This is the second-to-last column I’ll be doing for BushwickBK, as I’m moving westward to Williamsburg soon and will thus no longer be a resident of this particular area. I will note that there was just now, at 3:40 A.M. on Monday, an exchange of gunfire somewhere in the vicinity of my apartment at Broadway and Park Street, but otherwise I have nothing to report in terms of our community and its cultural undertakings. Rather, I’d like to spend the remainder of my output here in an effort to make a certain case.

Those of us with the good fortune to have been born at such time as our adolescence coincided with the sudden public availability of the internet are in a unique position. We are the last generation that will have spent our childhoods in an age in which textual information was essentially limited to the medium of the printing press as well as the only generation that will have spent our teenage years in sudden adaptation of the new medium of the internet and that will have straddled both of these mediums in such a way as that our transition to adulthood came at the same time as humanity’s transition to an unprecedented new age of global communication. The manner in which our minds were formed — a transition from the particularities of the printing press to those of the web — will never be replicated, as those younger than us will have grown up entirely in the information age and thus never know what it was like to learn within the constraints of the Dewey decimal system. More to the point, our unique development may of course be expected to have conferred upon us certain characteristics, some of which are presumably quite advantageous. Our situation is somewhat akin to that of those classical Greeks who lived during the transition from a culture of orality to one of literacy, the main difference being that our transition occurred in the space of a few years whereas the Greek alphabet came into common use only gradually, over the course of two centuries — which is to say, really, that our situation is without any real precedent in all of human history, and so quite fitting in an age in which unprecedented factors are the rule, rather than the exception.

Humans began to go their separate ways tens of thousands of years ago. Barriers of proximity and personality — geography and nationalism, among other things — conspired to perpetuate this separation. The institutions that developed as a consequence of those circumstances remain with us today. Some of them, such as the nation-state, are not yet obsolete, as geography still exists and nationalism still persuades. But those institutions are already threated by the new realities of the information age. This is perhaps a fine thing, but it is also worth remembering that the vast majority of human history — everything from art to invention to war to philosophy — is the result of collaboration between one or more individuals, sometimes only in the sense that an individual draws largely upon the work of other individuals, both contemporary and long dead, in creating what he creates and doing what he does, but more commonly in the sense that it takes two to tango. War, for instance, is rarely conducted by a party of one. Collaboration was and remains constrained by barriers that existed due to such things as geography, but such things as geography have been more or less kicked to the curb by virtue of the information age. Even with those barriers having been in full effect up until our present age, mankind had managed to produce a great deal of content — serfdom, sculpture, jihad, the opium trade, germ theory, existentialism, gulags, orgies, colonialism, animated comedy, chemical warfare, the novel, propaganda of the deed, railroads, Dadaism, calculus, the atom bomb. The barriers to collaboration are now fading — which is to say that it will be drastically easier to develop whatever new content to which we may look forward or shudder to contemplate, as the case may be. Meanwhile, there are more humans than ever to conduct such corroboration. It took the Punic Wars some thousand years to devolve into simply a footnote among even the educated; it will take World War II a mere two hundred years, perhaps, to devolve into similar irrelevance.

We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, as the reader will probably have determined. Likewise, the manner in which the bulk of the American citizenry is informed is not the best of  all possible manners. We would be reasonably dismissed as fools were we to demand perfection, but we would not be amiss in demanding something better than what we have, as what we have is easily improved upon if only a few people in certain positions were to make the right decisions. Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer are among the most widely-read columnists in the country, for instance, yet both are easily shown to be incompetent — and both will nonetheless retain their current positions of influence so long as the status quo continues.

The media structure as it is cannot be ended from within, but must rather be confronted from the outside, as producers and publishers gain little from rocking the boat. The internet provides the means to challenge this structure. It has already provided us with the means to outdo our predecessors in many respects; Alexander the Great would have leveled a city to obtain the access to information that is now available to us for only $49.95 a month from Cablevision or even for free if we know how to crack wireless routers, which we do. Such a skill is one among many to which we are privy and which were non-existent until a few years ago. Fifteen years ago, the media structure could not be overturned, but then fifteen years ago is ancient history in an age when things develop as quickly as they do today.  Fifteen years into the age of the internet, some fifty percent of individual human beings may now communicate with each other instantly and thereby make common cause with like-minded individuals across the globe, and this percentage is increasing rapidly. The possibilities are never endless, but today they are exponentially greater in number than they were yesterday. Among these possibilities is that we may now overturn that which ought to have been overturned long ago, assuming we are willing to do so.

Towards the end of an article that appeared last Friday in Vanity Fair, I announced the upcoming launch of a certain project, one which will combine software currently in development by former Bushwick resident Andrew Stein with the influence and skill sets of a hand-picked group of political commentators, some of whom write for traditional outlets but most of whom will be bloggers who have proven themselves to be intellectually honest and wholly capable of taking advantage of the peculiarities of the information age. In my final column for BushwickBK next Monday, I will explain the project a bit further and make what I hope to be a convincing request for assistance from those among our readers who see the increasing necessity of creative destruction.

Related Posts