Chapter 3 No.3

The opportunity for renaissance

The birth of the internet was interpreted by many as a revolution. Those of us in the counterculture saw in the internet an opportunity to topple the storytellers who had dominated our politics, economics, society and religion - in short our very reality - and to replace their stories with those of our own. It was a beautiful and exciting sentiment, but one as based in a particular narrative as any other. Revolutions simply replace one story with another. The capitalist narrative is replaced by that of the communist; the religious fundamentalist's replaced by the gnostic's. The means may be different, but the rewards are the same. So is the exclusivity of their distribution. That's why they're called revolutions - we're just going in a circle.

This is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we have the ability to step out of the story altogether. Renaissances are historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. People in a variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence changes. The stories we have been using no longer work.

Take a look back at what we think of as the original Renaissance; the one we were taught in school. What were the main leaps in perspective? One example is the use of perspective in painting. Artists developed the technique of the vanishing point and with it the ability to paint three-dimensional representations on two-dimensional surfaces. The character of this innovation is subtle but distinct. It is not a technique for working in three dimensions; it is not that artists moved from working on canvas to working with clay. Rather, perspective painting allows an artist to relate between dimensions: representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane.

Another example is calculus, another key renaissance invention. Calculus is a mathematical system that allows us to derive one dimension from another. It is a way of describing curves with the language of lines, and spheres with the language of curves. The leap from arithmetic to calculus was not just a leap in our ability to work with higher dimensional objects, but a leap in our ability to relate the objects of one dimension to the objects of another. It was a shift in perspective that allowed us to orient ourselves to mathematical objects from beyond the context of their own dimensionality.

The other main features of the Renaissance permitted similar shifts in perspective. Circumnavigation of the globe changed our relationship between the planet we live on and the maps we used to describe it. The maps still worked, they just described a globe instead of a plane. Anyone hoping to navigate a course had to be able to relate a two-dimensional map to the new reality of a three-dimensional planet.

Similarly, the invention of moveable type and the printing press changed the relationship of author and audience to text. The creation of a manuscript was no longer a one-pointed affair. The creation of the first manuscript still was, but now it could be replicated and distributed to everyone. It was still one story, but now was subject to a multiplicity of individual perspectives. This innovation alone changed the landscape of religion in the Western World. Individual interpretation of the Bible led to the collapse of Church authority and the unilateral nature of its decrees. Everyone demanded his or her own relationship to the story.

Our electronic renaissance

In all these cases, people experienced a very particular shift in their relationship to, and understanding of, dimensions. Understood this way, a renaissance is a moment of reframing. We step out of the frame as it is currently defined and see the whole picture in a new context. We can then play by new rules.

It is akin to the experience of a computer game player. At first, a gamer will play a video or computer game by the rules. He'll read the manual, if necessary, then move through the various levels of the game. Mastery of the game, at this stage, means getting to the end: making it to the last level, surviving, becoming the most powerful character or, in the case of a simulation game, designing and maintaining a thriving family, city or civilisation. For many gamers, this is as far as it goes.

Some gamers, though - usually after they've mastered this level of play - will venture out onto the internet in search of other fans or user groups. There, they will gather the cheat codes that can be used to acquire special abilities within the game, such as invisibility or an infinite supply of ammunition. When the gamer returns to the game with his secret codes, is he still playing the game or is he cheating? From a renaissance perspective he is still playing the game, albeit a different one. His playing field has grown from the CD on which the game was shipped to the entire universe of computers where these secret codes and abilities can be discussed and shared. He is no longer playing the game, but a meta-game. The inner game world is still fun, but it is distanced by the gamer's new perspective, much in the way we are distanced from the play-within-a-play in one of Shakespeare's comedies or dramas. And the meta-theatrical convention gives us new perspective on the greater story as well. Gaming, as a metaphor but also as a lived experience, invites a renaissance perspective on the world in which we live. Perhaps gamers and their game culture have been as responsible as anyone for the rise in expressly self-similar forms of television like Beavis and Butt-head, The Simpsons and Southpark. The joy of such programs is not the relief of reaching the climax of the linear narrative, but rather the momentary thrill of making connections. The satisfaction is in recognising which bits of media are being satirised at any given moment. It is an entirely new perspective on television, where programs exist more in the form of Talmudic commentary: perspectives on perspectives on perspectives. We watch screens within screens, constantly reminded, almost as in a Brecht play, of the artifice of storytelling. It is as if we are looking at a series of proscenium arches, and are being invited as an audience to consider whether we are within a proscenium arch ourselves.

