Web 2.0 Culture Wars & The End of Effective Rule of Law

I have been trying to write this letter for a long time. The kind of letter that reaches out and is met. It would be one thing, if what I had to say were pleasant or uplifting somehow, something easy to read, and it isn’t so. I feel like I should apologize, as if what must be brought to light in these pages is an impertinence, an incivility. And so I am sorry.

Nevertheless, the world is what we’ve made of it, and the roads we have chosen, to me, seem to be growing desperate delusional and dangerous. And I wish, like so many, that like a disagreement between friends an apology could make the difference. Yet the world is more insistent, and will not yield to such a chimera.

The world is what we are making of it, and I wonder if, like me you see the making is being done by people in many cases, with differing if not irreconcilable interests. As our world grows smaller I see no escape from relinquishing this dream of striving towards some higher level in which the fundamental conflicts of culture are resolved. We have no choice but to face as a fact, these conflicts will remain.

The good must not become the enemy of the best. Can so much of the conflict we have arrived at be attributed to our conceptualizing ourselves as essentially similar individuals? Doesn’t this framing set up the intractableness of issues like abortion and euthanasia, where two distinct conceptions of the good get in the way of achieving the best we can do in so many domains? I fear this dynamic of competing conceptions of the good has severely distorted our notion of participating, of being a citizen, of taking part in determining the future of ourselves and our society; don’t you. Too often our public debate fails to rise above stigmatizing of the other. So much is this the case that the practice of doing so, it seems, is embraced as citizenship, and mistaken for the work of determining the future of ourselves and our society.

If this were an argument rather than a letter you would expect to begin hearing an accounting of why. Why so much resentment, why so little prudence? And I will assemble some words here, in an attempt, in spite of the volumes already written, to account for how, and why, we have come to find our futures waylaid in a crisis of warring special interests, groups and subgroups.

When lost — and it seems we are, we have to begin where we’re at - honestly. If there is a zeitgeist, a spirit of our age, I would say, we live in an age of technological and spiritual crisis. An age when the things we are creating to make our lives easier somehow, or entertain us are too disruptive of our efforts to keep a future in view, and to nurture and benefit from a spirit of collective purpose. A novel I recently read comes to mind. One of the characters in Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday”—Theo, the eighteen-year-old son of Henry Perowne, the middle-aged neurosurgeon who is the novel’s protagonist—says to his father. “When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we are doing with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto—think small.” Theo’s feelings remind me of another writers thoughts.

“The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values....Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives?...Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?” Sociologist C Wright Mills wrote this back in fifty-nine and I don’t feel things have grown less complicated or slowed up any since. There are numerous ways to take Theo’s feelings and reaction to his point of view of a world of crisis and lost hope. I feel like thinking small from time to time. How about you?

We need to be doing much better at sorting out the collective purpose part of Theo’s concerns. Its so closely tied to meaning that there is a sense of the “trap” like Mills sees, and the longer we fail the more a sense of frustration and anger grows. And the big innovations right now, “all the world’s information, universally accessible and useful” and the new “populist democracy” and it’s inevitable good and progress to come form the world’s user generated content, don’t seem to be helping. After all, these two new platforms do nothing about purposes, at least for us anyway.

Mill again...“ It is not only information we need in this Age of Fact, information often dominates our attention and overwhelms our capacities to assimilate it....What we need, and what we feel we need, is a quality of mind that will help us to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within ourselves.” If anything it seems these great technological accomplishments are moving us in the opposite direction, far from being "the wisdom of crowds", it's the stupidity of crowds. Collectively what we are doing is creating a more simplified world. User generated media and social media amplify the political extremes and turn the roads to collective purpose into opportunities to savage any who stray form the ends of the political spectrum. Also, “all the world’s information” doesn’t seem to include access to information important to anyone working “to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world”. Most scholarly work is behind the gates of archives of university libraries, or must be paid for bit and byte.

