Pre-21st century political history seems to have been defined by an interlocking series of oppositions – what we might call Polar Memes. Left/right was the most obvious of these but not the most durable – the prize for longest-running political meme looks like authoritarian/libertarian, which is so deeply rooted in our philosophy that its demise seems unthinkable. Sometimes it’s necessary to think the unthinkable, though; the time has definitely come to question the Polar Memes.

If you turn over that authoritarian/libertarian meme, it turns out there’s another meme hiding underneath it, possibly the Ur-meme: the tension between the individual and the collective. Although you trace this one right back to ancient Greece (just like pretty much 95% of philosophical concerns), it became really important in the post-Medieval period, reached full flower during the Enlightement, and hasn’t stopped dancing yet. DISCO INTERLUDE.

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Yet Polar Memes can die – they just take a loooooooong time. Left/right is no longer common sense – not (just) because of the persistent decline of American political discourse, but because of the convergent politics that Europe excels at, where left- and right-wing parties now hover around the centre of the political buffet like vultures.¹ While the concepts of left- and right-wing might still have some utility, the tension between them has slackened like dad’s belt at Christmas.

In individualist polities (which are generally post-Enlightenment), there’s a palpable fear of the collective: it’s what turned anti-communism from a statement of personal preference into a declaration of Cold War. In communalist polities, meanwhile, there’s a distinct unease about the role of the individual, creating a tension that can resolve in amusing ways (a discussion for another time). Let’s focus on what happens after this particular Polar meme dies off – because dying it is.

The truth is that these Polar memes mask a spectrum of opinions and preferences, and are only presented as dichotomies when somebody is trying to sell you something. Nobody lives a completely individual or completely communal life: people just aren’t built that way. Instead, the two are always jostling up against each other, waxing and waning, life’s rich tapestry, etc, etc. So why do I think this Polar Meme in particular is such a problem?

It’s a problem because politics as it is currently structured relies almost entirely on the individual and the collective as the primary concepts. This doesn’t just put individuals in a difficult position, it’s an accident waiting to happen on a grand scale. Political parties form around blocks of opinions, but those opinion blocks can cut individuals off from their communities, which is why party politics isn’t good for communities or individuals; the alienated individual can derail communal interests through petulance, fraudulence or something else ending in -nce.

The creative tension between individual and communal served us well for a long time, especially while our modern polities were forming, but it may be time to leave them behind as the foundation myths of those polities. Instead we should be looking at the network as a replacement for both of them, although if you asked me right now to describe what that would look like, all I’d be able to do would be to sip my tea and look uncomfortable. All I know is this: the network seems to offer the only way of reconciling the two and forging a new type of polity. See also: Carne Ross.

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1. Don’t ask me what US political parties hover around, but it’s definitely not the centre, unless by “centre” you mean “abject fucking stupidity”.

“If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above)… In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background… To the extent that you agree that the modern conception of “cognition” is strongly related to the Western, English-speaking view of “the mind”, it is worth asking what cognitive psychology would look like if it had developed in Japan or Russia. Would text-books have chapter headings on the ability to connect with other people (kokoro) or feelings or morality (dusa) instead of on decision-making and memory? This possibility highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we’ve carved up the psychological realm – what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language.”

- Sabrina Golonka, How Universal Is The Mind?

2.

“Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time – and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.”

- James Gleick, The Information

3.

“In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

- John Maynard Keynes, Newton, the Man

Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Tracklist

Nad Dynaem (excerpt), Dakha Brakha, Na Mezhi
Xo, Whim, Po & Emili, Painted
Silver Light (dot tape dot remix), [.que], calm down
Black Wolves, Brynn, The Flux Sound
Harpsong, Scarfface, Let Them Eat Cake
Shimmer, Dauwd, Could It Be / Shimmer (single)
Den Andra Handen, Henrik Jose, Photo Album (single)
Clamantis, M-Pex, iPhado EP
Ghost Transference, Learning Music, An End Like This
Time Has Told Me, Jason Parker Quartet, Five Leaves Left: A Tribute To Nick Drake
Dhun in Raga Mishra Khamaj by Fateh Ali Khan (New Delhi), Human Mirror, India Field Recordings
One More Song, Mayon, So High-So Low
Psychedeliental, Kisszanto, Relax Capsule Volume 1 (Various Artists)

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool,
This is who the corporations are telling you to listen to:
Here’s our end-of-year best-of-lists;
Here’s our coolest journalists
Taking a trip to the coolest city in the world
With people who aren’t like you or me.
Or maybe they’re just like you and me -
How would you know?

