Blatant Optimism

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October 12, 2003

Belated Brain Dump

Had a great, great night with Euan and the missus hearing Douglas Rushkoff in a Demos-sponsored talk at the ICA about 'Open Source Democracy'. There's also a PDF of a book of the same name you can download.

My memory of reading Rushkoff's 'Cyberia' all those years ago is of being frustrated, as I felt that he'd started really well and then, in the final chapters, got swept along with a whole bunch of, admittedly charismatic, SF-style gurus talking utter bollocks.

This night reminded me that I should have remembered how good the first 90% of the book was, and stopped being such a smug cynical old whinger.

Rushkoff was a witty and charming speaker, who was courteous to some rather confrontational tangential questioning, yet still thinking on his feet to produce something of use from any situation. In fact, he seemed to think that the being of use was far more important that looking impressive, a welcome trait at these sorts of gatherings.

Pat Kane (of Hue and Cry all those years ago) was also fascinating - a strange combination of high-art and earthy leftiness. Was very wise in a lot of areas. He and Rushkoff bounced off eachother really well.

Sadly Martin Jacques, an incredibly intelligent bloke who was one of the founders of Demos, had the same infuriating interviewing style as Ned Sherrin. My memory is that he rarely asked a question without answering it himself, at length, leaving the interviewers with nowhere to go. And on the one occasion he did, talked over their answer to introduce a new question. Grrrr.

Euan has put up his notes from the evening

Here are my scribblings. Make of them what you will.

• R: Challenge of today is to push through own cynicism into a new naivete
  Have to find optimism against all the odds.
  Is Arnie a deliberate rebellion?

• Pat: howard dean – low charisma, dry policy maker. (T:Like many adopters of new media for power? V Carolyn Marvin)

• O’Hagan LRB essay : watchers culture. Pat says ‘crap nostalgia’

• Democracy and tech relationship, replaced by agency and tech relationship.

• What will Bono do with politics when he becomes a US citizen?

• Rushkoff hardly looks at the audience. (T: In hindsight this wasn't true. He was just thinking hard at the start)

• Dotcom failure thing:
  When there was only TV, we tended to just believe it.
  Govt cast itself as enemy to cyberspace.
  So public killed govt influence on the net, thereby stopping govt keeping check on commercial use of online.

• Net has shaken off the virus of commerce. Having shrunk off defence before. (T: Is it rejecting the web? Are we slowly reverting to Usenet?)

• BBC creative archive empowering memory?

• Internet innovation of any note driven by essentially a gift economy.- progress frozen since commerce involved.

• Has the web frozen community. (Can't remember if this was said or me thinking to myself)

• What is going on is not the net, but the net’s impact on other media. (T hindsight: this is a really interesting strand to mix into my rule-of-thumb toolkit. Look at net things and work out if I'm stading in Trafalgar Sq trying to find London. Ugh a pratchett quote. Tho it could be gaiman.)

• Most of our society is software, not hardware.

• The net alerts us to the fact that decisions are being made. When you see the frame round the picture, you realise the picture was drawn, rather than always in existence.

• Addicted to aristotelean arguments. Like it with Beginning Middle and End. Philosophically urged to postpone this moment in the hope of a better later. How to extend the now.( THE WIDE NOW?)

• Is society fo fabric crumbling because of increased individualism? Rushk – not based on expression. Commerce drives: The more we despise eachother, the less we will trust and borrow, so the more stuff we will need?

• People aren’t afraid of the net and what it’s going to do, they’re afraid of being in the drivers seat.

• A lonely sad person buys more stuff. TV helped that.

• Net is remedial help for ability to socialise.

• Lego mindostorms: Only 8% of kids want to reprogram their own toys.

• No such thing as society, only culture, networds and agency.

• Never hbave so many people felt freedom on this planet – (BUT HAS INTEGRAL UNDER CURVE CHANGED?)

• Creation of christian fundamentalist cities, where people recoil from power and return to an externally prescriptive society. Compare to that post on Euan’s blog the other night.

• ‘Revolution is obsolete’ – he doesn’t believe it. (this was re change not being obsolete, but the social structure of a revolutionary movement perhaps no longer being the most efficient and effective way of bringing about change)

• T: Captialst narrative as consensual game theory example. (WTF am I talking about here?)

• Religion is great and fabulously useful, but why on earth do you go to the follish move of believing it?

• Truths don’t stand still. “This week I am Buddha. That was fun, what truth will I try on *this* week”

• Flash-mobs: replaced by smartmobs and dumbmobs.. (IT’S A NEW MEDIUM?) Ravers didn’t understand what was underneath what they were doing. Similarly flash mob.

• By becoming a labelled movement you become a nice easy target.

• Does a movement absolve you of responsibility and identity. (Was this said or me getting ready for my later question about blame?)

• “People thinking of joining things that look like movments”

• The 'will you go with your mates for a Mcdonalds after the demo?' story: Small instances of Being courageous in the moment will effect cumulatively huge change.

• The shift from hieroglyphs to alphabets was a mass-consumerisation fo literacy. Suddenly you didn’t have to be a priest. Only 26 symbols as opposed to thousands.

• Emergence of public-access interenet in UK, as opposed to US where it was a status symbol.

• When you put things online people devalue things. Reritualise voting. Have a totemic bone in a secret room.

Posted by Tom Dolan at October 12, 2003 01:56 AM

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