Capitalist tools

I was struck the other day, upon reading this opinion piece within the peachy electronic pages of the Financial Times from UBS senior staffer George Magnus, by what an unusual clarion it was to find within the four corners of a business newspaper:

Financial bust bequeathes a crisis of capitalism
By George Magnus

Financial markets have had a torrid summer of breaking news about slowing global growth, fears over a new western economic contraction and the unresolved bond market and banking crisis in the eurozone.

But these sources of angst have triggered turbulence before, and will continue to do so. Our economic predicament is not a temporary or traditional condition.

Put simply, the economic model that drove the long boom from the 1980s to 2008, has broken down.

Considering the scale of the bust, and the system malfunctions in advanced economies that have been exposed, I would argue that the 2008/09 financial crisis has bequeathed a once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalism, the footprints of which can be found in widespread challenges to the political order, and not just in developed economies.

Markets may actually have twigged this, with equity indices volatile but unable to attain pre-crisis peaks, and bond markets turning very Japanese. But it is not fashionable to say so, not least in policy circles.

The basic theme is not that unusual—plenty of economic doom scenarios can be found throughout the mainstream media these days. What is so unusual is the way the diagnosis is expressed in Marxist terms—"crisis of capitalism" being part of the core lexicon of Capital, a term whose use reveals training in those texts as part of one's toolkit for understanding the contemporary world. To openly state that we are experiencing a "once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalism" is to summon all the Hegelian world historical eschatology of Marx—the idea that there are underlying forces in tension, that will ultimately lead to an endpoint of the current period, and some (hopefully better) period on the other side of the long apocalyptic night.



It's like the Kali Yuga of political economy.

I find the use of this lexicon very refreshing. Not just because of the gravity it invokes, but also because it reveals a healthy intellectual diversity that is largely unknown in the U.S. While anyone who studied economics or politics in the UK (at least before 1990) would have learned a healthy dose of Marx, you would be unlikely to easily find it in any American curriculum other than perhaps European intellectual history, or a dismissive sidebar in your introduction to classical microeconomics.

And you would never see a reference to a "crisis of capitalism" in an American newspaper (especially not a business newspaper), because you would so rarely even see the word "capitalism" used in an American newspaper.

We just talk about "business." Frequent use of the term "capitalism" to describe our political economic system would suggest, heretically, that there might be an alternative system.


[Pic courtesy of the amazing site of The Wanderer.]

Our culture is founded on religious freedom, as we see evidenced every day in the reality-confounding faith-based factual pronouncements of political leaders from both the Coke and Pepsi factions of our two-party system. But there really is no ideological freedom outside of the religious community. We have all the Utopias you can eat, and tolerate them with smiles—so long as they keep their fresh-baked modes of thinking and living confined to the congregation (which may be a secular variation, like the hippie communes of the 60s, or theologically science fictional but culturally successful religious movements like Mormonism). But we do not have an alternative political economy to capitalist Constitutionalism. The Federalist Papers are the real American Talmud, and there is no alternative to the seven Articles of the Founders.

American culture was extremely effective in the twentieth century in suppressing any authentic alternatives, violently excising any European-style revolutionary fervor beginning around the time of World War I. Who knew the first car bomb was a horse-drawn wagon detonated on Wall Street by an Italian-American anarchist who managed to leave a crater at the corner of Wall and Broad in protest of the imprisonment and deportation of other alienated immigrant anarchists? (See Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis.) Socialist thought was appropriated by FDR to navigate the culture through the Depression, but mainly to empower the state to create the military industrial war machine born in WWII that is the core engine of 21st century American capitalism. By the end of the Clinton administration, ideological difference was largely illusory, and the end of the End of History with 9/11 really did nothing to change that.



So the only place you are likely to find the world "capitalist" in the American mainstream is in a winking necktie from Forbes magazine.

This weekend, while Austin amps up the somatic consumerist revel of ACL Fest, in which our teens are taught to express the illusion of ideological diversity through their choice of bands, the folks from Adbusters are trying to occupy Wall Street. Of course, they do not have an actual ideological agenda—they want an American Tahrir movement, but they seem to barely know what they are protesting (beautifully presented but politically impotent grievances with the soul-crushing ennui of our advertising-based mental environment), let alone what the end goal is, as evidenced by their email to the multitude last night revealing that they can't even decide on their one demand. At least they're trying to break out of the haze.



