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Title: Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics

Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10753]
                Most recently updated: December 20, 2020

Language: English



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Title page:

Open Source Democracy
How online communication is changing offline politics

by Douglas Rushkoff



Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tom Bentley and everyone at Demos for the opportunity to
extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. Thanks also to my
editorial assistant, Brooke Belisle, and to colleagues including
Andrew Shapiro, Steven Johnson, Ted Byfield, Richard Barbrook, David
Bennahum, Red Burns, Eugenie Furniss and Lance Strate.


                              Introduction

The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for
cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology
industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium,
the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious
camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media
through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better,
have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace
have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are
developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by
allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the
broader challenges of our time.

As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised
threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly
irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a
new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only
possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism,
ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised
so much of late 20th century thinking and culture.

The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact,
help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of
fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. Thanks to
the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our
work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social
and political constructs in very new contexts. We may now be able to
launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of
individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the
world at large. These interactive communication technologies could
even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a
shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when
people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual
self-interest.

The emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its
subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of
the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of
interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study
in the politics of renaissance. The battle for control over new and
little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent
many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives.
Meanwhile, the technologies themselves empower individuals to take
part in the creation of new narratives. Thus, in an era when crass
perversions of populism, and exaggerated calls for national security,
threaten the very premises of representational democracy and free
discourse, interactive technologies offer us a ray of hope for a
renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement.

The very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be
dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in
conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. And we
may get our best rehearsal for these roles online.

In short, the interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding
civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with
civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or
taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with
cooperative behaviour. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of
traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and
politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against
neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. While such
strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of
exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid
collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they
imperil what is left of civil society. They threaten the last small
hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of
faith-justified oil wars.

As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States,
becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to
offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance
is diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the
Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American
regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time
the war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found half of Americans
believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 9
September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that
mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and
priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred
to the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions',
bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as
the now-laughable 'collateral damage'. This was the propagandist
motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists'
lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are
travelling, their coverage becomes skewed.

But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own
weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share
their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war.
Journalists' personal entries provided a much broader range of
opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the
conflict than were available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast
and cable television.

For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free
to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog
called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard
as a real person living in Baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war.
This daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in
Baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and opinion
about the war on the web.

Clearly, the success of sites like Dear Raed stem from our
increasingly complex society's need for a multiplicity of points of
view on our most pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a
mainstream mediaspace that appears to be converging on single,
corporate and government approved agenda. These alternative
information sources are being given more attention and credence than
they might actually deserve, but this is only because they are the
only ready source of oppositional, or even independent thinking
available. Those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative
value systems may be working against the current and increasingly
concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they
ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in
an entirely new context.

The communications revolution may not have brought with it either
salvation for the world's stock exchanges or the technological
infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though
one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology
may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again.
While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and
marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us
with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the
power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to
participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.


Chapter 1

 From Moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking control

We are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narratives
to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of
nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led
human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that
described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces.
Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed
the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the
afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that
early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we
understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of
God1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from
Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't
believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters
whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The
characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that
it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as
genuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. The people were
actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of
nature.

As different people and groups competed for authority, narratives
began to be used to gain advantage. Stories were no longer being used
simply to predict the patterns of nature, but to describe and
influence the courses of politics, economics and power. In such a
world, stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win
believers; to be understood as real. When the Pharaoh or King is
treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating
in the conceit. But he still needed to prove his potency in real ways,
and at regular intervals, in order to ensure their continued
participation. However, if the ruler could somehow get his followers
to accept the story of his divine authority as historical fact, then
he need prove nothing. The story justifies itself and is accepted as a
reality.

In a sense, early civilisation was really just the process through
which older, weaker people used stories to keep younger, stronger
people from vying for their power. By the time the young were old
enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the
system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk exposing the
stories as myths. More positively, these stories provided enough
societal continuity for some developments that spanned generations to
take root.

The Old Testament, for example, is basically the repeated story of how
younger sons attempt to outwit their fathers for an inherited birth
right. Of course, this is simply allegory for the Israelites'
supplanting of the first-born civilisation, Egypt. But even those who
understood the story as metaphor rather than historical fact continued
to pass it on for the ethical tradition it contained: one of a people
attempting to enact social justice rather than simply receive it.


Storytelling: communication and media

Since Biblical times we have been living in a world where the stories
we use to describe and predict our reality have been presented as
truth and mistaken for fact. These narratives, and their tellers,
compete for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories
and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told.
The content of a story might be considered the what, where the
technology through which the story is transmitted can be considered
the how. In moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the
competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value
of the message.

Exclusive access to the how of storytelling lets a storyteller
monopolise the what. In ancient times, people were captivated by the
epic storyteller as much for his ability to remember thousands of
lines of text as for the actual content of the Iliad or Odyssey.
Likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as
much through the magic of broadcasting technology as its script.
Whoever has power to get inside that magic box has the power to write
the story we end up believing.

We don't call the stuff on television 'programming' for nothing. The
people making television are not programming our TV sets or their
evening schedules; they are programming us. We use the dial to select
which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. This
is not so dangerous in itself; but the less understanding and control
we have over exactly what is fed to us through the tube, the more
vulnerable we are to the whims of our programmers.

For most of us, what goes on in the television set is magic. Before
the age of VCRs and camcorders it was even more so. The creation and
broadcast of a television program was a magic act. Whoever has his
image in that box must be special. Back in the 1960s, Walter Cronkite
used to end his newscast with the assertion: "and that's the way it
is". It was his ability to appear in the magic box that gave him the
tremendous authority necessary to lay claim to the absolute truth.

