Douglas Rushkoff
I wrote this piece six years ago for Arthur magazine, anticipating or
at least wishing for the Occupy movement. LSD magazine just republished
it in their latest issue with some beautiful graphics, here.
Here's the original text version:
(Originally published in Arthur, June 2005)
I had a weird vision the other day.
Having
brought our newborn back from the hospital just days before, my wife
and I weren’t getting much sleep. I lied on the bed next to the baby and
slipped into one of those theta wave trances you can reach on the way
to a magick spell, visionquest, or psychedelic trip.
I was in a
natural chamber of some kind, maybe a cave or clearing in a woods. It
was a starting place from which any number of journeys could be taken.
At each opening, another creature or entity beckoned me to follow it.
And, had it been any other time in my life, I probably would have picked
the one that seemed the most promising and followed it down the twists
and turns of its path – and been either delighted or terrified by what
happened. (The idea of being an experienced traveler or magician is
getting better at predicting, guiding, or simply tolerating the variety
of what’s on offer, and learning to bring back things or ideas of
value.)
This time, however, for no particular reason other than
really being okay with floating in that little entrance foyer, decided
to stay put. The beckoning entities gave up and scurried or drifted down
their reality tunnels, and I lied there, motionless.
Only then,
after I decided to do nothing, did I notice the Elders. Three or four of
them - shamans, prophets, zen masters, or some combination – sitting on
a bench to my side, looking down at me. “Welcome,” they said, nodding.
And I immediately got it. By doing nothing, I was doing everything. The
path of no path. Just be.
And though I’ve spent a career, maybe
even a whole lifetime creating realities for myself and others as a way
of retreating from the oppressive consensus culture of the American
Marketplace, I’m wondering if we might best abandon that tactic. Maybe,
it’s time to stand still and let them do the conjuring.
Hear me out.
What
I teach in my classes is that the evolution of media sees control of
the story move away from the teller, and towards the reader or listener.
The invention of text allowed people other than priests and royals to
read and write, showing human beings that they were contributing to the
human story. Thanks to the alphabet, we got the Judeo-Christian
tradition, laws, and all those notions of progress.
The printing
press put texts in the hands of many, leading to the democratization of
interpretation, the development of “perspective,” and eventually the
Enlightenment. If all perspectives matter, then all people matter
equally.
Although TV set things back a bit, deconstruction and
post-modernism came to the rescue, giving us all the ability to take
apart what we see, and dissemble the many messages being piped into our
living rooms and brains. Master deconstructionists, from William
Burroughs and Bryon Gysin to Genesis P-Orridge and Negativeland, cut-up
the news and paste it back together in news ways, in Burroughs words, to
find out “what it really says.”
Of course, they were only
foretelling the advent of the Internet, which turned the whole
mediascape – the primary landscape of alternative media creation – over
to us. Now, at least in theory, we are as capable of creating and
disseminating a message as anyone else. Your basic middle class American
teen (admittedly, among the planet’s better equipped individuals) can
build a set of images, texts, or videos that extend his visions to the
greater world. Rupert Murdoch’s ideas matter no more than those of the
kid posting on Slashdot.
And so we fight for our rights or even
just our freedom to do what we want to in the media space. To keep our
Bittorrents flowing and our alternative media blogs rolling. We know the
power of image creation, and want to retain our ability to make the
images that stimulate, hypnotize, and program our world.
That’s
why the powers that be are so committed to retaking their control over
the image factory. Whether it’s American Idol recasting its stacked deck
talent show as some sort of SMS-enabled democracy, or Project Echelon
monitoring all our keystrokes so that truly subversive material can be
cut off at the source, we’re witnessing first hand the dismemberment of
our new body politic. Just as the forces of business turned the original
Internet into a strip mall, they are now bribing the most popular
bloggers with ad-based revenues and creating watered down simulations of
online autonomy.
Meanwhile, they distract us with scary stories
about how the latest and greatest technologies will be used against us.
