The opportunity for renaissance
The birth of the internet was interpreted by many as a revolution.
Those of us in the counterculture saw in the internet an opportunity
to topple the storytellers who had dominated our politics, economics,
society and religion - in short our very reality - and to replace
their stories with those of our own. It was a beautiful and exciting
sentiment, but one as based in a particular narrative as any other.
Revolutions simply replace one story with another. The capitalist
narrative is replaced by that of the communist; the religious
fundamentalist's replaced by the gnostic's. The means may be
different, but the rewards are the same. So is the exclusivity of
their distribution. That's why they're called revolutions - we're just
going in a circle.
This is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of
interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we
have the ability to step out of the story altogether. Renaissances are
historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. People in a
variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability
to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is
the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a
dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our
understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence
changes. The stories we have been using no longer work.
Take a look back at what we think of as the original Renaissance; the
one we were taught in school. What were the main leaps in perspective?
One example is the use of perspective in painting. Artists developed
the technique of the vanishing point and with it the ability to paint
three-dimensional representations on two-dimensional surfaces. The
character of this innovation is subtle but distinct. It is not a
technique for working in three dimensions; it is not that artists
moved from working on canvas to working with clay. Rather, perspective
painting allows an artist to relate between dimensions: representing
three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane.
Another example is calculus, another key renaissance invention.
Calculus is a mathematical system that allows us to derive one
dimension from another. It is a way of describing curves with the
language of lines, and spheres with the language of curves. The leap
from arithmetic to calculus was not just a leap in our ability to work
with higher dimensional objects, but a leap in our ability to relate
the objects of one dimension to the objects of another. It was a shift
in perspective that allowed us to orient ourselves to mathematical
objects from beyond the context of their own dimensionality.
The other main features of the Renaissance permitted similar shifts in
perspective. Circumnavigation of the globe changed our relationship
between the planet we live on and the maps we used to describe it. The
maps still worked, they just described a globe instead of a plane.
Anyone hoping to navigate a course had to be able to relate a
two-dimensional map to the new reality of a three-dimensional planet.
Similarly, the invention of moveable type and the printing press
changed the relationship of author and audience to text. The creation
of a manuscript was no longer a one-pointed affair. The creation of
the first manuscript still was, but now it could be replicated and
distributed to everyone. It was still one story, but now was subject
to a multiplicity of individual perspectives. This innovation alone
changed the landscape of religion in the Western World. Individual
interpretation of the Bible led to the collapse of Church authority
and the unilateral nature of its decrees. Everyone demanded his or her
own relationship to the story.
Our electronic renaissance
In all these cases, people experienced a very particular shift in
their relationship to, and understanding of, dimensions. Understood
this way, a renaissance is a moment of reframing. We step out of the
frame as it is currently defined and see the whole picture in a new
context. We can then play by new rules.
It is akin to the experience of a computer game player. At first, a
gamer will play a video or computer game by the rules. He'll read the
manual, if necessary, then move through the various levels of the
game. Mastery of the game, at this stage, means getting to the end:
making it to the last level, surviving, becoming the most powerful
character or, in the case of a simulation game, designing and
maintaining a thriving family, city or civilisation. For many gamers,
this is as far as it goes.
Some gamers, though - usually after they've mastered this level of
play - will venture out onto the internet in search of other fans or
user groups. There, they will gather the cheat codes that can be used
to acquire special abilities within the game, such as invisibility or
an infinite supply of ammunition. When the gamer returns to the game
with his secret codes, is he still playing the game or is he cheating?
From a renaissance perspective he is still playing the game, albeit a
different one. His playing field has grown from the CD on which the
game was shipped to the entire universe of computers where these
secret codes and abilities can be discussed and shared. He is no
longer playing the game, but a meta-game. The inner game world is
still fun, but it is distanced by the gamer's new perspective, much in
the way we are distanced from the play-within-a-play in one of
Shakespeare's comedies or dramas. And the meta-theatrical convention
gives us new perspective on the greater story as well. Gaming, as a
metaphor but also as a lived experience, invites a renaissance
perspective on the world in which we live. Perhaps gamers and their
game culture have been as responsible as anyone for the rise in
expressly self-similar forms of television like Beavis and Butt-head,
The Simpsons and Southpark. The joy of such programs is not the relief
of reaching the climax of the linear narrative, but rather the
momentary thrill of making connections. The satisfaction is in
recognising which bits of media are being satirised at any given
moment. It is an entirely new perspective on television, where
programs exist more in the form of Talmudic commentary: perspectives
on perspectives on perspectives. We watch screens within screens,
constantly reminded, almost as in a Brecht play, of the artifice of
storytelling. It is as if we are looking at a series of proscenium
arches, and are being invited as an audience to consider whether we
are within a proscenium arch ourselves.
