Why the
Internet Is Ground Zero in the Global Consciousness War
by Daniel Pinchbeck, Reality Sandwich
Posted on May 24, 2010
Source
The Internet 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. We
are in a new kind of Renaissance—a creative entrepreneurial gold
rush.
Over the last few months, I've been working on the release strategy
for 2012 Time for Change, our documentary, with director Joao Amorim,
producer Giancarlo Canavesio and the staff at Mangusta Films. This has
been a great learning process for us, and it is still underway. The transformation
of media that began with the launch of 'Web2.0' a number of years ago
has continued, and is accelerating. At the same time, the old mechanisms
for distributing and marketing independent films have broken down. The
model of a new independent film debuting at a festival like Sundance
or Toronto, then getting a decent deal with a distribution company that
takes the film off the filmmakers' hands and brings them success and
some financial reward has become a distant fantasy. Nowadays, very few
films get such deals, and even when they do, the movies rarely pay back
their investors, reward the creators, or make much of an impact in the
mainstream.
In the new model that is still emerging, the creative energy of the
filmmakers no longer ends with the completion of the film, but continues
to be drawn upon for the entire life cycle of the project. The distribution
and marketing of the film become a direct extension of the process of
making it, and the creativity extends to every aspect of promoting, marketing,
packaging, distributing, and showing it. On one side, this means that
the artist can no longer be naive about business, or distanced from it,
and hope to survive.
While artists have to become business savvy, on the other side, the
business people have to become more like artists, sorting through all
sorts of radical possibilities that didn't even exist a few years ago.
In the film world and other cultural areas, business is becoming more
like art, and art is becoming more inseparable from business. Art purists
may feel this is a bad thing; although it is a bit exhausting for the
creative person who might like to retreat to his studio, I like these
new developments and find them promising as well as exciting.
We are in a new kind of Renaissance—a creative entrepreneurial
gold rush. These days, at least half of the musicians and directors
I meet
seem to be developing "technology plays," new software
systems and mechanisms for creating revenue and making their projects
stand out
in a blizzard of seemingly infinite options. The entire situation
is maddening in it's intricate convoluted complexity, but also fascinating.
In the breakdown of the old models, media has become incredibly liquid,
like mercury that runs everywhere and can coagulate into any form,
at
least momentarily, before it flows away again.
The model of a discrete 90 minute film as the ultimate
goal is beginning to give way as well. While theatrical release remains
a happy outcome,
many films, especially documentaries, may soon become more amorphous "projects," where
the outtakes, extras, YouTube clips, video blogs, Twitter feeds,
Facebook fan pages, etcetera, plus whatever comes next to replace
these evanescent
things, are integrated from the outset as elements of the creative
vision of the whole. In the new model of independent self-distribution,
films
are conceived of as campaigns similar to political campaigns that
need to mobilize the support of their audience even before they are
finished,
if possible.
With music, Peter Gabriel was one
of the first to recognize that a likely—and potentially very cool—shift
of emphasis could be from focus on product, that perfectly finished
single or album, to a focus on process,
on the continual development of a group or artist. He foresaw a model
where audiences would pay to subscribe to follow a favorite artist's
progress toward a finished work, noting that the completed product
was often only one version of many interesting improvisations. Gabriel
foresaw
that the changes in media would ultimately give more control and
power to the artists, and although we are still in a transition phase
where
this often gets obscured, I believe that he is correct. How this
will ultimately play out is still unknown, but it is entirely evident
that
not only information, but art, yearns to be free.
We see the new landscape, in which the creative
innovator can now reach directly to a
huge audience without need of a corporate intermediary,
in those Youtube phenomena where an unknown puts out a series of
comedy sketches or conspiracy theory videos and suddenly attracts
an audience
in the tens of millions, or more. Not just videos but new forms of
social media and interactive technologies can rapidly explode. One
recent example
is Chat Roulette, created by a Russian teenager, now attracting over
30 million users a month. While much of what goes viral in this way
is the usual vacuous trash, this cultural opening has also allowed
for phenomena
like the Zeitgeist Movement, where an effort is being made to transform
cultural reach into a new type of social and political force, supporting
the vision of a "resource based economy" developed by the
Venus Project.