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool.
This feature article is trying to tell you something:
This spontaneous photo opportunity just happened!
You could have been there, and you weren’t.

Are the corporations telling you I’m cool yet?
Are the corporations telling you to listen to me?
You should listen to me if they tell you,
You might learn something:
You might learn how to be cool.

Poor poor corporations whispering in your ear,
Like that kid at school that nobody liked,
Because deep down the corporations want to be cool.
That’s why they’re telling you who is cool
Because, if you finally believe them,
Then you’ll think they’re cool too.

So it’s karaoke blind dates in Tokyo with -
So it’s urban gardening in Buenos Aires with -
So it’s hacker protests in Tallin with -
So it’s organic microbreweries in Portland with -
So it’s hip-hop quotables in Nairobi with -
So it’s -

Whispering in your ear: am I cool yet?
Am I cool yet? Am I cool yet?
I’m linking your article,
I’m keeping my distance,
Trying to keep my cool.

Am I cool yet?

Postscript: the weirdest thing about this article is how fucking boring that trip sounds.

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1. One Year Ago…

I decided to stop being part of the destruc­tion of the old music indus­try and to be part of the con­struc­tion of the new music indus­try. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant: hav­ing dis­cov­ered Band­camp, Sound­cloud, Archive.org and Official.fm in the course of shar­ing some lo-fi cut-and-paste tracks that I’d put together over the pre­vi­ous year, I knew that I’d only scratched the sur­face. The more I dug, the more I dis­cov­ered: a range of net­la­bels, the Free Music Archive, free cul­ture blogs, a whole ecosys­tem of cre­ativ­ity that existed in ambigu­ous ten­sion with the com­mer­cial music business.

My place in that ecosys­tem was and remains unclear, at least to me – partly because the old label of “con­sumer” doesn’t seem to fit any more. I lis­ten to a huge amount of free music of all gen­res, and I’m always seek­ing out more, but I haven’t pro­duced any since last year. I started to share a monthly pod­cast (spo­rad­i­cally monthly, but I can always dream…) using only free music, and started a twit­ter hash­tag to share some of the best albums I was lis­ten­ing to (#yourfreemu­sic­to­day, if any­body wants to join the fun). I occa­sion­ally write to artists to thank them, I share spe­cific albums with friends, I write posts like this one – but none of that feels like it’s enough.

The rea­son why it doesn’t feel enough is described Alexan­der Stretton’s post, which fin­ished by say­ing “As con­sumers of the freely dis­trib­uted art we are par­tic­i­pants in the cre­ative com­mons cul­ture and com­mu­nity, but it is time we become active.” The inter­net pro­vided new means of dis­sem­i­nat­ing music, but while that shift has cre­ated new infra­struc­ture for mar­ket­ing and sell­ing, we have not yet man­aged to get away from the ter­ri­ble verb of “con­sum­ing” music. The music busi­ness con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate music – although some­times the price it pays is its own con­tin­ued exis­tence – partly because it con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate a model in which music is “consumed”.

So we reject that old label of con­sumer; we’re not Hun­gry Hip­pos, gulp­ing wildly at any cheap plas­tic mar­ble that the indus­try machine rolls in front of us. Yet it’s not clear what we are in a con­fused and con­fus­ing post-scarcity musi­cal econ­omy, where the tools of pro­duc­tion are in the hands of the work­ers thanks to a tech­no­log­i­cal cul­ture dri­ven by lib­er­tar­ian prin­ci­ples. We don’t want the free music cul­ture to become like poetry cul­ture, where those inter­ested in and sup­port­ing the music are pri­mar­ily the ones pro­duc­ing it, but what other mod­els do we have for participation?

