I meant to post something immediately after I watched Douglas Rushkoff’s keynote at Personal Democracy Forum in June, if only to say, watch this, it is important. But I didn’t, I just sent the link to a few friends. But anyway, do watch it, it’s worth your time.
My motive for talking about it now is slightly different. He has recently put a transcript of the talk on-line, which means I can read it – a different experience from watching or listening and one that highlights different things. (The significance of being able to experience the same thing in different modes is something I covered briefly in a piece “The Perfume of Sight” awhile ago after listening, watching and reading a speech by Bruce Sterling, which curiously echoes a similar theme to why I am writing now.)
The passage from Rushkoff I picked up on reading what he had to say as opposed to watching him say it was this:
“The next renaissance (if there is one) — the phenomenon we’re talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we’re using—the biases of these media—cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center—like a centrally issued currency—the network creates value from the periphery.
This means the way to participate is not simply to subscribe to an abstract, already-written myth, but to do real things. To take small actions in real ways. The glory is not in the belief system or the movement, but in the doing. It’s not about getting someone elected, it’s about removing the obstacles to real people doing what they need to to get the job done. That’s the opportunity of the networked, open source era: to drop out of the myths and actually do.”
One of the reasons I welcome the current financial turmoil, despite its personal cost to me and the profound unfairness of the suffering it brings to those who don’t deserve it, is that it part of the process of removing the obstacles to positive change. With each financial crisis, and there will be more, the Emperor’s clothes are gradually being show to be empty fantasy – wealth capture does nothing but shift resources from the many to the privileged few. More importantly the pursuit of money for nothing diverts attention from the stuff we really need to do if we are to survive and thrive on this planet. As Rushkoff points out it is time to drop out of the myths and actually do.
As Bruce Sterling vividly put it:
“We’re on a kind of slider bar, between the Unthinkable, and the Unimaginable, now. Between the grim meathook future, and the bright green future. And there are ways out of this situation: there are actual ways to move the slider from one side to the other. Except we haven’t invented the words for them yet. We’ve got smoke building in the crowded theater, but the exit sign is just a mysterious tangle of glowing red letters.”
My own view, as regular readers will know, is that the exit signs wont come from any master plan or leaders with grand visions of the the future, but will come from a kind of purposive drift of people doing stuff, some of which will work and some of which wont, but gradually muddling our way through to a new kind of civilisation.