Using fractals and their equations, we can now represent and work with objects from the natural world that defy Cartesian a.n.a.lysis. We also become able to develop mathematical models that reflect many more properties of nature"s own systems, such as self-similarity and remote high leverage points. Again, we find that this renaissance is characterised by the ability of an individual to reflect, or even affect, the grand narrative. To write the game.
Finally, our renaissance"s answer to the printing press is the computer and its ability to network. Just as the printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone access to authorship. The first Renaissance took us from the position of pa.s.sive recipient to active interpreter. Our current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. We are the creators.
As game programmers instead of game players, the creators of testimony rather than the believers in testament, we begin to become aware of just how much of our reality is open source and up for discussion. So much of what seemed like impenetrable hardware is actually software and ripe for reprogramming. The stories we use to understand the world seem less like explanations and more like collaborations. They are rule sets, only as good as their ability to explain the patterns of history or predict those of the future.
Consider the experience of a cartographer attempting to hold a conversation with a surfer. They both can claim intimate knowledge of the ocean, but from vastly different perspectives. While the mapmaker understands the sea as a series of longitude and lat.i.tude lines, the surfer sees only a motion of waves that are not even depicted on the cartographer"s map. If the cartographer were to call out from the beach to the surfer and ask him whether he is above or below the 43rd parallel, the surfer would be unable to respond. The mapmaker would have no choice but to conclude that the surfer was hopelessly lost.
But if any of us were asked to choose who we would rather rely on to get us back to sh.o.r.e, most of us would pick the surfer. He experiences the water as a system of moving waves and stands a much better chance of navigating a safe course through them. Each surfer at each location and each moment of the day experiences an entirely different ocean.
The cartographer experiences the same map no matter what. He has a more permanent model, but his liability is his propensity to mistake his map for the actual territory.
The difference between the cartographer and the surfer"s experience of the ocean is akin to pre and post-renaissance relationships to story.
The first relies on the most linear and static interpretations of the story in order to create a static and authoritative template through which to glean its meaning. The latter relies on the living, moment-to-moment perceptions of its many active interpreters to develop a way of relating to its many changing patterns. Ultimately, in a cognitive process not unlike that employed by a chaos mathematician, the surfer learns to recognise the order underlying what at first appears to be random turbulence. Events, images, and arrangements that might otherwise have appeared to be unrelated are now, thanks to a world view that acknowledges discontinuity, revealed to be connected. To those unfamiliar with this style of pattern recognition, the connections they draw may appear to be as unrelated as a fortune-teller"s tea leaves or Tarot cards are from the future events she predicts. Nonetheless, the surfer understands each moment and event in his world as a possible reflection on any other aspect or moment in the entire system.
What gets reborn
The renaissance experience of moving beyond the frame allows everything old to look new again. We are liberated from the maps we have been using to navigate our world and free to create new ones based on our own observations. This invariably leads to a whole new era of compet.i.tion. Renaissance may be a rebirth of old ideas in a new context, but which ideas get to be reborn?
The first to recognise the new renaissance will compete to have their ideologies be the ones that are rebirthed in this new context. This is why, with the emergence of the internet, we saw the attempted rebirth (and occasional stillbirth) of everything from paganism to libertarianism, and communism to psychedelia. Predictably, the financial markets and consumer capitalism, the dominant narratives of our era, were the first to successfully commandeer the renaissance.
But they squandered their story on a pyramid scheme (indeed, the accelerating force of computers and networks tends to force any story to its logical conclusion) and now the interactive renaissance is once again up for grabs.
Perhaps the most valuable idea to plant now, into the post-renaissance society of tomorrow, is the very notion of renaissance itself.
Interactivity, both as an allegory for a healthier relationship to cultural programming, and as an actual implementation of a widely accessible authoring technology, reduces our dependence on fixed narratives while giving us the tools and courage to develop narratives together. The birth of interactive technology has allowed for a sudden change of state. We have witnessed together the wizard behind the curtain. We can all see, for this moment anyway, how so very much of what we have perceived of as reality is, in fact, merely social construction. More importantly, we have gained the ability to enact such wizardry ourselves.