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2. The Bush of Ghosts

In a 2010 inter­view for the Guardian news­pa­per, Brian Eno pointed out that “records were just a lit­tle bub­ble through time and those who made a liv­ing from them for a while were lucky… Even­tu­ally, some­thing else will replace it.” Eno is of course a sem­i­nal fig­ure in cut-and-paste cul­ture thanks to his col­lab­o­ra­tion with David Byrne on the album Our Life in the Bush of Ghosts, orig­i­nally released in 1981. In 2006 Byrne and Eno released  two of the album tracks for remix­ing under a cre­ative com­mons license, an early shot in the con­flict around music dis­tri­b­u­tion that con­tin­ues to rage. (I’ll take this oppor­tu­nity to plug a project that came directly out of that, Our Lives in the Bush of Dis­quiet, curated by Marc Weidenbaum .)

That album title was taken from Amos Tutuola’s novel, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a clas­sic of African lit­er­a­ture. In Tutuola’s work, those enter­ing the Bush of Ghosts are trans­formed and trans­formed and trans­formed again; the Bush is the place “in which both ghosts and spir­its of the dead were liv­ing as if in their own town… Once one entered it, it was not easy to find a way out. One could not travel to the end of it; that was as impos­si­ble as it would be for a mos­quito to travel around the whole world with­out perishing.”

The Bush of Ghosts works as lit­eral / metaphor for the human sub­con­scious, the well of cre­ativ­ity from which our music comes. The music indus­try pro­moted the fic­tion that the Bush was so dan­ger­ous that ordi­nary mor­tals should not ven­ture there, that we needed expe­ri­enced inter­me­di­aries to nav­i­gate it on our behalf in order to bring back its trea­sures – the inter­me­di­aries being, of course, the record com­pa­nies. Cre­ativ­ity has always been regarded with unease, espe­cially by cul­tural elites who dis­like the way it eludes their con­trol, but the record com­pa­nies achieved some­thing great – they per­suaded us to actively par­tic­i­pate from our own alien­ation from that creativity.

3. … the Present Day

That alien­ation started with the rise of recorded music, which in some ways was a democ­ra­tis­ing influ­ence on music: for the first time, the great­est artists were avail­able for every­body to hear any­where, at any time. That hon­ey­moon period didn’t last for long, and in some ways the his­tory of pop­u­lar music has been a long process of tak­ing music back from cul­tural elites. First, play­ing music was reclaimed as mass-produced elec­tri­cal instru­ments (espe­cially the elec­tric gui­tar and key­board) appeared; then, per­sonal com­put­ers made the process of music pro­duc­tion more acces­si­ble to a wider range of peo­ple than ever before.

The last bar­rier was music dis­tri­b­u­tion, and the inter­net has cut the legs out from under the monop­oly pre­vi­ously held by music com­pa­nies and shops. The music indus­try started from the prin­ci­ple that every­body has the capac­ity to con­sume music, and was built around get­ting the max­i­mum num­ber of peo­ple to do just that. The prob­lem for that indus­try model is that it can’t earn enough money from get­ting more peo­ple to con­sume music any longer, since the cost of con­sum­ing music has dropped so pre­cip­i­tously. It’s still unclear, but the new music indus­try seems to start from the prin­ci­ple that every­body has the capac­ity to make music, and will be built around get­ting the max­i­mum num­ber of peo­ple to do that instead of merely con­sum­ing it.

This is the Bush of Ghosts that the music indus­try warned us about – dan­ger­ous to mor­tals, filled with trans­for­ma­tions, chaotic and deep – and told us that we couldn’t sur­vive with­out their guid­ing hand. Yet I just spent a year in the bush, liv­ing off only what I could for­age, and it turns out that the music indus­try lied to us. The trans­for­ma­tions are dan­ger­ous mainly to the music indus­try rather than to us, and you can live per­fectly well there (although whether you can make a liv­ing is another mat­ter). You can’t live there alone, how­ever, you need some­thing of a com­mu­nity around you; the new chal­lenge is to find the best tools for build­ing that com­mu­nity. Wel­come one and all to the Bush of Ghosts, because we all live there now…

