I posted this about a year ago – the night of Obama’s election. A few people have mentioned it to me in the past week, so I thought I’d repost it now.
Though I share in the jubilation at Obama’s election, I find I’m also a bit guarded. Holding back, as if afraid to get “fooled again” by the promise of new leadership.
To be sure, it’s going to feel good and be good for America to have a potential world leader as our president – someone who, instead of bringing himself down to the level of the least common denominator, actually demands that we raise ourselves to his level of discourse and sophistication. Friends are asking me what words like “bipartisanship” mean – a sure sign that they are actually, finally interested in how government functions and what it is Obama might do to change it.
But I’ve also got the nagging sense that too many of us are still hoping and waiting for what Obama’s going to do. As if the president somehow enacts policies or spends money in a way that makes everything better. This is not what a president does. Yes, there are certainly public works programs Obama can promote, to rebuild highways or develop alternative energy technologies while giving jobs to more Americans. These are potentially great top-down stimuli for a failed economy and neglected infrastructure – but they do not rebuild a society ravaged by runaway deregulated capitalism and military misadventure.
That part is up to us. And in this sense, we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol – an awakening, an opportunity.
When there’s a big blackout in New York, especially during the summer, some people take it as a “cue” to start looting. It’s not that the blackout itself makes it significantly to break down store fronts; it’s not that the police are so very busy with the blackout. The lights going out is a cue to behave differently – to release the hidden potential for vandalism and long-repressed rage.
Likewise, the election of a black man to the presidency is a cue that something has changed. As my friend, Ari Wallach explained to me on my new radio show last night, it’s a kind of “shock and awe.” There’s a thoughtful, progressive and black president-elect on the cover of the New York Post. The cognitive dissonance this generates is an opportunity to reprogram. It’s what advertisers and social programmers try to do in pretty much every communication they make. It’s as big a disconnect and reconnect as 9-11 was, only constructive instead of destructive. A narrative is broken; another is born.
But this new narrative is not the story of how we are led by some new person. It’s the story of how we lead ourselves. It’s about how we accept the cue to act.
Everyone I know in my own circles is obsessed with creating the next big Internet phenomenon or organization to marshall all this energy and help people do their own bottom-up activities. I’ve been invited to a few dozen meetings already for such projects, and I’m happy to see everyone so enthused. But if everyone wants to do the “meta” job of creating a brand or utility through which activism happens, then there will be no one left to do the actual organizing.
No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.
My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.
Obama’s going to be busy for while, anyway. Two wars, a dozen failed federal agencies, and a banking industry that needs to be dismantled are going to take up a lot of his time and energy. While he attends to mitigating the damage of past failures, it is we who need to build a new society based on the values we share but have closeted during these decades of institutionalized self interest.
How? Where? Just go out the door and look around. There are opportunities literally everywhere. If we do get fooled again, it will only be because we have fooled ourselves.
Nice, short, new interview with me at H+ magazine, about my new graphic novel series, eXoriare, and what it’s like to write story for a video game.
I read all of these books… Pause and Effect or First Person or what’s-his-name’s awful books on character and storytelling for games… or Marie Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, or Hamlet on the Holodeck. All of these. And the more I read about it, the less I felt that there was a there there. This holy grail about somehow merging gameplay with narrative or story or passive media, it just doesn’t fly.
How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.
Here’s my keynote from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference last week. It is my clearest articulation yet of how we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy. This is a lot of what I wanted to talk about at the New School’s “Internet as Playground and Factory” last week.
As unlikely as it sounds, Rupert Murdoch may end up being our last best hope for a peaceful solution to the Internet’s war on professional journalism. A man who many blame for commodifying, globalizing, sensationalizing, and cheapening news is considering taking a stand against a force even bigger than himself: the Web link.
So, both for fun and in my ongoing effort to find a university homebase, I’m going to teach a course called Narrative Lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program next semester. You have to be in the program to take it, but I’ll try to keep some component online for the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, though, here’s an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we’re after:
But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there’s an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil’s ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – let an avenger arise from my bones.
I just finished a new graphic novel – the first in a series I’m working on that will dig a reality tunnel through the universe of a video game series. Crazy stuff, but I’m the linear guy on the project (if you can believe that) so it’s not quite as brain-decimating as it could be.
It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.
Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I actually feel more obligated to make it work on many levels at once. Gamers spend thousands of hours in a world, so it really has to be true down to levels of granularity an author could ignore in almost any other medium. But it’s great to know people are going as deep into this material as I am. Way more intimate a sensation, really.
Robert Anton Wilson will be my guest on The Media Squat this Monday evening.
Alas, he’ll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He’s the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.
I’m doing a “live” appearance in Second Life, this Sunday evening at 9p Eastern, for CopperRobot.
We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.
Following my own advice to go local, I’m ready to settle down in a real place and time. I’m hoping that will be teaching media, interactivity, and narrative in a friendly, NY-area program that offers me a place to do it in an ongoing way. Strange to have a moment of “openness” like this.
To that end, I’m doing talks at some of my favorite schools in the area, to meet people and let my intentions be known. Two weeks ago, I had a great time at the New School – where I was truly inspired by the radical stripe of the student body. It did not feel fake.
This Wednesday at noon, I’ll be at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, in Brooklyn, speaking about “The End of Narrative.”
A Lecture by Douglas Rushkoff
Presented by The Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Interactivity changes our relationship to stories as well as the technologies through which they are transmitted. Where the power of a story to influence audiences often depended on the mysteriousness of the medium through which it was told, today’s storytellers must actually engender trust and playfulness – and they must do so on an increasingly violent paranoid playing field.
These are the challenges confronting anyone who wishes to communicate in today’s mediaspace. Do we create myths to compete with the ones we hope to dispel? Or do we abandon myth altogether? Is the traditional story itself a relic, incapable of providing meaning over time? Are the kinds of meaning it can convey biased towards creating childlike passivity in the recipients? Is it our job to create stories capable of competing with the ones currently programming our society, or to abandon this arms race altogether in favor of new artistic and cognitive mechanisms. And, if so, what are they?
I hope everyone who reads my posts already understands that the real beneficiary of the AIG bailout was Goldman Sachs. In brief, Goldman made money underwriting mortgage investments that it sold to various pension funds. Goldman suspected that the investments were doomed, and leveraged a whole lot of money to make bets against the very investments it was underwriting and selling.
When the mortgage industry collapsed, Goldman won very very big. They were right to bet against the investment products they were selling. So they made money on both ends – selling the crap, and betting against the crap. Problem is, AIG was on the other side of those bets, essentially insuring the awful mortgage packages. And AIG didn’t have enough money to pay Goldman its winnings.
Instead of letting AIG fail, and leaving Goldman with only its original profits from selling awful mortgage investments to major American pension funds, the central government (advised by its fiscal staff of former Goldman execs) bailed out AIG so that it could pay back Goldman its winnings. Our grandchildren’s tax money will be used to pay Goldman for winning its bets against the products it sold to our pension managers.
Now that Goldman has paid its executives the biggest bonuses in the company’s history, many people are mad. So the Administration’s bright idea is to force companies who took government bailout money to put caps on such bonuses. Problem is, Goldman didn’t get bailout money – not directly, anyway. They got the money, sure, but the loans were not made to Goldman.
So they get to keep it all. Again.
Kind of makes you wish you’d bought GS stock when it was down around 60 last year…
January 21 - Brooklyn, NY. Talk for ETSY, 7p February 1 - The Webb School, Bell Buckle Tennessee. February 2 - Frontline Digital Nation premieres, 9pm PBS March 12 - SWSX, Austin TX more...