The great Renaissance was a simple leap in perspective. Instead of
seeing everything in one dimension, we came to realise there was more
than one dimension on which things were occurring. Even the
Elizabethan world picture, with its concentric rings of authority -
God, king, man, animals - reflects this new found way of contending
with the simultaneity of action of many dimensions at once. A gamer
stepping out onto the internet to find a cheat code certainly reaches
this first renaissance's level of awareness and skill.
But what of the gamer who then learns to program new games for
himself? He, we might argue, has stepped out of yet another frame into
our current renaissance. He has deconstructed the content of the game,
demystified the technology of its interface and now feels ready to
open the codes and turn the game into a do-it-yourself activity. He
has moved from a position of a receiving player to that of a
deconstructing user. He has assumed the position of author, himself.
This leap to authorship is precisely the character and quality of the
dimensional leap associated with today's renaissance.
The evidence of today's renaissance is at least as profound as that of
the one that went before. The16th century saw the successful
circumnavigation of the globe via the seas. The 20th century saw the
successful circumnavigation of the globe from space. The first
pictures of earth from space changed our perspective on this sphere
forever. In the same century, our dominance over the planet was
confirmed not just through our ability to travel around it, but to
destroy it. The atomic bomb (itself the result of a rude dimensional
interchange between submolecular particles) gave us the ability to
author the globe's very destiny. Now, instead of merely being able to
comprehend 'God's creation', we could actively control it. This is a
new perspective.
We also have our equivalent of perspective painting, in the invention
of the holograph. The holograph allows us to represent not just three,
but four dimensions on a two-dimensional plate. When the viewer walks
past a holograph she can observe the three-dimensional object over a
course of time. A bird can flap its wings in a single picture. But,
more importantly for our renaissance's purposes, the holographic plate
itself embodies a new renaissance principle. When the plate is smashed
into hundreds of pieces, we do not find that one piece contains the
bird's wing, and another piece the bird's beak. Each piece of the
plate contains a faint image of the entire subject. When the pieces
are put together, the image achieves greater resolution. But each
piece contains a representation of the totality. This leap in
dimensional understanding is now informing disciplines as diverse as
brain anatomy and computer programming.
Our analogy to calculus is the development of systems theory, chaos
math and the much-celebrated fractal. Confronting non-linear equations
on their own terms for the first time, mathematicians armed with
computers are coming to new understandings of the way numbers can be
used to represent the complex relationships between dimensions.
Accepting that the surfaces in our world, from coastlines to clouds,
exhibit the properties of both two and three-dimensional objects (just
what is the surface area of a cloud?) they came up with ways of
working with and representing objects with fractional dimensionality.
Using fractals and their equations, we can now represent and work with
objects from the natural world that defy Cartesian analysis. We also
become able to develop mathematical models that reflect many more
properties of nature's own systems, such as self-similarity and remote
high leverage points. Again, we find that this renaissance is
characterised by the ability of an individual to reflect, or even
affect, the grand narrative. To write the game.
Finally, our renaissance's answer to the printing press is the
computer and its ability to network. Just as the printing press gave
everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone
access to authorship. The first Renaissance took us from the position
of passive recipient to active interpreter. Our current renaissance
brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. We are
the creators.
As game programmers instead of game players, the creators of testimony
rather than the believers in testament, we begin to become aware of
just how much of our reality is open source and up for discussion. So
much of what seemed like impenetrable hardware is actually software
and ripe for reprogramming. The stories we use to understand the world
seem less like explanations and more like collaborations. They are
rule sets, only as good as their ability to explain the patterns of
history or predict those of the future.
Consider the experience of a cartographer attempting to hold a
conversation with a surfer. They both can claim intimate knowledge of
the ocean, but from vastly different perspectives. While the mapmaker
understands the sea as a series of longitude and latitude lines, the
surfer sees only a motion of waves that are not even depicted on the
cartographer's map. If the cartographer were to call out from the
beach to the surfer and ask him whether he is above or below the 43rd
parallel, the surfer would be unable to respond. The mapmaker would
have no choice but to conclude that the surfer was hopelessly lost.
But if any of us were asked to choose who we would rather rely on to
get us back to shore, most of us would pick the surfer. He experiences
the water as a system of moving waves and stands a much better chance
of navigating a safe course through them. Each surfer at each location
and each moment of the day experiences an entirely different ocean.
The cartographer experiences the same map no matter what. He has a
more permanent model, but his liability is his propensity to mistake
his map for the actual territory.
The difference between the cartographer and the surfer's experience of
the ocean is akin to pre and post-renaissance relationships to story.
The first relies on the most linear and static interpretations of the
story in order to create a static and authoritative template through
which to glean its meaning. The latter relies on the living,
moment-to-moment perceptions of its many active interpreters to
develop a way of relating to its many changing patterns. Ultimately,
in a cognitive process not unlike that employed by a chaos
mathematician, the surfer learns to recognise the order underlying
what at first appears to be random turbulence. Events, images, and
arrangements that might otherwise have appeared to be unrelated are
now, thanks to a world view that acknowledges discontinuity, revealed
to be connected. To those unfamiliar with this style of pattern
recognition, the connections they draw may appear to be as unrelated
as a fortune-teller's tea leaves or Tarot cards are from the future
events she predicts. Nonetheless, the surfer understands each moment
and event in his world as a possible reflection on any other aspect or
moment in the entire system.
What gets reborn
The renaissance experience of moving beyond the frame allows
everything old to look new again. We are liberated from the maps we
have been using to navigate our world and free to create new ones
based on our own observations. This invariably leads to a whole new
era of competition. Renaissance may be a rebirth of old ideas in a new
context, but which ideas get to be reborn?
The first to recognise the new renaissance will compete to have their
ideologies be the ones that are rebirthed in this new context. This is
why, with the emergence of the internet, we saw the attempted rebirth
(and occasional stillbirth) of everything from paganism to
libertarianism, and communism to psychedelia. Predictably, the
financial markets and consumer capitalism, the dominant narratives of
our era, were the first to successfully commandeer the renaissance.
But they squandered their story on a pyramid scheme (indeed, the
accelerating force of computers and networks tends to force any story
to its logical conclusion) and now the interactive renaissance is once
again up for grabs.
Perhaps the most valuable idea to plant now, into the post-renaissance
society of tomorrow, is the very notion of renaissance itself.
Interactivity, both as an allegory for a healthier relationship to
cultural programming, and as an actual implementation of a widely
accessible authoring technology, reduces our dependence on fixed
narratives while giving us the tools and courage to develop narratives
together. The birth of interactive technology has allowed for a sudden
change of state. We have witnessed together the wizard behind the
curtain. We can all see, for this moment anyway, how so very much of
what we have perceived of as reality is, in fact, merely social
construction. More importantly, we have gained the ability to enact
such wizardry ourselves.
The most ready examples of such suddenly received knowledge come to us
from the mystics. Indeed, many early cyber-pioneers expressed their
insights (see my Cyberia for examples3) in mystical language coining
terms such as 'technoshamanism' and 'cyberdelia'. Indeed, in some ways
it does feel as though our society were at the boundaries of a
mystical experience, when we have a glimpse of the profoundly
arbitrary nature of the stories we use to organise and explain the
human experience. It is at precisely these moments that the voyager
wonders: "what can I tell myself - what I can write down that will
make me remember this experience beyond words?"
Of course, most of these mystical scribblings end up being
over-simplified platitudes such as 'all is one' or 'I am God'. Those
that rise above such clich, such as the more mystical tractates of
Ezekiel or Julian of Norwich, defy rational analysis or any effort at
comprehension. Our only choice, in such a situation, might be to
attempt to preserve just the initial insight that our maps are mere
models, and that we have the ability to draw new ones whenever we
wish.
This is why the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, businesspeople,
religious and social organisers of the late 20th century, who have
adopted a renaissance perspective on their fields, have also
proclaimed their insights to be so categorically set apart from the
work of their predecessors. Chaos mathematicians (and the economists
who depend on them) regard systems theory as an entirely new
understanding of the inner workings of our reality. They are then
celebrated on the pages of the New York Times for declaring that our
universe is actually made up of a few simple equations called
cellular-automata. Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of
ant hill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and
replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that
depends on the free flow of information between every member of the
colony.
