The digital condition is beyond the wildest utopian dreams of 20th century media activism. It has created an eighth continent that is no more imaginary than America itself. It’s a revolutionary social metamedium, and millions of reality-communities are rising up on its phantom topology. They’re multiplying exponentially and we’re busy selecting among them, assembling our lifeworlds. As a result, the communication revolution that can’t be allowed to happen is sort of actually happening. The utopian myth has almost become reality. The technological infrastructure is in place. Operationally, the internet is the inverse of the broadcast. Group conversation is replacing mass communication, and the social construction of realities is being decentralized and pluralized. The broadcast is imploding under corporate supervision. Its imperial speach is dissolving into a constellation of conversations where there’s no mainstream, just islands in the stream. It’s the end of mass media and the social control that’s based on it. We are slowly dismantling the regime’s legitimacy in our minds. Consensual hegemony has had its run: the return to classic totalitarianism begins. The architecture of tyranny is in place. The good hegemon is unmasked, truth-telling and dissent are criminalized, police are militarized, show trials are staged, the Panopticon rises over the eighth continent. The potential for radical democracy has never been so close, and, for that reason, so far away.
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
amandla