Neuromarketing, for example, the latest new tool in the advertising
arsenal, is supposedly capable of using MRI technology to measure,
definitively, our response to packages and advertisements. They shove
some poor soul into an MRI machine (that could be used for a diagnosing a
sick person) and then show him some Coke or Pepsi labels and then see
what parts of the brain light up. Then fascinated but misguided
journalists write bestselling books about that moment of decision that
supposedly takes place independent of any conscious or rational process.
Worse, these subconscious triggers can be tripped intentionally by any
marketer or political linguist with the access and money.
That’s
magick, people. And fake magick, at that, except for the fact that we
believe this shit. It just isn’t true. It’s the kind of tripe that
marketers and advertisers use to peddle their wares to the companies
trying to compete with real culture, real thought, and real human
progress. Of course the books claiming that our most important decisions
happen in a “blink” are going to sell well, because they are part of
the culture of selling.
It’s no wonder we get fooled by such
stuff. For in our effort to exert some measure of control over our
reality, we have migrated to the semiotic landscape – fighting with
image and symbol, rhetoric and reason. In the spirit of Hegel, we match
their faulty thesis with our daring antithesis, but forget that neither
one necessarily brings us any closer to the truth. Just because you’ve
got two opposing arguments doesn’t mean they resolve into some
reality-based synthesis. (Two politicians can argue about whether the
tax code should have 39 or 40 lines while a peasant starves on the
Capitol steps.)
The realities that marketers offer us, just like
the ones we offer back in return, are speciously detached from reality
on the ground. Sure, they provide solutions to our problems, but from
where do those problems originate?
As a new parent, I’ve been
painfully aware of how little real community there is around us. This is
a market success. Our parents are too far, our friends are too shy, the
mothering old ladies are nowhere to be found. So who teaches my wife to
breast feed? The “lactation consultant.” Yes – there is such a thing!
And who watches the baby when we have to take a shower or get to work?
Not a family member or friend down the hall, but a professional
babysitter, daycare center or nanny. The diminishment of community is
what fuels these new markets.
The greatest magic act of all – the
unrecognized king of all sigils – was the creation of the dollar
itself. We support the reality of this symbol whether we’re going after
dollars or complaining about the lack of opportunity to accumulate them.
By taking the very real values of wealth and prosperity and assigning
them to the symbol of money, we dissociated our labor from the real.
Sure, if we had some authority over that symbol system we might be in
business. But we don’t; it’s the most protected and inaccessible set of
mythology around. No cut and paste permitted, William.
I’m
thinking we should let them win. Surrender the unreal realities to the
bad guys. If they want broadcast television, mainstream newspapers, or
even the web, let ‘em have it. They’ve conjured up an alternative
universe that has very little true connection to what’s really going on
here. And the market-based, competitive, reality-as-propaganda dream has
swallowed them up. They are the victims of their own illusions. We
don’t have to be.
We can take charge of the real reality they
left behind. I mean the world we’re actually living in. The yards and
streets and fingers and tongues. Let’s build bike lanes and barbecues,
after school programs and AIDS care networks, places to play music and
playgrounds for kids. They’re so busy monitoring the airwaves for signs
of treason against the market or state that they’ve lost track of what’s
happening between real people. Turn off your cell phone and speak to
that guy sitting next to you on the bus. That’s about the most
subversive thing you could do.
Instead, like well-meaning Pied
Pipers, we play our tunes hoping the children might follow us instead of
the other guy taking them off the cliff. But when we enter into that
competition, we’re no better than the tune we can muster at that moment.
If ours is more hypnotic or captivating than theirs, we win for the
time being, and keep the kids believing our version of things until the
next round.
And in entering that pissing contest, we deny
ourselves the home field advantage. We live here, after all. If we can
learn to sit still for a moment rather than following any of those
phantoms, we can take over real reality, instead. It’s right here for
the taking.