I have always recoiled when this rhetorical advantage is exploited by
those who have the power to monopolise a medium. Consider, for
example, a scene in the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi.
Luke and Hans Solo have landed on an alien moon and are taken prisoner
by a tribe of little furry creatures called Ewoks. In an effort to win
their liberation, Luke's two robots tell the Ewoks the story of their
heroes' struggle against the dark forces of the Empire. C3PO, the
golden android, relates the tale while little R2D2 projects
holographic images of battling spaceships. The Ewoks are dazzled by
R2's special effects and engrossed in C3PO's tale: the how and the
what. They are so moved by the story that they not only release their
prisoners but fight a violent war on their behalf! What if the
Empire's villainous protector, Darth Vader, had arrived on the alien
moon first and told his side of the story, complete with his own
special effects?

Television programming communicates through stories and it influences
us through its seemingly magical capabilities. The programmer creates
a character we like and with whom we can identify. As a series of plot
developments bring that character into some kind of danger, we follow
him and within us a sense of tension arises.

This is what Aristotle called the rising arc of dramatic action. The
storyteller brings the character, and his audience, into as much
danger as we can tolerate before inventing a solution, the rescue,
allowing us all to breathe a big sigh of relief. Back in Aristotle's
day, this solution was called Deus ex machina (God from the machine).
One of the Greek gods would literally descend on a mechanism from the
rafters and save the day. In an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the
miraculous solution might take the form of a new, super-powered laser
gun. In a commercial, the solution is, of course, the product being
advertised.

TV commercials have honed this storytelling technique into the perfect
30-second package. A man is at work when his wife calls to tell him
she's crashed the car. The boss comes in to tell him he just lost a
big account, his bank statement shows he's in the red and his
secretary quits. Now his head hurts. We've followed the poor guy all
the way up Aristotle's arc of rising tension. We can feel the
character's pain. What can he do? He opens the top desk drawer and
finds his bottle of Brand A Pain Reliever and swallows the pills He
swallows the pills while an awe-inspiring hi-tech animation
demonstrates the way the pill passes through his body. He, and us, are
released from our torture.

In this passive and mysterious medium, when we are brought into a
state of vicarious tension, we are more likely to swallow whichever
pill and accept whatever solution that the storyteller offers.


Interactivity: the birth of resistance

Interactive media changed this equation. Imagine if your father were
watching that aspirin commercial back in 1955 on his old console
television. Even if he suspected that he was watching a commercial
designed to put him in a state of anxiety, in order to change the
channel and remove himself from the externally imposed tension, he
would have to move the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lever on his
recliner, walk up to the television set and manually turn the dial.
All that amounts to a somewhat rebellious action for a bleary-eyed
television viewer. To sit through the rest of the commercial, however
harrowing, might cost him only a tiny quantity of human energy until
the pills come out of the drawer. The brain, being lazy, chooses the
path of least resistance and Dad sits through the whole commercial.

Flash forward to 1990. A kid with a remote control in his hand makes
the same mental calculation: an ounce of stress, or an infinitesimally
small quantity of human effort to move his finger an eighth of an inch
and he's free! The remote control gives viewers the power to remove
themselves from the storyteller's spell with almost no effort. Watch a
kid (or observe yourself) next time he channel surfs from program to
program. He's not changing the channel because he's bored, but he
surfs away when he senses that he's being put into an imposed state of
tension.

The remote control breaks down the what. It allows a viewer to
deconstruct the content of television media, and avoid falling under
the programmer's spell. If a viewer does get back around the dial to
watch the end of a program, he no longer has the same captivated
orientation. Kids with remotes aren't watching television, they are
watching the television (the physical machine) playing 'television',
putting it through its paces.

Just as the remote control allowed a generation to deconstruct the
content of television, the video game joystick demystified its
technology. Think back to the first time you ever saw a video game. It
was probably Pong, that primitive black and white depiction of a
ping-pong table, with a square on either side of the screen
representing the bat and a tiny white dot representing the ball. Now,
remember the exhilaration you felt at playing that game for the very
first time. Was it because you had always wanted an effective
simulation of ping-pong? Did you celebrate because you could practice
without purchasing an entire table and installing it in the basement?
Of course not. You were celebrating the simple ability to move the
pixels on the screen for the first time. It was a moment of
revolution! The screen was no longer the exclusive turf of the
television broadcasters.

Thanks to the joystick, as well as the subsequent introduction of the
VCR and camcorder, we were empowered to move the pixels ourselves. The
TV was no longer magical. Its functioning had become transparent. Just
as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct the content of
storytelling, the joystick allowed the audience to demystify the
technology through which these stories were being told.

Finally, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed a receive-only
monitor into a portal. Packaged programming was no longer any more
valuable, or valid, than the words we could type ourselves. The
addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. We
were no longer dependent on the content of Rupert Murdoch or corporate
TV stations, but could create and disseminate our own content. The
internet revolution was a do-it-yourself revolution. We had
deconstructed the content of media's stories, demystified its modes of
transmission and learned to do it all for ourselves.

These three stages of development: deconstruction of content,
demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or
participatory authorship are the three steps through which a
programmed populace returns to autonomous thinking, action and
collective self-determination.


Chapter 2

        The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash

New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual
contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged
content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took
the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.

The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2).
People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of
financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email
program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users.
The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP
email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this
shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois
at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was
first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was
Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker
groups around the world.

Invariably, the software applications developed by this community
stressed communication over mere data retrieval. They were egalitarian
in design. IRC chats and USENET groups, for example, present every
contributor's postings in the same universal ASCII text. The internet
was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into
the keyboard as reading what was on screen. It is as if the internet's
early developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting
by a few but for the expression of the many.

