levers of authority and control, to crumble so quickly? What killed the fungus? If you could have stopped someone on the street then and described the world we live in today, a mere 30 years later, they would never have believed it was a vision of their own future you were painting. And it is a curious fact that we ourselves, who have lived through it all, cannot really account for the speed of the change, or the ease at which we cast off an entire layer of existence and replaced it with something so radically different.
But perhaps it is not so mysterious. The rulers of the world might have had a thousand tools at their disposal to dominate, divide and distract us, each more cunning and irresistible than the last. They could employ these tools as weapons to distort the laws in their favor, to confuse us and keep us so busy toiling, consuming and playing that we didn’t have the time or mental space to look around and see the truth. They could fabricate enemies out of thin air. They could make us eat and drink poison and pay for the privilege. They could even lock away the dangerous, destabilizing ideas of justice and equality in a box high on a dusty shelf where none of us could ever hope to find them. But they couldn’t do the simplest, yet most important thing of all: they couldn’t make us happy. And that simple fact was the root of all that was to come. Underneath all the smoke and mirrors being conjured by the technocratic sorcerers of the modern world, humanity still existed, a small child looking around with grave, uncomprehending eyes.
8
Entire neighborhoods began to go to the dragons together. That required some amount of coordination, and one of the myriad aspects of our psychological and social evolution that was so fascinating and unexpected was that for that coordination we tended to go door-to-door and not use the phone or some slick digital technology. We actually stepped out of our houses and apartments and walked next door, or down the street, to arrange the day and time with our neighbors. Unbelievable!
The merchants of electronica and ‘social media’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one) were nonplussed, to say the least. This wasn’t supposed to happen! Everything had been going in the opposite direction, toward the corporate-themed sanctity of the atomistic individual, toward hedonistic choice, toward an ever-increasing frantic fluidity in human relations: social engineering as Brownian motion. It was an austere and terribly efficient vision of society and human motivation, and now we were spoiling it by suddenly hanging around on our stoops, wasting gobs of time with our friends and neighbors, and trooping off to a park to ogle some damned reptiles. Worst of all, none of this could be sold. Developers tried of course to pump out dragon-themed apps and computer games, but they were all dismal failures. The dragons never did anything, so the standard commodifying approaches—cute, quirky, erotic, violent, or some combination of those—didn’t work. One start-up attempted to market a Dragon’s Eye app, but it was laughed off the digital shelves. In this particular case, people were not willing to accept electronic substitutes for the real thing.
The lonely, Stepford-Wives impression one used to get when walking down residential streets became a thing of the past. Street corners grew lively again; cafes, street vendors, buskers and sidewalk musicians did a booming business as people began to take their first, tentative steps back to a more communal social life, one based outdoors. Neighborhood league athletics, picnics, street games, festivals, concerts and theatre, amateur talent shows, street art exhibitions—any activity that got people off their bums and interacting in public was rediscovered.
Along the way, fun was rediscovered too. We relearned many things that our ancestors had known perfectly well. Being together with people you know is fun. Meeting new people, lots of new people, is fun. Meeting people who are possible romantic partners is really fun. Forming stable bonds of friendship and affection with people who live near you, or who share your interests, is fun. Getting together with these people and engaging in various activities like dumb games or athletic contests at which you might broaden that circle of friends—this too is fun. The electronic replication and virtual manipulation of humanity’s deepest, most fundamental social and emotional processes—how cold, artificial and just plain unnecessary it was all coming to seem now! This is what we discovered when we opened our doors and our hearts to the Other: people are fun.
9
And corporate titans, except those lucky enough to be in the sports equipment business, continued to pull out their hair. The infotainment industry, still licking its wounds after the Great Nothing, made a few timid, half-hearted forays into this new market. Beyond the handful of obligatory reality shows (“Who is the Best Busker?”; “Street Bands of Berlin”; “London Pub Crawl”; “Softball Champs of New York”) there were one or two sharply-written, intelligent urban dramas produced. They represented the best the industry had to offer. They were the kinds of shows people had only recently gone nuts over, binge-watched, tweeted about, etc. And they were spectacularly, unequivocally ignored, lasting less than a season. It must have been around this time that the men and women who occupied corner offices and penthouse suites began to have emergency meetings with their staffs.
The media also tried to cover the burgeoning movement as straight news, but even that didn’t go very well. News teams doing perfectly innocuous stories on street festivals and sports tournaments were harassed and even chased away by the locals. “What the hell do you guys want?! We’re sick of you!!” shouted one irate spectator at a street gathering to a news team prepping their equipment. Bewildered television reporters and media personalities who had grown accustomed to kid-glove treatment could do little but retreat. The public seemed to have lost its tolerance for the casual intrusion of privacy and objectification that had been part and parcel of modern media operations.
One should be careful not to exaggerate matters. We were not suddenly living in a socialist free-love commune. There was still crime and addictions of all kinds; people still watched TV and spent time existing vicariously on the Internet. But we now had begun to do less of these things. Incidentally, this trend of people worldwide to consume their leisure-time less electronically and more face-to-face soon acquired a name: the Analog Movement. It was both a precursor and a harbinger to the later, greater revolution that was to transform our world.
We had also lost our patience for our government spying on us. This too flew in the face of the conventional wisdom. Leaders, policymakers and pundits had been united in their belief that the public was willing to accept a considerable degree of electronic monitoring in exchange for ‘security’ against crime and terrorism. All major cities were festooned with cameras and surveillance equipment; Internet and cell phone use was tracked and logged; and this tower of info-Babel was then stored by a semi-secret consortium of government agencies and private security firms. Like that fungus the construct was self-propagating: any occurrence of violence could easily be portrayed by the government as an act of terrorism or public disorder that merited increased security measures. The enhanced monitoring and control both raised the baseline insecurity level of the populace and provided more opportunities for the government to identify, and attempt to rein in, divergent behavior. It was a vicious cycle, and gained in intensity with every iteration.
As with the larger construct constituted by the business-media-government axis, one need not expend too much energy looking for power-hungry despots or sinister proxies for Big Brother. With the exception of a few totalitarian regimes whose leaders really did have as their one and only priority staying in power, the architects and operators of these systems saw themselves as protectors of the citizenry and of public order. And, with some abuses and overreaching taken into account, perhaps they were.
But as with capitalism, the media and the entire cavalcade of technological and social ‘progress’, it had all gone too far, too fast. It turned out that people weren’t ready to re-skill themselves every few years in a desperate attempt to stay employable. They weren’t willing to live out their lives in a virtual electronic cocoon. They didn’t want to be constantly lo
oking over their shoulder for some imaginary enemy or threat. And they were really tired of having their shopping trips monitored, or their conversations with their grandmothers recorded.
“If all this is true, why did people tolerate it for so long? Indeed, why did they even seem to ask for it, in a myriad of ways?”
A fair question. The short answer is that humans are not perfect, either as individuals or in the aggregate. They are excitable, lazy, irrational, selfish beings susceptible to snake oil salesmen and demagogues of all stripes. And they are often insufferably arrogant, self-righteous, short-sighted, intolerant, violent, and even cruel to boot.
Yet, for all that, humans are “a little lower than the angels,” as Psalm 8:5 reminds us.
Pico della Mirandola , in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, has God tell humanity:
Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee