What we need to learn from future robots on Mars... and Bees

On this weeks ever-excellent Skeptics Guide to the Universe, I heard tell of a possible future plan for exploring the surface of Mars. Rather than use a single rover, the idea is to use a swarm of robots that will spread out from the landing spot, search a wide area and then return to upload and share data and presumably recharge. Each robot would have searched for the same list of pre-defined information and used common measuring techniques so that when the data is shared, a consensus can be reached as to the value of each robots findings.  Should a particularly interesting spot have been found, a larger group could go to analyse in more depth, or perhaps nothing of interest was found and the search could continued elsewhere.

The inspiration for the idea came from bees. It is the same process that is involved in looking for a new place to start a hive.  Each bee will scout before reporting its findings back to the hive, which will then come to a collective decision.  In each case, consensus is possible because each individual is part of the same shared reality, which is in turn interpreted the same way, according to the same rules. So what the hell is it that robots and bees have that humans don't?! Well, the question actually needs to read, "What do we humans have that these bees and robots don't?"

Here's a thought experiment (I will use the robots for the comparison, since the concepts are more familiar to us, being tools of our creation, than the inner-workings of a bees brain): Clearly the robots represent a highly simplified model of what our society actually represents.  To make analogy true therefore, we would need robots that were looking for different things, with different measuring devices, and different concepts of what information was of most importance. Furthermore, instead of each robots having an equal voice, a small percentage of the robots spoke for all the others, thereby ensuring that all but a few of the observations were ignored and consensus remains an impossibility.

We humans do not all share the same software; we are not the Borg. Indeed, geographical separation alone has ensured radically different coneptions of what has value and how to measure that value, simply by virtue of the natural environment one inhabits. On top of that, more abstract separations have further undermined the unity of our judgement: Religion, race, sex, gender, wealth, even being ginger for crying out loud; All of these things and a thousand more have ensured that we are far from the robot ideal in terms of reaching consensus. All of these things I have mentioned, together they form culture, the software, our imagined community, our political identity.  It is thousands of years of top-down cultural (bio-political as Micahel Hardt and Antonio Negri call it) production, shaping our identities, passing from generation to generation; religious, nationalistic, commercial. It is what we believe, where we live, what we do... that is what we have that bees and robots do not.  That is what gets in the way of us sharing an understanding our reality, the same shared reality that makes consensus possible in bees and robots. 

Notice above that I blame top-down cultural production for our woes? Top-down production of our identities is, by definition, synonymous with political power, not in the strict 'state' defintion but political in terms of the power to govern peoples lives in any form. This includes the religious and commercial as well. Each time communication structures have progressed, the political structure has been forced to evolve, open-up, in a constant struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. Yet always the oppressors had the power of identity creation, thereby ensuring that whenever the tension did finally break, the oppressed would, like an abused child, know nothing other than retribution-in-kind.  This no longer holds.  The internet is ushering in a new dawn of democratised cultural production, horizontally-derived identity that can, in all but a few countries, ignore all of the boundaries that stop us from reaching consensus (Anonyminity being the extreme conclusion).  Note here the I'm not saying that the Web is some sort of ready-made utpoia; all I am saying is that is can allow you to ignore those boundaries and that, since kids enjoying the internet have in many cases not yet internalised prejudice and ignorance quite yet, it can innoculate the young from the prejudice filled fear-politics used by their apparent elders.  Unfortunately, evolution is slow, condemning the Internets early years to cultural production whose authors were still very much of the top-down identity.

Another criticism would be that I am arguing for us to literally become the Borg, something that is further reinforced by the fact that I'm totally up for transhumanism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Robots and bees have one primary function.  We do not; we have and should cherish our subjectivity. Consensus need only be reached in political arenas, in areas of societal organisation that has the power to impose identity upon us. We must work toward a complete split of past culture and politics, a counterintuitive notion yet only so to that part of us that has been directly formed from hundreds of years of top-down political identity.  To put it a less counterintuitive way: Do we want the fundamentalist religious, nationalistic or capitalistic ideologies of the few to determine the organisation of all of society? For all of past identity is the creation of the few, ensuring that public policy is determined by religious ideas thousand of years old, 18th Century political philosophy and institutions or wealth grabbing corporations fresh from the 19th century.  The alternative is to allow reality, evidence, to guide us, to recognise our own flaws and the insignificance of the individual, to harness, trust and give equal voice to all of the swarm.  If we were to work toward that then, far from becoming a mindless bee, you would become free in all the other areas of your life to be more than simply an indictrinated robot.  All that is being asked is that in political arenas, where people make decisions that are imposed upon others (whether willingly or not), that those decision makers leave their personal past, their personal judgement, their concept of right or wrong at the door, and allow the evidence to dictate the end results.  This could not fail to be more humanitarian, since all of the evidence points to us all being one system.

None of us should trust our own judgement.  We must all recognise our own pejudices, reflect on the perhaps instinctive rejection of the idea of splitting our known-culture and politics. Even our physiology works against us, showing patterns that aren't there, showing us a limited confabulation of reality. Slowly we are coming to realise these things, something epitomised by the exploding growth of the skeptic movement. Consensus is possible in science, precisely because it understood very early on that culture was an impediment to truth and thus attempted to filter out its effects. It has advanced tremendously, a testament to our ability to work together toward understanding ourselves and our environment. It is by defintion a step-by-step process evolution; but we are beginning to walk the right way.

A look back to Athens and the writing that was on the wall.

Looking for a photo, I came across this blog I wrote about the Greece riots of 2008. I thought I'd repost it here since it seems quite prescient (if, given the subject, slightly more Eurocentric than reality turned out) given what 2011 has brought us thus far. That, and the fact that I am more certain than ever that the West too shall have their revolution unless drastic, I would say impossible in the States, reform takes place separating business and politics and addressing the enourmous social imbalances that have been allowed to occur....

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9th December 2008

Athens burns... but how far will it go?

This is more than simply unrulely hooligans, this could be a warning for us all.

I have been following the protests which have effectively brought Greece to a debris strewn stand-still with much interest. Once again, as with Mumbai, twitter and Flkr have been keeping the world up to date with minute by minute eye-witness reporting. As with the mainstream, one obviously has to try to detect and filter bias from what is understandably emotional reporting. Having read many conflicting accounts I thought I'd try to collate my thoughts and see where it plays out..

The Greek government, like its economy, is in a pretty sorry state. With a majority of a whopping one whole seat and corruption rife throughout, Greece has witnessed a privatisation policy which, rather predictably, has led to a growing wealth gap, rising unemployment, a rise in violent crime and poverty and continued police brutality (something which amnesty international today condemned). I say predictably because as many people know (it was after all the central theme of Naomi Klein's new bestseller Shock Doctrine), this is what always happens when a state attempts to push such harmful reforms through. Some countries fare better than others... the UK for instance decided on going to war with Argentina to pull people onside (though they didn't skip the police brutality).

Many Articles speak of the selfish and destructive mob of holligans terrorising Greece. I do not doubt for one second that there are groups of youths who are, quite simply, cunts and who are quite rightly admonished for their behaviour. Yet these articles invariably fail to mention the thousands willing to face tear gas and riot police whilst remaining steadfastly non-violent. Nor do they mention the, in my mind at least, legitimate groups who are willing to stand up and fight for the kind of state that they feel people deserve.

Lets get this straight. When a corrupt government gets rich by privatising the state at the cost to the people, they have every right to demand change. If the state then uses the police to repress this dissent, people are fully justified in fighting back. I understand that the pros and cons of the free market is a decisive subject. It is roughly divided like this. Much of America believe it to be the economic ideal (overlooking their own heavy subsidising of key industries), as do the ruling corporate/political elites in charge of countries where and when it was enacted and a smattering of intellectuals around the world. On the otherside of the fence lie the millions of people who have suffered throughout the years: witnessing their rulers siphon billions of dollars, the WTO blackmailing them and depriving them of any future prosperity through outrageous debt, suffering military juntas and severe repression. Standing side by side with these victims of the silent economic war that we in the west have been sheltered from even seeing are those that have refused to be blind-folded. Anarchists are one of those groups.

Anarchists are not simply bitter hooligans. Sure, a minority have no objection to using violence. Yet as I outlined above, there are situations in which it is necessary (had it not been for the anarchists leading the uprising in Spain, Franco could have walked over Spain from the start). The simple fact is that anarchists, like a growing number of young people now that the internet is considered an integral part of our development, are well-read, politically aware and share a common theme of believing in the equality of all.

They are all aware of the effects of the free-market: how it has brought war and repression to numerous countries and millions of people, and here, before their eyes, unfettered greed has wrought a mighty blow upon the world under the banner of capitalism. The coming depression promises harsher economic conditions and a rise in poverty. To see infrastructure crumble for lack of money whilst $27 billion has found its way to Greek Banks in bail-outs is simply to much to bare.