People became the content, a shift that had implications not just for
the online community but for society as a whole. The notion of a group
of people working together for a shared goal rather than financial
self-interest was quite startling to Westerners whose lives had been
organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving
personal security. The internet was considered sexy simply because
young people took an interest in it. People who developed internet
applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their
antics were often equated with those of Wild West outlaws, hippies,
Situationists and even communists.

But their organisation model was much more complex and potentially
far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. Many of
these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered
themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. Indeed, many new
models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were
developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of
military technology. A US government policy requiring all firms
working under Defense Department contracts to test their employees'
blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection
between most Silicon Valley firms and the majority of the fledgling
computer counterculture. (In fact, of all the Silicon Valley firms,
only Sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on
its employees.)

Whatever the applications envisioned for the communication technology
being developed, the operating principles of the finished networking
solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to create
them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective
self-determination.

Online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. On the West Coast
in the late 1980s one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Stewart Brand
(now co-founder of the prestigious Global Business Network), conceived
and implemented an online bulletin board called The Well (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link). Within two years thousands of users had joined the
dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing their deepest
hopes and fears with one another. Famous scientists, authors,
philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in order to
develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone. Meanwhile as
the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a distributed
system called USENET began to proliferate. These were absolutely
self-organising discussions about thousands of different topics. They
themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and
patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in
collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural
divides.


The Backlash

These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote,
joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as
usual. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that families with
internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less
television per week. Even more frightening to those who depended on
the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were
sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free!
Software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift
economy based on community and mutual self-interest. People were
turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they
didn't have to pay for. Worse, they were watching fewer commercials.
Something had to be done. And it was.

It is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the
mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet and
the culture it spawned. Certainly, the many executives of media
conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and I for advice throughout
the 1990s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of interactive
culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments. They were
chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television programming, but
they hoped this shift could be managed and ultimately exploited. While
many existing content industries, such as the music recording
industry, sought to put both individual companies and entire new
categories out of business (such as Napster and other peer-to-peer
networks), the great majority of executives did not want to see the
internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government,
concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption
technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the
early internet's new model of open collaboration.

Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media
conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their
conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive
technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural
development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner,
Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or
simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.

The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not
orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose
almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to
the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if
misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more
unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat
to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects
of the remote, the joystick and the mouse.

Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates
declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True
enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many
hours in a day during which potential audience members might be
viewing a program. These units of human time became known as
eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites
'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an
advertisement.

Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was
accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of
young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated
with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called
Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were
(much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real
reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages
were even considered.

The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early
interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development
of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer
users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored
information and launched programs, later operating systems such as
Windows 95 put more barriers in place. Although these operating
systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users
from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes. Now,
to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. What better
metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer? Computer
literacy no longer means being able to program a computer, but merely
knowing how to use software such as Microsoft Office.

Finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was
replaced by the new value of commerce. The communications age was
rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never
really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating
with other people. The difference was that information, or content,
unlike real human interaction, could be bought and sold. It was a
commodity. People would pay, it was thought, for horoscopes, stock
prices and magazine articles. When selling information online didn't
work, businesspeople instead turned to selling real products online.
Horoscope.com and online literary journals gave way to Pets.com and
online bookstores. The e-commerce boom was ignited. Soon the internet
became the World Wide Web. Its opaque and image-heavy interfaces made
it increasingly one-way and read-only, more conducive to commerce than
communication. The internet was reduced to a direct marketing
platform.


The burst of the bubble and the re-emergence of community

Few e-commerce companies made any money selling goods, but the idea
that they could was all that mattered. When actual e-commerce didn't
work, the internet was rebranded yet again as an investment platform.
The Web was to be the new portal through which the middle class could
invest in the stock market. And which stocks were they to invest in?
Internet stocks, of course! Like any good pyramid scheme, everyone was
in on it. Or at least they thought they were.

News stories about online communities such as The Well, or even
discussion groups for breast cancer survivors were soon overshadowed
by those about daring young entrepreneurs launching
multi-million-dollar IPOs (Initial Price Offerings of formerly private
stock on public exchanges such as the NYSE or NASDAQ.) Internet
journalism, written by option-holding employees of media
conglomerates, moved from the culture section to the business pages
and the dot.com pyramid scheme became the dominant new media story.

A medium born out of the ability to break through packaged stories was
now being used to promote a new, equally dangerous one: the great
pyramid. A smart kid writes a business plan. He finds a few 'angel'
investors to back him up long enough to land some first-level
investors. Below them on the pyramid are several more rounds of
investors, until the investment bank gets involved. Another few levels
of investors buy in until the decision is made to go public. Of
course, by this point, the angels and other early investors are
executing their exit strategy. It used be known as a carpet bag. In
any case they're gone and the investing public is left holding the
soon-to-be-worthless shares.

Tragically, but perhaps luckily, the dot.com bubble burst along with
the story being used to keep it inflated. The entire cycle, the birth
of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the
first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of
stories to the technologies through which they are disseminated. And
the whole ordeal may have given us an opportunity for renaissance.

Back here in the real world, the internet is doing just fine. Better
than ever. The World Wide Web, whose rather opaque platform ascended
primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been
adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically
primitive functions. USENET discussions have been reborn as web-based
bulletin boards such as Slashdot, and Metafilter. Personal daily
diaries known as weblogs have multiplied by the thousands. Blogger.com
provides a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create
a weblog, automatically add content to a Web site or organise links,
commentary and open discussions. In the short time Blogger has been
available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of
thousands of users. These people don't simply surf the Web. They are
now empowered to create it.

Rising from the graveyard of failed business plans, these
collaborative communities of authors and creators are the true
harbingers of cultural and perhaps political renaissance.