If digital culture isn’t the inevitable good of an inclusive populism, what should we hope for? There is always the hope that we begin to dislike the culture of these platforms, that they are a fad and their novelty will fade, or, maybe mores law, the doubling of computer power every year will have to run it’s course. Once everyone has a palm computer with all the worlds information and billions of voices cry out Digg/Blogg-herded opinions, is there reason to believe we will be in no better position to get on with the business of working on our irreconcilable differences, and winning our way to the fruit of collective purposes?

The character Theo’s motto, “think small” - is it a sign of this problem? Is it the result of his lack of sociological imagination, a failure to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society? Or is “think small”, a realization of, and frustration with, the crisis of purposes in our age of political stagnation? Isn’t that where he’s coming form, “ when we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to”. There was a time when the prime task of public education, as it was understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge public affairs. Since the sixties the function of education has shifted from the political to the economic: to training people for better-paying jobs. There is evidently a price to pay for this. It seems we have sacrificed the long view for the short term gain in some sense doesn't it?

Whether these platforms, the promise of our age: social media, and search and user centered information are merely entertainment, or technological tools useful for the aim of working on our irreconcilable differences and collective purposes, depends on their users pedigree. This new “populist democracy” cannot ignore the problem of garbage in garbage out. But you won’t hear Google’s Eric Schmidt or technology visionary Ray Kerzweil confront this problem. They will tell you by 2020 a thousand dollars worth of hardware will have one thousand times the power of the human brain, but if you were to insist, how will we be in a position to organize these resources to do intelligent things, they might, like Kerzweil does in his November 1st 2005 Charlie Rose interview, stammer for a moment and begin talking about our progress in understanding and modeling the brain and thought. I see this as turning the conversation academic, at any rate this effort will face the problem of the existential structure of the subject, “the full dimension of a subject cannot be determined by the rational examination of it’s own structure” or, a person is much more than a brain.

This is the spirit of our age. Where there is not the political will and the communication to forge some improvement of circumstance, like education, technology steps in. Cannot control child obesity via a food bill in Washington, science begins to generate a medication to treat type one diabetics. Won’t correct the problems of education feeding our political peril, build computers smarter than humans to tell us what to do, and watch those who build them become billionaires while experimenting with society and peoples lives. This is spiritual and technological crisis. And — if we're not vigilant the triumph of a technologically imposed police state over a society organized by a rule of law and democracy.

Theo’s motto, to “think small” as he describes it, is a position of retreat. Many people have been turned off by the adolescent, argumentative, sound-bitten character of politics today, he’s not alone. Everything now smacks of theater. A public forum ripe with the drama of exaggeration and scandal in which there is no consensus on anything — there’s a reason. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever, by the shift of focus from author, to audience member. This shift is popularized at one end by new platforms for user generated content like blogs, youtube, social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and at the other end of the spectrum, by news programming catering to the entertainment preferences of viewers, even to the point of reading their soundbite email comments. Something once exclusive to late night television. The recent MSM coverage of Obama’s speech to youth returning to classes being characterized as an evil extreme, when it was, in fact, an unremarkable piece of political theater easily forgotten is a good example. It seems this lunacy bubbles up from the new collectives born form the technology of the crowds in social media.

University of Exeter English Phd Alan Kirby describes our current epoch as follows. "Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishized (ie. placed supreme importance on) the author. But the culture we have now fetishizes the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratization of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products generated (at least so far). Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of “what is real” were problematized. It therefore emphasized the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call digi-modernism (our current era), makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Digi-modernism includes all television or radio programs or parts of programs, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer, listener or voter.

Digi-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programs about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologized cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony (postmodernism), is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity.”