The most ready examples of such suddenly received knowledge come to us from the mystics. Indeed, many early cyber-pioneers expressed their insights (see my Cyberia for examples3) in mystical language coining terms such as "technoshamanism" and "cyberdelia". Indeed, in some ways it does feel as though our society were at the boundaries of a mystical experience, when we have a glimpse of the profoundly arbitrary nature of the stories we use to organise and explain the human experience. It is at precisely these moments that the voyager wonders: "what can I tell myself - what I can write down that will make me remember this experience beyond words?"
Of course, most of these mystical scribblings end up being over-simplified plat.i.tudes such as "all is one" or "I am G.o.d". Those that rise above such clich, such as the more mystical tractates of Ezekiel or Julian of Norwich, defy rational a.n.a.lysis or any effort at comprehension. Our only choice, in such a situation, might be to attempt to preserve just the initial insight that our maps are mere models, and that we have the ability to draw new ones whenever we wish.
This is why the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, businesspeople, religious and social organisers of the late 20th century, who have adopted a renaissance perspective on their fields, have also proclaimed their insights to be so categorically set apart from the work of their predecessors. Chaos mathematicians (and the economists who depend on them) regard systems theory as an entirely new understanding of the inner workings of our reality. They are then celebrated on the pages of the New York Times for declaring that our universe is actually made up of a few simple equations called cellular-automata. Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of ant hill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony.
More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change. The greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to be the recollection that we are working with a mere model.
11 September 2001: Coping by retreat into a world view
More than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success.
Though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. To mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the territory. This, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the 20th century. Many people, inst.i.tutions and nations have yet to adopt strategies that take this lesson into account.
The oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited resources. They continue to push the rest of the industrialised world toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce.
The chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the planet"s topsoil or ecosystems. In more readily appreciated examples, the Church of England is still consumed with its defence of the literal interpretation of Biblical events and many fundamentalists sects in the United States still fight, quite successfully, to prevent the theory of evolution from being taught in State schools.
Although the terrorist attacks on the United States can find their roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided American foreign and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories about the world and humankind"s role within it. And the lines between these worldviews are anything but clear.
Hours after the attacks, two of America"s own fundamentalist ministers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were quick to fit the tragic events into their own concrete narrative for G.o.d"s relationship to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic moment as anything but the wrath of G.o.d, they blamed the feminists, h.o.m.os.e.xuals and civil libertarians of New York City for having brought this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves.
In a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many American patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our nation"s sacred values. This was to be seen as a war against capitalism and a free society. As American flags were raised in defiance of our Middle Eastern antagonists, just as many American freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. Our nationalism overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved from deconstruction.
Meanwhile, free-market capitalism"s stalwarts, who had already suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on their most visible symbol of global trade. With its dependence on perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by this sure sign of resistance. Might the world not really be ready to embrace the World Trade Organisation"s gifts? With a utopian future of global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with G.o.d, believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they could. They sought a war to defend their story.
The most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, pinpointed, devastating, and worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were the world"s singularly invincible nation. The people we appointed to protect us had proved their inability to do so. President Bush"s quick rise to an over 90 percent popularity rating shows just how much we needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. But like a child realising that his parents can"t save him from the bully at school, Americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapons and our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world.
Our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always been unfounded, of course. But waking up to the great existential dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. It led us to revert to old habits. Anti-Semites (and latent anti-Semites) around the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the "Jewish problem". Tsarist and n.a.z.i propaganda books, such as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like Saudi Arabia where they are still being published by official government presses. Newspaper stories revived blood libel (that Jews drink the blood of murdered non-Jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that Jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special radios they keep in their homes. Indeed, such informational treachery is nothing new. But in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it otherwise would have.
Efforts to package America"s New War on news channels like CNN further alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what had happened. Conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter from a Brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years earlier during the Gulf War. Like any other narrative, the extreme counterculture"s saga of a "new world order", directed by the Bush family, had to be wrapped around the new data.