Chapter 3

                     The opportunity for renaissance

The birth of the internet was interpreted by many as a revolution.
Those of us in the counterculture saw in the internet an opportunity
to topple the storytellers who had dominated our politics, economics,
society and religion - in short our very reality - and to replace
their stories with those of our own. It was a beautiful and exciting
sentiment, but one as based in a particular narrative as any other.
Revolutions simply replace one story with another. The capitalist
narrative is replaced by that of the communist; the religious
fundamentalist's replaced by the gnostic's. The means may be
different, but the rewards are the same. So is the exclusivity of
their distribution. That's why they're called revolutions - we're just
going in a circle.

This is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of
interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we
have the ability to step out of the story altogether. Renaissances are
historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. People in a
variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability
to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is
the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a
dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our
understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence
changes. The stories we have been using no longer work.

Take a look back at what we think of as the original Renaissance; the
one we were taught in school. What were the main leaps in perspective?
One example is the use of perspective in painting. Artists developed
the technique of the vanishing point and with it the ability to paint
three-dimensional representations on two-dimensional surfaces. The
character of this innovation is subtle but distinct. It is not a
technique for working in three dimensions; it is not that artists
moved from working on canvas to working with clay. Rather, perspective
painting allows an artist to relate between dimensions: representing
three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane.

Another example is calculus, another key renaissance invention.
Calculus is a mathematical system that allows us to derive one
dimension from another. It is a way of describing curves with the
language of lines, and spheres with the language of curves. The leap
from arithmetic to calculus was not just a leap in our ability to work
with higher dimensional objects, but a leap in our ability to relate
the objects of one dimension to the objects of another. It was a shift
in perspective that allowed us to orient ourselves to mathematical
objects from beyond the context of their own dimensionality.

The other main features of the Renaissance permitted similar shifts in
perspective. Circumnavigation of the globe changed our relationship
between the planet we live on and the maps we used to describe it. The
maps still worked, they just described a globe instead of a plane.
Anyone hoping to navigate a course had to be able to relate a
two-dimensional map to the new reality of a three-dimensional planet.

Similarly, the invention of moveable type and the printing press
changed the relationship of author and audience to text. The creation
of a manuscript was no longer a one-pointed affair. The creation of
the first manuscript still was, but now it could be replicated and
distributed to everyone. It was still one story, but now was subject
to a multiplicity of individual perspectives. This innovation alone
changed the landscape of religion in the Western World. Individual
interpretation of the Bible led to the collapse of Church authority
and the unilateral nature of its decrees. Everyone demanded his or her
own relationship to the story.


Our electronic renaissance

In all these cases, people experienced a very particular shift in
their relationship to, and understanding of, dimensions. Understood
this way, a renaissance is a moment of reframing. We step out of the
frame as it is currently defined and see the whole picture in a new
context. We can then play by new rules.

It is akin to the experience of a computer game player. At first, a
gamer will play a video or computer game by the rules. He'll read the
manual, if necessary, then move through the various levels of the
game. Mastery of the game, at this stage, means getting to the end:
making it to the last level, surviving, becoming the most powerful
character or, in the case of a simulation game, designing and
maintaining a thriving family, city or civilisation. For many gamers,
this is as far as it goes.

Some gamers, though - usually after they've mastered this level of
play - will venture out onto the internet in search of other fans or
user groups. There, they will gather the cheat codes that can be used
to acquire special abilities within the game, such as invisibility or
an infinite supply of ammunition. When the gamer returns to the game
with his secret codes, is he still playing the game or is he cheating?
From a renaissance perspective he is still playing the game, albeit a
different one. His playing field has grown from the CD on which the
game was shipped to the entire universe of computers where these
secret codes and abilities can be discussed and shared. He is no
longer playing the game, but a meta-game. The inner game world is
still fun, but it is distanced by the gamer's new perspective, much in
the way we are distanced from the play-within-a-play in one of
Shakespeare's comedies or dramas. And the meta-theatrical convention
gives us new perspective on the greater story as well. Gaming, as a
metaphor but also as a lived experience, invites a renaissance
perspective on the world in which we live. Perhaps gamers and their
game culture have been as responsible as anyone for the rise in
expressly self-similar forms of television like Beavis and Butt-head,
The Simpsons and Southpark. The joy of such programs is not the relief
of reaching the climax of the linear narrative, but rather the
momentary thrill of making connections. The satisfaction is in
recognising which bits of media are being satirised at any given
moment. It is an entirely new perspective on television, where
programs exist more in the form of Talmudic commentary: perspectives
on perspectives on perspectives. We watch screens within screens,
constantly reminded, almost as in a Brecht play, of the artifice of
storytelling. It is as if we are looking at a series of proscenium
arches, and are being invited as an audience to consider whether we
are within a proscenium arch ourselves.

The great Renaissance was a simple leap in perspective. Instead of
seeing everything in one dimension, we came to realise there was more
than one dimension on which things were occurring. Even the
Elizabethan world picture, with its concentric rings of authority -
God, king, man, animals - reflects this new found way of contending
with the simultaneity of action of many dimensions at once. A gamer
stepping out onto the internet to find a cheat code certainly reaches
this first renaissance's level of awareness and skill.

But what of the gamer who then learns to program new games for
himself? He, we might argue, has stepped out of yet another frame into
our current renaissance. He has deconstructed the content of the game,
demystified the technology of its interface and now feels ready to
open the codes and turn the game into a do-it-yourself activity. He
has moved from a position of a receiving player to that of a
deconstructing user. He has assumed the position of author, himself.
This leap to authorship is precisely the character and quality of the
dimensional leap associated with today's renaissance.

