Social networks: the tools for a global rebellion?
According to Dedefensa, a website analyzing defense-related and geopolitical issues, the Western civilization is running out of steam, proving the failure of a system based on « technologism » and communication. Salvation will come from alternative networks that have attained
À propos de l'auteurPilote de char russe reconverti /-)
Related postsAccording to Dedefensa, a website analyzing defense-related and geopolitical issues, the Western civilization is running out of steam, proving the failure of a system based on « technologism » and communication. Salvation will come from alternative networks that have attained unprecedented maturity and strength on the Internet.
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The elections of presidents Sarkozy and Obama were both based on a strong hope for a rapid change. Disappointment ensued and both administrations quickly lost energy. How are their comparable stories a symptom of our political system?
We are not living in a diversified world anymore. Not even in a globalized one or in a world at all. We live in a system that acquired, thanks to its power, a total autonomy, to the point where we can ask ourselves if we are not witnessing a phenomenon in itself, which no human entity can control and that possess an automated way of thinking, maybe more, while remaining totally nihilistic when it comes to its ambitions.
Two forces govern this system. The first is the system of technologism, this extraordinarily powerful dynamic which is run by technologies and animate most things we continue to call ‘politics’. The other one is the system of communication, which governs a flow of information that takes the form of instructions aiming at “dressing up” the effects of the system of technologism in a way that is acceptable for the human mind, so as to prevent it from any fundamental criticism.
In this ensemble, ‘politicians’, those who talk and seem to be here to give credit to the idea that there are still diversified ‘policies’, are necessarily creatures of the system of communication.
Otherwise they wouldn’t be where there are now. This doesn’t mean that they are totally homogeneous. Some are intelligent, some are cynical, others are sentimental, some are very corrupt, some are not, and so on. But something makes them all the same when they pass their exam (whether it is an election, the nomination to a strategic position etc.): they have to go through the system of communication.
The system of communication is very diversified and very clever. It can produce the impression of criticism against some of the effects of the system of technologism by blurring the borders from cause to effect, so as to avoid systemic criticism.
Politicians can use, when it comes to communication, very strong arguments against the current situation, but that must remain very vague to avoid any systemic criticism. It’s the implicitly radical “reform” for Sarkozy, the implicitly revolutionary “change” for Obama.
We’ve just described the system in its ideal situation. Next to this we have reality, and reality is characterized by 2 facts: on the one hand, this system is deep in crisis because it is attaining the vertex of its power, that is to say the maximal oppression it can impose on us even though it needs ‘us’ to keep a veil of legitimacy (elections, democracy, free speech, etc.).
On the other hand, ‘we’, as in you and me, peoples etc. are surviving, suffering from this systematic oppression and are reaching a point where they can’t take it anymore. That’s why candidates promising an implicitly radical ‘reform’ or an implicitly revolutionary change are elected and immediately provoke widespread disaffection. The system of communication authorizes a tactical promise which cannot be upheld a single second when the politician, once in power, succumbs to the system of technologism.
To break this vicious circle, for the time being, we would need a Gorbachev, a person who plays by the system’s rules to reach power and who, at a given time, when she’s in power, breaks away from the system, goes underground in a way and attacks the system from the outside, using the inside forces she has access to from the power she holds, exactly as Gorbachev did.
Because Gorbachev, purposefully or not, acted exactly like that, as soon as Fall 1985, 6 months after his election as General Secretary of the USSR Communist Party in March 1985, after he put his strongmen in high positions (Shevardnadze instead of Gromyko at the Foreign Ministry) as soon as May 1985. All those who do an institutional description of Gorbachev’s action since 1987 did not understand the historical essence of his actions, generally because they remained anti-communist even after the death of communism and cannot imagine that a communist could be sick of communism to the point of killing it. Once again, the fact that Gorbachev planned the final effect of his action doesn’t matter. Gorbachev has been a formidable tool of History against the Soviet system, a dissident of the system, a Resistance fighter who prepared destabilizing actions completely outside of the bounds of the system, talking to groups of citizens to prompt them to accuse the bureaucracy. He was a great man, no doubt. We believed that Obama could be this ‘American Gorbachev’, but to this point, we have been notably, if not irremediably, disappointed.
Note that I talk in constant time, ‘at the time being’, because I think that the situation is evolving at a staggering pace, taking the system itself by surprise. I’m not even talking of what we call ‘politicians’. The pressure of the system of communication on psychologies is huge, and it often fosters tactical criticism to avoid systemic criticism. It is always on the verge of paving the way for an unleashed psychology to evolve towards fundamental criticism. Agitators like the Tea Party in the US, the fall of pres. Sarkozy in public opinion polls, etc. are also perverse effect (for itself) of the system of communication.
It’s likely that 2012 will be a game-changing year because, apart from the Maya calendar, we’ll have the Russian, American and French presidential elections a few months from each other. The situation will likely be very different and very different things will happen. The truth is that we’re in all domains in a situation of maximal tension, and collective psychologies are constrained by the system. It’s impossible to know what tomorrow – say, 2012 – will be made of.
How do you explain that their skillful mastery of the media, which is so strong during electoral campaigns, seems to have abandoned them after the vote?
