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The Anti-Manifesto Manifesto
Manifestos are from an era when information moved slowly, but at the speed of light, there’s no time to declare your intentions … everything is made public as it happens.
Today a traditional manifesto arrives as a footnote to reality, just in time to make sense of a motion that’s already transpired.
Our actions and the reactions they excite are now the only meaningful declaration possible. The manifesto can no longer be separated from the reality it hopes to manifest.
New crowd funding platforms like Kickstarter point to a new kind of manifesto - one that merges declaration, action, and response into a single connective motion.
The new manifesto turns goals into roles for both actors and audience alike … before the environment or the goals have a chance to change.
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yesterday’s news tomorrow
What would a newspaper look like if it was invented today?
Mu.
It’s a meaningless question, like:
“What would a telegraph look like if it was invented today?”
It wouldn’t be, couldn’t be,
and it’s successors are already in our hands.
But it’s a safe question for the old guard of journalism:
It lets them feel like they’re in control of the future
by framing the present in the past that they own.The future of news is not a slick, ‘interactive’ iPad app that delivers tightly controlled, editorialized content. That’s yesterday’s news dressed up in today’s gadgets. The future of news is you and i connected, sharing and co-creating …
It’s a future that severely threatens the media giants of the previous era who are trying to rewind the clocks and promise us an ‘interactive’ future … which is to say, a glossy future of anemic, shallow participation, a future that we ditched years ago along with our cd-roms.
And this is the curse of the iPad:
it’s designed to make us crave the interactive
instead of the connective. -
We are the connected not the collected
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era.
They assume the priority of the group over the individual
and a joint identity that’s shared by all its members.
Hierarchies thrive in collectives.
But an entirely different kind of logic is emerging in our networked culture …In a connective, it’s the selfish yet common goals of individuals that allow a distributed network to self-organize around a common task. Identity in a connective is in a process of continuous renewal, emerging from each individual’s immediate ability to contribute to the common task.
Connectives co-operate.
Collectives collaborate … co-labor.
Wikipedia is a collective (hence the brutal hierarchies).
Delicious is a connective.
A connective is neither the group
nor the individual
but a transcending
that encompasses (and denies) both simultaneously.We are Me.
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my generation
“This generation gap is really a technological gap”- McLuhan
The social and psychic distance that emerged between industrial age parents and their electric children in the ’60s can’t be blamed on teenage rebellion: Kids were experimenting with radical new sensibilities, new art, new fashion, new social architectures, new inner trips, all in an effort to make sense of the emerging electric surround.
For decades, we’ve been unable or unwilling to recognize the vital role that youth culture has played in revealing the vocabulary and grammar of our electronic environment.
The kids found shelter in electric music
while their parents could only hear noise.o o o
As the pace of innovation accelerates,
the gaps between disruptive technologies get shorter and shorter,
and the interval between ‘generations’ correspondingly shrinks.Today, kids are growing up in a technological environment that didn’t exist five years ago. We speak of the Wikipedia generation, the YouTube generation, the Twitter generation. Each of these environments encourages new literacies and new social and psychic patterns. The cultural architecture that grew around Wikipedia already seems dated when compared to the distributed intelligence that is emerging around the real time web.
“… in the world of the future, the new illiterate will be the person who has not learned how to learn.” - Alvin Toffler
A new meta literacy is emerging that isn’t based on any single technology but instead on our ability to quickly internalize the grammar and vocabulary of any new technological environment.
As meta literacy begins to grow, the gaps between generations are becoming irrelevant.
Generations no longer measure biological descent
from grandparent to parent to child
or even the cultural divides that once split neatly along age groups.
Today, a generation is a technological environment and its literates
and is no longer bound to any specific age.Generation is becoming a choice rather than an inheritance. And we are quickly approaching a time when generation gaps may disappear entirely … what Gabriel dubbed ‘The Last Generation’.
Wendy challenged the idea: “How do you know that some crazy thing that we can’t even imagine yet isn’t going to come along and create an even bigger divide than anything we’ve witnessed before.” And she’s right. This may not be the Last Generation, capital L capital G, but maybe just the last electric generation.
The kind of Meta literacy we’re gaining today is smoothing out the tremors of digital innovation, but will it be able to bridge the gap between the electric and the quantum? A while back I asked:
When you and I are old (and a bit senile), how will we interface with a generation, that has transcended biology?
agovernmentman replied:
“i intend to transcend right along with the kids.”
Beautiful. But I wonder whether we’ll actually be able to.Today, the bleeding edge of art isn’t as shocking and disorienting as it was in the 20th century when we were first starting to make sense of our electronic culture.
The gaps between successive technologies have gotten shorter, and the bridges of consciousness that most artists are building don’t need to stretch as far as they once did.
But will the art and counter cultures of the quantum era be so easy for us to digest? It’s difficult to imagine what a rave or woodstock full of stelarcs would even be. -
Peripheral
vision
opens
peripheral
mind.How many centuries have our eyes been tightly locked on printed pages?
How many hours have you been staring at that screen?
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
All figure and no ground makes Jack a dull boy.
When ambient interfaces finally arrive,
they are going to reawaken an integral, ecological awareness
that’s been mostly dormant for thousands of years. -
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touch down
Three hours of pre-game analysis for a regular season football game. Thirty seconds of gloss about two wars and why 15% of American’s are now on food stamps.
“Miraculous you call it, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
They’ve got Pepsi in the Andes, Mcdonalds in Tibet.”Today, facts and arguments huddle around the instant replay, while the most pressing issues of our time float in a vague sea of images and emotions. Who has time to agree or disagree about politics when there’s so much to like and dislike?