Another thing of note about anarchists, and all actvists in general, is the incredible networking capabilities now available. Twitter and Flkr capture countless acts of police brutality and mob retaliations which are disseminated and read by people all over the world. It is in these networks of young, active groups which the most interesting developments lie. The solidarity felt at an international level, particularly in Germany and France, is really quite remarkable. For this reason I wonder whether this is really the extent of the hostilities. If we really are about to enter the kind of depression many fear, frustration at the vast sums given to banks, the vast bonuses and the greed which infects the financial sector and the universal corruption in politics will manifest itself in similar riots around Europe and beyond.

It will no longer simply be about how we can get back to being a stable credit-fuelled consumer society in a world which cannot afford to consume on an ever-expanding orgy of luxery-fucking. As liberal democracy attempts to hold on to the jet-set corporate mentality of placing profit over a fair and just society, it will come up against an ever increasing and ever more militant educated generation who place the planet and people first.

Dan Carlin smacks it once again.

If you haven't already discovered Dan Carlin, I suggest you check him out.  Be it his Common Sense political podcast or his Hardcore History podcast, both are excellent.  I have just gotten around to watching the short video introduction to the website and I was struck once again by what he said.

He talks about the relevance of social, digital media to our future descendants by reflecting on how different our historical knowledge of Alexandra the Great's times would be if they all had blogs and podcasts.  Our future selves will be able to look back on our own time and garner a three-dimensional image of our society, rather than a culture that is rigidly controlled by power structures that monopolised cultural creation (the 'Gatekeepers', as he calls them).

As ever with Dan (he can be rather downhearted and pessimistic at times, not that I can blame him for that), I can't help but feel he doesn't follow through with his clearly excellent grasp of History and apply those rules to the present time.  Just as Historians could only ever work with history written by the winners, so too has society only ever been able to form identities written by the winners.  Historians work with culture to construct identity.. precisely what we all do in the creation of our selves everyday of our lives.  Therefore, what is revolutionary to future historians is, ipso facto, revolutionary to us, today.

We too can now construct a three dimensional view of our world, bypassing the biases and interests of the Gatekeepers.  Indeed, with digital technology this revolution will be visualised, a 3D epic to end them all.  Our global shared identity is being born, spreading through wires and through the air, attracted to that which is most rational; our reality whose perceived order betrays our shared existence within it.

There are walls to be overcome, fundamentalists of religion, state and commerce, but we must remember that for all but the few with everything to lose, everyone will be exposed to attractor of the most rational in a time of global communication: our global, universal commonalities.

A Sociocultural Evolutionary View of Skepticism; Its Origin and Function.

I am going to give a talk on my theory of sociocultural evolution and how it applies to skepticism at our next Skeptics in the Pub meeting. As preparation I thought I would write a blog on the topic to try to flesh out my ideas.  Bare in mind, I have to take it right back to the beginning of civilisation and back again, but skepticism does appear eventually...


In the beginning there was instinct ;), and the abstract had yet to exist. Foresight and memory evolved alongside social living and created the first shared abstract notion of identity emerging from our knowledge of the world and our place within it.  Imagined communities did not exist beyond what was immediate, the 'other' incorporating everybody not of ones own nomadic tribal group.  Shared experience was limited to geographical space since communication was limited to speech, story and song.  As I see it, a few simple evolutionary maxims, once the domain of instinctive genetics but now rationalised by early humans through newly developed cognitive abilities into a cultural form, ensured the emergence of human civilisation:

1) Fear the unknown - The new and different is potentially a threat.  When applied to humans this would include cultural factors since such a difference would suggest genetic difference i.e from a  rival nomadic group, due to the limited extent of communication networks.

2) Do not waste energy fearing the known - The familiar can only become familiar if it hasn't already killed you. This is seen in various forms of habitualisation, and when applied to other humans would also include cultural familiarity since this would highly correspond to genetic similarity.

3) Defer to authority - Whether it is something akin to Blackmores imitate the best imitators, or simply an evolution from animalistic strength hierarchies, Authority has since the dawn of power structures been synonymous with exclusive knowledge/cultural production

4) Just as the brain constantly strives to rationalise our physical world, so too the brain strives to rationalise our cultural world.  Really, there is no clear distinction since both combine to make up our environment.

Then technology started.  Agriculture brought with it geographical stability and the concept of belonging to a certain area.  Power dynamics, once limited to shamans and the like within individual groups, began to grow along with the resources now available: overabundance of food, increased leisure time and specialisation leading to new weapons.  Instead of ruling a nomadic group, those first individuals to claim superiority now found it possible to rule over more than one group within a geographical locale.  The imposition of abstract knowledge (initially religion, understandable rationalisations given the lack of knowledge) from the exclusive few could now find form in art, artifacts, story, song etc which means, according to the above maxims, that enough common culture was produced and consumed by the different peoples to ensure a stable group identity (pretty much the definition of a group) under a common hierarchy. 

All over the world these cultural units formed.  Written language arrived, and with it came exclusive literacy and ability to construct and record abstract concepts.  Culture was either created by or influenced from a monopoly of the few creating the identity of the many, utterly saturating all of society.  Yet technological advance ensured the status-quo could not last.  Ships, mathematics and all manner of advances came from the opening up of these largely closed systems through trade (primarily around the Mediterranean and along land trade routes) creating cultural mixing (and bringing about the end of the Bronze Age).  Now huge empires were possible, encompassing a number of different religious identities. This did not produce for stable times, and as humanity tried to rationalise this state of affairs memes such as secular citizenship flourished. It was in effect the large scale adoption, a scaling-up, of old memes from Classical Greece and other localities that, due to their diversity, had found ways to accommodate such differences.  A new form of imagined community was created, that of the state, and it managed this not by replacing religion but by capturing a niche and constructing for itself a role separate from that of religion: politics.  Religion was relegated merely to matters of the esoteric (and even this was not free from the manipulating intrusion of political memes) and the rest of culture was monopolised by the state.  Once again, this monopolisation led to a permanent suffusion of state-memes within culture, becoming a part of all that came after.  Expanding empires made various degrees of attempts at imposing 'home' culture on plundered lands but in Europe, the close proximity of closed systems of 'others' meant the continual war of states, just as nomadic and religious closed systems fought before that.

This type of transition has happened once more since the emergence of the State.  Once again, technology was the driver.  As science led to revolutions in navigation, weapons, bureaucracy and the like, individuals began to escape the closed system of state's common vernaculars (derived from market forces after the invention of the printing press) and trade internationally.  This fresh autonomy, directly analogous to the Mediterranean traders, led once more to increased dissonance as people saw the actions of the state as counter to their desire to maintain peaceful trade. Multinational imagined communities arose such as traders and academics, the increased mixing leading to massive innovation, something the state needed to tap in order to achieve it's own aims.  Yet the memes of Commerce, those of individual freedom, were more rational than the status-quo of war, propaganda and fear espoused by the State.  Slowly, the States role was sidelined (just as Religion before it) as Commerce became the new producer of cultural, and therefore identity, production.  They had their monopoly, granted in recognition by the State (and fetishised in corporate personhood laws) in its new role as protector of Commerce, as well as in the large, inhibitive cost of production.  In this age of mass-production, imagined identity is formed by the wealthy few who censor and produce according to the narrow interests of state and commerce.  Commerce has become a fundamental identity, the democratic state now restricted to Public Service campaigns and press statements, funnelled to us through the corporate sphere.

