[P2P-F] Fwd: The New Nationalism is a Media Environment

Fri Jul 8 05:00:49 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 7:15 PM
Subject: The New Nationalism is a Media Environment
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

Sorry, again, for the radio silence. It's been a busy few months, and while
I should have been sending more messages during this productive season
rather than fewer, it never quite works out that way.

In any case, I'm wrapping up all the speaking and media related exclusively
to economy, and beginning to talk more like a pure media theorist again.
The piece below (to be published this morning on Fast Company) has been
percolating for a couple of years now; I'm not sure if it's what I'm going
to be thinking and writing about next, but it likely points in that
direction.

*The New Nationalism Of Brexit And Trump Is A Product Of The Digital Age*
*TV may have been about global unity, but the Internet inspires the
opposite.*
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3061574/the-new-nationalism-of-brexit-and-trump-is-a-product-of-the-digital-age

Most of us thought digital technology would connect the whole world in new
ways. The Internet was supposed to break down those last boundaries between
what are essentially synthetic nation states and herald a new, global
community of peers.

National governments were considered extinct. Internet evangelist (and
Grateful Dead lyricist) John Barlow dismissed them in his Declaration of
Independence of Cyberspace 20 years ago: "I declare the global social space
we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to
impose on us."

But the Internet age has actually heralded the opposite result. We are not
advancing toward some new global society, but instead retreating back to
nationalism. Instead of moving toward a colors of Benetton racial
intermingling, we find many yearning for a fictional past when people like
to think our races were distinct, and all was well.

Welcome to the digital media environment. It is not a continuation of
television environment that preceded it, but an entirely distinct landscape
for human society, which engenders very different attitudes and behaviors.

A media environment is really just the kind of culture engendered by a
particular medium. The invention of text encouraged written history,
contracts, the Bible, and monotheism. The clock tower in medieval Europe
led to hourly wages and the time-is-money ethos of the industrial age.
Different media environments encourage us to play different roles and to
see, think, or act in particular ways.

The television era was about globalism, international cooperation, and the
open society. TV let people see for the first time what was happening in
other places, often live, as it happened. We watched the Olympics,
together, by satellite. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Even 9-11 was a
simultaneously experienced, global event.

Television connected us all and broke down national boundaries. Whether it
was the British Beatles playing on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York or the
California beach bodies of Baywatch broadcast in Pakistan, television
images penetrated national divisions. I interviewed Nelson Mandela in 1994,
and he told me that MTV and CNN had more to do with ending the divisions of
apartheid than any other force.

But today's digital media environment is different. At the height of his
media era, a telegenic Ronald Reagan could broadcast a speech in front of
the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin and demand that Gorbachev "tear down this
wall." Today’s ultimate digi-genic candidate Donald Trump demands that we
build a wall to protect us from Mexicans.

This is because the primary bias of the digital media environment is for
distinction. Analog media such as radio and television were continuous,
like the sound on a vinyl record. Digital media, by contrast, are made up
of many discrete samples. Likewise, digital networks break up our messages
into tiny packets, and reassemble them on the other end. Computer programs
all boil down to a series of 1’s and 0’s, on or off.

This logic trickles up to the platforms and apps we use. Everything is a
choice—from font size to the place on a "snap-to" grid. It’s either 12
point or 13 point, positioned here or there. Did you send the email or not?
There are no in-betweens.

So it’s no wonder that a society functioning on these platforms would tend
toward similarly discrete formulations. Like or unlike? Black or white?
Rich or poor? Agree or disagree? In a self-reinforcing feedback loop, each
choice we make is noticed and acted upon by the algorithms personalizing
our news feeds, further isolating each one of us in our own ideological
filter bubble. Not one of the thousands of people who show up in my own
Twitter feed support Brexit or Trump. For those supporters, I am sure the
reverse is true. The Internet helps us take sides.

This is very different from the television environment, which engendered a
"big blue marble" melting pot, hands-across-the-world, International Space
Station, cooperative internationalism—well-funded by globalist foundations
from Rockefeller and Ford to Soros and Clinton (who are both still
espousing the transnational values of a television world).

We are flummoxed by today’s nationalist, regressively anti-global
sentiments only because we are interpreting politics through that
now-obsolete television screen. The first protests of the digital media
landscape, such as those against the World Trade Organization in Seattle
made no sense to the network news. They seemed to be an incoherent
amalgamation of disparate causes: environmentalists, labor activists, and
even anti-Zionists.

What unified them, however—more than their ability to organize collectively
on the Intenet—was their shared anti-globalism. The WTO represented the
peak of global cohesion, at least as orchestrated by the world’s biggest
corporations. The protestors had come to believe that the only entities
capable of acting on the global level were ones too big for human beings to
control.

Those protests were followed by Arab Spring, often misinterpreted as a
global movement, when it was really more of a series of nationalist
revivals. These were not young people demanding to be part of a world
community of revolutionaries. These were local revolutions, with clearly
defined boundaries.

The breakdown of European cohesion can be understood the same way. The
European Union is a product of the television environment: open trade, one
currency, free flow of people across boundaries, and the reduction of
national identities to mere soccer teams. (That goes a long way to
explaining the rise of hooliganism over the past few decades.) The
transition to a digital media environment is making people a whole lot less
tolerant of this dissolution of boundaries. Am I Croatian or Serbian? Kurd
or Sunni? Greek or European? American or Mexican?

But if that newfound need for discrete identity were the entirety of the
dynamic, things shouldn’t have gotten quite as jingoistic or xenophobic.
No. There’s something else fueling Trump’s backward-looking "Make America
Great Again," and the Brexiters’ "Take Back Control." It’s the other main
bias of digital media: memory.

Memory is what computers were invented for in the first place. In 1945 when
Vannevar Bush imagined the "Memex" on which computers were based, he
described it as a digital filing cabinet. And even though they can now
accomplish much more than data retrieval, everything computers do—all of
their functions—simply involve moving things from one part of their memory
to another. RAM and ROM are just kinds of memory.

Meanwhile, as Wikileaks, Google, Ed Snowden, and the NSA continually remind
us, everything we do online is stored in memory. Whatever you said or did
on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, or Twitter is in an archive, timeline, or
server somewhere, waiting to be retrieved by someone.

So when we combine these two biases—boundaries and memories—we get
Brexiters justifying isolation as a confirmation of distinctly British
values and the return to a nationalist era, when foreigners and other
non-whites knew their place. Trump’s followers, likewise, recall a clearly
redlined past when being white and American meant enjoying a safe
neighborhood, a sense of superiority, and guaranteed place in the middle
class. Immigrants were fellow Irish and Italians—not foreigners, refugees,
or terrorists leaking illegally across permeable national boundaries.

To be sure, globalism has had some genuinely devastating effects on many of
those who are now pushing back. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high, as
the mitigating effects of local and national economic activity is dwarfed
by that of global trade and transnational banks. But the way people are
responding to this pressure, so far anyway, is strictly digital in spirit.

In some sense, those of us who want to preserve the one-world vision of the
TV media environment are the ones who must stop looking back. If we’re
going to promote connection, tolerance, and progressive internationalism,
we’ll have to do it in a way that’s more consonant with the digital media
environment in which we are actually living.

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