I suppose this is an opportune time to share the input I sent along to the Occupy National Gathering through their online component. It's not a comprehensive "this is exactly how society needs to work", but it is a suggestion for a next step towards a long-term, fundamental shift like what that TED talk describes. It's also my answer to every time someone has responded to my criticisms of the status quo with "what do you suggest?"
And I know it's badly in need of some editing. I wrote it in a more hurried fashion than I would have liked, but I was running out of time before the end of NatGat.
I have an idea for enacting change that is probably different from the usual Occupy discussion. It's not a call to some new radical trend or strategy for resistance or revolution. It's more that I want to point out a change that I believe is already happening, but which we need to more actively pursue.
Not that our social struggles, protests, and occasionally even revolutions aren't necessary. They bring relief to the desperate and heighten cultural self-awareness.
However, what we face in our modern day is the looming collapse of the systems which our lives have been based on for thousands of years, and the imminent explosion of consequences from having lived this way for so long. What I see is a final conflict between Centralization and Decentralization, and this runs right to the foundations on which civilization stands.
As soon as humanity began adopting sedentary lifestyles, we began centralizing. We pooled resources, divided labor according to specialties, and centralized decision-making power into authority figures who would dictate the allocation of labor and resources. I think that in the long run, this was a good thing. I will explain.
At this point, I think it's easier to describe this in analogy. Civilization is like a computer. Human beings are all bits of code interacting with each other. Our communications technology is the hardware that runs civilization. Our political-economic systems are operating systems. They determine how data is organized, and how resources are allocated. Because of hardware limitations, our operating systems throughout most of human history required centralization to function. Information travel was limited to word of mouth, physical documents, abstract signals, etc, so organic spread of information was inefficient. Every human being/bit of code couldn't consult every other bit of code in the course of every process.
So we developed hierarchies around leadership figures, who would act as central nodes for the dissemination of information and instruction. Instead of people learning what their collective goals, values, and standards of behavior were through casual interaction, they would get it through an authoritative hierarchy dedicated to systematically disseminating instructions.
Capitalism is just another operating system. Its unique feature is that it selects leadership figures by an organic, abstract procedure. Instead of people controlling resources because they are selected as leaders, people become leaders by controlling resources. A person does something that benefits others, and the operating system has built in feedback mechanisms to reward that person with more resources. Theoretically, this results in people who benefit others being given greater ability to bring even greater benefits to those around them.
But we know how that turned out in the end, right? When society is organized around these central nodes, malicious self-serving bits of code know exactly where they need to place themselves in order to gain control of the whole system. When the wrong people get into those positions, their influence becomes viral and infects the whole system. An economic system is no different from a political system, in that people are encouraged to compete for those central positions. The only thing that changes is the form of competition. In capitalism, the winners are those who figure out how to get the most return on the least investment, which is an adequate definition for both greed and profit at the same time. I don't need to preach too much on this subject, right? It's why we're all here.
However, it would have been impossible for us to organize all the infrastructure and technology that we have today without these operating systems of the past. We had a reason to put up with all of these inherent problems... until now.
Now the reasons we were willing to put up with the side-effects of Centralization are completely obsolete. We have mass communications. People on opposite sides of the world can communicate with each other almost instantaneously. We've designed information aggregators simultaneously visible to billions of people. We've reached a point where organic spread of information among a population (which I will hereafter refer to as "memetics") is actually faster than the spread of information down through a hierarchy, even when the hierarchy is taking advantage of the same technology. Mass communications has spread to a majority of the global population as well. It was estimated at the end of 2011 that there are 5.9 billion cell phone subscriptions among a global 7 billion people.
What we are doing is the equivalent of running Windows 1.0 on a cutting edge computer. The operating system doesn't know what to do with the resources that it has, and it's so inefficient that it's placing a self-destructive strain on its own hardware. This is that "unsustainability" buzz word that everyone has been so focused on.
Our response to this so far has been to reject progress, and further reinforce our centralization processes, resulting in a more and more unequal society.
For the longest time, I thought that changing this situation was going to be a matter of intense struggle, resistance, and even insurrection. I'm not thinking that way so much, anymore. I still think these things are important as a matter of survival in immediate terms, but it is not how real change is going to eventually take place.
For an example of real change, I've recently looked to the issue of online file sharing/piracy. This is not an activity that most people engage in out of principle. They do it because it just makes sense. The capability and infrastructure to do it is just there. It's not going to go away, because the cultural normalization of it is huge and growing, even as the various ideological debates relating to the issue rage on. I have my own convictions as to whether or not it is an immoral behavior, but I will keep those to myself for now. This is just an example of change that is occuring.
What is the difference between piracy and large-scale decentralized organization? The answer is we have built easily accessible infrastructure to enable the former, but not the latter. There's no reason we can't change this.
I propose that our way forward is to build a social media tool that facilitates infinitely scalable organization of people for as wide a range of practical purposes as possible, and is undertaken with a sophisticated understanding of internet memetics and information filtering.
If we build it, people will use it when it makes sense for them to do so. There's no need for ideological conversion or struggle. Just like piracy is destined to replace technologically outdated business models for media, this sort of tool has the potential to completely displace the way civilization functions.
The exact form that this could take is completely up for debate and I do not have all the knowledge and resources necessary to make it happen myself. To get things started, here's a bit of what I'm envisioning.
Something like a giant community messageboard/information aggregator. There are different types of posts you can make on it, and the visibility of those posts will distribute accordingly. You can post information that you simply think your community should be aware of, and it will be made visible to people who have either assigned themselves to that specific interest or who live within an appropriate geographic radius. Or you can post an idea for a project that can benefit yourself, someone else, or your community, or a specific need that you recognize as being unfulfilled for yourself/your community.
For example, if you post that the plumbing in your house is broken and you don't know how to fix it, that information can propagate to everyone within a reasonable distance who has plumbing listed as a skill. If you post that you think a road near where you live is in need of repairs, that post becomes visible to your immediate community and anyone who has knowledge of/tools for road repair within a larger distance. If you post that you think the world needs a cure for cancer, that's visible to the entire world as a major global project.
Then every post has tools for consensus decision making processes and practical discussion. People can upvote things that they believe to be important, downvote things that they don't like, or place a block on something that they believe should be stopped. A block can spawn a thread for discussion so that whatever issues can be resolved. A complex project will automatically spawn a small forum where participants can work out details. A cure for cancer scale project will generate a very large forum, but the users would probably go on to create their own infrastructure for dealing with that level of project.
People with accounts on this site can attach information to their profiles regarding what resources and skills they can contribute. There could also be a social credit score, where people can vouch for others who have had a positive effect on their communities. This could encourage those who most deserve it to be rewarded with more enthusiastic support from their communities in return.
What we would be doing here is generating an informal economy that is based on mutualism rather than competition. This is already happening in various ways on the internet. We have websites like freecycle, craigslist, and hundreds of others devoted to free exchange of resources or organization action on specific subjects. Internet culture in general is also embracing a more mutualistic culture, as open source software development continues to grow and file sharing communities have grown very mature about handling the innately interdependent nature of what they do. As our traditional economy continues to collapse and abandon greater portions of the population, it is only natural that those people will band together and find ways to make their lives work outside of those establishments. All these things just need to be taken to the next stage.
I also have a warning: Those in power know that exactly the change I've described is coming. They want to get the internet under control and turn it into a tool serving exclusively their own ends as soon as possible. We have to fight this. I honestly believe that the fate of humanity is directly tied to fate of internet freedom.
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Topic: Occupying Wallstreet (Read 296983 times)