that will bridge our contemporary world with its best possible outcomes are still obscured. We know that the production and exchange of cultural intelligence is critical in order to move forward but we still need to establish the specific steps involved in social transformation.

The example set by the Communist reformers of the early 20th century should impress us with the need for caution. The far-reaching insights of Karl Marx and his affiliates brought about cultural catastrophes when they attempted to embody the emergent patterns of the new socius. One of their greatest failings was the inability to distinguish between regressive & progressive networks of human relationships.

In order to promote any forms of social activism we need to be able to provide a framework for the ethical validation of benevolent activism, and for the sake of coherence we must derive this from the principles of distributed intelligence itself. The ethical validity of these modes of engagement must emerge from their integrity to a form of human cultural exchange which is intrinsically ethical -- and this must be demonstrated and announced in order that it might become a tool for the Heart.

We have too often seen the example of primitive culturopathic forces destablizing and capturing social networks while expropriating their functional aspects. Today's world is innundated with a plague of flexible, intelligence-sharing networks of politically activated individuals taking moralizing action to re-pattern society but who are nonetheless agents of evil & decay.

From the vile al Qaeda networks, to the perverse webs of individuals who promote the criminal slaughter of abortion doctors, to the anarchic destruction of excited mobs, we know that high-level decentralized intelligence systems are readily hijacked by shared simplicities of structure and common emotional and biological pathologies. A network IS only as good as its inputs and outputs but the same goes for its communication hardware (human architecture) and its replicable protocols for the exchange of data & verification of data.

This is where true politics continues to have a role -- not of proxy "rulers" who take the place of intelligence-compiling networks but as a the capable guardians whose constant effort is to enable positive group functioing and disable corrupt group functioning.

Individuals who function as hubs for the other nodes of a given net are the political entities -- philosophers, leaders, civil servants. Many social systems have failed due to the eerie fascination that the status and power of leadership exerts upon individuals who are not otherwise temperamentally inclined to the intellectual and moral tasks of a leader. Even when -- not too far off -- much of the direct organizing is done at mega speeds by socially facillitating softward there will continue to be a call for individuals who are moved to the task of duplicating the sytem within themselves and assisting in the orchestration of its behaviour.

Regulations must be created such that repression, restriction and rules are creatively minimized without the anti-cultural effects of political non-intervention which so dramatically decrease people's collective capacity to deal with arising circumstances. Those who take on the challenge of this dance between old and new world are the authentic political agents who are currently needed.

As the great historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, "Globalization" is a fact in commerce, science, art and virtually all domains with one glaring exception - politics. The nation-state model, the minimalized successor to the mass system of Colonial Imperialism already outdate and proving itself daily to be inadequate to the needs of human survival and thrival. Ethnic insurgencies of every kind are evidence of the broadly felt impulse to break down the nation-state. However there must be no return to a gangland world of supersitious and predatory tribalism. Instead we must modify the decentralization of power, technology and culture by laying the social safety nets to accomodate precisely these events. As the number of pixels per square centimeter increases, our eye is drawn more sharply to the images which cross the entire screen. To prevent culturopathy there must be efforts by individuals to produce the trans-group systems which will be the social glue between freely networked individuals in a global future.

This, then, is the political task that stands before us -- to observe the unwinding techno-psychic context of tomorrow, to understand and communicate it, to differentiate between its vital and nihilistic elements and to be its defenders and promoters within the world that currently dominates this Earth.

Strategies and Suppositions

Pascal writes:

"Crucially, there must be "political individuals" to recognize this situation and accomplish a feasible transition to healthy networks of this kind. Perhaps the self-canceling social systems are themselves only unhealthy, unintelligent versions of these networks. What are the half-way steps? How do we prevent toxic networks and what protocols can be established and tested for the sensible production of these anti-mass political bodies?"


If we accept that the goal of politics is primarily involved with the organization of power, and that corruption occurs when this function is externalized into control over others’ actions, then right away an antidote suggests itself. This is twofold- first is the need for as much independence from the system as possible; second is the technological means for distributing intelligence. These two factor are intertwined, meaning that an impact on one will adversely affect the other.
So far, historically speaking, we have had a great deal of the former, but little of the latter, and now that trend has reversed itself, in that the prominence of so-called ‘social media’ applications makes it possible for a multitude to rapidly network and assert its power. Unfortunately, as long as we remain dependent on corporations to create these tools, both hardware and software, and governments to sanction their use, then the possibilities for true freedom will remain only half realized.
The ‘political individuals’ of the future are the informed ‘activists’ of today. I use this term in its broadest possible connotation, implying not merely those who hold signs, shouting in protest about this or that issue, but individuals actively engaged in the restructuring of society. This restructuring can take many forms, in fact, the less traditonally organized the better. To be an activist, implies, at heart, the ability and capacity to act. Anything which furthers this capacity is a step in the right direction.
Even seemingly simple things, such as writing a blog, cutting down consumption, growing food, searching the net, can all be considered forms of activism.

1) How do we prevent toxic networks?
The most critical thing is to have clear and concise information, and a strategy for utilizing it (finding, filtering, compiling, processing, and distributing it). It may sound cliche, but knowledge IS empowerment. A network is only as good as its imputs and outputs- the information flowing through it. The key is to achieve enforceable standards which are as deeply inclusive as possible without running the risk of becoming epistemologically meaningless. This can be done through a process of independent reinforcement. Information which is valuable (‘useable’) will propagate itself through multiple nodes in the network. Interfacing with it will tend to reinforce these connections, strengthening the network. Ultimately, the best defence against bad (read: corrupting) information, is freedom. An openess to critical and contrary viewpoints serves to filter the information we must deal with.
[note: i intend to write further regarding the best way to deal with the volumes of information we are confronted with daily, as this is a key problem that needs to be addressed for our development to continue.]

2) What protocols can be established and tested for the sensible production of these anti-mass political bodies?
If you are asking how we will know once this kind of network has established itself, then all i can say is that we will probably be able to judge by its effects in the world. Primarily, we will begin to see a breakdown of so-called ‘traditional’ social structures, for example, the decline of traditional media, and its replacement with digital alternatives.
Also, keep an eye out for an increase in repression, restriction, and rules- the three R’s of all failing social systems.
Other than that, if you are referring to a plan of action for implementation, well, that is jut something that will have to evolve organically through time.
As far as i have been able to determine, the single most critical step is the creation and distribution of information, basically what we are engaged in right now.