What they may not perceive is the extent to which the network technologies incubated by the military-industrial complex are now bulldozing the monolithic institutions of the post-Westphalian world in a way no revolutionary cadre could ever imagine. The future is looking to be one of network-based polities and mass-customization, in which the advertising is derived from what's already in your head. These are some very real Hegelian world historical forces rolling over the political economic landscape, and we don't even yet have an "ism" to locate them in our cultural taxonomy.

9/12/11

Yesterday the Soaring Club of Houston couldn’t fly because of Temporary Flight Restrictions having to do with a wildfire to the east of the Field. The last time I remember it being clear, bright weekend weather when we couldn’t fly our sailplanes was the days after 9/11/01, when US aviation was grounded. It’s deja vu with the perspective of ten intervening years.

Sunday’s Houston Chronicle Editorial pages include a column by Kathleen Parker in which she says, ” We stumble at last upon a purpose for columnists – to say that which no one else dares.” This in a column in which she posits that 9/11 caused America to go temporarily insane; that today’s political dysfunction took root in the soil of Ground Zero. Well, in observing the American mindset today, I’ve had to conclude that you can’t understand it without invoking psychopathology, or religion, and in particular, religion and psychopathology intersecting like a Venn diagram of doom.

Earlier this week Thomas Friedman dared too. He said, “. . . rather than use 9/11 to summon us to nation-building at home, Bush used it as an excuse to party — to double down on a radical tax-cutting agenda for the rich that not only did not spur rising living standards for most Americans but has now left us with a huge ball and chain around our ankle. And later, rather than asking each of us to contribute something to the war, he outsourced it to one-half of one-percent of the American people. . . . We used the cold war to reach the moon and spawn new industries. We used 9/11 to create better body scanners and more T.S.A. agents. It will be remembered as one of the greatest lost opportunities of any presidency — ever.” The entire Friedman column is worthwhile reading.

The Day the Narrative Died

On the front page of this morning's business section, cranky Bernanke (one wonders what he's measuring between thumb and forefinger in that photo) has a message for American consumers: lighten the f up!

Fed Chief Describes Consumers as Too Bleak
By Binyamin Appelbaum
Published: September 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, offered a new twist on a familiar subject Thursday, revisiting the question of why growth continues to fall short of hopes and expectations.

Mr. Bernanke, speaking at a luncheon in Minneapolis, offered the standard explanations, including the absence of home construction and the deep and lingering pain inflicted by financial crises. He warned again that reductions in government spending amount to reductions in short-term growth.

Then he said something new: Consumers are depressed beyond reason or expectation.

Oh, sure, there are reasons to be depressed, and the Fed chairman rattled them off: “The persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high.”

However, Mr. Bernanke continued, “Even taking into account the many financial pressures that they face, households seem exceptionally cautious.”

Consumers, in other words, are behaving as if the economy is even worse than it actually is.



Who can blame them? The psychology of the American Zeitgeist has been shattered by the failure of all of our national narratives. No wonder the hot new movie out this weekend is Steven Soderbergh's appropriation of the paranoid 70s don't trust the Man thriller, updated for the Tea Party age. Bernanke's mystifying multitude can see what he perhaps cannot: that the inability of the plotline of the nation to reel out in accordance with the oft-repeated master plan signals changes far more profound than we can really yet fathom.

Consider what those consumers have witnessed in the past decade:

- The crushing destruction of the blissful utopian prosperity (at least for the class of Americans Bernanke is talking about—the ones who spent extra money on stuff they don't need) of the technology-induced Long Boom, and the end of the End of History.

- A presidential election that no one won, until the power factory made up a reason to break the statistical tie. Between two candidates, it should be noted, who were members of the (un)American aristocracy: politicians who are electable because they inherited the title.

- A Charlton Heston and George Kennedy disaster movie scenario played out with a reality Orson Welles could never imagine on the Tuesday morning news, complete with exploding skyscrapers and heroic men in uniform, in which the basic everyday technologies of our commercial lives were employed by medieval necromancers hiding in caves in exotic locations to begin the destruction of our meta-narrative. The new era was ushered in by investment bankers learning to fly.