Religion is what we believe.  The State is where we live.  Commerce is what we do.  These three monopolies, allowed to suffuse culture with their memes, have between them constructed our cultural environment and our identities.  Yet now we face a technological revolution to put all the others in the shade.  With each previous transition, cultural production has passed to more and more hands, from the Demi-God to Multinational CEO..  Yet it has always remained the foundation of the power dynamic, the exclusive domain of the few who rule over the multitude that are cast in their image.  These past transitions of imagined community have been quantitative revolutions only.  The Internet (presaged by universal education) has democratised cultural production and made it global; A truly qualitative revolution in the creation of imagined communities  Dissonance is once more rising as the communication network outstrips the reach of either religion, state or commerce.  Their 'official' imagined community narrative, based upon a now false notion of exclusivity and exploitation of the 'other', is now at odds with what we have come to understand for ourselves.  Yet this is misleading as I will come to soon... a better description would be to say that our selves are now produced by, and so now morally includes, the multitude itself: horizontally derived, global, democratising, open system (there is no one else that can be the closed-out 'other')  A new global identity is being formed based upon information, a basis which includes everybody regardless of belief, habitat or profession.  In the words of this Syrian journalist, "A real revolution is nothing like what we were taught about in our school books. No military coups, no revenge, no political bloodshed in the name of the revolution. Tunis first, then Egypt. I watched how young men and women declared their refusal of the reality that had been forced on them (my italics)

This is where skepticism comes in (finally).  The reason that we can form a universal imagined community is because we have universal commonalities.  Not only are we physically similar but we also share familiar real communities; we are all mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, we all need to eat and we all need to rationalise our existence.  This last point is key.  Because we all share the same reality, the scientific method reaches the same conclusions for everyone, creating a universal commonality based upon legitimate, agreed consensus (including agreed upon provisos, distinguishing it from dogma).  This creates an attractor, truth if you will, that objectivises creation of shared identity and thus insulates it from manipulation of the few, the powerful.  Updated: It's kind of analogous to Entropy in regard to time, in that the same false beliefs are far less likely to spontaneously appear the world over than an the ever more rational interpretation that is the scientific consensus, based as it is on a reality independent of subjectivity.  In terms of individual rationalisation, false beliefs demand a complex, specific, amalgamation of different memes in just the right order, with defense against dissonance, for the overall belief to hold up.  There are many different false possibilities, but only one consensus that attempts to describe reality objectively.  There is an asymetric drive towards belief in the rational, determined by our inate need to reason and our acumulating knowledge of the world; eventually objective reasoning will replace superstition.  I like the idea of skeptical thinking being analogous to high entropy, fits with the notion of broad, disparate knowledge as opposed to localised, low entropy dogma. The attractor chips away at this structure leaving only that which requires no dogma whatsoever, the ever-changing world of science.  

Up until now, science has retained, due to a need for trust, an exclusive network within which it works.  So long as cultural production via the scientific method remained exclusive, it remained alien and unknown to many of the multitude, resulting in the state and commerces ability to ring fence it for their own use.  This has limited the ability of science to influence the social sphere, since it was still produced by exclusive culture (even exclusive language), for exclusive groups. The Internet and open information memes are chipping at this closed structure, trying to open it up, something that I think is central to the aims of skepticism.

Skepticism can be to the social what the scientific method is to the physical.  Both seek to objectify thinking and behaviour by attempting to identify and work around our human limitations, both biological and psychological (or cultural, i.e. accumulated knowledge. The terms are to me largely interchangeable though psychological would also account for the effect of genetics too).  Objective knowledge of our world has reached a point whereby different people, applying skepticism, can come to universal conclusions of abstract notions (morality, ethics etc) in the social sphere (as the scientific method does for the physical world).  Previous forms of meta-subjectivity created for us by the few, the foundations of exclusive imagined identities, are mere constructs designed to maintain the status-quo; institutionalised culture rationalised (communicated down) in such terms as paternal (religion), duty (state, social contract) or theories of economics-as-freedom (commerce).  We must reject these dogmas, for that is what they are, and objectivize the subjective through the objectification of thought (applying skeptical rules).

This is what skepticism does.  It facilitates the emergence of a common identity through the universal acceptance (within the group) of agreed upon rules that are designed, from our objective knowledge of science, to recognise and mitigate our own mental flaws and biases.  These rules demand that we all recognise and mitigate those parts of our identity that are exclusive, that have come from an undemocratic sphere of cultural production, and instead accept the evidence of our shared reality.

This attractor of truth that is independent of humanity is a revolutionary concept when you consider its correlation with technology.  Hegel always imagined History as the story of mankind coming to know itself, but I think he underestimated the next step, getting to know each other.  So long as capitalism continues to connect people the dissonance will grow.  Yet the powerful, those purveyors of ideology, have come to believe their own dogma... how else do you rationalise greed so one is able to sleep soundly and be a good family man?  This makes them dangerous.  They have created a global gated community, inoculating themselves from the darker externalities their wealth accumulation demands.  Yet even they inhabit the self same world as the multitude and it remains to be seen how high the pull of the attractor can reach.  Each transition of imagined identity has brought with it increased reliance on the cooperation of the people and as the latter of the three, commerce can, reluctantly, change when forced to by the expanding moral spheres/communication structures of its consumers.  That those with the most to lose and of the most immoral nature (oil, weapons, finance) are the ones to have used their wealth to subvert the state, the supposed representatives of the very people that now exceed them in moral capacity, is not a coincidence.  They will be the last bastions of imposed identity, the most fundamentalist of opponents against the emerging global identity.

Everyone will always have reality in common.  This fact must not be allowed to be taken from us by the extreme post-modernists who represent the social equivalent to pseudo-scientists.  To endow validity to individual 'realities' is to erect walls where there need not be any.  Celebrating subjectivity is not the exclusive domain of those who deny a shared objective truth.  If it were so, we would be doomed to the constant threat of manipulation as we continue to allow belief to be a valid criteria for defining authority to which we are subservient.  We have tried that, indeed we have tried nothing else.  While it may have been moral according to the limited definition granted by limited communication technology in the past, it was still the cause of much pain and suffering as dissonance, caused by the attractor, began to contradict those belief systems.  The only way for us to reach a globally just and fair society is to base that society on universal commonalities of reality as it really is.  The public realm must be free from the ideologies of religion, state and commerce and be replaced with institutions that emerge from the complex network of independent minds.  The multitude must be allowed to communicate, to create global culture that eliminates the 'other' and renders the identities of the oppressors obsolete.

No longer will we be defined by what we believe, where we live or what we do.  We will be recognised for our unique set of knowledge and the social value that contributes.  In short, we will go from objectified subjectivity of the soul, to the subjectivised objectivity of a complex network.  We are a system, and a system is defined by the number of links, by relationships, more than by individual nodes. Ironically, we once knew that, as indigenous people do, but we didn't understand it.  That's why it all got a bit crazy for a few thousand years.  Now we are beginning to understand it, we are replicating that understanding in culture because it seems the most rational interpretation and eventually people will be able to grow in an environment where there is enough understanding that we can once again come to know what it is to be part of a system, both human and, inseparably, ecological. We can only know such things when we are allowed to live it, understanding clearly isn't enough.  As such, I predict that skepticism will grow to become a fundamental part of this new, information based, global identity and will eventually lead to the eradication of enforced, indoctrinated, false subjectivity to a true subjectivity whereby an individual is free to express themselves as they truly feel themselves to be, not as a call-centre worker from Hull who wishes she had the time and money to learn violin.

Thanks to @Mikeharris100 for his input!

David Cameron: A man on the wrong side of History

I just read this quote in todays Guardian.  Given everything I have written I don't need to tell you here why this is wrong.  This shit speaks for itself:

In February, Cameron criticised "state multiculturalism". He argued that the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism and proposed an end to engagement with non-violent extremist groups as well as violent ones, on the basis that extremists often begin in non-violent groups.

This way is Fascism.  It is time for the Multitude to assert itself.

Is this the worst definition of meme ever?

This "definition" of a meme was in the 'about' section in a Facebook quiz about how many of the top 100 literary books you may or may not have read.  It has to rank as the worst attempts at defining a meme I have yet come across.

A “meme” is a little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet.

Is it?  I couldn't resist... here was my reply.

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Oh man that definition up top of 'meme' makes me bristle.  In one hundred years time cultural evolution, through memetics (or whatever the fuck you petty academics want to call it), will be recognised as equally significant as genetic evolution; it is what makes us, us.

Without memes there would be no identity.  We would be animals of pure instinct. Memes are all human-made products, all language, all artifacts, all culture. They are the basis for our morality, the vehicle of our progression, the network from which History emerges.  When shared, they are what give us our humanity; when not, our inhumanity.

Dawkins name will go down with Darwin's as the two most influential individuals to avow and propogate evolutionary ideas.  Once humanity comes to understand the power of the meme, we will understand the conceptual darkness humanity has suffered under, the false notions of the self as soul and external, interpretable moral codes born of a time of memetic infancy, where the 'other' prowls relentlessly and power was held by the few over all civilisation.

We are now coming out of that darkness, the illusion of 'other' dissapating before our now global eyes. We will soon recognise our true responsibilities and our true sense of self within a complex network of equal individuals.

The Internet, global identity and the overthrow of power.

The world is beginning to fracture, dissonance is building and if nothing is done by those in power the fault-line will snap.  The world may be talking of an Arab revolution, but History will, I believe, see this as the birth of something bigger: the emergence of the first global identity founded on equality and a rejection of power.

Why do I think this? Throughout my writing, one thing stands out as crucial: Morality is correlated with communication technology.  That we empathise with that which we know, that we connect with, has been known a long time yet it's ramifications have yet to be fully understood.  It is clear that the accelerating pace of technological change was responsible for an accelerating pace of emancipation, inclusion into societies moral sphere. Now this advance has progressed beyond national boundaries, we are seeing the first generation in History able to form an identity that was not of their masters creation.  And what do they see? They see others of their generation around the world cheering them on, helping them at risk of arrest, connecting with them far more deeply than they do with their own rulers.

