[P2P-F] Fwd: When Memes Fail Us

Mon Nov 28 09:44:03 CET 2016

"a paralyzed, incompetent federal administration will simply require people
to develop more local mechanisms for economic recovery, social cohesion,
and mutual aid. This means red and blue people working together to maintain
the basics of civil society, from food supply chains and healthcare to
education and peaceful streets. With neoliberalism and supra-national
corporations at bay for a moment, we may actually have more of an
opportunity to develop bottom-up alternatives than we've had for a long
time. The Depression spawned local currencies, farm cooperatives, and new
mechanisms for distributed prosperity. Those of us with a foot in the real
world stand a chance of building similar tools and networks, today. "

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 6:43 AM
Subject: When Memes Fail Us
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

I know this has been a rough time for a lot of you, and I hope you are
doing well. In brief: Yes, there has been a major electoral upheaval, and
it seems there are many confused people out there working under some pretty
strange assumptions. But no, this isn't as much of a shift as it may seem.

If anything, this is the legacy of the 20th Century coming back to haunt
us. In an effort to counter the propaganda of our political enemies,
American social scientists (Bateson and Meade, to be exact) proposed a
world of screens they called "the surround." Their idea was that if people
had the experience of choosing different things - or of looking at
whichever screen they wanted to - they wouldn't care so much that all the
choices were for essentially the same thing.

In short, looking at a screen - any screen - was more important than what a
person learned or came to believe, other than that he or she was
experiencing real autonomy and choice. That was supposed to be America: the
land of choices. The supermarket offers us fifty different laundry
detergents to choose from - even though they are almost all the same, and
are distributed by the same two or three corporations. You can choose
whichever one you want, as long as you choose (and pay for) one of them.

An array of TV channels gave us a similar experience of choice. But Bateson
and Meade probably never imagined a world with quite as many screens as
ours now has. Or as much of a direct connection between our experience of
screen choice and that of democracy. American Idol and other reality
programs made the connection discrete. And thus Donald Trump's migration
from reality TV to electoral politics was seamless. Social media and smart
phones took screens to the next level of illusory user-control, while they
simply reduced the array of possibilities to a narrow beam of
sensationalist, algorithmically assembled, self-affirmation.

But the underlying techniques for influencing people *through* all those
screens? Thats magic. Or at least the approach to magic practiced by Hitler
and his propagandists in WWII, before it was utilized by the British and
American advertising agencies after the war. It's the subject of the
graphic novel I released last week - Aleister & Adolf
<https://www.amazon.com/Aleister-Adolf-Douglas-Rushkoff/dp/1506701043> -
about the occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler at the end
of WWII. I hadn't meant it to be quite so prescient, but it's a great way
of understanding how we got where we are. The social media landscape is the
ideal space for sigils and memetic engineering because we are utterly
untethered from grounded experience. Those who succeed at these techniques
are the ones who successfully tap into existing hidden agendas in popular
culture. They just jump into the unacknowledged standing wave of society,
and it carries them along for the ride. It's not the subject or surfer that
matters so much as the wave itself, and one's willingness to surrender to
it entirely. That's why celebrities or candidates who adopt this strategy
end up seeming to have no coherent goal.

On the bright side, I think running a government as large as ours is really
hard. Trump's obsession with his Twitter feed will keep him more than
occupied over the next months of his presidency. The bigger issue is
whether his hiring of people who have never worked in their assigned fields
before (Ben Carson at HUD?) will lead to large parts of the government
simply not working. It's not a good moment to count on FEMA, the FTC, or
Department of the Interior.

But a paralyzed, incompetent federal administration will simply require
people to develop more local mechanisms for economic recovery, social
cohesion, and mutual aid. This means red and blue people working together
to maintain the basics of civil society, from food supply chains and
healthcare to education and peaceful streets. With neoliberalism and
supra-national corporations at bay for a moment, we may actually have more
of an opportunity to develop bottom-up alternatives than we've had for a
long time. The Depression spawned local currencies, farm cooperatives, and
new mechanisms for distributed prosperity. Those of us with a foot in the
real world stand a chance of building similar tools and networks, today.

Meanwhile, look for solidarity wherever you can find it. Sometimes it
involves working with or helping people we don't even like. Imagine that.
My TeamHuman.fm show is an effort in that direction, but I'll be working
hard to engage with more guests who don't already agree with me on what it
means to be human or how best to express it.

I'm also committed to getting off the factual news cycle and deeper into
the cultural psyche. I've been writing factual books for a decade now, and
I feel like they only reach people who have already reached the right
conclusions and are simply looking for ways of backing up their newfound
sensibilities. That's a noble role to fill, for sure, but I want to open
some new minds, and to do that I may have to shift from scholarly research
to cultural alchemy. More to come.

With love
Douglas

-- 

----------

Douglas Rushkoff
http://rushkoff.com
Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and
Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
<http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172> my new book on what went
wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.
Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm> - my new podcast!

Sign up for RushkoffMail <http://www.simplelists.com/subscribe/rushkoff> to
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