Meanwhile, many Jews and Christians who hadn"t even thought about their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves instinctively asking: "how will this impact Israel?" or "is the Armageddon upon us?" They bought memberships in religious inst.i.tutions for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and synagogues looking for rea.s.surance, for a way to fit these catastrophes into a bigger story. Like everyone else, they hoped to reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered.
But surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren"t functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life"s biggest questions. The challenge to all thinking people is to resist the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nationalist, or G.o.d-forbid, holy posture. Rather than retreating into the simplistic and childlike, if temporarily rea.s.suring, belief that the answers have already been written along with the entire human story, we must resolve ourselves to partic.i.p.ate actively in writing the story ourselves. It is not enough to go back to our old models, particularly when they have been revealed to be inadequate at explaining the complexity of the human condition. It is too late for the Western World to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, accelerating global conflict in an effort to bring on the messianic age. It is too late to push blindly towards a purely capitalist model of human culture. There is simply too much evidence that the short-term bottom line does not serve the needs of people or the environment. There are too many alternative values and cultural threads surrendered to profit efficiency that may yet prove vital to our cultural ecosystem.
Instead, we must forge ahead into the challenging but necessary task of inventing new models ourselves, using the collaborative techniques learned over the past decade, and based in the real evidence around us.
Chapter 4
Networked democracy
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. The very survival of democracy as a functional reality is dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society.
Religions and ideologies are terrific things, so long as no one actually believes in them. While absolute truths may exist, it is presumptuous for anyone to conclude he has found and comprehended one.
True, the adoption of an absolutist frame of reference serves many useful purposes. An accepted story can unify an otherwise diverse population, provide widespread support for a single regime and rea.s.sure people in times of stress. Except for the resulting ethnocentrism, repression of autonomy and stifling of new ideas, such static templates can function well for quite a while. Dictators from Adolph Hitler to Idi Amin owed a good part of their success to their ability to develop ethnically based mythologies that united their people under a single sense of ident.i.ty. The Biblical myth of Jacob and his sons served to unify formerly non-allied desert tribes (with the same names as Jacob"s sons) in ancient Sinai. They not only conquered much of the region, but created a fairly stable regime for centuries.
So these stories enable a certain kind of functionality. Their relative stasis, if protected against the effects of time by fundamentalists, can allow for the adoption and implementation of long-term projects that span generations, even centuries. But when one group"s absolute truth b.u.mps up against another group"s absolute truth, only conflict can result.
New technologies, global media, and the spread of international corporate conglomerates have forced just such a clash of worldviews.
While cultures have been reckoning with the impact of cosmopolitanism since even before the first ships crossed the Mediterranean, today"s proliferation of media, products and their a.s.sociated sensibilities, as well as their migration across formerly discreet boundaries, are unprecedented in magnitude.
Globalism, at least as it is envisioned by the more expansionist advocates of free market capitalism, only exacerbates the most dangerously retrograde strains of xenophobia. The market"s global aspirations (as expressed by Global Business Network co-founder Peter Schwartz"s slogan "Open markets good. Closed markets bad. Tattoo it on your forehead"4) amount to a whitewash of regional cultural values.
They are as reductionist as the tenets of any fundamentalist religion.
In spite of the strident individualism of this brand of globalist rhetoric, it leaves no room for independent thinking or personal choice, except insofar as they are permitted by one"s consumption decisions or the way one chooses to partic.i.p.ate in the profit-making game. Mistaking the arbitrary and man-made rules of the marketplace for a precondition of the natural universe, corporate capitalism"s globalist advocates believe they are liberating the ma.s.ses from the artificially imposed restrictions of their own forms of religion and government. Perceiving the free market model as the way things really are, they ignore their own fabrications, while seeing everyone else"s models as impediments to the natural and rightful force of evolution.