The great Renaissance was a simple leap in perspective. Instead of seeing everything in one dimension, we came to realise there was more than one dimension on which things were occurring. Even the Elizabethan world picture, with its concentric rings of authority - God, king, man, animals - reflects this new found way of contending with the simultaneity of action of many dimensions at once. A gamer stepping out onto the internet to find a cheat code certainly reaches this first renaissance's level of awareness and skill.

But what of the gamer who then learns to program new games for himself? He, we might argue, has stepped out of yet another frame into our current renaissance. He has deconstructed the content of the game, demystified the technology of its interface and now feels ready to open the codes and turn the game into a do-it-yourself activity. He has moved from a position of a receiving player to that of a deconstructing user. He has assumed the position of author, himself. This leap to authorship is precisely the character and quality of the dimensional leap associated with today's renaissance.

The evidence of today's renaissance is at least as profound as that of the one that went before. The16th century saw the successful circumnavigation of the globe via the seas. The 20th century saw the successful circumnavigation of the globe from space. The first pictures of earth from space changed our perspective on this sphere forever. In the same century, our dominance over the planet was confirmed not just through our ability to travel around it, but to destroy it. The atomic bomb (itself the result of a rude dimensional interchange between submolecular particles) gave us the ability to author the globe's very destiny. Now, instead of merely being able to comprehend 'God's creation', we could actively control it. This is a new perspective.

We also have our equivalent of perspective painting, in the invention of the holograph. The holograph allows us to represent not just three, but four dimensions on a two-dimensional plate. When the viewer walks past a holograph she can observe the three-dimensional object over a course of time. A bird can flap its wings in a single picture. But, more importantly for our renaissance's purposes, the holographic plate itself embodies a new renaissance principle. When the plate is smashed into hundreds of pieces, we do not find that one piece contains the bird's wing, and another piece the bird's beak. Each piece of the plate contains a faint image of the entire subject. When the pieces are put together, the image achieves greater resolution. But each piece contains a representation of the totality. This leap in dimensional understanding is now informing disciplines as diverse as brain anatomy and computer programming.

Our analogy to calculus is the development of systems theory, chaos math and the much-celebrated fractal. Confronting non-linear equations on their own terms for the first time, mathematicians armed with computers are coming to new understandings of the way numbers can be used to represent the complex relationships between dimensions. Accepting that the surfaces in our world, from coastlines to clouds, exhibit the properties of both two and three-dimensional objects (just what is the surface area of a cloud?) they came up with ways of working with and representing objects with fractional dimensionality.

Using fractals and their equations, we can now represent and work with objects from the natural world that defy Cartesian analysis. We also become able to develop mathematical models that reflect many more properties of nature's own systems, such as self-similarity and remote high leverage points. Again, we find that this renaissance is characterised by the ability of an individual to reflect, or even affect, the grand narrative. To write the game.

Finally, our renaissance's answer to the printing press is the computer and its ability to network. Just as the printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone access to authorship. The first Renaissance took us from the position of passive recipient to active interpreter. Our current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. We are the creators.

As game programmers instead of game players, the creators of testimony rather than the believers in testament, we begin to become aware of just how much of our reality is open source and up for discussion. So much of what seemed like impenetrable hardware is actually software and ripe for reprogramming. The stories we use to understand the world seem less like explanations and more like collaborations. They are rule sets, only as good as their ability to explain the patterns of history or predict those of the future.

