Back in my Berkeley days there was a “notorious” coop called Barrington, which was ground zero for Cal’s population of freaks. I put “notorious” in quotes because the term is relative, of course. The coop’s neighbors were convinced that it was actually a cult, arguing that Barrington’s motto– “Those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know”– was evidence of its secret society status.
I bring this up because of a reader’s response to Douglas Rushkoff‘s video in the previous post, which I didn’t properly set-up (due to the fact that I have been grading finals and research papers and am in blog-lite mode at the moment). Life, Inc. is Rushkoff’s response to a situation he found himself in a while back (this site has more details on the book project). He was mugged on Christmas Eve, and when he posted the information for the crime’s exact location and time to a neighborhood email list, several people responded angrily that making such info public would lower their property values. This is the ultimate triumph of capitalism, which culminates in its most devious form as neo-liberalism– the complete conversion of community value into monetary value. The video goes on to describe a basic premise of the book, which is that banking and finance was deliberately created to disempower and de-democratize our lives. It has worked well, up to now. But things have changed.
So, Mediacology reader Ken asks, what to do? He recalls how reading Mother Jones at a military super market in Germany opened his eyes to see the Matrix. But once armed with this knowledge, what can we do about it? Where is the Whole Earth Catalog of our times that offers us alternative solutions, such as local currencies or life without banks?
This leads back to my opening story. I had an email conversation with Rushkoff a while back, and in it I mentioned a desire to create some kind “freakipedia” of forbidden knowledge, a place where you could read about an alternate history of banks or forward thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson (RAW). The inspiration for creating such a space was spurred by a discussion I had had with a college student I randomly met at the Bonnaroo festival a few years ago. We happened to be eating at the same picnic bench and ended up having a conversation which turned into a mini-deconstruction/lecture on the commodification of music and culture. This young man from Arkansas was shocked to learn about demographics, cool hunting and how much of culture production was contrived for profit. He didn’t like the idea that he was a target market. But I was more shocked because such knowledge is commonplace among my peers, and I naively assume that most people understand how the system “really” works. But what brought me to the point of my own awareness was no accident: I was involved with a self-educated knowledge community (punk), and I had countercultural mentors who helped me learn about subcultural art and protest movements like Dada and Situationism.
I told Rushkoff that I wanted to help kids like the one I met at Bonnaroo discover the secret history of the world, and that a collectively produced Website could do the trick. To paraphrase, he responded by stating that this kind of information comes organically, and perhaps shouldn’t be forced upon anyone or centralized as a Website. That is, we discover and learn things when it is appropriate and when we are ready. This helped me realize that the network that possesses this knowledge avails itself to us as part of our process of learning and growing. This kind of deep life knowledge is designed as a great puzzle and journey of discovery, a mystery school, so-to-speak, that has no certified degrees, but lots of teachers and students who don’t necessarily know each other. Sometimes I think I’m actually playing an intergalactic virtual reality arcade game and I keep wondering when the “deposit another quarter” screen is going to pop up in front of my face.
Given the nature of our current crisis– economic, ecological, educational, societal, spiritual and so on– maybe it’s time for the mystery school to be less mysterious. It seems to me that the opportunity calls for everyone’s collective wisdom, but in what form I don’t know. I certainly believe the Internet has the potential to coordinate all our efforts, not because it is a technological innovation, but because it’s a human creation, and it’s a human trait to come together to solve problems and to design solutions. After all, consider the miracle that we have evolved to the point we are at now. Every time a baby is born I’m dumbstruck about how amazing it is we haven’t died as a species, considering how hazardous birth is. But we know how to successfully bring kids into the world and educate them to build cities and world economic systems. Surely there is a way to tap this capacity for sustainability and deep democracy.
Just knowing you are not alone is a start. To quote one my favorite sayings from RAW,
You should view the world as a conspiracy run by very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.
Bless the freakatoni!
What a lovely post! thank you.
Thanks for reading the whole thing! It’s about 100 twitter posts too long!
You mean we weren’t a cult?
Antonio,
This was very interesting to read (I stumbled across it looking for a link to the cult of Onng Yongg (sp?) that had the same motto as Barrington). I lived at Oxford Hall for a while and even we thought Barrington was too wild (heroin dealing for one thing was rampant).
If you can find a short story collection by Avram Davidson containing his wonderful “The Sources of the Nile”, you will read one acutely aware author’s version of how cool becomes commoditized (sp). The protagonist stumbles across a family whose every whim turns into a fad, falls in love with the young woman of the family, only to have her “stolen away” by a crass Madison Avenue type. Written about 1960 or earlier.