{"id":709,"date":"2012-02-04T13:23:13","date_gmt":"2012-02-04T17:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=709"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:47:27","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:47:27","slug":"is-big-media-now-big-brother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/is-big-media-now-big-brother\/","title":{"rendered":"Did we turn “Big Media” into “Big Brother” ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A response to today’s On The Media program<\/a> (WNYC 2\/4\/11) on how social media is taking over our lives, pushed by perpetual growth driven giants like Google and Facebook, not to mention Apple.<\/p>\n

Great program today, important subject.<\/p>\n

Your conclusion that social media will now always be a global presence in our lives needs a major general exception. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If you ask whether Google\u2019s and Facebook\u2019s goal of ultimate power over our choices might lead to ultimate corruption, the instability of succeeding at it becomes clear.\u00a0 \u00a0Things that grow till their host dies, like cancer, don\u2019t survive, as their \u201csuccess\u201d is killing their host.<\/p>\n

Everything we admire in nature, though, actually starts its existence as a \u201clittle cancer\u201d.<\/h3>\n

Every kind of new culture or organism starts life with a process of compound\u00a0 growth, starting with a temporary process of seeking ultimate power.\u00a0\u00a0 That universal start-up processes works by using products from its first tiny bit of control of its environment to continually expand its control of its environment, exponentially.<\/p>\n

That’s how every human individually begins life, as a single cell that multiplies to became trillions of cells, that explosively consume the resources of the womb at that alarmingly growing rate in just 9 months.\u00a0 \u00a0That start from \u201cgrowing like a cancer\u201d only has the \u201ceffect of being a cancer\u201d if it doesn’t change itself in mid-stream.\u00a0\u00a0 The things we admire all do, turning a little switch inside, to change gears from exploding control to delicately fitting in.\u00a0\u00a0 It may be mysterious, but allows their home environment and themselves to survive.<\/p>\n

The basic problem with “capitalism” (defined as the endless “growth machine” we see) is that it\u2019s \u201ca cancer\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0People try, but have a hard time seeing how it could change.\u00a0 \u00a0Historically, people of other times also created growth societies and took them “over the edge” to collapsing the environments they were growing in, seemingly every other time they tried it.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0So, if our society has that same \u201ctell-tale mark of the beast\u201d that commits us to ever growing control over earth, it\u2019ll have the usual result again.\u00a0\u00a0 It would be just another example of how \u201chighly successful people\u201d create insolvable problems for themselves, to destroy their own environments and complex societies.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been closely studying this set of issues from various viewpoints for several decades.\u00a0 The big change marked by social media is just another stage in a larger sweep of change in how humans perceive reality.\u00a0\u00a0 Human experience previously centered on living in “the physical world” is becoming one of living in “the information world” delivered by anonymous \u201cmedia\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0That really changes the nature of our social constructs of reality.<\/p>\n

From very ancient times human perception of reality has been a matter of social agreement about our experiences.\u00a0\u00a0 The giant leap we\u2019re now taking, away from living in the \u201creal world\u201d to living in an \u201cinformation world\u201d, marks a great change in the material connection between what the realities people might come to agree on and their physical experience, with the latter no longer what connects us.<\/p>\n

The shared experiences we come to agree on change from ones about things of nature we did not create, to agreeing on experiences of imagery we invent by ourselves.\u00a0 It might possibly seem like a \u201chappy world\u201d where life can be beautiful all the time, then.<\/p>\n

It also provides a wide open invitation to fictional realities generally.<\/h3>\n

Whether orchestrated from behind the scenes by \u201cmad capitalists\u201d, or not, having our \u201csocial reality\u201d become made only of self-affirming information, physically isolates us from the reality of our material existence. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s an open invitation to a complete take-over by \u201cmagical thinking\u201d.<\/p>\n

Still, our vast new world of \u201cmagical thinking\u201d does kind of feel \u201cmagical\u201d at the moment.\u00a0\u00a0 Whether it grows to kill its host or to mature to become the backbone of a deep new connection between humans and with the earth is the question.\u00a0\u00a0 It could do that if our material existence becomes sustainable, but you really have to say we\u2019re blowing it so far, as EVERYTHING seems built for the other plan.\u00a0\u00a0 There is real cause to think we\u2019re in trouble on that count.<\/p>\n