Consider the experience of a cartographer attempting to hold a conversation with a surfer. They both can claim intimate knowledge of the ocean, but from vastly different perspectives. While the mapmaker understands the sea as a series of longitude and latitude lines, the surfer sees only a motion of waves that are not even depicted on the cartographer's map. If the cartographer were to call out from the beach to the surfer and ask him whether he is above or below the 43rd parallel, the surfer would be unable to respond. The mapmaker would have no choice but to conclude that the surfer was hopelessly lost. But if any of us were asked to choose who we would rather rely on to get us back to shore, most of us would pick the surfer. He experiences the water as a system of moving waves and stands a much better chance of navigating a safe course through them. Each surfer at each location and each moment of the day experiences an entirely different ocean. The cartographer experiences the same map no matter what. He has a more permanent model, but his liability is his propensity to mistake his map for the actual territory.

The difference between the cartographer and the surfer's experience of the ocean is akin to pre and post-renaissance relationships to story. The first relies on the most linear and static interpretations of the story in order to create a static and authoritative template through which to glean its meaning. The latter relies on the living, moment-to-moment perceptions of its many active interpreters to develop a way of relating to its many changing patterns. Ultimately, in a cognitive process not unlike that employed by a chaos mathematician, the surfer learns to recognise the order underlying what at first appears to be random turbulence. Events, images, and arrangements that might otherwise have appeared to be unrelated are now, thanks to a world view that acknowledges discontinuity, revealed to be connected. To those unfamiliar with this style of pattern recognition, the connections they draw may appear to be as unrelated as a fortune-teller's tea leaves or Tarot cards are from the future events she predicts. Nonetheless, the surfer understands each moment and event in his world as a possible reflection on any other aspect or moment in the entire system.

What gets reborn

The renaissance experience of moving beyond the frame allows everything old to look new again. We are liberated from the maps we have been using to navigate our world and free to create new ones based on our own observations. This invariably leads to a whole new era of competition. Renaissance may be a rebirth of old ideas in a new context, but which ideas get to be reborn?

The first to recognise the new renaissance will compete to have their ideologies be the ones that are rebirthed in this new context. This is why, with the emergence of the internet, we saw the attempted rebirth (and occasional stillbirth) of everything from paganism to libertarianism, and communism to psychedelia. Predictably, the financial markets and consumer capitalism, the dominant narratives of our era, were the first to successfully commandeer the renaissance. But they squandered their story on a pyramid scheme (indeed, the accelerating force of computers and networks tends to force any story to its logical conclusion) and now the interactive renaissance is once again up for grabs.

Perhaps the most valuable idea to plant now, into the post-renaissance society of tomorrow, is the very notion of renaissance itself. Interactivity, both as an allegory for a healthier relationship to cultural programming, and as an actual implementation of a widely accessible authoring technology, reduces our dependence on fixed narratives while giving us the tools and courage to develop narratives together. The birth of interactive technology has allowed for a sudden change of state. We have witnessed together the wizard behind the curtain. We can all see, for this moment anyway, how so very much of what we have perceived of as reality is, in fact, merely social construction. More importantly, we have gained the ability to enact such wizardry ourselves.

The most ready examples of such suddenly received knowledge come to us from the mystics. Indeed, many early cyber-pioneers expressed their insights (see my Cyberia for examples3) in mystical language coining terms such as 'technoshamanism' and 'cyberdelia'. Indeed, in some ways it does feel as though our society were at the boundaries of a mystical experience, when we have a glimpse of the profoundly arbitrary nature of the stories we use to organise and explain the human experience. It is at precisely these moments that the voyager wonders: "what can I tell myself - what I can write down that will make me remember this experience beyond words?"

Of course, most of these mystical scribblings end up being over-simplified platitudes such as 'all is one' or 'I am God'. Those that rise above such clich, such as the more mystical tractates of Ezekiel or Julian of Norwich, defy rational analysis or any effort at comprehension. Our only choice, in such a situation, might be to attempt to preserve just the initial insight that our maps are mere models, and that we have the ability to draw new ones whenever we wish.