- A framing of the response to this event with the all-American Western movie paradigm of hunting down the bad guy. This narrative played out perfectly for the first three months, with grainy telephoto images of ass-kicking Grizzly Adams Special Forces dudes outfitted with the Full Metal Apache version of the Outside Magazine gear of year catalog, riding horseback with the good Indians across the Afghan plain. We had the big denouement on the snowy approach to the Blofeld hideaway of the bad guy (see below). And then? Ten years without an ending.


[Matt Bors gets it dead-on pretty much every time.]

- Instead of the tidy ending that would end the movie with the cowboy riding off into the sunset, we got Apocalypse Forever. A decade of grim governance through geopolitical fear, personified by the cyborg Veep, and all the well-mannered lawyers clinically constructing extra-Constitutional space where no one can hear you scream. You had to work hard to find the real images of the pain that our war machine unleashed on the globe, but you could see it seeping out all over the pop cultural glaze of our ubiquitous screens, as dissected in our 2007 post on "The Warporn Eucharist."


[For an unhealthy survey of the GWOT Zeitgeist, check out these morale patches at MilSpecMonkey: "Pork Easting Crusader"? "What Would Jesus Shoot?" "What Would Jack Bauer Do?" (via Bruce "Gothic High Tech" Sterling)]

- And let's not forget about the unsolved mystery of the anthrax in the mail.

- Because the Taliban Toyota cowboy movie lost reel wasn't enough, we repeated pretty much the same paradigm in Iraq, as neocon War College scenarios turned out to be a lot bloodier, and resistant to definitive ends, when they were in the real world.

- In The Big Uneasy, the disaster movie paradigm really failed, as the guys with the ladders and the helicopters and the megaphones managed only to watch a complete Hobbesian meltdown that exposed all of the unhealed cultural lesions of American race and class. (Yes, they did just convict those cops for wrongfully shooting the people on the bridge.)

- The beginning of the end of privacy, in which all secrets—corporate, government, and personal—are live on the network, ushering in a panopticon society in which we are all conducting surveillance on each other all the time.

- A diminishing of the relevance of the sovereign nation state, revealed in the insecure efforts to reinforce its very existence with the fantasy of border walls, the inability of governments large and small to service their own debt, and the dubious viability of governance by a monolithic "sovereign" in a world that is really run by networks.

- The diminishing viability of the long-term employment contract, a destabilizing force that is probably one of the main cultural factors behind the Tea Party movement—networked Capital's transformation of the American middle class into a mass of disenfranchised grey collar lumpenproles.

- A global economic meltdown far worse than the bubble burst that began the decade, one where you can see the raw fear in the confounded eyes of the Masters of the Universe, as scenarios play out that violate the Talmudic laws of neoclassical economics, crisis scenarios only Karl Marx could have imagined. The American narrative really doesn't work when you take away the theme at the heart of it all: growth.



What Bernanke's really complaining about? Americans got the message of the past decade, and they don't believe the movie anymore. They no longer buy into the basic narrative that growth should be generated by borrowing against future income. It's the Great Deleveraging. Is that really such a bad narrative to abandon? Wasn't Rocky Balboa a lot more likable when he stopped working for the payday lenders?

It is no accident that this decade in which our narratives failed us began with the confluence of the *real* end of the long war of the twentieth century, and the dissemination of networked computing into every fabric of society. The network is the common thread in the mass destabilization of the past decade, the tool that is disassembling the reality we inherited.

What did we really lose in the past decade? The Future. Our narratives failed because network culture does not tolerate the orderly linearity of "narratives."

The end of the Future doesn't mean The End. It means an anarchist's dream of liberated territory, waiting to be explored, spelunked, and recreated in the image of the emerging world. It won't be easy, but it will definitely be interesting, and it should be fun. And you can bet that it won't have a lot to do with Ben Bernanke.

Michele Bachmann is a Mexican?

Today's Washington Post reports from the campaign trail that the people of New Hampshire, Minnesota, and other wintry climes are going totally loco about immigration, hounding the candidates at every stop for not being tough enough on the issue. And no, they are not talking about the border those states actually share, with Canada.

The piece notes how the issue is posing challenges for our Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who, like his predecessor, has a record on the issue that confounds the Midwestern xenophobes that might be drawn to his otherwise opportunistically jingoistic politics—having called the idea of a border fence "idiocy," and promoted paths for the children of "illegal immigrants" to get great public educations. It is a peculiar politico-cultural moment when Ann Coulter can complain, however coded, that Rick Perry isn't white enough.

Michele Bachmann has no such problem:

Bachmann promised to build a fence along “every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch” of the nation’s southern border, to “have the back” of enforcement agents, and to put an end to the provision of federal benefits to illegal immigrants.

But she really got her audience going with a series of lamentations about the border that places her to the right of her opponents.

“On the southern border, we are dealing with a narco-terrorist state today in Mexico,” Bachmann said. “Because 70 percent of narcotics are coming to the United States are coming from Mexico. Mexico is in a very different place right now. We are seeing criminals, felons, drugs, we’re seeing contagious diseases coming into our country. What is wrong with our government that it isn’t stopping this from coming into the nation?”

Contagious diseases? Michele Bachmann really is scarier than Sarah Palin, because she encodes a much more powerful American archetype than Palin's frontier mama who fields strips her own elk—Bachmann echoes the Mad Men-era white housewife, practitioner of hygiene as the domestic theology that distinguishes the people of the sanitized linoleum from people who get dirty.

June Cleaver was a white supremacist.



And Charlton Heston is a Mexican.

Watching "Inspector Vargas" and his gringa wife Janet Leigh walk across the border in Orson Welles' long opening tracking shot from Touch of Evil, you see the essence of border angst shown, not told—anxiety about miscegenation and menace crossing freely through our trusting and essentially insecure borders, ready to explode.



Like the contagious diseases Nurse Bachmann would protect us from, the real threats represented by the idea of the southern border are invisible. As noted earlier on this blog, you can see the architecture of our anxieties clearly reflected in the research procurement program of HSARPA, the Homeland Security version of DARPA, which is trying to develop the technological components of a "virtual" border fence that sounds more like a sci-fi forcefield than a castle wall—a "barrier" comprised of speculative fields of surveillance and electronic interdiction.

An imaginary barrier, constructed with semiotics designed to sustain the belief that it exists, is the perfect way to maintain the fictions that sustain our political economy—like the idea that there really is a viable distinct sovereignty called the United States of America, rather than a networked world of blurred borders hurtling inevitably and chaotically towards new global systems, or the idea that there really is such a thing as "white people," rather than a single species of naked apes playing out in infinite permutations.

How do you sustain the idea that there is such a thing as *an American*, and *a Mexican*, and that you are supposed to be able to, you know, tell the difference? By the social construction of the idea that such a distinction exists. And the more illusory the idea of the difference is revealed to be, the more its proponents struggle to represent it with real world fortifications.



The Jeffersonian tree of liberty has a mythic potency. How sad to watch the culture ramp up for a political season in which that idea of the right of revolt is appropriated to express the narcissistic frustrations of the children from Gilligan's Island—the American lumpenproles who find themselves disenfranchised by the productivity-sucking forces of global capital, subjugated into the gray collar class of The Matrix. One can only hope that the lunatic anachronisms of Bachmann's race-based demagoguery and demonization of the phantom Mexican Other will prove itself ultimately unsuccessful in a twenty-first century milieu.



The antidote? Maybe go catch a Labor Day Weekend screening of "Saving Private Perez" (Salvando al Soldado Perez), the recent Mexican hit film satire of Saving Private Ryan, in which a narco and his band of hermanos travel to Iraq to rescue his American soldier brother from his jihadi kidnappers. That sounds a lot more like the 21st century than the Tea Party's hate-based Pleasantville. And the real contagion Michele Bachmann needs to be worried about is that her June Cleaver version of reality is under full assault when indigenous Mexican humor and perceptions of American identity start getting relayed via Hollywood into the minds of the mall rats of Wayzata.

The Osprey Book of Secret Hideaways of Flamboyant International Dictators

Remember this picture? It appeared in November 2001, as the hunt for Osama Bin Laden built up its full Western movie denouement steam. The evil mastermind's secret hideout, invented by an excited Anglo-American press unknowingly unfurling pre-programmed narratives, resulting in a USA Today infographic that mixed equal parts threads of sourced urban legend and Silver Age Batcave cross-section. Edward Jay Epstein has a brilliant deconstruction of the whole thing at his Fictoid Series, explaining how the imaginative alignment of this image with our idea of how the story was supposed to go was so potent that Tim Russert and Donald Rumsfeld grimly discussed the drawing on Meet the Press.