The media that I call ‘official’, classical media, answering to the conformity of economic powers, follows the instructions of the system. But they mostly answer to the ministry of the system of communication rather than to the ministry of technologism. We saw that winning candidates answer to the system of communication and that they play the flattering role of the reformist, even sometimes of the revolutionary, so as to get elected. Once in office, they are dependent on the system of technologism, they are the foot soldiers of ‘the party line’. The media, who still depends on the ministry of communication, starts to strongly criticize the candidate that became president.
Of course, there are sometimes corrections, but in general, in a context of crisis, this trend becomes more and more obvious. Journalists of the system cannot escape the heights of the system of communication, the role of which is a constant pressure on the psychology, in general in the way dictated by ‘the party line’. It also implies a psychological excitation in general for the tactical adjustments I talked about earlier. That gives excitement to those beautiful souls who carry high their virtue, making them think they can write freely. Each time, they are like virgin teenagers who go to their first sentimental rendezvous.
The system may well be at the height of its unchained power, it still is the climax of the crisis fathered by this power that deconstructs everything. Order does not follow. More and more, it is disorder. The excited psychologies of the system’s journalists lose more and more often the sense of the instructions as candidates become feebler, more worn out as they become presidents in an advanced phase of dissolution. Then, these psychologies give way to the euphoria of writing and criticize more forcefully those they have been forced to adore by their own psychology. All the more as this pleases the audience, which still brings the money in.
If I describe this situation as full of contradictions and paradoxes, it’s because things change at an extraordinary speed and that the power of the system’s crisis impedes more and more the power explosion of the system. It’s a titan fight happening before our eyes. My general interpretation is that this crisis is due to the struggle between the system after its explosion and the great forces of History which are more and more rising against the system. I generally define, in the present situation which is a final combat, the forces of the system as destructuring, when the forces of History are structuring.
Will this situation, already present in several countries considered as advanced democracies, extend to other countries?
This time is over. The situations of extensions are accomplished. The invasion of the system is globalized, its crisis is too. All countries are more or less in the above-described situation, of this growing struggle and chaos at play in the battle of communication and we cannot analyze the situation in national terms because it is a general and transversal situation. But there are national differences across countries, more or less conscious of their situation, more or less ready to revolt.
The concept of ‘advanced democracies’ is obsolete and I’d rather talk of ‘obsolete democracies.’ Hence the idea that our democracy has become some kind of dog food, which is not a system of general laxity nor a police state, but a chaotic mix of all of this and of attempts in all directions, all this boiling in the ridiculous proclamation by the system’s parrots of ‘moral values’ reduced to pieces of trash meant to fill the bins of what’s left of History.
The situation describing France and the US is happening to various degrees in all countries of the central American-Western central bloc, with its heart boiling with it in the US, of which nobody knows anything because this monster is transforming in something else before our eyes.
On the other hand, in countries that are not considered full-fledged democracies, like Russia, the political class continues to be preoccupied with its legitimacy…
Indeed, some countries are both ‘inside and outside’ of the system. Countries that keep some of the characteristics of a strong political regime, like Russia and China, keep a certain identity and a certain legitimacy. They’re not infected with the terminal sickness of our finishing civilization, the one we call ‘democracy’.
These countries are no alternatives; they don’t offer an alternative system. They preserve what can be preserved to face the ineluctable general crisis of the Western civilization. They have some lucidity. It’s certainly among Russians, instructed by the collapse of the USSR and with an innate sense of apocalypse, that we find the most precise analyses of the collapse of the USA and the Western system.
Curiously, I think that France is close from these countries, because it’s a country that’s both inside and outside of the system. Thanks to its history and the powerful tradition of La Grande Nation, its transcendental identity remains strong.
Do you think that media outside the system, like analysis sites or social networks, can prevent this evolution?
No doubt, the answer is very positive. They already had effects of an unprecedented force, although this cannot be accounted for yet. The phobia of conspiracy theories around 9/11, although largely based on precise elements, is a cancer that is eating out the system of communication in general. What’s important isn’t to prove that the conspiracy exists since 9/11, but the devastating doubts on this issue. Alternative networks created this doubt which devours the system and takes away its legitimacy.
The angst that alternative networks create in the system is a formidable pressurizing factor. It imposes considerable limits on the powers of the system of communication, lest it creates errors that are used by alternative networks. The system is afraid of revelations, hypotheses, and accusations. The hate from professional journalists towards the net is something great and fascinating at the same time. The networks play the same role as the opposition’s samizdat in the USSR from the 1970’s onwards, which were instrumental in bringing the regime to collapse.
The best journalists and opinion writers are to be found on these networks. In the US, this is already a fact, names and examples abound. Writers can set themselves free from the system on the networks. Historians and scientists too. The only thing that networks lack, especially in Europe and in France, is a consciousness of their overall, constant, organized strength, when they are currently considered a tool for one-off shots. In the US, this is already the case. They know that the only way of destroying the system lies in alternative networks. They’re the equivalent of barricades and riots becoming revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are the supreme and only tool of general revolt.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Social networks: the tools for a global rebellion? » Article » OWNI.eu, Digital Journalism
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