As a physicist I developed a very cool new way to “connect the dots”, to know a few important things about how growing environmental systems are evolving, before they get there. \u00a0\u00a0You might aptly describe it as a way to see if “little cancers” will or won’t turn themselves into “stable partners”.\u00a0 \u00a0In the physics of how self-organizing systems use energy, the question is whether they switch the energy of the “growth machine” they start-up from, to funding an exploration and participation in their new environment, instead of destroying it.<\/p>\n

That sounds complicated, and it is, so you might prefer to skip that and just say, Oh GROW UP please!<\/span>, instead.<\/h3>\n

That’s what it\u2019s about, making that critical turn we all personally need to have made ourselves to now be reading this.\u00a0\u00a0 We make that choice to change from an immature ever growing consumption of our host, to using the same resource for our learning to \u201cget along\u201d and invent a mature and skillful way to participate in our new world.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can read my Tweets as Shoudaknown and find more, various other pages of complications condensed into single lines.<\/p>\n

Another conclusion I can\u2019t escape, from carefully studying the question for so long, is that for hundreds of years there\u2019s been a regular pattern of scientists doing good work trying to make this a subject one of general discussion.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0It seems to have always been actively discredited by the social media of their time.\u00a0 \u00a0I think that\u2019s clearly why you\u2019ve probably never heard of it. \u00a0\u00a0So, today there\u2019s a LOT of information on this \u201call bottled up\u201d all over the place.\u00a0 Things \u201ckept bottled up\u201d do sometimes burst out, yes, but there\u2019s also LOTS of evidence that the opposite is still dominant, of sparks of awareness still being actively extinguished.<\/p>\n

Take the remarkably clear evidence today, of how the\u00a0consensus world government and societal policy\u00a0for maintaining prosperity is to continue the approach that is accelerating our depletion of all the earth’s available resources. \u00a0 Intending to have it produce the opposite result now and\u00a0reduce impacts at the same time instead, the all but universally accepted strategy to grow the economies ever more efficiently.<\/p>\n

That, of course, only speeds up the old process, assuring that
\nour depletion of the earth
\nwill occur as fast as we’re\u00a0technically able to do it.<\/h3>\n

It spells T.R.A.G.E.D.Y \u00a0like \u201cHollywood\u201d written out across the earth in super-sized billboard letters. <\/span><\/h3>\n

Among the just stunning parts of it is how our mass social movements \u201cto save the earth\u201d, as sincere in advocating their social values as they may be, have also served to suppress the discussion of what the real problem is.\u00a0 It\u2019s really been as if the \u201cface reality communities\u201d had banned together to \u201centirely avoid reality\u201d.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been a part of many of these social networks and certainly support their intent as I always have.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0I find it quite inescapable, though, that as a rule they are relying on sincerely heroic sounding \u201cfeel good\u201d efforts that quite visibly have no effect.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s genuinely as if our mistake is thinking that nature cares more about whether we feel good about what we are doing than anything else.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Honestly, she doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The belief that gaining more support for ineffectual efforts would help, doesn\u2019t make them anything but even more ineffectual, of course.\u00a0 \u00a0Nor does it correct the very real growing direct reverse effects, that go by unnoticed and unresponded to.<\/p>\n

The consistent response is classic!\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s to no longer \u201cshoot the messenger\u201d, but now it\u2019s to just discredit the evidence, politely saying to the messenger things like \u201cOh we don\u2019t think that way\u201d.<\/p>\n

“dissing the data” is quiet effective<\/em><\/span><\/span>
\nfor evading questions about what\u2019s steering our perfectly fine sounding social values, so very far off course.<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A response to today’s On The Media program (WNYC 2\/4\/11) on how social media is taking over our lives, pushed by perpetual growth driven giants like Google and Facebook, not to mention Apple. Great program today, important subject. Your conclusion that social media will now always be a global presence in our lives needs a … Continue reading Did we turn “Big Media” into “Big Brother” ?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2472,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions\/2472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}