More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical
reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a
retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and
change. The greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to
be the recollection that we are working with a mere model.
11 September 2001: Coping by retreat into a world view
More than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to
retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are
mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success.
Though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. To
mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the
territory. This, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the
20th century. Many people, institutions and nations have yet to adopt
strategies that take this lesson into account.
The oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in
government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit
model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited
resources. They continue to push the rest of the industrialised world
toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive
dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce.
The chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a
particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered
species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the
planet's topsoil or ecosystems. In more readily appreciated examples,
the Church of England is still consumed with its defence of the
literal interpretation of Biblical events and many fundamentalists
sects in the United States still fight, quite successfully, to prevent
the theory of evolution from being taught in State schools.
Although the terrorist attacks on the United States can find their
roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided American foreign
and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of
a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories
about the world and humankind's role within it. And the lines between
these worldviews are anything but clear.
Hours after the attacks, two of America's own fundamentalist
ministers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were quick to fit the
tragic events into their own concrete narrative for God's relationship
to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic
moment as anything but the wrath of God, they blamed the feminists,
homosexuals and civil libertarians of New York City for having brought
this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves.
In a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many American
patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our
nation's sacred values. This was to be seen as a war against
capitalism and a free society. As American flags were raised in
defiance of our Middle Eastern antagonists, just as many American
freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. Our nationalism
overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved
from deconstruction.
Meanwhile, free-market capitalism's stalwarts, who had already
suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging
reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on
their most visible symbol of global trade. With its dependence on
perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by
this sure sign of resistance. Might the world not really be ready to
embrace the World Trade Organisation's gifts? With a utopian future of
global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any
fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with God,
believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they
could. They sought a war to defend their story.
The most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to
feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. The attacks
on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, pinpointed, devastating, and
worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were
the world's singularly invincible nation. The people we appointed to
protect us had proved their inability to do so. President Bush's quick
rise to an over 90 percent popularity rating shows just how much we
needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent
fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. But like a child
realising that his parents can't save him from the bully at school,
Americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapons and
our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world.
Our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always
been unfounded, of course. But waking up to the great existential
dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. It led us to
revert to old habits. Anti-Semites (and latent anti-Semites) around
the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the 'Jewish
problem'. Tsarist and Nazi propaganda books, such as Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like Saudi
Arabia where they are still being published by official government
presses. Newspaper stories revived blood libel (that Jews drink the
blood of murdered non-Jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that
Jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special
radios they keep in their homes. Indeed, such informational treachery
is nothing new. But in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted
narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it
otherwise would have.
Efforts to package America's New War on news channels like CNN further
alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what
had happened. Conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded
leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through
television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter
from a Brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of
Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years
earlier during the Gulf War. Like any other narrative, the extreme
counterculture's saga of a 'new world order', directed by the Bush
family, had to be wrapped around the new data.
Meanwhile, many Jews and Christians who hadn't even thought about
their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves
instinctively asking: "how will this impact Israel?" or "is the
Armageddon upon us?" They bought memberships in religious institutions
for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and
synagogues looking for reassurance, for a way to fit these
catastrophes into a bigger story. Like everyone else, they hoped to
reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered.
But surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren't
functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life's
biggest questions. The challenge to all thinking people is to resist
the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nationalist, or
God-forbid, holy posture. Rather than retreating into the simplistic
and childlike, if temporarily reassuring, belief that the answers have
already been written along with the entire human story, we must
resolve ourselves to participate actively in writing the story
ourselves. It is not enough to go back to our old models, particularly
when they have been revealed to be inadequate at explaining the
complexity of the human condition. It is too late for the Western
World to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, accelerating global
conflict in an effort to bring on the messianic age. It is too late to
push blindly towards a purely capitalist model of human culture. There
is simply too much evidence that the short-term bottom line does not
serve the needs of people or the environment. There are too many
alternative values and cultural threads surrendered to profit
efficiency that may yet prove vital to our cultural ecosystem.
Instead, we must forge ahead into the challenging but necessary task
of inventing new models ourselves, using the collaborative techniques
learned over the past decade, and based in the real evidence around
us.