In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…
What I’m working on when I don’t seem to be actively producing anything: Actually helping to fix a future that in the short term looks very dark indeed.
Some basics about my current mindset:
The real crisis confronting us is a collapsed generation of young people who ore not only profoundly uneducated but maliciously miseducated into a state of impaired consciousness that is also highly suggestible, easily manipulated, and unable to think their own way out of their uncreative serfdom.
We have a small population of survivors who understand and do their best to write helpfully about the parts of the crisis they understand. They are fiercely proud of their individuality, which sits at the core of their belief systems. They are lone wolves seeking to howl loudly and charismatically enough to be heard by a significant audience of acolytes. These are the Michael Smiths and Daniel Jupps of the Facebook/Substack universe. They are also serving two masters — saving the world and making a living at it.
The social network universe of the past 10 to 20 years has failed. A combination of brute and subtle censorship has eliminated the potential for real conversation on even the best of the networks, Facebook, which has turned every Page into an island cut off from the main by barriers hardly anyone detects. The situation is growing worse. The new model for mass involvement by young people is TikTok, a deliberately created instrument by the Chinese for mind control and subjugation. The word most commonly used to describe its effects is addictive.
The ‘Idea People Don’t Seem Able to Grasp’ is that to save our heirs we need to build our own rival version of TikTok. Addiction is fine if it leads to real learning, creative apprenticeship and output, and authentic conversations among the people involved. The lone wolves will all die smugly in the cold, cut off from any salvation by the pack. No single person or even a single group of colleagues can build what’s needed. The scope of what needs to be done is so enormous is that the mission is to build an attractive nuisance that has the not so secret agenda of enabling lost pups to educate themselves by navigating their own paths through an incredibly rich multimedia environment that is designed to let everyone do everything to leverage their unexplored talents into productive skill sets and accomplishments in every arena.
I have been playing for many years with the how-to’s of an architecture that is not designed to entertain a captive audience but to let each person’s experience of interacting with created works be its own unique creative narrative and legacy. Provide an immense field of choice, put discrepant topics and genres side by side and let the adventurers find their own way through to an end that either satisfies them or provokes them to superior accomplishments if their own.
I say people don’t seem to get it, and I say that because I have proposed the idea to multiple persons of the lone wolf class, of which I have also been a long-standing member, but they tend to see any such suggestion as an attempt to conscript them into someone else’s money-making scheme. They can’t understand the idea because they’re not listening for a variety of — I suppose — understandable reasons. Thing is, I can prove I’m not here for the money. I don’t have any. I tried the Substack thing and gave it up because the whole business model of it is a bait and switch. Be tantalizing for 500-1,000 words so they’ll pop for the paid subscription, which means you’re effectively in the business of writing New Yorker essays, which always begin with polite indirection in order not to give away the writer’s real (usually political) intention. I can see this happening with Michael Smith more and more, which is tending to surface his academic roots as a presumptively objective invitation to follow his (usually psychological) argument past the paid subscription barrier.
The people who need our help can’t understand what the lone wolves are writing. What is needed is to harness the flash and bang tools of the new technologies to make it incredibly easy for the curious (or distractable) to encounter materials and forms and assorted riches they’ve never know existed because nobody told them they existed.
There are clearly organizational and technological barriers to be dealt with. What I’m most interested in at the moment is to start a conversation about what I’m describing in outline.
As you can probably tell, I have spent more time than most searching for ways to create connections across barriers between elements that touch in but do not necessarily seem to belong without a leap of faith. We need lots of leaps of faith.
Just to remind you the challenge if creating an Internet within the Internet has drawn my fascination and insider and considerable effort for quite a few years…
The Undernet
Click the pic and blow through the Wordpress warnings… it’s there.
Undernet Black
Click the graphic…
SnoogleNet Universal
Click the graphic…
YourBook
YThe DarkNet
The Qovernet
The following miniature can show you how these different networks can pose unexpected associations and connect with each other as well as what I call the OverNet, that bane of our existence. As someone famous once said, ‘You can be serious without being solemn.”
What’s at Stake
Maybe I am too much on the solemn side here. I have long been serving two masters myself — the people in the political trenches of today AND the grandchildren who will be born in darkness when the trench fighters finally do go into that good night. As I still believe in my heart of hearts they will. But I have battled hard, and mostly for free, to do my part in preventing that outcome.
What this is. Another stab in the dark… “down to a sunless sea.”
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