THIS IS A GREAT PIECE ON THE BULLSHIT PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO BELIEVE. JOHN PATTERSON IS THE ONE WHO COINED THINK and YOURE FIRED Self-Manufacturing People The Internet, by design, gives individuals the capacity to fragment information and use it how- ever they choose. Today, there are hundreds of millions of personal filters operating at cyber speed, taking others’ expressions out of context, selecting parts they like, and constructing selves for public viewing. What’s being created is millions of individual identities, brilliantly displayed. What’s being lost is a sense of collective identity, of the shared meaning that transcends the individual and brings coherence to a culture. We’re losing the capacity and will to enter into each other’s perceptions, to be curious to see the world from another point of view. Our insatiable appetites for self-creation and self-expression have transformed us into twenty-first- century hunter-gatherers. We’ve become addicted to where the next click might lead us, so we keep hunting incessantly. Overwhelmed by inputs, caught in our self-sealing cycles, we devolve into self-manufactured people driven apart by rigid opinions and lonely for acceptance, into hungry ghosts grasping for the next new thing to satisfy us. I chose the word devolve very carefully. The most dire consequence of this instant-access, information-rich world is that it has changed the very nature and role of information. In living systems, information is the source of change; Gregory Bateson defined it as that which makes a difference. Information no longer plays this mind-changing role. No matter how reputable the science, or how in-depth and thorough the investigative reporting, no matter the photos and evidence, we sort through the information with our well-formed personal filters. Information doesn’t change our minds; we use any report or evidence merely to intensify our assaults on the other’s opinions. When we aren’t interested in disconfirming information, when we fight to protect our own opinions rather than work together for a reasonable decision, the world becomes unpredictable and random. It seems as if there’s no order, but it’s we who are the source of the chaos. When we don’t think and discern patterns, events seem to come and go out of nowhere. We don’t prepare for natural disasters; we mock leaders who take time to make decisions as “indecisive”; we refuse to read well-developed analyses; we criticize complex legislation for its page length. At work, we demand five-minute presentations and elevator speeches to “get” whatever the issue is. If something complex requires more time to understand, we’re too busy. Just like the radio operator on the Titanic. The world, of course, is neither random nor chaotic. It’s our lack of thinking that makes it appear so. Before many disasters, the information is there that could have prevented a tragedy. After a disaster, I wait to see how long it takes to reveal the information that was suppressed, the voices of warning that were silenced. This is always the case. Before the economic collapse, a few people saw the illusion for what it was (and were able to profit from the meltdown). One year before Katrina, the federal government had simulated just such a catastrophic hurricane, but officials failed to do the prep work specified in their action plans. We have made this world into an unpredictable, fearful monster because we’ve refused to work with it intelligently. And the ultimate sacrifice is the future. Thinking forward is impossible for those reacting fearfully moment by moment. Tibetan cosmology includes a class of beings who “hurl the future away from themselves,” as far from their awareness as possible. Seems they saw us coming.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:01:47 +0000
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