I am still waiting for my 1/72 scale Airfix playset. In 2004, I got the next best thing—in the local hobby shop, a military modeler's guide to how to create your own: The Osprey book Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004: "Mountain strongholds of the Mujahideen, Taliban & Al Qaeda", part of the Fortress series.



And now I have Richard Fernandez's brilliant fresh Qaddafied analysis of the Secret Underground Fortress meme over at The Belmont Club.

Our media loves the Blofeld narrative. Because they think just like we do. The built architecture of contemporary geopolitics needs to conform to the narrative architecture of the library of movies playing out at all times on the back of our foreheads. The lone 007, or the elite MIF squad, needs to find the bad guy and his Easter eggs inside the secret fortress, to get to the next level. That was the really brilliant thing about Christopher Nolan's Inception: the way it tasked the secret mission force with actually assaulting the imaginary fortresses of our dreams.



But perhaps the most astounding thing is how much the pulp narratives pumped out by Hollywood et al into the global mediasphere come back at us through the actual behaviors of our 21st century evil dictators, who, while presumably acting out very different archetypal roles in the tradition of their own culture, always manage to throw us some very meaty semiotic bones that let us know they are also playing the same pantomime as the designers of the Bin Laden Playset.



With Saddam, we had the confounding discovery of Rowena Morrill chainmail cheesecake adorning the walls of his secret Baghdad bachelor pads. Perhaps it should not have been that surprising, when one is reminded that Saddam also wrote his own fantasy novels. Boggling the mind with ideas for potential psyops.

Bin Laden's special effects team was a bit more muted, setting him up in a WWII walled farmhouse diorama, sitting in front of the matte backdrop of the Pakistani Colorado Springs, watching himself play Osama Bin Laden on TV. And lots of porn, though maybe that was just another psyop by the Langley wiseguys who allegedly produced their own fake Osama pedo-porn. He gets it, and they get it: the movie version is as real as the reality version.

NB: There is a movie currently playing in theaters about the reality-altering life of one of Uday Hussein's body doubles. When will there be a convention of the body doubles of deposed international dictators? You know you could totally mint that in Vegas. Especially if you hired the CIA porn producers to orchestrate a Ziegfeld Follies of dancing with the impostors.



So now it's Muammar Q's turn (again—he's been stealing the scene and chewing the geopolitical scenery since the days of Reagan and the Libyan Hit Squad). Does he really have an elite team of lipsticked female bodyguards trained at his secret Tripoli facility?



Will they find him hiding out with them in his labyrinth of secret underground tunnels?



You already know the answer, because those tunnels lead into the Gygax catacombs of your head.

LoneStarCon 3 wins 2013 Worldcon bid for San Antonio

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RENO, Nev. – The World Science Fiction Convention will return to Texas for the first time since 1997 after voting results announced Aug. 20 at Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, awarded the right to host the international conference to the Texas in 2013 bid.

LoneStarCon 3-–the 71st World Science Fiction Convention-–will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 2, 2013, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Mariott Rivercenter and Mariott Riverwalk will serve as the host hotels.

The guests of honor list for LoneStarCon 3 includes Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Norman Spinrad, Darrel K. Sweet and Willie Siros, with Paul Cornell serving as toastmaster and featuring special guests Leslie Fish and Joe R. Lansdale.

Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers and fans of science fiction and fantasy entertainment. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by Worldcon membership and presented during the convention.

LoneStarCon 3 is sponsored by ALAMO, Inc., (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization), a 501(c)3 organization. Membership for LoneStarCon 3 may be purchased at www.LoneStarCon3.org. In addition to individual memberships, LoneStarCon 3 will also offer a family rate. For more information about LoneStarCon 3, memberships or hotel information, visit www.LoneStarCon3.org.

About the Guests of Honor

Paul Cornell is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in prose, television and comics, and is the only person to have been a Hugo Award nominee for all three media. He’s written Action Comics for DC Comics and Doctor Who for the BBC. His novels are Something More and British Summertime. His forthcoming novel, an urban fantasy, will be published by Tor in 2012.

