This is the first in a three part essay on the state and the fate of the world, to be continued over the next two days. Events discussed within it were true at the time of writing, but may already be out of date. Things move pretty fast when you’re in the middle of a singularity.

The Eternal Battle Between Chaos and Control

Cat Vincent wrote this piece a while ago, The Tribe of the Strange, and it perfectly describes how I’ve always self-identified. These past few months I’ve spent a lot of time examining and reexamining the Toolkits left by past members; those grand attempts made by individuals to express their philosophy, most often in a work of fiction, and documentaries on, or thinly disguised fictional re-tellings of, revolutions, attempts at revolution and so on. Trying to understand competing versions of how the world might be; how those attempts to affect this have succeeded and failed in the past.

The work that resonates the strongest with me is still Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, the key message from which I’ve titled this piece. Other philosophical fictional works I’ve studied include UK TV show The Prisoner, Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta comic, the films If…., The Battle of Algiers, Costa Gavras’s Z, The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Weather Underground documentary, combining all that with the more philosophical parts of Sons of Anarchy and Cayce Pollard‘s journey in William Gibson’s latest trilogy.

Trying to absorb it all, have it feed upon each other and basically see what happened. To know why and how people have rebelled, and against what; why they conform, how they cooperate, how they’re repressed and how they’re controlled. An attempt to gain through other’s attempts at understanding and representing the world, how it has functioned.

Now, I’ve had rather random interests over the years; when I was living in London in the late 90s and travelling around Europe it was political theories that held my interest. Having closely observed western capitalism for many years, I countered this by reading Marx, Lenin, Proudhon and Kropotkin. I left that period having decided that Anarchist theories held the answers to how the world could be a better place, but understanding that no magical, overnight transition or revolution could make that immediately possible. For that reason I have since referred to myself as a Utopian Anarchist and frequently wonder how it might be possible to instigate a guided evolution that might bring about that condition.

It is through all this as a lens that I have viewed recent events and believe that this moment is now at hand.

I firmly believe that at each fundamental shift in human society’s evolution, that combination of technological and social change, as we’ve seen in the past, with the beginnings of agriculture, the formation of cities, the industrial revolution and now entering the post-industrial age, that we have a unique opportunity to correct old wrongs. That true equality might exist and a genuine Golden of Age of Humanity could begin. That together we could fulfill our mission as Gaia’s agents and take life with us out into the stars. There’s no reason we shouldn’t, other than in each period so far we have failed to get our shit together.

I firmly believe that this possibility has never been so near, so close to our grasp. That thanks to the Internet more and more people are so closely connected and we understand that, in the words of David Forbes that I have often repeated here, “There Is No They.” As Anonymous said in their Open Letter to the World, ‘We have begun telling each other our own stories’; it’s for this reason that @Glinner has called Twitter “The Conversation.”

The need to bridge hierarchies and networks

Ben Hammersley has this year made an important point, that, for want of a better word, the Ruling Class fundamentally can not grasp this new reality. Where we see networks, they still see and think in hierarchies; competing hierarchies. That it is the mission of that generation that has grown up experiencing this change to explain this new world to the older residents that have largely known only the world of the 20th Century and are basing all their decisions based on experience gained within it. We must ease this transition, because they populate the existing orders of control; our governments, our institutions, our corporations and our families. They are an impediment to this change, but they can be made to understand if we can just manage the task of explaining it to them in their own terms.

Surely this cannot be an impossible task. It is too important not to be fixable, for it’s the best way to avoid the very bloodshed we’re witnessing in Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere, as this change sweeps the world. And it will sweep the world, because the world is connected in one big network now.

As Hammersley said, speaking of Col. Gaddafi, “the pain isn’t from the change, the pain is from the struggling against the change.” In the midst of Egypt’s revolution, Hammersley spoke of the ‘confused look’ on Mubarak’s face. Why was he so puzzled? Because Mubarak did everything straight from the textbook on quelling dissent; use agent provocateurs and false flag attacks, control the media, cut off access to the Internet. None of it worked, because the very textbook he was reading from was out of date; it was written to deal with competing hierarchies and useless when confronted with networks.

The question then becomes: how do we update the textbooks that those controlling the world are reading from?

The existing order is not only entrenched, it’s still, despite recent events, very sure of itself. After all, to their mind, it has gotten them this far, hasn’t it?!

The current conflicts are occurring in regions where the disparity between what is and what could be is greatest: high unemployment, food shortages, lack of political representation, erosion of rights, sadly the list only continues to grow. But in the land of the network, there is no geography. We see struggles around the world supporting each; rumors of Walk Like An Egyptian posters in the UK Uncut protests:

Placards in Cairo’s Tarhir Square supporting the striking workers in Wisconsin, Egyptians buying them pizzas even.They draw strength from each other; Wisconsin protesters reportedly have this picture above their beds to boost their morale.

To better understand this, in the spirit of Atemporality, I have resurrected the Domino Theory; so popular during the Cold War, when the world was divided between two competing idealogical and economic blocs. Since the fall of Communism in 1989 the entire planet has intertwined into a network of states with varying ideologies and economies, all linked together in complex ways. Rather than visualising this change as countries falling one by neighbouring one, a map of the world slowly turning Red (like an infection), this video helps demonstrate our more complex contemporary condition:

The dominoes represent states sharing similar conditions, as each fall they have an impact on the overall system that can inspire change in any other state. So far they are teetering in states such as Bahrain, Algiers, Cameroon, Azerbaijan and now Syria, whilst the regimes in others, such as Jordan, are attempting to head this off by instituting what they hope are sufficient changes and reforms to avert being toppled. Remarkably, even China is looking rocky.

Also, in the case of Iraq it’s worth emphasizing that had the US and its allies not intervened, we would almost certainly be witnessing regime change there too. That the country might have been spared a bloody war.

The point here is: we are witnessing acts of self-determination. The people are asserting their will, rather than relying on an outside power invading to ‘liberate’ them, make them a client state or the subject of a proxy war. No one is saving them, they are rescuing themselves.

To be continued…

* Note: Images that aren’t credited with hyperlinks to their source are unknown, but will be happily credited to, if and when, they become known. (ie I found this stuff on the interwubz.)