Lets be clear. We are relative beings. Its all very well having lots of material goods, but if your 'advanced' nation has extreme wealth inequality then happiness it will not bring. Every nation on earth is governed by corrupt people who share more in common with each other than they do with their own citizens.  Let me explain why this is so important.

Imagine taking all the people in the world and splitting them into two groups. In the first group, you have all of the people with power: the wealthy, the politicians, the capitalists and all the resources they command.  In the second group we have everybody else: the dispossessed, the relative poor, the oppressesed.  Seems fairly one-sided right? Well you are right... the powerful don't stand a chance.  Here's why.

Imagine these two groups as two circles whose size is proportioned solely to the number of individuals. Now see the people tower over the powerful (at least on paper).  But, those resources I mentioned earlier are also people: the army, the police force, lower ranking officials who decide they don't have enough to risk their own lives... an awful lot of their family and friends may well be on the other side of the divide.  Those not fully indoctrinated, once confronted with a huge fucking circle that aint afraid no one no more, will switch sides, aware of their kingmaker status due to the reliance that power has on them.

Where it gets messy is when you consider those 'old-school' elements of society, potentially numerous, who have been subjected to living an identity constructed by others, be it religion, nationalism or free-market ideals.  These people know no other identity, literally.  They are unable to empathise with the 'other', unaware that all around them their children are coming to identify with them more than their own parents. This largely generational divide has never been more evident than now, the young having evolved beyond the power schemas of their elders, disgusted at the immorality of outdated politics.

Example:

N.b This is very generalised but, since I'm making judgement calls solely on systems theory, I don't feel like I'm being offensive in what is to come.  After all, I'm not actually passing judgement at all here, merely talking History.

America is an interesting memetic sandwich.  Down the coasts it is highly multicultural.  It is here we also find the most liberal, open-minded, largely Democratic individuals.  Through the middle and down south you have a more religious, largely Republican society with little memetic mixing at all.  If one looks at the different memes inherent in these two polarised views, you simply have to come to the conclusion that Democrats represent the most recently emancipated ideas. After-all, Republican dogma is wrapped up in religious ideas whose age is measured in thousands of years.  Their most recent dogma is that of the free-market, an unobtainable ideal decades old, long disproved, that is successful solely because of it's undoubted facilitation of greed.  These are ideas whose time came when communication technology was still limited to a state monopoly!  They may have been moral then, but in the face of an opposition whose ideals extend further they appear ever more selfish and immoral.

The problem is that there has been such limited mixing in many Republican heartlands that identity there is still created with mental tools that are decades old at best, retaining the 'other' of that time. History does not swing back as far as republicans want.  Not without major repression.  They are desperately clinging to certain ways, certain of God, certain of the possibility of the chance of the dream of becoming Rich; indoctrinated to blind subservience and supplied with pre-packaged, logic-defying ammunition with which to insult dissonance away. Group-think, positive and negative bias; a cultural bubble unto themselves where the unknown is riduculed in an unknowing way.  Whatever narrative Fox news says, is.

On the other side, Democrats too are now on the wrong side of History. They share more in common with their Republican counterparts than either party has with the citizens they represent.  Both comprise a Duopoly of corruption self-legitimised by unquestioned capitalist ideals of the primacy of wealth and misguided social Darwinism. Neither talks about the real issues: military spending, corruption, bought-power, a re-evaluation of what it means to be a state in the globalised world, because it is both parties that are guilty of forgetting their place.  The choice of social destination is a sham, a mirage; it is merely whether you take the scenic rout* to repression or the highway.

Yet through it all comes a youth that by human nature seems to grow into technology as if it has always been there (which to them it has).  This ability to adapt is leading millions of youths to plug in, along with like-minded individuals around the world, and witness global events of shared importance.  Images and voices of Tunisia and Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, have seared themselves into minds the world over, especially in the wired-up West, marking the beginning of a global identity that will countenance the universal use of the 'other' by states everywhere.  This breaking free of nationally enclosed, officially-manufactured identity will coalesce into a global moral force that will rally around the one issue that unites people everywhere: Corrupt Power.  Rationality will act as an attractor, and rationality derived from global communication structures will be global in its conclusions: One people, One planet.

When people see freedom, they yearn for it.  The opening up of social spaces into a global communication network will, without doubt, mark the greatest revolution humanity has ever known.  Until now, revolutions have been subject to limited, nationalistic worldviews, the oppressed becoming the oppressor because, like the abused becoming abusers, it was all they ever knew.  Global communication and the explosion of comparative data it brings marks a turning point, the first expressions of global identity no longer bound by the grip of the few.  Here dissonance begets cynicism and the very concept or 'power' begins to go the way of racism; a social ill that will no longer be tolerated.  This is the first generation for whom their moral common denominator is that of humanity as a whole, and that is something that the inherently nationalistic state, a concept born in ignorance of the wider-world, was not built to cope with.  

Read Anonymous's latest statement.  Tell me that social schema isn't way more moral than the racist, wealth-obsessed, real-politik of the status-quo.  That shit's contemporary, that shit's on the right side of History.

* (sic)

The out-dated mindset of the Social Contract and it's support for exploitation

Since I haven't posted in a while, I'd thought i'd share this rant I was compelled to write in reply to someone my wife knows back in the states...
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History is not one continuous, unchanging line. Humanities empathy is determined by what we know; our fears determined by what we don't know. This means morality is determined by the extent of the communication infrastructure that capitalism is responsible for building.

As exploitative as it is, at least capitalism is thereby sowing the seeds of its own downfall.

You see, militarism makes sense when communication structures were limited to national borders (except for the republic of letters during the enlightenment). In that age, everyone was an 'other', a potential enemy that meant governments had a duty to protect their citizens with strength. During this time, xenophobia was a virtue and racism acceptable.

That is no longer the age we are in.

Communication is global. Global influences through the internet are generating a youth who, more than ever before, incorporate humanity as a whole as equally worthy of rights and respect. But where does that leave nationalist duties of government? What was once a virtue: wealth grabbing, resource plundering, national security entailing military bases all over the world, propping up repressive regimes because it suits (i.e for money, or access to it), being a superpower... these things are no longer the moral imperative. They unquestionably assume that whatever is best for ones own population must be done, no matter the cost to 'others'.

There are no 'others' anymore.

Violence begats violence. Unquestionably, the U.S has been the single leading sponser of terrorism for the last 60 years, no corner of the globe has been left untouched.  Whether it was directly in proxy wars with Russia or beating on Latin American countries who dared defy the corporations that held them to ransom, or indirectly through scores of dictatorships, armed by U.S companies, trained in the U.S and sent to subjugate people like those in West Papua, suffering cultural genocide whilst their land is sullied and raped.

 Imagine.  Look at Americas response to 9/11. You rightly, as did I, got amazingly upset and angry. The 'other' of which you are scared are human too. They fear, they get angry, and then you have the gall to wonder why?

"It's because they hate our freedoms!" - The most insulting soundbite of them all. It is because they want your freedom but the U.S. denies them this chance.

Seriosuly, what Human does not want to be free?!

The safest thing America could possibly do is to practice what it preaches. Stop the militarism, stop the exploitation, stop determining peoples futures like they are pieces on a chesssboard. Because it isn't the 'other' that will be the threat when it all gets too much. No, the 'other' will have actually have joined with the increasing millions of Americans and people around the globe that have seen their humanity and empathise with them. It will be corporate apologists that will become the 'other' as people fail to understand how such one-sided, exclusive empathy could exist in such an unjust world.

Good luck Egypt, the world is cheering for you.

Atheists, to my regret, have thus far failed to coin a phrase more resonant than "God help them", exclamation being so infused with religious terms.  Instead, I hope with all my heart that Egyptian helps Egyptian today, the 'Day of Departure', a 21st Century civic D-Day.  Will they march on the palace? Will the army finally flinch? Will Mubarak be forced to step down and would the people settle for Suleiman?  Having done my back in, I shall be watching the bravest example of journalism since Bradley Manning leaked those files, that of Al Jazeera (English Version). It will be an emotional ride as I cheer the brothers and sisters I never knew I had on their struggle to end the nightmare of dictatorship.