The evidence of today's renaissance is at least as profound as that of
the one that went before. The16th century saw the successful
circumnavigation of the globe via the seas. The 20th century saw the
successful circumnavigation of the globe from space. The first
pictures of earth from space changed our perspective on this sphere
forever. In the same century, our dominance over the planet was
confirmed not just through our ability to travel around it, but to
destroy it. The atomic bomb (itself the result of a rude dimensional
interchange between submolecular particles) gave us the ability to
author the globe's very destiny. Now, instead of merely being able to
comprehend 'God's creation', we could actively control it. This is a
new perspective.

We also have our equivalent of perspective painting, in the invention
of the holograph. The holograph allows us to represent not just three,
but four dimensions on a two-dimensional plate. When the viewer walks
past a holograph she can observe the three-dimensional object over a
course of time. A bird can flap its wings in a single picture. But,
more importantly for our renaissance's purposes, the holographic plate
itself embodies a new renaissance principle. When the plate is smashed
into hundreds of pieces, we do not find that one piece contains the
bird's wing, and another piece the bird's beak. Each piece of the
plate contains a faint image of the entire subject. When the pieces
are put together, the image achieves greater resolution. But each
piece contains a representation of the totality. This leap in
dimensional understanding is now informing disciplines as diverse as
brain anatomy and computer programming.

Our analogy to calculus is the development of systems theory, chaos
math and the much-celebrated fractal. Confronting non-linear equations
on their own terms for the first time, mathematicians armed with
computers are coming to new understandings of the way numbers can be
used to represent the complex relationships between dimensions.
Accepting that the surfaces in our world, from coastlines to clouds,
exhibit the properties of both two and three-dimensional objects (just
what is the surface area of a cloud?) they came up with ways of
working with and representing objects with fractional dimensionality.

Using fractals and their equations, we can now represent and work with
objects from the natural world that defy Cartesian analysis. 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 passive 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 latitude 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 shore, 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 competition. 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 platitudes such as 'all is one' or 'I am God'. Those
that rise above such clich, such as the more mystical tractates of
Ezekiel or Julian of Norwich, defy rational analysis 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, institutions 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 God's relationship
to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic
moment as anything but the wrath of God, they blamed the feminists,
homosexuals 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 God,
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 Nazi 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 institutions
for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and
synagogues looking for reassurance, 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
God-forbid, holy posture. Rather than retreating into the simplistic
and childlike, if temporarily reassuring, belief that the answers have
already been written along with the entire human story, we must
resolve ourselves to participate 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
reassure 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 identity. 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 bumps 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 associated 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 participate 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 masses 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
competition, 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 mass 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 reassuring
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
mediaspace. The notion of remote high leverage points (a butterfly
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.

These models for interactivity and coordinated behavior may have been
launched in the laboratory, but they were first embraced by
countercultures. Psychedelics enthusiasts (people who either ingested
substances such as LSD or found themselves inspired by the art,
writing and expression of the culture associated with these drugs)
found themselves drawn to technologies that were capable of
reproducing both the visual effects of their hallucinations as well as
the sense of newfound connection with others.

Similarly, the computer and Internet galvanized certain strains of
both the pagan and the grassroots 'do-it-yourself' countercultures as
the 'cyberpunk' movement, which was dedicated to altering reality
through technology, together. Only now are the social effects of these
technologies being considered by political scientists for what they
may teach us about public opinion and civic engagement.

The underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and
in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually
beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. The term
scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a
community is 'emergence'.

As we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a
colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top:
the queen. It turns out that this is not the way individuals in the
complex insect society know what to do. It is not a hierarchical
system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. The
amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a
collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. In a sense,
it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. The
collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon.

Likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all
around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. Most of the
time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their
business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for
food and moving about on its own. But when conditions worsen, food
becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct
creatures coalesce into a single being. The large mass of slime moves
about, amassing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more
hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual
creatures. The collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned
through millennia of evolution. But it is only activated when the
group is under threat. The processes allowing for these alternative
strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only
beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in
understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations.

At first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the
behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap
backwards. An individual human consciousness is infinitely more
advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. But
coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly
structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical
precursors to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, thanks
to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks,
we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body
politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and
maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking
premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it.

This is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open
access to the internet in the early 1990s would herald a new era of
teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the
collective will into public affairs. The emergence of a networked
culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion
and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political
system wherever it spread.

But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former Clinton
pollster Dick Morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat
effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new
versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next
phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites
amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the
gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the
day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy
to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for
a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally
flawed vision of push-button politics. That's the vision shared by
most teledemocracy champions today.

So what went wrong? Why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely
networked engagement in public affairs?


Interference in the emergence

First, by casting itself in the role of cultural and institutional
watchdog, governments, particularly in the United States, became
internet society's enemy. Though built with mostly US government
dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be
impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of
information, images and ideas that the network spread. The
government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of pornography
and the fear of terrorism. The result was a tirade of ill-conceived
legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. New decency
laws aimed at curbing pornography (which were ultimately struck down)
elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. Unsubstantiated and
bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law
enforcement into the Keystone Cops of cyberspace and the US Justice
Department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most
valuable members. Misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing
the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries
turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (This
tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven
internet is contrasted by the early participation of the UK's Labour
government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as
community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially
exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists.
Of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent UK internet
industry, which saw its slow start compared with the US and other
developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and
anti-competitive funding policies.)

So, the US government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture.
Every effort was made to diminish state control over the global
telecommunications infrastructure. The internet itself, a government
project, soon fell into private hands (Internic, and eventually
industry consortiums). For just as a bacteria tends to grow unabated
without the presence of fungus, so too does corporate power grow
without the restrictive influence of government.

This in itself may not have been so terrible. E-commerce certainly has
its strengths and the economic development associated with a
profit-driven internet creates new reasons for new countries to get
their populations online. But an interactive marketplace is not
fertile soil for networked democracy or public participation. As we
have seen, the objective of marketers online is to reduce
interactivity, shorten consideration and induce impulsive purchases.

