laodan's favorite postmodernity web sites

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http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf: Feb 12, 11:21am 1 review reality, postmodernity, modernity, worldviews
http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf; Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming via Metafilter / Kattullus; in avantgame.com by Jane McGonigal, PhD game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster.
Jane McGonigal, one of the lead designers of I Love Bees writes about collective intelligence, the phenomenon of massive groups of people gathering online to solve problems, as it played out in I Love Bees. Can a computer game teach collective intelligence? The term "collective intelligence", or CI for short, was originally coined by French philosopher Pierre Levy in 1994 to describe the impact of Internet technologies on the cultural production and consumption of knowledge. Levy argued that because the Internet facilitates a rapid, open and global exchange of data and ideas, over time the network should "mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity" in new and unexpected ways. As part of his utopian vision for a more collaborative knowledge culture, he predicted: "We are passing from the Cartesian cogito" - I think, therefore I am - "to cogitamus" - we think, therefore we are. The result of this new "we", Levy argued, would be a more complex, flexible and dynamic knowledge base. Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming Alternate Reality Gaming The polarities ( ) of humanity are: - the individual ( + ) - the societal ( - ) The polarities of any unity are permanently striving to attain harmony. Little moves from one of the polarities destabilize the harmony within the unity and provoke a chain of interactions that will reset harmony at a new level. Along the history of humanity we observe successive stages that are characterized by given forms of harmonization between societal and individual: 1. animism: individuals belong to the group. They are glued in the understanding of reality transmitted to them by their man of knowledge. The shaman is a free man! 2. religious and/or philosophic: individuals are coerced into submission to the king or emperor. They are glued in the understanding of reality transmitted to them by the priest or wiseman. The priest and the wiseman are at the service of the king or the emperor. 3. modern and rational: shared collective belief systems are eroding and individuals are free to believe whatever they want. In this context of societal atomization the reason of capital imposes its logic upon all. 4. postmodern: In late modernity we are witnessing a string of parameters that are emerging simultaneously and interacting upon one another: SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY: Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air, Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food. Societal Atomization + ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag, ). Those interactions most probably are shaping the contours of a new paradigm of reality out of which will emerge a new form of integration of the individual within the societal. Jane McGonigal's thesis is that the internet will "mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity" from where will emerge a "Collective Intelligence". Another vision is that of a collapse of modernity.

Post Modern Times | 2012: Jan 31, 3:49pm 13 reviews postmodern, video, postmodernity, worldviews
http://www.postmoderntimes.com/; Postmodern Times via Dreams in digital / Sya; in Postmodern Times/2012
Postmodern Times is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Toward 2012", introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality, and a host of other subjects. Postmodern Times Postmoderntimes in Google search 86 interesting videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7NOOBaZBjw Postmodern Times. 6 min - Jul 30, 2007 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3777563855883100822&hl=en A recording of Daniel Pinchbeck talking about Postmodern Times "Toward 2012". 1 hr 27 min - Sep 17, 2007 From what we know societal evolution goes in stages: 1. