Dear Leftist-Progressives (& Others): Be Internet Visionary
You cringe. The next internet/web3 will surely take all of humanity even farther from the living earth and what dignity is left to us.
Crypto disasters, transactional losses—all prove your instinctive repulsion to internet/web3. Look what’s happened with social media: more violence, degradation, a political sphere emptied of coherence. Weaponize that further?
I get it. Until, that is, I look at humanity’s evolutionary position. We’re in the Anthropocene now. Our position to the earth and one another as creator-drivers is a new position. We are tasked with seeing changes taking place inside physical, biological, cultural realities—the world(s) of our making—as an urgent matter of public mind.
How shall we mediate this living planet to ourselves? What kind of news and discourse is called for?
It’s clear that legacy media fails us on a daily basis. Important stories are routinely missed or suppressed. Yet, today’s media problem isn’t a problem that can be solved by breakaway journalists starting their own news outlets.
The problem we face is a logic problem.
We just can’t see physical, biological, cultural realities in their own terms and conditions. We are, in truth, functionally blind to them. Why? Because we question through well-established economic, political, and social interests. Such interests have their own views, their own questions and discourse. And, everyday, money flows through their structures and systems, reifying that collective blindness.
It’s time for a paradigm shift. A shift that identifies humanity’s need to learn physical, biological, and cultural realities as the primary world(s) of our making.
For the first time, humanity is becoming conscious of having a mind unto itself. It’s true that our shared public mind is, today, highly irritable, polarized and paralyzed. Nonetheless, we are self-birthing a collective public mind. Identifying what we need to know is on us.
Imagine going online everyday as a student or worker or in your free time to question ‘what is going on’ on the planet. A living planet. A living planet that’s alive in ways yet to be seen. And, in the seeing, in the discovery, radically shifts public understanding of creative/destructive action.
Imagine going online everyday as a learner among learners, questioning ‘what is going on’ within cultural life—the emo-cognitive matrices of being human—as a matter of public urgency.
Imagine having the technological means to initiate or join inquiries underway through questions you’d not previously considered: Through views of the planet and humans that blow up assumptions. Through indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through other species’ ways of knowing and being. Imagine exposure to the full spectrum of perceiving-feeling life forms and how such questioning—how such learning—informs public reasoning.
Here’s where the next internet/web3 merits full attention. How will it be designed? How could its architecture enable all of us to become inquirers? How could money flows reinforce the informed and self-informing public mind? How might democracy itself ‘level-up’ through such an informed public mind?
Let’s not freeze in a cynical distaste for all things internet. Let’s have some confidence in ourselves as moral/ethical creatures driven by an insatiable need to know so that we can be wise.
Let’s be clear that the questions and concerns driven daily by contentious economic, political, and social interests will not inform humanity as needed.
Let’s be visionary. Let’s see that questions and concerns driven by humanity’s need to know physical, biological, cultural life will vastly, radically re-inform our very idea of economic, political, and social life.
And, do so in the timeframe called for by eco-human crises.
Let’s understand that we are at the end of one paradigm and at the beginning of a new one.
Let’s put our heads to what needs to be built next.
—Casey S. Walker
Copyright 2023 Casey S. Walker All Rights Reserved
Casey S. Walker 