That's why the software and interfaces developed for the commercial
webspace tended to take user's hands off the keyboard and onto the
mouse. The most successful programs, for them, lead people to the
'buy' button and let them use the keyboard only to enter their credit
card numbers and nothing else. The internet that grew from these
development priorities, dominated by the World Wide Web instead of
discussion groups, treats individuals more as consumers than as
citizens. True, consumers can vote with their dollars, and that in a
way feels something like direct communication with the entity in
charge - the corporation. But this is not a good model for government.

Sadly, though, it's the model being used to implement these first
efforts at teledemocracy. And it's why these efforts suffer from the
worst symptoms of consumer culture: they focus on short-term ideals,
they encourage impulsive, image-driven decision-making and they aim to
convince people that their mouse-clicking is some kind of direct
action. Anyone arguing against such schemes must be an enemy of the
public will, an elitist. Teledemocracy is a populist revival, after
all, isn't it?

Perhaps. But the system of representation on which most democracies
were built was intended to buffer the effects of such populist
revivals. Although they may not always (or even frequently) live up to
it, our representatives' role is to think beyond short-term interests
of the majority. They are elected to protect the rights of minority
interests, the sorts of people and groups who are now increasingly
cast as 'special interest groups'.


Achieving the promise of network democracy

The true promise of a network-enhanced democracy lies not in some form
of web-driven political marketing survey, but in restoring and
encouraging broader participation in some of the internet's more
interactive forums. Activists of all stripes now have the freedom and
facility to network and organise across vast geographical, national,
racial and even ideological differences. And they've begun to do so.
The best evidence we have that something truly new is going on is our
mainstream media's inability to understand it. Major American news
outlets are still incapable of acknowledging the tremendous breadth of
the WTO protest movement because of the multiplicity of cooperating
factions within it. Unable to draw out a single, simplified rationale
that encompasses the logic of each and every protestor, traditional
media storytellers conclude that there is no logic at all. (Just as I
am writing this section, a newscaster on CNBC, reporting from a WTO
demonstration, is condescendingly laughing at the word 'neo-liberal'
on a placard, believing that the teen protestor holding it has
invented the term!) In actuality, the multi-faceted rationale
underlying the WTO protests confirm both their broad based support, as
well as the quite evolved capacity of its members to coalesce across
previously unimaginable ideological chasms. Indeed, these obsolete
ideologies are themselves falling away as a new dynamic emerges from
nascent political organism.

For politicians who mean to lead more effectively in such an
environment, the interactive solution may well be a new emphasis on
education, where elected leaders use the internet to engage with
constituents and justify the decisions they have made on our behalf,
rather than simply soliciting our moment-to-moment opinions.
Politicians cannot hope to reduce the collective will of their entire
constituencies into a series of yes or no votes on the issues put
before them. They can, however, engage the public in an ongoing
exploration and dialogue on issues and their impacts, and attempt to
provide a rationale for their roles in the chamber in which they
participate. They must accept that their constituents are capable of
comprehending legislative bodies as functioning organisms. In doing
so, politicians will relieve themselves of the responsibility for
hyping or spinning their decisions and instead use their time with the
public to engage them in the evolution of the legislative process.
Like teachers and religious leaders, whose roles as authority figures
have been diminished by their students' and congregants' direct access
to formerly secret data, politicians too must learn to function more
like partners than parents.

In doing so, they will leave the certainty of 20th century political
ideologies behind, and admit to the open-ended and uncertain process
of societal co-authorship. Whatever model they choose must shun static
ideologies, and instead acknowledge the evolutionary process through
which anything resembling progress is made.


Chapter 5

              Open source: Opening up the network democracy

One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which
legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the
'open source' software movement. Faced with the restrictive practices
of the highly competitive software developers, and the pitifully
complex and inefficient operating systems such as Microsoft Windows
that this process produces, a global community of programmers decided
to find a better development philosophy for themselves. They founded
one based in the original values of the shareware software development
community, concluding that proprietary software is crippled by the
many efforts to keep its underlying code a secret and locked down.
Many users don't even know that a series of arbitrary decisions have
been made about the software they use. They don't know it can be
changed. They simply adjust.

By publishing software along with its source code, open source
developers encourage one another to correct each other's mistakes, and
improve upon each other's work. Rather than competing they
collaborate, and don't hide the way their programs work. As a result,
everyone is invited to change the underlying code and the software can
evolve with the benefit of a multiplicity of points of view.

Of course this depends on a lot of preconditions. Participants in an
open source collaboration must be educated in the field they are
developing. People cannot expect to be able to understand and edit the
code underlying any system until they have taken the time and spent
the necessary energy to penetrate it. Very often, as in the case of
computer software, this also depends on open standards so that the
code is accessible to all. But it is also true of many other systems.
If those who hope to engage in the revision of our societal models are
not educated by those who developed what is already in place, they
will spend most of their time inefficiently reverse-engineering
existing structures in an effort to understand them. Progress can only
be made if new minds are educated in the current languages, exposed to
the rationale for all decisions that have been made and invited to
test new methods and structures.

Those who are invited to re-evaluate our social and political
structures in such a way will stand the best chance of gaining the
perspective necessary to see the emergent properties of such systems,
as well as avenues for active participation in them. If no one is
invited then the first harbingers of emergent paradigms will be those
who have been motivated to train themselves in spite of the obstacles
set in front of them by those who hope to maintain exclusive control
over the code. The new models they come up with may, as a result, end
up looking much more like old-style revolutions than true
renaissances.

The implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig
deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth
it in the new context of our networked reality. It will require us to
assume, at least temporarily, that nothing at all is too sacred to be
questioned, re-interpreted and modified. But in doing so, we will be
enabled to bring democracy through its current crisis and into its
next stage of development.