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1. Your body clock is rarely wrong. Some of us are morning people, some are evening people, some are night people (interestingly, almost nobody appears to be an afternoon person). I’m assigning different activities to different times of the day when I know I’ll have the most energy, motivation and opportunity to carry them out. (For example, I’m much happier exercising in the late morning after doing some work and before lunch.) This is one of the big advantages of being a consultant working from home – my time is pretty much my own.
2. Lists are your friend. Taking a leaf out of Ben Franklin‘s book, I’m going to use lists effectively. First thing in the morning, I’ll review and finalise the list of tasks I need to do that day; last thing in the evening, I’ll review my progress that day and draft the list of tasks for the following day. This ToDo list will be supplemented by Run Lists which cover specific areas such as writing I want to complete, errands I need to run, things I need to buy, etc. (I also need to remember that lists can also be your enemy, especially if you make the mistake of generating a never-ending list that, you know, never ends.)
3. Paper is for plotting. I want to avoid the computer and use paper for brainstorming and early drafting wherever possible. I’m going to make sure that there are three sizes of paper in the room: large (preferably A1), medium (A4) and small (notepad or post-it notes). A1 is for mindmapping and other planning activities; A4 is for drafting layout or copy by hand; the small sizes are for reminders, quick lists and keeping track of stray thoughts. (I tend to hoard paper, so I’ll destroy notes as soon as possible after they become redundant – when I type them up, when I action them, when they go over their own time limit.)
4. Keep the internet on a leash. Computers are great for productivity / computers are terrible for productivity. (In order to maximize the former and minimize the latter, you should never sit down at a computer without being absolutely clear about exactly why you’re sitting down at a – wait, what was I doing again?) In particular spending too much time online is a time-killer, leads to depression, and probably turns you into a morlock: I’ll assign specific sessions for activities such as checking email and RSS feeds, web searching, and social media, turning off my wireless connection outside those times.
5. Chunk your work, then take a break. This is basically a variation on the Pomodoro technique: every work task (or anything that resembles work, like blogging) gets a specific time limit, and a timer to tell me when that limit is up. Work takes place during that time only, and each task is followed by a break during which I’ll do something completely different, so drafting the executive summary for that evaluation report will be followed by baking a cake. Most of these work chunks will be 25 minutes (followed by 5 minute break) or 45 minutes (followed by 15 minute break). If I’m not finished in the allotted time, tough: I’m still stepping away from the task. One exception. If I’m writing creative stuff and I get into the flow.

NOW, MORLOCKS

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So a lot of people are in a tough place, particularly when they’re operating even further out – not just away from the roulette wheel (aka the “stable job market”) but outside the casino altogether (e.g. outside the formal economy). One such friend has been ploughing a lonely furrow for a few years now, working on a critical issue for post-crash resilience, gaining traction but not generating income. He needs to change his strategy, and so far he’s come up with three possibilities:

1. Continue down the same path with the communities he’s already working with, while broadening his work into other areas of resilience.
2. Go professional and open source his work – the product is free, the services are paid – but this will probably need a lot of work, possibly some compromises, and definitely some investors.
3. Undertake some other work and receive payment in kind (specifically non-monetary – think gold or silver), on the basis that the existing money system isn’t looking very healthy.

He emailed a bunch of people recently with a call for comments on these options, and suggestions for alternatives. Personally, I think these options are interesting but insufficient. The first won’t generate enough income and break the cycle; the second will probably derail the community-focused work (since we’ve already established there isn’t a lot of profit in it); the third won’t further the work and renders you a hostage to fortune, i.e. the market for gold/silver (I’m not a believer). So what else is out there?

1. Seek funding from the sort of foundations that throw funding around – up to and including the whole TED Fellows circus. This might be good in the short-term, but I’d see it as a pretty big sell-out since I harbour an unwarranted hatred for the whole TED ethos.
2. Go the Kickstarter route a la Marcin Jakubowski and others. There’s a strong vision which can generate a plausible objective to fund, and I think other people could get behind it. This approach is ideal for relatively limited projects but might not work for longer-term income.

Overall, I think his only hope of survival is a three-pronged approach: first, pursue as wide a range of income streams as possible (including any and all of those described above); second, make a big push in branding himself more visibly, although that can feel a little uncomfortable in the Big Brother age in which we live; and third, establish a plan which enables you to say that it’s okay to spend a couple of years earning income outside your immediate interests, in order that you can return to your life project at a particular point in the future. If you’re forced to make compromises, you may as well set the terms of those compromises.