Ellen Datlow has edited science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction for three decades. She served as fiction editor of Omni magazine and SCI Fiction, and has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults and children. She has won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

Leslie Fish is one of the best-known authors of filk songs including “Banned from Argo,” a comic song parodying Star Trek which has spawned more than 80 variants since first performed.

James Gunn is a science fiction author, editor, scholar and anthologist. His most significant writings include fiction from the 1960s and 70s and his scholarly Road to Science Fiction collections. Gunn is a founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won a Hugo Award for non-fiction in 1983 and was honored in 2007 as a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than 30 books and is known to his fans as Champion Joe, Mojo Storyteller. His is known for his horror stories, the Hap and Leonard mystery/thriller series and the theatrical film Bubba Ho-Tep. Lansdale’s many awards include 16 Bram Stoker Aawards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award and the American Mystery Award.

Willie Siros was instrumental in starting the long-running Austin science fiction convention, Armadillocon, serving as chair of the first three editions. Siros also contributed to the founding of the Fandom Association of Central Texas, the original LoneStarCon (the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention) and Adventures In Crime & Space Books. He is a former para-librarian at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center where he developed its speculative fiction collection.

Norman Spinrad is the author of more than 20 novels, including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, Child of Fortune, Pictures at 11, Greenhouse Summer and The Druid King. He has also published approximately 60 short stories collected in a dozen volumes. Spinrad has written teleplays, including the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine.” He is a long time literary critic, occasional film critic and songwriter, and perpetual political analyst.

Darrell K. Sweet is an artist most famous for providing the cover art for the fantasy epic saga The Wheel of Time. He is also the illustrator for the well-known Xanth series by Piers Anthony, the Saga of Recluce series by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and the Runelords series by David Farland. He is also the original cover artist for Stephen R. Donaldson’s series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

In the Panopticon, no one can hear you reboot

As the streets of the UK erupted last week, I happened to be reading an old blue Penguin I picked up on a trip there earlier this summer, a history of another period of English tumult—the seventeenth century.



The 1600s were of course the period of English revolution. A couple of revolutions, actually, political revolutions fueled by broader cultural currents, especially the religious fervor of the Reformation and its idea that our relationship with our deity needn't be mediated by other men, and the new wealth and change represented by the discovery and colonization of the New World. The 17th century always seems to express some of the essential dichotomies of English political culture, incubating a class radicalism that actually achieves the killing of the King, only to put the monarchy back in a short generation later. And reading about political agitators being banned to the Tower has a particular resonance when Cameron seems to want to do the same with Twitter, right after he kills the BlackBerry messenger.



The dismal scientist of the Interregnum was Thomas Hobbes, the first articulator of social contract theory--considering government as the implementation of a social bargain among its citizens to maintain order. Hobbes arrived at his theory through the reverse extrapolation that led him to conceive of a root state of nature in which an essentially self-interested population of human selves ruthlessly competes for the available resources, resulting in a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The theory, as modified by Locke, strongly informs all contemporary constitutional conceptions of republican government. But you know all that from school.



What would Hobbes do with the revolutions of today's world against the order established by our twentieth century sovereigns? The events of this year thus far have me thinking a lot about whether the current moment of Network Culture represents the base state of a newer nature: the realm of our Network selves, the chaotic new frontier that has not yet been subjugated to the order and dominion of the State, whose initially unbounded freedom we love and seem to be actively (if not quite consciously) importing into the institutional and socio-political fabric of consensus reality. Bruce Sterling captured the emerging situation pretty well in his February 2010 talk on "Atemporality for the Creative Artist," grimly diagnosing the not-yet-evenly-distributed disharmony of a coming decade of Gothic High Tech as the old institutions collapse before their replacements have emerged:



History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Then there is the colossally huge, searchable, public domain, which is now at your fingertips. There are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going. There are intellectual property problems in revenue, which interferes with scholarship as much as it aids it. There is a practice of ‘ragpicking’ with digital material - of loops, tracks, sampling. There are search engines, which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors. There is ‘collective intelligence’. Or, if you don’t want to dignify it with that term, you can just call it ‘internet meme ooze’. But it’s all over the place, just termite mounds of poorly organized and extremely potent knowledge, quantifiable, interchangeable data with newly networked relations. We cannot get rid of this stuff. It is our new burden, it is there as a fact on the ground, it is a fait accompli.