But, like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not
impossible to control once they are unleashed. Once people are invited
to participate in, say, the coding of a software program, they begin
to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for
discussion. They used to see software as an established and inviolable
thing - something married to the computer. A given circumstance. With
an open source awareness, they are free to discover that the codes of
the software have been arranged by people, sometimes with agendas that
hadn't formerly been apparent. One of the most widespread realizations
accompanying the current renaissance is that a lot of what has been
taken for granted as 'hardware' is, in fact, 'software' capable of
being reprogrammed. They tend to begin to view everything that was
formerly set in stone - from medical practices to the Bible - as
social constructions and subject to revision. Likewise as public
awareness of emergence theory increases, people are beginning to
observe their world differently, seeing its principles in evidence,
everywhere. Formerly esoteric subjects such as urban design or
monetary policy become much more central as the public comes to
recognize the power of these planning specialties to establish the
rules through which society actually comes into existence.

This marks a profound shift in our relationship to law and governance.
We move from simply following the law, to understanding the law, to
actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to
understanding the map, to drawing our own. At the very least, we are
aware that the choices made on our behalf have the ability to shape
our future reality and that these choices are not ordained but
implemented by people just like us.

Unlike the 1960s, when people questioned their authorities in the hope
of replacing them (revolution), today's activists are forcing us to
re-evaluate the premise underlying top-down authority as an organising
principle (renaissance). Bottom-up organisational models, from slime
mould to WTO protests, seem better able to address today's
participatory sensibility. Indeed, the age of irony may be over, not
just because the American dream has been interrupted by terrorism and
economic shocks but because media-savvy Westerners are no longer
satisfied with understanding current events through the second-hand
cynical musings of magazine journalists. They want to engage more
directly and they see almost every set of rules as up for
reinterpretation and re-engineering.


Applying the theory

So what happens when the open source development model is applied to,
say, the economy? In the United States, it would mean coming to
appreciate the rules of the economic game for what they are: rules.
Operating in a closed source fashion, the right to actually produce
currency is held exclusively by the Federal Reserve. Quietly removed
from any relationship to real money such as gold or silver by Richard
Nixon in the early 1970s, US currency now finds its value in pure
social construction. Whether or not we know it, we all participate in
the creation of its value by competing for dollars against one
another. For example, when a people or businesses borrows money from
the bank (an agent, in a sense, of the Federal Reserve) in the form of
a mortgage they must eventually pay the bank back two or three times
the original borrowed amount. These additional funds are not printed
into existence, but must be won from others in the closed source
system. Likewise, every time a student wants to buy one of my books,
he must go out into the economy and earn or win some of these
arbitrarily concocted tokens, US currency, in order to do it. Our
transaction is brokered by the Federal Reserve, who has a monopoly on
this closed source currency.

Meanwhile, the actual value of this currency, and the effort required
to obtain it, is decided much more by market speculators than its
actual users. Speculation accounts for over 90 percent of US currency
transactions in any given day. By this measure, real spending and the
real economy are a tiny and secondary function of money: the dog is
being wagged by its tail.

What if currency were to become open source? In some communities it
already is. They are not printing counterfeit bills but catalysing
regional economies through the use of local currencies, locally
created 'scrip' that can be exchanged throughout a particular region
in lieu of Federal Reserve notes or real cash. The use of these
currencies, as promoted by organisations such as the E.F. Schumacher
Society, has been shown to accelerate the exchange of goods and
services in a region by increasing the purchasing power of its
members. There is no Federal Reserve surcharge on the creation and
maintenance of cash, and no danger of government currency depreciation
due to matters that have nothing to do with actual production and
consumption.

Like any other bottom-up system, the creation of local currency
develops transactional models appropriate to the scale of the actual
transactions and the communities in which they occur. While Federal
notes, or Euros for that matter, might be appropriate for a merchant
to use across state or national boundaries, local currencies make for
greater fluidity and accountability between members of the same
community.

Thanks to the dynamic relationships permitted in a networked society,
we need not choose between local and closed currencies. A
post-renaissance perspective on economic issues has room for both to
exist, simultaneously functioning on different orders of magnitude.

In a society modelled on open source ideals, 'think globally, act
locally' becomes more than just a catch phrase. The relationship of an
individual or local community's action to the whole system can be
experienced quite readily. For example, an open source software
developer who writes just a few useful lines of code, say the protocol
for enabling infrared communications to work on the Linux operating
system, will see his or her contribution interpolated into the kernel
of the operating system and then spread to everyone who uses it. He
has done more than distributed a line of computer code. He has also
enabled thousands of people using Linux to connect cell phones, PDA's
and other devices to their computers for the first time. And he did it
from his home, in his spare time.

Likewise, a developer who leaves a security hole open in a piece of
software quite dramatically sees the results of his action when a
software 'worm', written by a computer criminal, penetrates the mail
files of thousands of users, sending replicates of itself throughout
the internet, sometimes for years to come.

Members of an open source community are able to experience how their
actions affect the whole. As a result, they become more conscious of
how their moment-to-moment decisions can be better aligned with the
larger issues with which they are concerned. A programmer concerned
with energy consumption and the environment might take time to
consider how a particular screen-saver routine impacts the total
energy consumption pattern of a particular monitor. The programmer
already understands that if the code is used on millions of machines,
each effort to reduce energy consumption by a minuscule amount can
amplify into tremendous energy savings. (Indeed, it has been
calculated that the energy required to power all the televisions and
computers in America that are currently in sleep mode equals the
output of an entire average-size power plant.)

