(I've held up daffodil 3 for a few days so as to include the digital diary entries for 2nd and 3rd of june)
a connective manifesto
I woke to the idea that yesterday's entry 'in the light of new media' calls for a big and profound change in industrial culture before my optimistic list of softopian technologies could be realised - or seen for what it is...
So, after some thought, I set myself to write a sequel (a 'quick design' as I call it) in which to state the essence of the cultural change I have in mind. Here are the words, almost as I wrote them quickly on a piece of paper (since my taking up 'the digital pen' it's almost a heresy now for me to do that!):
...leaving yesterday's list (1) of positive developments I turn to the prior necessity of cultural changes and personal changes that could make such developments possible, and not as neglected or utopian but arousing profound interest (2) in a few who seek ways to go, faced with globalisation seen as negative (3) and all such bad surprises of the industrial culture as it is recreating (or destroying?) itself in our acts and minds...
Is there anything I can envisage that would or could alter the situation (4) - that could (for at least a few) make it possible for these presently disconnected (and thus ineffectual) wholistic efforts (5) to connect and to flow into possibility and reality of action and thought (6) that is good, and seems so, in place of the cynicism (7) and such of the new media as they are known (and misused) in the present?
So I begin with this list (8), with devotion to bringing it into action (in and as a new watershed or social geography)...
But not as a matter any longer of abstract organisations (9) (and global bureaucracy, or worse) but as the natural result of decentral (10) (and of the workings of the nervous system and of new arts of all kinds) seen and made to be the new software, the new politics, the new culture, 'of everything'!
viva!
Yes, I think this is it, and particularly point (10).
...ten points? is this then a manifesto - of everyone?
Yes, this is it! It feels right.
Some hours later I attempt to continue this 'declaration of rights' to be free to collaborate, free of centrality, and of management and of government!
(At which a big smile...)
I see now that it needs a movie, and a book, just to realise in fiction the 'new sociality' of it - perhaps in my kind of non-realist play, and novel, which are I feel the right forms for all this. A chance to discover and to learn the new ways of relating and of work and of non-work and of pure existence that in the past were for special people only but are now open to us all...
A little surprised by what I'm writing I begin to enumerate these 'new rights' that are emerging:
the right to be free of hierarchy
and free of compulsory education, and work
the right to be in friendly relations with all people in all countries
with no passports, nor restrictive nationalities, nor labels of any kind
and particularly the right to creative democracy
and above or beneath all these: the right to connect.
Not only a bill of 'human rights' (individual) but a new bill of collective rights (to interact freely with anyone)!
This is IT!
I can see that it's a bit explosive - but what is the cost of not doing it?...
...of not living in, or ever reaching, the world that is already written or evident in the forms of new media - hidden beneath old social forms imposed that are surely the cause of what is wrong?