There are people from whom I expect some level of deception - politicians, sales people, PR people. When I listen to people in those positions, I do so with a grain of salt. In some cases, with a truckload. When I hear deception on their tongues, I am neither hurt nor surprised.
But recently I've discovered that even people I thought were trustworthy are actually just as deceptive, and maybe even more so. I've always thought of the leaders of the online community as somehow above the spin common to those who are paid to produce a public opinion. I was wrong. And strangely, I am both hurt and surprised.
Somewhere the championing of the truth turned into the championing of a cause. The importance of transparency became just another tool in the spin kit, a way to discredit, instead of revealing. Telling a good story became more important than finding the facts. The important feeling of being in the center of attention became more seductive than the message itself.
What stings most of all is that the cause is one that I hold incredibly dear. We stand on the verge of losing something that I love, and I am mourning. When I hear the slick propaganda I feel sickened, as if what is precious to me is being pissed on, by the very people I trusted to protect it. Even if we win this one, it will be a bitter tasting win, rank with the smell of lies and character defamation, a wound in our greater community that will take a long time to heal, if ever.
I'm disillusioned. I sit by the sidelines and watch both the truth and the public being manipulated. I can't speak out, or dare challenge the misinformation. If I publish a critique on a "friendly" forum, any deviation from the narrative being created by people I once admired will be ruthlessly attacked by those that follow them. If I publish a critique in any of the alternative venues available to me I will be further damaging both the cause and my friendships. I'm left with my private blog, with it's reassuring readership of three. No keywords that google could pick up. Everything vague.
So, lesson learned. Even the leaders of the online community are politicians, PR people, sales people. Nothing better. Nothing nobler. What a shame.
When I heard the news it was as if a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders, something I've been carrying so long, I forgot it was not part of me. A sickening sense of responsibility, a dark shadow of fear... all lifted so quickly I had to sit down and catch my breath.
20 years, and it is now over. So much pain, and shame and rage. Over and done forever, with Death as the guarantee.
Julia and I walked down to the water and tossed something old and ugly out to sea - a symbol of all that we were releasing. It was a casual ritual. No casting of circles or conjuring of witnesses. Just a discarding.
The summer heat wave reminds me of my journeys to hotter places.
I remember travelling the length of beautiful Vietnam, the silk of my Au Dai like a gentle breeze against my flesh, the sharp smell of eucalyptus oil on my temples and aching muscles.
I remember passing through the Three Furnaces of China on a crowded river boat on the Yangtze, drinking cup after cup of hot tea from the omnipresent red thermos, and glorying in the privacy under the cold showers piped up from the river below.
And I remember settling in to a beautiful log house with a sweet man in Georgia for a Southern Summer romance.
They are all body memories, slipping over my lethargic limbs like honey, taking advantage of the mental fragmentation caused by this amazing heat. These are memories of incredible beauty, and resilience, of love and pleasure, of the bone weariness of travellers, and the fantastic weight of history, of exotic flavours in my mouth, and strong hands on my skin.
"Those lazy crazy hazy days of summer..."
I'm a part of the water cycle again... sweat pouring off, clean, cold, water pouring in. The little pink office where I am due during the hottest part of the day is an oven, and we are all baking there together.
And I love it.
My skin has turned brown, my feet are bare and leathery against the thirsty soil. I'm delighting in fresh food, and dappled garden light, in warm thundershowers, and all that goes with it. With just the screens on the patio door, it is as if I am sleeping under the stars. I think I will go do that now.
From Iran, a river of protest in their Green revolution. I find this so moving, not the least because of the role that social media has taken in bringing this momentous piece of history to the world. Following this river of protest is an ocean of support coming from all over the world, streaming through twitter feeds, blogs comments, and every other facet of the internet. Comments like "You all take my breath away and make me appreciate what we have here so much more. Don't let up - the world is with you!" are streaming in from all over the world.
For me, the apocalypse happened pretty much on schedule. Almost a decade later, the war is still on, apparently. I'm not always the angry mother owl though. Dispassion comes with experience.
I wrote this on New Year's Eve, 2000, at the Studio...
The sunbeam is gone, but I'm still here, enjoying final golden light across the green, cascading as it does from wysteria to rhubarb from magnificent fern to the sand at my feet. I'm still here, watching the flowers as they wilt; their pollen, spent; their wild, colourful flirtations suddenly irrelavent as they swell with fruit.