The experience of open source development, or even just the acceptance
of its value as a model for others, provides real-life practice for
the deeper change in perspective required of us if we are to move into
a more networked and emergent understanding of our world. The local
community must be experienced as a place to implement policies,
incrementally, that will eventually have an effect on the whole. For
example, the environmental advocate who worries about the Brazilian
rainforest will quit smoking himself before racing off to the next
rally held to save the lungs of the planet. The woman organising
against genetic engineering in agriculture will refuse to let her
children eat at McDonalds, even if it requires them to bring their own
lunch to a friend's birthday party. A consistency between belief and
behaviour becomes the only way to make our designs on reality real.


Closed source: no justice, no power

An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy
will force us, or allow us, to confront the issues of our time more
directly. Using the logic of a computer programmer, when we find we
can't solve a problem by attacking one level of societal software, we
proceed to the next level down. If necessary we dig all the way down
to the machine language.

For instance, today's misunderstood energy crisis provides a glaring
example of the liability of closed source policymaking. The Western
World is unnecessarily addicted to fossil fuels and other energy
commodities not because alternative energy sources are unavailable,
but because alternative business models for energy production cannot
be fully considered without disrupting the world's most powerful
corporations and economies. It really is as simple as that.

Solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources are quite ready
for deployment in a wide variety of applications. They are not
encouraged, not through tax policies nor through venture capital,
because they don't make sense to an industry and economy that has
based its business model on the exploitation of fixed and precious
resources: A closed source model. As a result, we are suffering
through a potentially irreversible environmental crisis, as well as a
geopolitical conflict that is already spinning wildly out of control.

The maintenance of such imbalances is dependent on closed source
processes. The power of puppet dictators in the oil-producing Middle
East is perpetuated not just by US warplanes, but by their own
economies which derive all their wealth through the exploitation of
resources. Were these nations required to compete in the global
marketplace through the production of goods or services, then a
passive, uneducated population would no longer bring their monarchs
the wealth to which they are accustomed. As it is the peasants need
only be educated enough to dig. And the closed source mentality
travels all the way around the distribution cycle. Nowhere is the
closed source imperative of an oil-based economy more evident than in
the appointment, by America's judicial branch (though not its
population), of a President to represent the oil industry.


                               Conclusion

The new transparency offered by the interactive mediaspace allows even
the casually interested reader to learn how the West's foreign and
domestic policies have been twisted to a perverse caricature of
themselves. I do not wish here to beat the drum for a partisan
revolution. Instead, I am to demonstrate how a growing willingness to
engage with the underlying code of the democratic process could
eventually manifest in a widespread call for revisions to our legal,
economic and political structures on an unprecedented scale, except in
the cases of full-fledged revolution. Transparency in media makes
information available to those who never had access to it before.
Access to media technology empowers those same people to discuss how
they might want to change the status quo. Finally, networking
technologies allow for online collaboration in the implementation of
new models, and the very real-world organisation of social activism
and relief efforts. The good news, for those within the power
structure today, is that we are not about to enter a phase of
revolution, but one of renaissance. We are heading not toward a
toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes,
but toward their reinvention in a new, participatory context. In a
sense, the people are becoming a new breed of wonk, capable of
engaging with government and power structures in an entirely new
fashion. The current regime, in the broadest sense, will have ended up
being the true and lasting one, if it can get its head and policies
around these renaissance modalities of increased dimensionality,
emergence, scalability and participation.

My advice? Don't beat them. Let them join you. Choose to believe that
the renaissance I am describing has already taken place. Instead of
looking forward to a day when justice will be won, declare that we are
living in a just world right now. Declare that we are simply fighting
for more justice.

Movements, as such, are obsolete. They are incompatible with a
renaissance sensibility because of the narrative style of their
intended unfolding. They yearn forward towards salvation in the manner
of utopians or fundamentalists: an increasing number of people are
becoming aware of how movements of all stripes justify tremendous
injustice in the name of that deferred future moment. People are
actually taken out of their immediate experience and their connection
to the political process as they put their heads down and do battle.
It becomes not worth believing in anything.

This is why we have to advocate living in the now in order to effect
any real change. The should be no postponement of joy. Once we start
down this path, there's can be no stopping. We begin to see the
unreality of money. We begin to see how 'salvation' has been traded in
for 'retirement' as the new ultimate goal for which Westerners suspend
their lives and their ethics. (People work for companies they hate,
and then invest in corporations whose ethics they detest, in order to
guarantee a good retirement). We see the artificial obstacles to
appropriate energy policy, international relations, urban planning and
affordable healthcare as what they are: artificial. Meanwhile, what we
can accomplish presents itself on a much more realistic scale when we
engage with it in the moment and on a local level.

Yes, political structures do need to be changed. But we may have to
let their replacements emerge from the myriad of new relationships
that begin to spawn once people are acting and communicating in the
present, and on a realistic scale, instead of talking about a
fictional future.

The underlying premise is still dependent on the notion of progress.
Indeed, things must get better or there's no point to any of it. But
our understanding of progress must be disengaged from the false goal
of growth, or the even more dangerous ideal of salvation. Our
understanding must be reconnected with the very basic measure of
social justice: how many people are able to participate?

Our marketing experts tell us that they are failing in their efforts
to advertise to internet users and cultural progressives because this
new and resistant psychographic simply wants to engage, authentically,
in social experiences. This should sound like good news to anyone who
authentically wants to extend our collective autonomy. This population
is made up not of customers to whom you must sell, or even
constituents to whom you must pander, but partners on whom you can
rely and with whom you can act.

Treat them as such, and you might be surprised by how much you get
done together.



1 Karen Armstrong, A History of God, (London: Vintage, 1999)

2 First Monday, The High-Tech Gift Economy, Richard Barbrook., 1998,
(http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/)

3 Douglas Rushkoff, Cyeria: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace,
(Flamingo, 1994)

4 Wired Magazine, Jul 1997 (see
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom_pr.html)



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