Gary sent link to Present Shock, and I wrote a post commenting on that, and on an article appearing in Time Magazine on Karl Marx influence today. Oddly enough, those two articles are connected, and both connected to the world of PSA, where we live in a world dominated by the two trends discussed in the two articles.

Here’s the lengthy commentary/ rant on the above:

Maybe everything IS connected to PSA? Six degrees of separation melting down into it’s all connected to everything all the time, and everywhere? =^)

This Present Shock stuff sounds a bit like it could have been coined by Marshall McLuhan, who often sounds loopy… and impenetrable…..but if you approach at the right angle…it can make sense. Reading McLuhan one had the same sense that it might not actually be coherent if you thought about it too much…while at the same time blowing one’s mind.

IOW, I’m enjoying Rushkoff’s wild flights, but reserving a final imprimatur until later.

Ah, looking at his bio at Amazon I see Rushkoff got the McLuhan Award for “best media book” whatever that might be. He’s a prolific writer…puts out stuff at a torrid pace… which means he spends a LOT of time sitting with his hands on a keyboard staring at a monitor of some type. Which probably has a fairly strong effect on his experience of reality.

Perhaps a nice balancing thought is that there’s nothing totally new; everything does have some connection to the past…and while our sense of time is being “disrupted” by new tech, it’s not the first instance of this in history…various cultures have their own ways of experiencing time many of which we might find disorienting…

I like the idea that today we experience less frequently beginnings middles and ends in the classical greek sense…and it’s hard to tell often what part of a process we may be engaging in at any one time…multi-tasking isn’t so much of a reality as it is a “feeling”.

Our brain doesn’t actually do very well trying to drive a car and talk on the phone while solving some problem, but it does construct our reality on the fly in an impressive manner, striving mostly to filter out “extraneous” perceptions so we can function with the information that we need to pay attention to.

Look at it that way, and what we are “going through” or “living in” now is just another version of that multitasking perception and filtration system at work. In some ways, it’s a lot less stressful on the brain to peck out a text message than it is to walk across the room.

Narrative is a fascinating part of consciousness, kind of built in…even way before the Greeks, there was myth and story and yes, maybe we are less interested in the overall arc of things and more immersed in an episodic structure. Again, not totally new to our time.

And if Einstein knew what he was doing, we really should be talking about space/time…the where and the when being all tangled up with distributed cloud presence.

(Perhaps interestingly, the talk about: “how you are benefiting your culture in real time rather than what you can pay to investors next week” implies a value not accounted for otherwise in old theories of capitalism, as referenced in story on Marx below.)

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Odd to find a story on how Marx got it right in Time magazine, but there it is today.

Henry Luce rotating in his grave at rapid RPM…Marx getting kudos in Time Mag? Something is going on here…

Power is power, and AFAIK, it’s like energy in the universe…it’s a constant, we can only change the form. Marx assumption that there’s a way to “liberate” people from power relationships…state drops away, etc…needs a lot of work.

OTOH, the realities of the middle class on the wane in US, and dramatic shifts of economic and other power to oligarchic few, is becoming a widely held awareness.

What to do about it, as we have discussed, a tough nut to crack. Marx approval rating is probably permanently in the tank, and his negatives score high too…..but the idea of leaning on the other side of the scale to balance out capitalism’s excesses, seems likely to win consensus of some sort… from people on both sides who find that shift unsustainable for our democracy and our economy. Assuming there’s some leadership coming from somewhere that can define the problem in actionable terms.

Something is needed with coherent analysis that spells out what the solutions are….perhaps a so called Port Huron type statement with new ideas and approaches…which can be taken “wide” and support action.

Alas, political groups, when they get big enough to effect change, like hurricanes, create their own weather, …distort much within their path…and create new insiders with new power relationships that obscure and distract from the original vision.

Not to say it’s never “worked” in the USA before. Civil rights movement?

Power is just hard to ride…without it eventually riding those who would seek it. Lord of the rings etc.

I’m not a promoter of Marx as noted above, but this reader’s comment makes him sound more like Maslow or other human potential movement guru:

The basic concepts of Marx will, as history progresses, absolve him. Globalization and the pernicious heart to capitalism will be exposed for their limited, objectifying vision of human nature. Humans are not here as mere objects to produce wealth for the ownership class. There is a depth to life that an economic analysis will never penetrate. . . and this is what Marx tried to point out. Capitalism undoubtedly unleashes an immense creativity. But, sadly, its vision of what it means to be human is shockingly limited. It lacks a depth dimension and, by its very nature, it will never gain one. Its entire goal is to produce profits. This can never be the entirety of what it means to be human.

IOW, if we set up a game where the winner is the one with the biggest number, we are going to have the kind of power relationships we have today. Need to redefine how people can be “winners”…so, as the commenter says, the other aspects of life come into focus as also important.  But the problem of power will still be with us.

Which is why I like the concept of non profit. Someone can have power separate from the state, but the goal of the game is subtly different. At least part of the time, and that’s a big plus. Profit is fine, but needs to be part of something larger, like community, for civilization to be sustainable. Capitalism, according to Marx, can and will eventually “eat itself”…and we don’t want that. =^)

Bill Gates, in his foundation work, may still try to support the financial health of his for profit interests, but he must also define success in terms other than profit, such as learning by students, or health of children worldwide.

Gates can “win” by doing something other than upping the numbers in his hedge fund. So he does it. Clearly one of the better perks of capital is having the opportunity for philanthropy…but not enough bajillionaires figure that out. OTOH, Koch brothers are big givers to some projects other than politics, like arts and science….and active oligarchs at the same time…..so my theory seems to have some holes in it.