As a result, globalism to almost anyone but a free market advocate, has come to mean the spread of the Western corporate value system to every other place in the world. Further, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, followed by the revelation of corporate malfeasance and insider trading, exposed corporate capitalism"s dependence on myths; stories used to captivate and distract the public while the storytellers ran off with the funds. The spokespeople for globalism began to be perceived as if they were the 15th century Catholic missionaries that preceded the Conquistadors, preparing indigenous populations for eventual colonisation. The free market came to be understood as just another kind of marketing. Globalism was reduced, in the minds of most laypeople, to one more opaque mythology used to exploit the uninitiated majority.
Networked democracy: learning from natural interconnectivity
The current renaissance offers new understandings of what it might mean to forge a global society that transcends the possibilities described by the language of financial markets. It might not be too late to promote a globalism modelled on cooperation instead of compet.i.tion, and on organic interchange instead of financial transaction.
Again, our renaissance insights and inventions aid us in our quest for a more dimensionalised perspective on our relationship to one another.
Rather famously the first renaissance elevated the Catholic ma.s.s into a congregation of Protestant readers. Thanks to the printing press and the literacy movement that followed, each person could enjoy his or her own personal relationship to texts and the mythologies they described. Our own renaissance offers us the opportunity to enhance the dimensionality of these relationships even further, as we transform from readers into writers.
It"s no coincidence that early internet users became obsessed with the fractal images they were capable of producing. The rea.s.suring self-similarity of these seemingly random graphs of non-linear equations, evoked the shapes of nature. One simple set of fractal equations, iterated through a computer, could produce a three-dimensional image of a fern, a coastline or a cloud. Zooming in on one small section revealed details and textures reflective of those on other levels of magnification. Indeed, each tiny part appeared to reflect the whole.
For early internet users, sitting alone in their homes or offices, connected to one another only by twisted pairs of copper phone lines, the notion of being connected, somehow, in the manner of a fractal was quite inspiring. They began to study new models of interconnectivity and group mind, such as James Lovelock"s Gaia hypothesis and Rupert Sheldrakes theory of morphogenesis, to explain and confirm their growing sense of non-local community. By the mid 1990s many internet users began to see the entire planet as a single organism, with human beings as the neurons in a global brain. The internet, according to this scheme, was the neural network being used to wire up this brain so that it could function in a coordinated fashion. In another model for group mind, this time celebrated among the rave counterculture, this connectivity was itself a pre-existing state. The internet was merely a metaphor, or outward manifestation, of a psychic connection between human beings that was only then being realised: the holographic reality.
As functioning models for cooperative activity, these notions are not totally unsupported by nature. Biologists studying complex systems have observed coordinated behaviours between creatures that have no hierarchical communication scheme, or even any apparent communication scheme whatsoever. The coral reef, for example, exhibits remarkable levels of coordination even though it is made up of millions of tiny individual creatures. Surprisingly, perhaps, the strikingly harmonious behaviour of the collective does not repress the behaviour of the individual. In fact the vast series of interconnections between the creatures allows any single one of them to serve as a "remote high leverage point" influencing the whole. When one tiny organism decides it is time for the reproductive cycle to begin, it triggers a mechanism through which hundreds of miles of coral reef can change colour within hours.
Another more immediately observable example is the way women living together will very often synchronise in their menstrual cycles. This is not a fascistic scheme of nature, supplanting the individual rhythms of each member, but a way for each member of the social grouping to become more attuned and responsive to the subtle shifts in one another"s physical and emotional states. Each member has more, not less, influence over the whole.
These models of phase-locking and self-similarity, first studied by the chaos mathematicians but eventually adopted by the culture of the internet, also seemed to be reflected in the ever-expanding medias.p.a.ce. The notion of remote high leverage points (a b.u.t.terfly flapping its wings in Brazil leading to a hurricane in New York) was now proven every day by a datasphere capable of transmitting a single image globally in a matter of minutes. A black man being beaten by white cops in Los Angeles is captured on a home video camera and appears on television sets around the globe overnight. Eventually, this 30-second segment of police brutality leads to full-scale urban rioting in a dozen American cities.