Whatever the outcome, we are seeing a seismic shift in Geo-politics.  Don't think for a second that with the Euro still in danger, the utter failure to reform the financial system, the widening inequality and the like, politicians the world over aren't thinking to themselves just how far this could spread.  This fight for freedom (a stunningly rare occurrence given that some would have it used as the subtitle for edited highlights of the last decade.) is being watched worldwide, the majority cheering for those who have finally had enough with living under a dictator.  They outnumber armchair Mubarak fans by thousands to one.  It provides empathy through shared memes (#jan24: symbol for 'freedom') in just the same psychological way that sports fans bond.  That isn't to belittle the situation; that's to accept humanities beautiful capacity to empathise.  And it's that which is going to win us this battle against corruption and abuse of power everywhere.

If the protest groups that gained freedom in Tunisia can gain political representation of some description and reach out to (we hope) protest groups that gained freedom and political significance in Egypt and beyond, then they have an amazing opportunity to form bonds from the unique (in the multinational sense) position of already having a strong bond.  Has this happened before?  There is a certain anti-politics in the expressions of the last few weeks, unless the manifesto from the Gaza Youth has influenced subsequent views.  Has dissonance simply got to a point already whereby political reality and social reality are now too far apart, creating a generation of cynical, sceptical youth?  It is clearly on the rise in West, and I'd put money on a lot of people in Greece being inspired by Egypt at this very moment.

But today is Egypt's day.  We must do everything we can to help.  Phone your congress, phone your MP, offer words of hope and encouragement online and continue to develop this shared, global, imagined identity.  Everyone is linked now, in ten years time: ten times more so, a crowd-sourced, democratised (pray* it stays so) global identity.  If all those who legitimately support freedom continue to support it, be assured that when your time comes, the people of newly, truly, democratic Egypt will have your back. 


* See what I mean?

A Defense of Capitalism, not that they might see it that way...

Capitalism is shit.  That I feel is the consensus of the majority of the world from my limited viewpoint from on lucky street.  It is also, I would argue, closer to what the majority of the capitalist world itself would proffer compared to its glittering opposite as the contemptuously titled ‘End of History’.   The growing inequality; complete ignorance of what it is to be happy, nay, the frightened denial inherent in wealth’s desire to buy what cannot be bought.  It has the potential to tear us apart as a species, this walling off of homes and minds.  But this article isn’t really about that.  It is about perspective, about how we got where we are and why we can have optimism about where we may be going.  It is also about picking the right target, so that we may endeavour not to marginalise those that might otherwise adept to the zeitgeist.

Humanity has progressed to varying degrees through three main types of imagined identities (as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities), created by those who monopolised cultural production.  Religion, the State and Commerce emerged one from the other to accommodate the ever-greater complexity that derived from the accumulation of knowledge and technology.  Larger empires, multiple faiths and disparate people... they could only be bound by common memes to the extent communication technology allowed.  This is why a common vernacular in Europe, as brought about through the printing press (commerce), facilitated such fervent nationalism.

Throughout history, power has devolved; and that is reflected in the level of brutality.  Just a few hundred years ago, heads were left on spikes in city streets as warnings. Genocide was commonplace, the wholesale rape, pillage and hand-made destruction of entire cities… who could imagine that in the developed world? From Emperor and Demi-God, King and Aristocracy, CEO and Marketing… Those who create culture, create identity.  That power is now democratising further, toward an information-based identity.  If we identify with the ‘other’ through shared culture then we have done the complete opposite to the dehumanising process that enabled the Holocaust.   Even simple communication is enough, since our shared humanity brings with it common desires, familiar fears, more than enough to make that connection.

This is what capitalism has given us.   It got here through some pretty noble ideas, ideas that the right are loudest to (often blindly) shout but which, compared to what came before (and sometimes now to be fair) are pretty radical.  Individual Freedom?  A lot of the headway with that was from merchants and business.  Free-Markets and movement of capital and labour are very much post-nationalist ideals that resulted in a changed dynamic by the mid-20^th Century.   The consumerism it produced enabled TV’s to be in almost every house, something many would regard as negative when it fact it’s merely primitive.  By the standards of the age however it was a miracle and no one can deny the effect film has had on the global consciousness. In the book Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri sum up this transormational aspect of caiptalism by saying:

"Capital has always been oriented towards the production, reproduction and control of social life... [however], the production of Capital is, ever more clearly and driectly today, the production of social life."

In other words, now that the fuits of capital have enabled the multitude itslef to partake in social production, capital has gone from creating and maintaining virtical social identities (when the form was monopolised by the state) to being the medium of expression of the multitude itself.  Truly this represents the biggest shift in tendency since Marx himself recognised the coming hegenomy that capital represented at a time when agriculture was still hugely dominent.  Now we are tending toward true emancipation of the individual, a reawakening of the notion of network, not centralised discipline.

We have to be careful to remember what Capitalism actually consists of.  We are quick to picture the fat cat corporate exec, lighting his cigar with a fifty-pound note.  Yet the majority of capitalism feeds from the same meme-pool as you or I (assuming you aren’t an actual corporate exec reading this which, if so, please change).  Sure, as you get to the top, the memetic influence becomes restricted to high-powered, institutionalised jargon and dogmatic priorities, an identity that has outsourced its own responsibility to humanity for the sake of shareholders.  But they do not live in a vacuum.  Not like Kings, not even like the four-yearly terms for politicians.  They have customers and they have staff and more so than religion or the state they have more incentive to keep us happy. They know about evolve or die.

In the last hundred and fifty years capitalism has shown considerable amounts of adaptation in the west when it comes to western populations. It’s because we aren’t the ‘other’ anymore, no longer the proles.  We’ve had that outsourced now too.  For decades, multi-nationals have polluted, killed, bribed, betrayed and pillaged their way across the world, every bit the fundamentalist with their own holy book with it’s own commitments.  Number 1, Make money for shareholders. Number 2, Make money for shareholders… I’ve no doubt many are great family people that sincerely believe they do good.  We are relativistic beings, and if you are unknowingly trapped in a wealth induced meme-bubble consisting primarily of positive reinforcement how can you think otherwise?

The co-opting of the political class by corporations combines the two most potent cultural identity producers in the world since the demise of religion in the west.  Listen to a politician.  Now listen to a high-level manager.  They speak the same language.  There is a pretty obvious reason why: it is because of the intricate web of links between business and government, a back-slapping, champagne swilling orgy of congratulatory arse-licking; a web that forms a cocoon. It is this meme-bubble that the global consciousness should seek to expose, using the infrastructure capitalism lays, (as they must to compete) to counter this push from corporations (unlimited funding of politicians in the U.S., the concentration of media conglomerates, the institutionalisation of mainstream media) in an info-war that will grow ever larger as technology continues to explode exponentially. 

But this will take time.  Evolution has to happen in steps.  There are no sky-hooks in biological evolution and there aren’t any here.  Violence can clear a blockage, but it must be an act of last resort on behalf of the majority else, like suicide bombings, they will appear illegitimate to the global consciousness.  It must be rational, targeted violence and only when the right to speak and to listen to contributions to the creation of imagined identity have been fully denied.  Too much, and without rational limits and objectives both stated and kept to, and the chaos produced can have the opposite to the desired effect in the short-medium term leading to greater suffering.

Cultural evolutionary function of Twitter and Wikileaks and how it applies to Tunisia

Did wikileaks cause a revolution? Did Twitter? Did rain in LA a couple of weeks back cause a mild spell in the UK today? Probably not, but it is impossible to tell anyway.  They all aspects of non-linear complex systems sitting on the edge of chaos, a googol of tiny threads interacting in ways that produce unpredictable and sometimes emergent outcomes.

Complex systems have emergent properties, new phenomena that arise as a result of interactions in networks of enough nodes.  When humans began to settle, the network was at such a scale as to generate emergent properties; there were enough threads to create a tapestry.  Story, myth, nature… those that could decipher them to the level of believable knowledge of the time could command prominence in the system, conflating the religious authority with authority over humankind and monopolising the memetic content of the system.  Religious empires were the result of millions of nodes acting from, I would argue, a few simple axioms (1), an emergence that evolved along with communication technology into the state and then commerce, though all remain to varying degrees of power throughout the world.  Our culture represents a tapestry of countless links that interact in unpredictable, chaotic ways.

Wikileaks function is to introduce new material that can be woven into the tapestry.  It so happened that it’s colour didn’t match the colour that those with the most potential to weave were describing to us.  How much?  I couldn’t possibly claim to know what the picture is in reality, too much content I’m exposed to is manufactured, be it for power or profit or spin.  Some content is easier to trace, such as the blinding significance of Mohamed Bouazizi.  It shows that from what we each know as individuals we can only make subjective, if as well-informed as is possible, claims on the subject.  Besides, without prior prediction the claim leads to criticism of post-hoc reasoning, a rationalisation for western minds who, as is our curse, demand to see cause-and-effect according to our personal, wiki-saturated, schema.

Our societal system has an infrastructure that connects us.  It is our speech. It is our culture, our reality, accessible through sight and sound.  It is us.  And now we are intimately connected to Moore’s law.  Computer-based technology, whether in manufacturing or the final product, is accelerating at an exponential rate.  That means that an already significant proportion of our systems links are also increasing exponentially.  More than that, they are going global, pitting growth against the established order of the state, whose nodes are indoctrinated into a nationalistic mind-set as institutionally demanded by the democratic concept of the social-contract. 

That could all be about to change, and for me personally this is the most exciting prospect I have the optimism to believe in. 

Twitters function is to weave this new content via commenicating information in as close to real-time as possible in an auto-correcting, crowd-sourced system.  Try to see where this is going: imagine Twitter 2.0, as part of an advanced semantic web, when everyone’s connected most of the time, multi-sensory, multi-media communication controlled by speech and thought, mashable with any other function on the web (i.e. google earth).  What you could well see is its own emergent property, it's own artists and culture yet so diverse that the picture it weaves encompasses all humanity, a realised tapestry-within-a-tapestry, a fractal self-similarity that we will all be able to see free from the perverting conduit of self-interested, narrow-minded, nationalistic, corporate ‘protectors’. 

Wikileaks is a node.  Twitter is a network of links.  Yet they are but parts of a larger whole, the internet. This is itself but a part of a larger network, one that encompasses all of the culture and civilisation that each node experiences.  To give credit to one or the other for people taking to account the previously unaccountable would be glib to the extreme.  It would ignore the decades of suffering for a society who for the most part didn’t even have the internet. 

As long as technology continues to progress and the number of people who have access to it continues to increase, we will see the creation of a global scale memetic Hamilton’s rule that will finally eliminate the ‘other’ that for so long has been used against us.  Evolution is inevitable.  For that reason the onus for allowing this progression for humanity falls upon the politicians.  Yet it is the state, with their subjugated media, and corporations with their subjugated states, those hegemonic meme-producers, that have the most to lose. In these globally connected times, our collective sense of morality is raising the bar to a point that states and multi-nationals aren’t happy with. It’s not profitable and it makes no sense to them because they are simply doing their job as they should, as nationalists and profiteers. That reality is beginning to become untenable to todays youth due to their ability to sync with technology and the resulting dissonance.  Exposure to dissonance, be it wikileaks or the sight of a Palace, equals conclusions contrary to that which we are told by those in authority. It is the state’s resistance to this moral change which turns evolution into a revolution. 

So there you have it.  Ultimately it was the Tunisian government that was responsible for the revolution..

1. Axioms of human behaviour: All that is needed for this thesis is three axioms which I think you'll agree make both evolutionary and intuitive sense.

· Fear the unknown
· Do not waste energy fearing the known
· Defer to percieved authority

Addendum to last post

What we once knew/what we need to at least understand

@exiledsurfer put me onto a blog by a guy called George Mobus. This particular article dealt with the difference between 'knowing' and 'understanding'.  Then I started watching The Coconut Revolution and it struck me that there was an ethnocentric hole staring me in the face from this essay. To say that we have yet to acheive widespread recognition of the individual, let alone as part of a complex system, is to ignore that once we all knew that once before.  Indiginous peoples know their place within nature, recognise the relationships and the reliance.  This is not to say they understand it.  Theirs is a language of metaphor and story, myth and song as beautifully explored by Jay Griffiths in Wild.  I very much doubt an indiginous amazonian knows that sand blown from across a massive ocean helps fertilize their homeland and that isn't to be derogatory.  Knowing an ecosystem is in a lot of ways far more difficult to acheive.  The amazonian may not know of the Saraha, but I very much doubt the scientist who figured it out would last very long if left in the Jungle on his own.  You can buy understanding.  You can only acheive knowing through hard work, in this case survival.


So how did we in the developed world lose our knowledge of the environment? Was there no place for mans idividual link to nature within the plans of those early usurpers? Was there a point whereby History bore silent witness upon a Reformation in reverse, an initial event that instigated the worlds first organised relgion, the first of many obstacles to place themselves between the individual and the system they inhabit? What happened? Were we infantilised? Well, not right away.  I've no doubt that as the chart would predict, those first creators of imagined community draped their visions in the laguage of the land, invoking spirits and myths, many using drugs, all using music and dance... happy to be the priviledged mediator for the time being.  During this time, knowledge of the land would still be to the fore, it's simply that their understanding will be becoming skewed. 

When humans began to settle, two things happened.  They lost a lot of the previous knowledge of the land that came from nomadic life (obviously not at once, it was and still is an ongoing process). They also had a far greater opportunity and motive for replacing it with an imagined community.  As the land lost it's power on the minds of the people, the reins were handed to the preachers and the prophets, the witch-doctor and the shaman, the CEO and the Politician. Rather than an amalgamation of beliefs stemming from each groups connection with the land, the need for shared memes across greater numbers of people required a central dogma to homogenise the group.  Unless the territory was small, the land often would not be able to provide that link with different, isolated land types and entirely different peoples often located within the same dynasty.  Technology was such that stories were the only way to provide this bond, and so as the marauding armies expanded, religious belief grew.


Since then we in the west have lost almost all our knowing of the complex system that surrounds us.  We have literally insulated ourselves, placed walls between nature and our senses, plugs in our ears, cars on our feet.  Yet paradoxically we are also beginning to understand it for the first time.  Will this understanding explode in sudden realisation? Seeing ourselves as part of a complex system is possible for those who grow-up unawares to come to understand, it's merely very difficult.  How is knowing nothing conducive to coming to understand it?  Our culture has cut itself off from nature, reduced it to a therapy or somewhere to buy a third property.  The people who know their lands, accross the world, are screaming at us to look at what we are doing, and our leaders simply do not want to know.  By cutting nature out of the question, it is eaier to rationalise the raping of it for wealth.  In the national interest.


It would be far easier if we geared more of our resources into both knowing and understanding our role in natures system to transcend it's identity from national, to global, to ecological before we fuck everything up.  Indiginous peoples want to help, maybe we should let them, we can teach each other a lot of fascinating things. 

Or we could continue to kill them and destroy their homes for profit and we all lose.

Some predictions for humanities continued progress

 Extrapolating from the Historical Progress of Identity

After reading the inspirational predictions for the next 25 years on the Guardian website, I felt inspired to expand on my theories of the correlation between identity and communication technology and attempt to extrapolate my own predictions from the historical progress of identity and humanities study of the complex system that is society.

Here is the chart I drew up giving a rough outline of the cycles and progression of memetic production (identity), as accelerating advances in communication technology take our complex system to greater scales of connectivity: http://tinyurl.com/2ub9khm

Nb. For the sake of identifying key features, simplification and generalisation are to some extent necessary. Exceptions will always be found since the spread of communication technology (the framework of the complex system) is not universally even.  Indeed, accross the world all stages of identity may be present at any one time until we converge together.

The following identities are based upon the catagorisation of what Anderson termed 'imagined communities', those identities that transcend the local and which bind humans together into large enough groups to constitute emergent properties we know as History.  Emergent properties of complex systems are self-similar, and so we see at each definition of scale self-similar processes and cycles regardless of the actual content of these imagined identities...



Fundamental Imagined Identities

Three fundamental identities have arisen on Earth: Religion, State and Commerce. These identities have found homes within each of us to varying degrees of dominance in what we believe, where we live and what we do, respectively.  Each arose in times of expanded communication technology (language, mathematics, transport, media, digital etc) and became seemingly permanent by attaining a monopoly of memetic production which then suffused cultures with language, symbolism and memes which persisted beyond the control of the monopoly itself, continuing to influence future individuals identities.

As each new identity emerges it goes through a cycle.  Firstly, it identifies itself in relation to the older identity, by definition a necessity since this is the memetic monopoly one has to play with.  Thus States began as theocracies, corporations evolved from National enterprises and individualism is the progeny of the corporately defined 'individual as consumer'.  There have been three fundamental identities thus far, but a fourth is now emerging, that of the autonomous individual. 

Each progression is the result of an increase in knowledge facilitated by a more detailed, diverse and extensive complex system (society).  Each progression of identity represents a new level of emancipation, with greater sharing of power, more feedback, more freedom and importantly greater democratisation of memetic production.  This last point is crucial.  Since identity is produced from culture, the less monopolised memetic-production is the more emancipated individual identity can be.  It represents the opposite of dogma, of ideology.  Democratised memetic production means the elimination of whole-scale identity creation of the many by the few and the exposure of that manipulation through contact with the demonised, mythologised 'other' of which they speak.

Driving this emancipation is rationality and cognitive dissonance.  Each new identity succeeds the last because it's embracing amalgamation of more diverse memes results in a closer approximation of reality.  As the anachronisms of prior identities become visible through the advance of knowledge, cognitive dissonance increases also, leading to new generations to come to predominantly new conclusions contrary to the dogma of the established order.  It is precisely because we grow old and die, together with the rebellious, adaptive, open-mindedness of youth, that society is able to progress politically as our technologically driven shifts in identity occur.




