Broken Bits

                Just as capitalism has reduced everything in the world to a single type of value, computers have reduced all information to binary bits.  Everything a computer transmits has to be stripped of any contextual value it had because of where, how and by whom it was created so it can be shuffled through the internet and delivered without context to your screen.  As a result, we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, but none of it has any meaning attached to it.  This presents us with a problem people have never faced before: how to construct a world without context.  In the past information was sorted by the tribe, by the school, by the government or church.  Those institutions still exist, and some people still use them to construct meaning, but the more common experience is to be set adrift to drown in random and unconnected bits of information.

                On one hand, this situation is liberating.  People don’t have to rely on the school, the government, or the church to get their information about the world.  I don’t agree with folks who argue we should go back to an institutional check on knowledge.  I think the leveling of knowledge is an important part of liberation.  Going back to the old set up is to go back to the old forms of oppression.  On the other hand, the overabundance of decontextualized information presents us with a challenge people have never faced before, and we are ill equipped to deal with it.  Many people run back to their tribe and use it block out anything that challenges that orthodoxy.  The irony of having so much information is that it is so overwhelming that the easy way out is to block it out and only let in information that confirms what our tribe already believes. 

                We see the impact of this move in our politics and the culture wars that divide us.  It shows up in climate change denial and arguments about abortion and drugs and almost anything else you can imagine.  Anybody can find somebody who supports their beliefs.  Blaming this situation on cultural relativism or postmodernism misses the point.  We were always already ‘relativistic’ in our views, we just used the centralized institutions of modernity to silence the dissonance.  That’s not possible anymore.  That is both a good thing and a perplexing problem.  How do we build a decentralized and democratic space where we can engage with each other in a civil and affirming manner? 

                More than a few Sci Fi novels and movies have taken this problem and resolved it by imagining a future dystopia where there is only one book and one mystery to solve.  This going back to the beginning and starting over path is beyond brutal and unacceptable.  It is futile to keep running out the same institutional elites we’ve used in the past to solve this problem.  We are at a critical point where we are either going to make a collective jump in consciousness or we’re going to perish.  People have made these leaps before – at the end of the Middle Ages – in the speculative philosophy of Greece – and in other times and places where the old way of thinking broke down.  Our situation is all the more intense because if we fail it won’t just be the end of one civilization, it will be the end of civilization, period.

                We are going to have to revise our understanding of learning, education and community.  We don’t need centralized institutions.  We need to shift our focus away from a single solution to multiple and iterative solutions, solutions that work one person and one community at a time.  The only way to create this new consciousness is to work with each person to help them reach the highest frame of consciousness they can attain.  The goal is to work past anger and purification to create small and shifting alliances that can strengthen over time.  We have to revisit the idea of what it means to be human and how we fit in the larger life system we’re a part of.  If you’re thinking that sounds way too idealistic and spacey, consider the alternative.  We have played ourselves into a position that is as dire and desperate as any we have ever been in.  Nothing we’ve already done will work again.  This work will be done face to face, day to day.  We’ll find out if we’re up to the task.  We’ll find out if we have a future.