<nettime> The only real network path to sustainable peace and progress is Experience

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Here in the USA the right knows well how to titrate and leverage plausibly deniable street violence.

For example, right-wing youths -- minors, too young to vote or drink -- can legally patrol the streets of their state of residence armed with assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.  Think rural-conservative kids who visit diverse cities after peaceful daytime protests devolve into property damage at night.  These right-wing youth can kill in self-defense if they feel threatened, say by profanity or body language.  

There's no need for brown shirts even!  These volunteers can do all the terror you could wish for legally, free of charge, and the algorithm gins them up to action at the turn of a dial.  It was even done pre-digitally in Mexico in the seventies for example.  Easy as pie, whether your local right-wing is socialist or capitalist (they're almost always an even mix of the worst of each like today's USA).  The goal is of course to inflame the violence not preserve public order, not in the slightest.  But people still buy the lie that it's about law and order.

Because of this refined and intensive capability on the right -- which has been seen in both France and Italy of late -- progressives in the US have taken a rigorously peaceful approach throughout the despotic regime of Drumpf's second term based on learning from the first.  The restraint and effectiveness have inspired the world, but perhaps not enough.

Without imagining a path to progress and hope, those suffering from injustice cannot resist the provocations of the right.  Le Pen is almost certain to cash in and deliver France to Drumpf.  Germany will soon follow, and a Drumpfian right will be funded and enabled by Big Global Tech to bring the EU to heel from within, utterly smashing progressives' and moderates' ability to organize, cooperate, and exert political influence.  Where domestic vigilantes are too poorly armed, Putin will be allowed to venture forth.  A cheap and simple plan for coercion not just of one's adversaries but of putative partners.  It's in every Hollywood script, plus Orwell.

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This coercion of allies is all part of realigning for the Second Cold War.  Just like 1950, it's big repression and regression in domestic US publics, coercion of partners, and setting strategic lines of conflict with the primary adversary (was the CCCP, now it's the CCP).  Russia check Europe, Europe check Russia; China checks Russia, Russia checks them right back.  Autocracy everywhere checks democracy anywhere.  The climate, human rights, and biodiversity all become expendable and erode perhaps never to return.  

What path forward then?  Besides joining the Inferno as per page the last of Calvino's "Invisible Cities."  Well, the Second Cold War could be skipped, jumping straight to the inevitable peace of pragmatic compromise, if a couple of people -- call them "P" and "X" -- could be persuaded to skip it.  No leader can abandon their people's perception of interest without being replaced, but there is room to maneuver.  How to increase this room, and incentivize the move to peace, for real, toward the "optimal" side of the bell curve?  Like 80-90%tile?

That will take something cultural, some kind of ideas, beyond control of minerals, computation power, and land mass.  What possible candidates are available?  Postmodernism is pure right wing friendly now.  Old time Marxism is a garbled mess and anyway is already being talked about everywhere and not helping.  Pop culture?  Fun parties?  Those will remain, but they won't change the big calculus.  They are not new, after all.  Is anything new even possible?  Anything we haven't tried yet, or known how to try?  Pomo said no but as in much else seems to have been quite inaccurate.  

Mindfulness, that is nondenominational meditation, is real; and though ancient it also has substantial new momentum.  The brain science (which is network science) proves it is real; and since all humans have brains all are part of the original network of networks.  Remaining calm despite provocation, even theatrical super-violence, worked in the sixties and won civil rights for three generations.  Meditation and brain health can deliver real benefits for individual resilience; might they also confer advantages to social common goods, that is, strategically as well as tactically?  History and science say yes, sometimes they can.  Could now be such a time?

What if meditation could somehow synergize or dialogue with what is called "Western philosophy," or the European tradition, which typically says meditation is pure bullshit?  Well that could offer synergy above and beyond, and it would be new by perhaps an order of magnitude or even two.  But Europeans aren't Buddhist, despite the UK Parliament's program to teach MP's to meditate.  There needs to be a richer and fuller connection, despite the fairly good current one, an inroad to this helpful practice in Europe as well as its former colonies in the Western Hemisphere (the US and Brazil say) and elsewhere.  This inroad would also have to reach into common good spaces, not just personal health habits, via all social formations and the disciplines of all arts and sciences, all culture and all governance, economics, technology, and even the spiritual behaviors.  

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"Experience" as discussed by Martin Jay (see his 2005 survey) might be the key.  It is a rigorously network principle and phenomenon despite being analog.  It cannot be mechanized or controlled by machines.  Its history goes all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, and persists through every European era to today.  It's central for all study of consciousness and most Ai criticism (like Lanier's 2005 "Information is Alienated Experience," Anil Seth, you name it).  This is worth trying, and fast, because the hour is getting late.  

Perhaps most tellingly, the greatly malign tech forces of Elno Mush, Peter the Heel, and their ilk ABSOLUTELY want to keep you from anything remotely resembling mindfulness or your own experience (with respect for that of others).  They want to manipulate you like zeroes and ones, pawns and coins.  Why assume in advance you have to let them?  Even Pollan argues that simple awareness is the great overlooked advantage we still have over tech overlordism.

Experience is hard to personify, and people don't easily understand anything they can't personify at least at first.  That's why Il Duce is back in fashion, and in the eyes of the ignorant rich, necessary.  Maybe to personify Experience would help us get somewhere, like in statues of the Buddha, De La Hyre's drowsy portraits, a few woodcuts here and there, or other snippets by Montaigne, Emerson, and Cervantes; Strickland's Nanabozhou.  

Who knows who else might have done this; but in any case we can each do it.  We can each innovate, initiate, and speak afresh, if we have any agency left at all and a single breath in our body.  This can denature the scorched-earth 21st c. of the Neomachiavellians and their race to the bottom of the tragedy of the commons. 

We can each do it, and we all must.

Therefore I urge peaceful protest and meditation, in honor of Experience and its great potential, to all people everywhere hoping for progress and peace.  Don't be provoked into non-peaceful paths or deceived that they will help protect what you care for most.  Violence is a trap set by the machine.

If you want I will send you my new novel about it for free.

If you have a vehement and intransigent objection to this idea ask yourself if it stems from a belief, idea, or habit that isn't quite lined up with reality or might not be and could use a bit of evolution.  Because there are definitely cases of this -- I have them too -- and plenty of work to go around.  One novel cannot a new world make.

And vote!  :)  


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