There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.

This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.



It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.

The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work - it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.

Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.

I don’t think we are going to get one. We could conceivably get a new ideology or a new business model that is able to seize control of the course of events and reinstate some clear path to progress, that gets a democratic consensus behind it. I don’t think that’s likely. At least not for ten years. I could be wrong, but it’s not on the near-term radar.

What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of ‘Gothic High-Tech’ and ‘Favela Chic’ (as I’ve called it), a crooked networked bazaar of history and futurity, rather than a cathedral of history, and a utopia of futurity.

That’s just the situation on the ground. I don’t want to belabor this point. I don’t want to go on and on about the fact that this is a new historical situation. If you don’t get it by now, you will be forced to get it; you will have no other choice.

That kind of sounds a lot like 2011, to my ears.



Think about the Gothic High Tech through the prism of Abraham Bosse's frontispiece from Leviathan (the picture up at the top of this post), with Hobbes's idea of the 17th century sovereign comprised of the people. Now watch the headless Multitudes that represent the new popular movements of 2011, like the creatures from deep fathoms just beginning to swim around near the surface. Isn't the Network itself looking like the real 21st century sovereign? It's starting to feel like the indigenous peoples of Network Culture (we) are on the verge of a very rare opportunity and responsibility: to rewrite their own social contracts from scratch. Which sounds very cool, but also very scary and disruptive (like, there is no food in cyberspace, and the current products of the social contract do a pretty good job of keeping me from getting killed by people who would like to take my shit).



Sure, every one of these popular movements we are watching in 2011 is different, reflecting unique histories, social conditions, and tactical moments. But it can't be a coincidence that David Cameron, Bashar Al-Assad and Hu Jintao all share one executive tenet: that limiting access to the Network is an essential ingredient to their personal conceptions of law and order (i.e., maintaining the power of the establishments, and failing nation states, they represent). The Network increasingly embodies a school of awakening Leviathans around the world (and, as the Network slowly cracks away at language barriers, a global one). As the cyber-mediated mob develops its self-awareness, it starts to act more like a sentient, directed Multitude. The US wants to give would-be rebels in oppressive societies Network access in a briefcase—but may not have fully parsed what the consequences will be of ubiquitous open Network access at home. Zeus's next baby is coming straight out of his head, and this time it's a litter of infinite avatars.



We don't know what the terms of the new social contract that emerges from this chaos will be. But one can venture a few thoughts:

- The Network will be the more important polity than the nation state (another 17th century idea that emerged from the chaos of the Reformation). Network Culture thinks about borders like it thinks about firewalls.

- The social contract of Network Culture will look more like an operating system than a constitution.

- As a polity, Network Culture has an inherent preference for direct democracy. A society of ubiquitous networking, in which people vote for their favorite products and television contest winners quite effectively though naturally occurring systems, will rapidly challenge the republican filters of constitutional democracy, in which popular ideas about how the society should operate are mediated through sclerotic representatives from the power elite whose upgrade schedule is more horseback courier than iPhone. Is it heresy to suggest last week's debt ceiling "debate" and this week's Bachmann Perry Overdrive make the Federalist Papers look like the user's manual for a 1960s television?

- The most important right of Network Culture must be freedom of speech. Free and open self-expression is the best fertilizer and preservative of other freedoms and virtues in any human social network. Network access, I suppose, becomes a necessary predicate to freedom of speech, right after electricity and running water.

- Secrets—state, trade, personal—will be essentially non-existent, or the most precious things there are.

- Politics will operate much more like capitalism, the most effective socially evolved network on the planet, and the one that (together with the nation state's war machine) created the Network. But its currency will be something more like reputation than money. And in parallel, the institutional agglomerations of Capital will atomize, as the anachronism of the long-term employment contract is replaced by project-based collaboration and episodic generation of wealth, in a society where specialization is only helpful in groups of at least three.

- If you've ever been run down by an Internet mob, you know that protections for minority dissent will be the most important countermeasure, and the thing that will probably be the hardest to figure out. Mob rule in a world without privacy? We are going to end up with plenty of Network hermits, 21st century analogs to the Irish monks the Vikings found living in the caves of early medieval Iceland.