This is why the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, businesspeople, religious and social organisers of the late 20th century, who have adopted a renaissance perspective on their fields, have also proclaimed their insights to be so categorically set apart from the work of their predecessors. Chaos mathematicians (and the economists who depend on them) regard systems theory as an entirely new understanding of the inner workings of our reality. They are then celebrated on the pages of the New York Times for declaring that our universe is actually made up of a few simple equations called cellular-automata. Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of ant hill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony.

More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change. The greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to be the recollection that we are working with a mere model.

11 September 2001: Coping by retreat into a world view

More than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success. Though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. To mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the territory. This, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the 20th century. Many people, institutions and nations have yet to adopt strategies that take this lesson into account.

The oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited resources. They continue to push the rest of the industrialised world toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce. The chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the planet's topsoil or ecosystems. In more readily appreciated examples, the Church of England is still consumed with its defence of the literal interpretation of Biblical events and many fundamentalists sects in the United States still fight, quite successfully, to prevent the theory of evolution from being taught in State schools.

Although the terrorist attacks on the United States can find their roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided American foreign and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories about the world and humankind's role within it. And the lines between these worldviews are anything but clear.

Hours after the attacks, two of America's own fundamentalist ministers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were quick to fit the tragic events into their own concrete narrative for God's relationship to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic moment as anything but the wrath of God, they blamed the feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians of New York City for having brought this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves.

In a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many American patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our nation's sacred values. This was to be seen as a war against capitalism and a free society. As American flags were raised in defiance of our Middle Eastern antagonists, just as many American freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. Our nationalism overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved from deconstruction.

Meanwhile, free-market capitalism's stalwarts, who had already suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on their most visible symbol of global trade. With its dependence on perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by this sure sign of resistance. Might the world not really be ready to embrace the World Trade Organisation's gifts? With a utopian future of global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with God, believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they could. They sought a war to defend their story.

The most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, pinpointed, devastating, and worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were the world's singularly invincible nation. The people we appointed to protect us had proved their inability to do so. President Bush's quick rise to an over 90 percent popularity rating shows just how much we needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. But like a child realising that his parents can't save him from the bully at school, Americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapons and our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world.

Our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always been unfounded, of course. But waking up to the great existential dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. It led us to revert to old habits. Anti-Semites (and latent anti-Semites) around the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the 'Jewish problem'. Tsarist and Nazi propaganda books, such as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like Saudi Arabia where they are still being published by official government presses. Newspaper stories revived blood libel (that Jews drink the blood of murdered non-Jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that Jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special radios they keep in their homes. Indeed, such informational treachery is nothing new. But in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it otherwise would have.

Efforts to package America's New War on news channels like CNN further alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what had happened. Conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter from a Brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years earlier during the Gulf War. Like any other narrative, the extreme counterculture's saga of a 'new world order', directed by the Bush family, had to be wrapped around the new data.

Meanwhile, many Jews and Christians who hadn't even thought about their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves instinctively asking: "how will this impact Israel?" or "is the Armageddon upon us?" They bought memberships in religious institutions for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and synagogues looking for reassurance, for a way to fit these catastrophes into a bigger story. Like everyone else, they hoped to reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered.

But surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren't functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life's biggest questions. The challenge to all thinking people is to resist the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nationalist, or God-forbid, holy posture. Rather than retreating into the simplistic and childlike, if temporarily reassuring, belief that the answers have already been written along with the entire human story, we must resolve ourselves to participate actively in writing the story ourselves. It is not enough to go back to our old models, particularly when they have been revealed to be inadequate at explaining the complexity of the human condition. It is too late for the Western World to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, accelerating global conflict in an effort to bring on the messianic age. It is too late to push blindly towards a purely capitalist model of human culture. There is simply too much evidence that the short-term bottom line does not serve the needs of people or the environment. There are too many alternative values and cultural threads surrendered to profit efficiency that may yet prove vital to our cultural ecosystem.

Instead, we must forge ahead into the challenging but necessary task of inventing new models ourselves, using the collaborative techniques learned over the past decade, and based in the real evidence around us.