This shift from author to audience, form contemplation to trance, has taken place during the past two presidential election cycles. Each periods of sever political and cultural division in America. For the first time our new social media platforms make “dining room table conversation” out of sensitive matters like religious orientation, sexual proclivities and every other subject, until then, considered too taboo for public discussion. Much of this conversation never quite gets beyond stigmatizing and preaching to the converted, whom tend to congregate together in cultural forums. Its Balkanization, it gives people security. So over here is the part of the internet, and therefore of the world, where there are people who think the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. Over here are people who think it's all about stopping Muslim hordes taking over our culture. And over here, it's the neo-conservative lot who think it's all about ideas. What marks out all these groups is that they're fundamentally negative - they're looking for something to criticize. They don't have a political ideal, and they don't know what's going on, so they retreat into a simplified and often very dated view of the world.

All of this, effectively raises the temperature in the room to a boil. We have all gotten an eye-full of this in the recent months’ coverage of the political theater of our town hall meetings. More atomized than ever, and more connected than ever, it didn’t take long for the groups already formed to begin to discern that there is no effective rule of law out here, and the next step beyond voting on a shit-head on American idol of course, would be to commodify and vote and judge and control the fate of individuals singled out for one reason or annother. If you can opt in to share information about yourself and your friends, what stops any group form gathering and sharing information on their enemies? — nothing!

User generated media and social media opened the door to "attention economies" as the politics of direct democracy. Everyone is by now familiar with the stories of men caught cheating on their wives being savaged by online communities, following the wife’s posting the details of the affair online. Cyber bullying has lead to youth suicide on Facebook. Forums like “The Well” and “Craigs List” and the use of email list serves have rapidly become the platforms fomenting this criminal behavior. Social media and email fueled vigilante justice is everywhere, and why should this surprise you, most people have strong political views, and people seem to believe in the rhetoric of social media as a populist revolution. There are no institutions not corrupted, police, prosecutors, courts, broadcasting, journalism, doctors, dentists, telecommunications employs, food service. People in all walks of life are now expressing their political alliances in and through the roles they play in society. From the misanthrope who serves filthy food, to the medical doctor making people sick, to the political criminal justice system, and social exclusion form employment. The crimes being perpetrated in this “populist revolution”: fraud, medical malpractice, judicial mistreatment, violations of privacy, are all nearly impossible to beat individually, and together they can easily destroy anyones life. Today CNN coverage of the preacher who wishes our president dead from brain cancer, included a parishioner of his warning the viewing audience, “people who don’t believe in God will have bad stuff happen to them” and this statement was not an allusion to the end of days.

There is a fascist national movement taking place in the United States. One in which harassment and torture and practices of exclusion are being used as weapons in our culture and political wars. People are saying things like “we are going to use this to reduce our taxes” and the just mentioned “people who don’t believe in god will have bad stuff happen to them”. The “this” in the first example, means organized efforts to impose an extra legal social prison system through the use of torture. Rather than being moved toward tolerance, greater inclusion, and a more open society we are seeing new technology being used to organize and act out politically motivated violence in culture wars along old lines of division on issues like religious vs. secular, the war on drugs, and gay rights. A national movement of extralegal mob violence should frighten you. You should be concerned. What concerns me the most is the thought that this has been going on for years without being brought to the national stage by our nation’s journalists. Apparently passed off as Americans being Americans, or some kind of new patriotism which only excludes certain people form human and civil rights. The reality is such a consensus is delusional and totally ignorant of history. Any culture lacking a free press will experience a halcyon era of corruption, something we absolutely cannot suffer at such a critical point in our national history. These words are an effort to bring this crisis to light in main stream media. I believe there are ways the technology responsible for making possible such a crisis can be used to pull us back form the brink of collapse into all out social terrorism and fascism. There are ways to aggregate enough consensus on the issues dividing us to reach a culture of greater tolerance and inclusion. There has not been a time in our history when we have needed such an effort more.

The letter to follow this will open a window into this dark, violent police state America that is emerging. As I said in the beginning I feel I should apologize, but I think I should instead offer a warning. The details of how "the system" of violence works can be disturbing information to be made aware of. I am sorry for that. What I will write I promise you will be an unembellished accounting of what is taking place.

Robert Reid