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.
Although many of the major players avoid acknowledging
this, the shaping of attention is an inherently political act.
While I use Facebook all
the time—to take one obvious example—because that's where the
people (400 million of them) are now, I find it extraordinarily frustrating
as a tool. Originally designed to fit the short attention spans of
college
kids, Facebook maintains the feckless ambience of television. It
encourages a passively ironic attitude, for the benefit of the "flattered
self" that
expects all of the attention pointed in its direction, like a baby
who knows it's mother can't help but coo over its every move. The
architecture
of Facebook does not allow for deeper discourse, collaboration or
critique. Eventually, I believe it will be superseded by a network
that encourages
critical and analytical thought, that is carefully designed to support
a rapid increase in collective intelligence and the evolution of
civil society.
While all sorts of news items float aimlessly through it, Facebook has
the overall effect of constricting communication to short, narrow, and
superficial exchanges. It is a medium made for a culture of self obsession
and distraction, where there is no accountability for ideas that trail
away into the ether like comic strip thought balloons. Worst of all,
Facebook takes a proprietary control over the data of its users, acting
like a vast Panopticon. At the same time, the astonishing spread of Facebook
reveals the awesome power inherent in this still-so-new, simultaneously
silly and profound, communication medium.
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.
We can consider the global financial system, which
lives in the same virtual and intangible space as other digital media,
as a particular
type of social network, an immaterial sheathe of connectivity, that
uses an abstract metric to tabulate exchanges of goods and quantify
other
forms of human energy. The inherent problems built into this system—entirely
controlled by private banking interests who issue money into circulation
as debt, creating artificial scarcity and fostering
cut-throat
competition that leads automatically to tragic negligence and dire
misuse of resources—are becoming increasingly self-evident. Because
financiers
devised and run the global markets and central banks, the work of
a banker, derivatives trader, or currency speculator is valued at
an exponentially,
one can safely say obscenely, greater level than that of a kindergarten
teacher, carpenter, or midwife. Labor that contributes nothing to
the real economy, human freedom, or human knowledge and involves
speculative
movements of nonexistent capital is most prized, and almost all forms
of honest and meaningful work are devalued by this system.
Propping up this deception, an entire mass
media complex has developed to manage cultural perception and make
people believe
the current situation
is somehow natural and good, and to keep the masses from developing
the analytical tools to question it, and work together to create
the alternative.
As thinkers like Marx and Marcuse have noted, there
remains a difference between false and true consciousness, whether
or not individuals
are aware of it. Recently, I spoke to a guard who works in the
lobby of in
an office building that contains a popular yoga studio. I had noticed
the guard many times, as he sat still, staring straight ahead,
without any reading material or distractions of any sort. I asked
him what
he used his time to think about. "I'm thinking about all the things
I'm going to do when I become rich," he replied.
His answer startled me. I tend to forget that so many people in our
society still believe, with a startlingly naive faith, in the Horatio
Alger myth and have even extended this idea: it is no longer the case
that people imagine they can become wealthy from hard work and ingenuity.
It is more the case that they believe wealth to be their natural right,
and expect it to happen to them in the same inevitable way that the sun
rises each morning.
This is one reason that the developing situation is so extremely threatening
and dangerous to the powers that be: through rigorous indoctrination
via the media, they have set up unreal expectations in the populace,
who may become irate when it finally dawns upon them that these expectations
will never be met. Instead, in reality, the little that they have is
being inexorably stripped from them. The recent riots in Greece and France,
and the volatile student protests in California, reveal the potential
for civil unrest on a scale that will, I suspect, ultimately dwarf what
we saw in the 60s.
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.
Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin,
2006) and Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books, 2002). He is Editorial
Director of Reality Sandwich.
© 2010 Reality Sandwich All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146989/