Recent events within my community remind me of the resiliency of what we have built. It seems that those who can, do. And there is usually someone who can, and it is not only me.
I've been thinking about social bugs again. Ants and termites, bees and wasps... The more I find out about these amazing creatures, the more I question my own species - our supposed technological dominance, our economies and cultures, even our very individuality!
Why do humans separate ourselves from animals? We have this idea that humans are the pinnacle of God's Creation, so we are hardly surprised that we have this technology that allows us to take dominion over the earth. But if technology is evidence of divine favour, then there are God's fingerprints elsewhere in the clay of the universe.
Human engineering pales next to the marvels of 15 foot tall termite mounds in West Africa. These Gothic wonders regulate temperature, humidity, and air quality with humbling precision. They have to, they have farms in those mounds where they cultivate a fungus which will die if the temperature varies by 2 degrees!
And Termites aren't the only social insects with fungus gardens. Leaf cutter ants have had agricultural systems for 50 million years, kept pest free by utilizing a bacteria stew containing half of all the antibiotics used in human medicine. We've had antibiotics for about 60 years...
Somehow within these insect societies, technologies have developed that we are only now just beginning to fathom. We still have no idea how they communicate between individuals - or even if the colony can be rightly said to even consist of individuals, or are better thought of as a super-organism. Technology, insect, fungus, bacteria - all part of one being. After all, we humans are also super-organisms. We are carrying around an entire microbiome, which includes thousands of species, many of them necessary for our survival. We have 1,000 times as many microbial genes as human genes.” Are we not also colonies?
And what about our societies? Over the last very short while (in evolutionary terms) we have suddenly began acting very much like social insects. We developed agriculture, and domestication of other species, we embarked on vast engineering projects called urban centres, and are swarming to them at an accelerating pace, and now we are growing our nervous system, the network that communicates to the parts of the whole - the mediascape, the information highway, cyberspace. Social insects seem to communicate by sending pheromone signals. Humans use electrical signals. But what intelligence is directing the show? Is the same hand behind the technologies of the ants and the technologies of mankind? Is there a choreographer?
I came across this interview with William Gibson, that prophet of cyberspace.
Gibson about withdrawing cash from an ATM in a foreign country "just for a minute it struck me as miraculous and kind of spooky. I had that feeling, that post geographical feeling."
Yes! Exactly!
Gibson goes on...
"I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic extended nervous system for the past 100 years. It's really starting to take, it's really, really starting to grow now. You are dealing with something that has penetrated every corner of the human universe now."
And there's the crux of it. It is as if there is a bigger organism forming around us - a built macro-organism, a cultural construct that is reshaping our species. This organizing principle is manifesting in technologies, in symbiotic relationships with other species, and in the compulsion to swarm. The communications technology that forms this macro-organism's nervous system is just now forming as we watch. The hive is coalescing! Like Gibson said ... kind of spooky, but miraculous too
Yep... forming as we watch...
That fantastic new prosthetic nervous system has evolved within a few generations from a postal system, to a network that collapses time and space - allowing instant communications and transactions across space, language, and culture. At the cutting edge are the leaps forward; iphone, twitter, facebook, google wave, all geared towards making the network more intense, and more immediate.
"Epic" is my favourite piece of science fiction written this decade. Written in 2004, it called the way the mediascape would evolve with astonishing perception. Five years later, we are watching it come true.
The next leap forward... Google Wave... As I watched the developer preview my jaw was on the floor. More immediate, and more intense - oh yes that nicely describes Google Wave, and the future of media.
Of course, now I find that none of my thoughts are original - a fellow named Joel de Rosnay is talking about this same macro-organism, made up of our species, its culture, and its technology. His book on the subject, "The Macroscope" is available online, and is next on my reading list. I found it when I came across the following quote while surfing...
"On Joel de Rosnay’s postulation of man’s future as cybiont, or an amalgamation of humanity, technology and nature as one synergistic organism: "It’s one of the more inspiring visions. Life keeps finding ways to cooperate in larger symbiotic wholes. It’s like we’re creating a new cell at the scale of a planet. That seems to me an inspiring vision that many people can understand both theologically and religiously. There’s an illustration in my book — more complex forms of life going up a staircase. The neanderthal’s standing behind a guy in a suit, saying ‘I was wondering when you were going to notice that there were more steps.’"