The cycle of each fundamental identity

Emergence
As dogma becomes exposed through increased communication, ideas begin to form from the emerging cognitive dissonance.  These ideas are presented as rationalisations within the context and under the regulation of the existing memetic monopoly (as cause-and-effect demands).  As knowledge advances and more of the unknown becomes known (diluting the power of the mythological other), these sporadic rationalisations become untenable and cognitive dissonance spreads with more veracity for it, eventually leading to a paradigm shift in political governance and identity creation.

Co-opted Monopoly
Emerging from the language and culture of the previous fundamental identity comes a new monopoly on memetic production.  Religion is divorced from the state, corporations go from state enterprises to multi-national to supranational.  And yet, despite gaining absolute power, they still feel the need to dress themselves in rationalisations of memetic identities past, co-opting the power of reminiscence .  Hitler draped his genocide in divine garb, corporations practice with 'national interest' and individualism defines itself according, for now, to the corporate plan.  Each subverts the last to saturate our culture with their identity-creating memes common interests: power, wealth and the wilful ignorance of dissonance that may shake their self-serving, manufactured, yet no less sincere rationalisations for maintaining their brief turn at benefiting from inequality.

Peak identity
Our innate nature insists we continue to communicate, the obvious benefits that result maintaining a drive at increasing our communication networks.  Whilst political structures may come about through a domino-like paradigm shift, communication technology keeps accelerating exponentially, telescoping the rate of change dramatically as we get to ever finer definitions of this networked complex system we call society.  As such, there comes a point where dissonance becomes too great for the rationalisations of the ruling elites to make sense any longer. Take the Democratic system.  Founded on the inherently nationalistic doctrine of the social contract, it's usefulness is drastically outdated and unsuited to a globalised world.  It represent a broken network, with nodes that shut themselves off from one another, polluting the system. When communication structures available to the public exceed what is directly manageable by the ruling class, reality will begin to contrast with the official line, creating dissonance and the desire for change.

Decline
As our newly emerging identity (more complex network) forms, it's greater scope and scale of identity emancipation produces far more rational memes than those that came before.  This exposing of anachronisms is most keenly felt in the young, those who have yet to be infected with the dogmatic ideology they have had forced into their brain.  Dogma dies, to be replaced with better dogma, more inclusive dogma, until finally we break the cycle altogether.....


So what happens next?

I think Hegel will be happy to hear that his notion of History being mankind coming to know itself is truer than most gave him credit for.  As communication technology spreads to the masses one step at a time, political structures follow suit by slowly adjusting, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes radical and violent, much as an earthquake does depending on how much tension has arisen.  The Internet is a radical technological invention and its effect on that tension cannot be over-estimated.  The corporate meme-machine as been busy telling us we are individuals, the by-product of which (lets not forget it's central aim is to flatter us into buying stuff) has resulted in a radical notion of the self as an autonomous unit, a self-contained bundle of rights and privileges.

This information age, where the democratisation of memetic production has exploded in a noisy, ill-defined sea of identity bits and bytes, isn't the utopia people make it out to be however.  It's message is better for sure, we are sovereign citizens of our own mass-manufactured castles, walled off mentally and physically in order to capture that essence of individuality, that false veneer of material possession hiding us from ourselves.  This hyper relative individualism, combined with the concept of competition that previous rulers deemed a virtue, plays havoc with peoples minds! The dissonance between the religious, state and corporate  models of perfected form and the reality we as individual live with is vast, resulting in depression, mental health problems and growing neurosis.

These problems, together with the Wests emerging relationship with those that have until now silently shouldered the burden of manufacturing our continued opulence, will expose the anachronisms of the corporate subversion of the state.  The supranational manifestation of wealth production will lose it's facade of greater good once the publics idea of what 'greater' constitutes exceeds that of their former creators.  Religious identities will continue to decline in-line with access to communication technology, with only those shunning the technolgoy itself left to ever-more radical ratioanlisations of their own actions.  The state will follow a similar course, with direct-democracy coming to those who recognise and escape the crip of corporate co-opting. 

The advantages of this progression are vast.  The information age will at last recognise humanity as one complex system, eliminating much of the discrimination and prejudice the exploitation of the 'other' has caused.  The corporate co-opting of the state will be exposed mainstream, with a separation similar to that of church and state (already a publicly stated ideal, it is never-the-less another lie rationalised from above) and the autonomous individual will demand greater power and control over their political lives through the co-opting of corporate ideals of individual freedom from outside forces.  The availability of information will need to adjust to the finer definition of network connections, recognising that democratised memetic production invalidates the rationalisation for such extensive centralised power and access to knowledge.


And beyond that...

Religion will become an ever decreasing force though still visible as memetic echoes of a former age.  States will be udner ever greater pressure to stampt out corruption, open itself to accountablility and allowing the public to govern itslef to ever greater degrees.  Corporations will be under similar pressure, perhaps basing themselves within those states that are most stubborn in embracing progress (since those conditions best for profit also appear to be worst for the public as a whole).  Free from national obligation, they could become even more explicitly dangerous, even to powerful states slow to change, before subsiding themselves into a rather different legacy than they currently envisage in their assumed noble ideals.

I am reminded at this point of an interview in the film Waking Life.  Aklilu Gebrewold talks about humans coming to understand themselves, how our minds work, what and who we waking up to in this new age of hypersubjectivity.  Only when our individual minds fully understand themselves in relation to reality can we then look outside of ourselves anew with a radical objectivity.  The ideas in this essay are in a similar vein, having come from an attempt to work my knowledge of philosophy and cognitive science to the world of the emergent properties of complex human systems (what we call History).  And so it goes with identity.  Once we understand ourselves as part of a complex system, it is a small step to recognise that that system is not closed, the sole dmoain of monosapien. No, we are but one part of a greater system, that of Nature, which in turn is but one insiginficant part of even greater, galactic, universal systems.

This will become the next source of conflict, the recognition of Nature and the environments place within our network.  Although communication structures will encompass all of humanity, we will still need to hear from Nature itself in order to understand our effect on it.  Dwindling resources and growing destruction of habitats and wildlife cannot continue if we are to exist peeacefully.  As such, practices and beliefs that run contrary to this will in turn produce enough dissonance to ensure that after the age of the individual comes the age of Earth itself: An identification with and recognition of this global biosystem and our place in it.  Once we are there, there is no other to be exploited and we will finally be able to live in harmony before amking the jump of understanding our place not simply on this planet, but within our galaxy, our universe.  We are still only at the beginning of that journey.

A Letter to the Guardian...

I encourage you to copy and paste this letter and send it to reader@guardian.co.uk so that they can be encouraged to remember they are allowed to use google.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I was just wondering when you were planning to retract the false story regarding the supposed banning of 'Sicko', Michael Moore's documentary?

As he says in this article, http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/viva-wikileaks, a simple google search would have enabled your journalists to see that it was in fact shown in theatres throughout the country and was even broadcast in prime time on national television!

This laziness in reporting, despite much talk of the hard slog contextualising and checking the cables, has led you to miss the real story; that despite histories lessons, the U.S government is still deluding itself regarding Cuba and making the same mistakes as decades ago.  Namely, that embassy staff are making up news to pass on up the chain of command where upon it can get seized upon in a fit of positive bias.  This in turn fuels the kind of groupthink that enabled the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the first place.

So... presumably this correction will be appearing soon then?  I also presume that a lesson will have been learned and that future leaks will have at least a bit of fact-checking?  I'm a huge fan of wikileaks let it be said, but those claiming that these cables aren't Truth do have a point.  They are instead the inner workings of wholly nationalistic machinations and as such can also be bewilderingly wrong (whether purposefully or not). 

Yours,

A sociocultural evolution view of Wikileaks..

Democratically elected governments are meant to be for the people, by the people.  This has never really been the case, but the argument against mob rule and it's relative advantages over other forms of government have led to it being the acceptable, prosperous and relatively peaceful system that it is.

The only reason we as citizens could accept this was because communication structures in the world led to a national concern only, stretching to a European/U.S. concern at the most. We were prosperous and peaceful because capitalism was able to outsource exploitation away from it's major markets and onto the environment and workers of undeveloped and voiceless people of the world that were hidden from us in our nationalist bubbles of bordered language.

Recent technological advances in transport and communication have popped this bubble. Sociocultural evolution teaches us that a form of memetic Hamiltons Rule operates as an evolutionary function of maintaining tribal/group loyalty. These two facts combine to create a global movement whereby people are now able to communicate and come to know people the world over and regard humanity as a whole, entirely worthy in recieving concern and respect.

The democratic system as it is however is, rightly from the age in which it was derived, stuck at the nationalistic level demanded by the enlightenment concept of the social contract. Since that time, memetic Hamiltons rule has ensured that, since money is the main factor in determining progress, private companies have been co-opted by governments and vice-versa the world over, both through lobbying and individuals swapping public and private high-level jobs. This is apparent even in the shared language of corporatese.

This puts them in direct opposition to the new generation who do not share such nationalist/corporate limtiations of identity and who instead recognise and empathise with those exploitated masses which were necessary for the system to progress peacefully in the West.  These cables represent the internal machinations of that corporate/government class, exposing it's inner-workings and crucially showing the vast gulf in moral criteria between what is good for state/business, and what is good for humanity as a whole.  Both sides feel they are doing a moral thing... it's simply that those who are for wikileaks are using a much vaster criteria in coming to those moral conclusions (i.e. seeing humanity as equals).  This for me makes Wikileaks the good guys and the true heirs to progress.

Releasing this material contributes to undoing this veil behind which the state operates. The internet is going to lead to this kind of thing as a matter of course. It is inevitable. That those in power rail against such leaks is also sadly inevitable since it threatens their position of power and represents a view of the world that they do not understand from their caged meme-pool of self-satisfying positive feedback and group-think.

We have come to a point where 'mob rule' is coming to be understood as crowd-sourcing, it's connotations going from contemptable to highly efficient. The new generation, a globally-minded generation, see those in power for what they are, a relic of an age that is no longer with us and whose time was, in reality, suited for a pre-global communication age. This kind of cognitive dissonance (the cables) is desperately needed because of the homogenisation of discourse, the corporate takeover of mass media, things utterly antithetical to sociocultural evolution. 

When we see humanity as a whole, one has to see the 'democratic' system a immoral and detestable. From the destruction of environments to the brutal pursuit of fenced-off profiteering, humanity is suffering at the hands of the few on a scale never seen before. To say that 'we have it good' is not enough in a world of global communication. That isn't how the Hamilton Law works.

Seen from this persepctive, not releasing it is a far greater crime than releasing it.

Sidenote:

These cables were accesible to nearly 3 million people accross dozens of U.S. agencies.  Unless espionage simply aint what it used to be, that would seem a walk in the park for at the least Russia, China and the UK to get a hold of it.  So why the anger?  Why the outrage?

If they knew America knew, yet did not raise a whimper until it got out into the wider public, what does that say about th relationship between these various states governments?  It says that so long as everyone keeps schtum, nobody cares what each other knows.  Russia knows America's corrupt, America knows Russia's corrupt... everyone knows everyone is corrupt.  Like Democrats and Republicans keeping quiet about stuff they both do, it has become an unwritten rule to simply keep mouths shut.

How did it get to this?  Well, there is one area that is powerful and multinational... corporations.  Take bribary.  U.S corporations have to bribe (see Haliburton in Nigeria) along with everyone else.  Big multinationals have to stoop to the lowest common denominator when business is global.  If that means competing with Russians, then that's what tehy'll do... safe in the knowledge that they certainly aren't going to complain about it if they too do it.  Corporate aims and ideology have seeped into that of the state, perverting it from principles of serving the public interest into a multi-state conspiracy (forget the kooky connotations, this aint truther territory) creating a secret environment amenable to profiteering at the expense of the public interest.

A new model of poltical debate...

It is time to bring technology to the process of governance and harness the power of the crowd.  Here's my idea about how we can do that...

In the houses of parliament, we need politicians to be working on national issues.  MP's should still be voted on by constituencies but as representatives working on national issues (they can of course still represent their locale, when called upon by councils if necessary).

Each day Mon-Fri, There should be a two-three hour debate on each of the main areas of interest: Economy and Business (inc. Employment), Energy and Environment, Home Affairs (transport, health, housing), Foreign Affairs and Science, Technology and Education (just off the top of my head).  In front of each seat is an ipad-like device, with software that facilitates the debate.

Each member can prepare for the debate in advance, uploading evidence and questions and even debating the questions in forums.  Come the debate, evidence and questions can be dropped into a queue during the government reports to argue or counter the claims made.  This queue is voted upon by MP's and those questions that get the most votes rise to the top to be asked.  If it is particularly pertinent to that precise moment of time, then an urgent flag can be attached and the speed with which the votes are placed contributing to the speed with which the question or evidence is put forward.

With practice, and with a slower oratory, I believe technology is finally at a stage where this can happen in close to real-time (it would take no longer than having to wait for the "rah rah rah' to die down).  Not only that, it can also open the process even further.

Imagine that you then have a pool of people picked for their outstanding knowledge.  Have their peers vote on candidates in journals in various expert disciplines, have NGO's and activist groups vote on experts of Human Rights etc.. Nurses, doctors, architects, lawyers, anyone with expertise and not simply academics.  This pool of people is then split into the five areas of interest for the debates, plus a pool of people that represent the universals.  By this I mean those factors that must be thought about in any given debate.. the environment, human rights, philosophers, historians etc.  This sixth group is included in every debate, alongside the segment that are experts for that particular debate.  MP's have no authority over members of these independent groups.

There could be space, say 20 virtual seats, that are open to public vote over two-yearly terms, subject to acceptance from the person.  Again, I don't care who is voted for.. they will have duties to attend and the possibility of recall if not participating.  A level of commitment is required and, bottom line, they are going to be as human as you or I.  As the only common denominator we all share, that has to be a valid viewpoint.  It would also allow campaigners to argue the case for any academic that may have fallen foul of their peer-group for whatever reasons (and there are good as well as bad...).   The worst case scenario, some kook gets in denying something, would see that person up against the hundred most eminent thinkers in that field and his lack of any sort of support would automatically stop progress of his or her agenda.  He would have to argue his case and if they are a kook, they'll lose.  It will be a totally public airing of their inadequacies as shown by the multimedia smack down they took.  If you feel that's time-wasting, be assured it wouldn't impinge on the debate itself, but in the experts only section.

These two groups (universals and each set of experts) would total a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people strong.  Exclusive software areas enable them to debate the following weeks debate in advance, do research, think of questions etc, which get voted upon by the group as a whole with the top 6-8 automatically guaranteed to be asked.  They then watch the debate live with the software shunting urgent or highly voted real-time questions into the parliamentary software for MP's to judge and vote upon also.  If a question or piece of evidence gains, say, 60% of the vote in the experts section, it would automatically bypass the MP's section and be put forward regardless. 

It would also be conceivable to have a national, open version with the top question voted prior to the debate, and the most voted upon question during the debate, being addressed at the end.  I don't care if it the most trivial or comical or irrelevant question you could imagine.  It could become a national sport to have asked of the prime minister a 'would you rather, or...' question and be good practice at campaigning for anyone willing to put the effort in just for a laugh.  We need to connect to our leaders in a deeper, more human sense as well as connecting to cut out the bullshit.

Everything should be viewable to the public.  Not only would we have hundreds of committed experts both contributing and holding our leaders to account, but the legitimacy would be so much greater.  We would be able to see for ourselves and contribute, the public funneling useful ideas and important evidence to experts, who are able to then pass it on up.

At the moment, we are but numbers in a faceless bureaucracy.. we need to use this technology we have now to create a structure connecting us all, one that we can see working and see when and why it doesn't.  MP's profiles would have to include all previous voting patterns with explanations attached, details of all contributions and interests.

Same too with the experts.  We need complete transparency, including all data.  There are computer wizards out there who are voluntarily inclined to sift through data, mashing it up and creating illuminating displays.  Let's use them!  They would be a great tool for the experts to present their questions and arguments in as concise a way as possible to facilitate practical real-time debate.. Twitter is a good training tool.  It could become an art-form in itself, stream-lined understanding.

To some, this may sound a backward step.  "Complicated things take time to discuss, you cannot present arguments in 140 characters!".  However, when as is the case in politics today, all that we the public hear is 90% corporatese bullshit spun from a yarn of obscurities anyway it might simply help trim the PR from the evidence.  It would be judged upon its merits, and with multimedia technology as it is, the possibilities for mashing evidence together in beautifully clear ways, labeled and linked from to indicate the providence of the evidence, together with a short paragraph outlining the implications, those merits could be substantial and contribute significantly to debate.

This kind of mass conversation in governance hasn't been possible before now.  But we would face such a fight to instigate it.  MP's have far more to lose than to gain in implementing this kind of reform.  The idea of opening themselves up to that level of expertise with the ability to upload implicating or contradictory evidence before everyone's blink of an eye would terrify them!  Yet this is surely the direction that democracy must take at some point in the non-too-distant future; it would be folly to fight it.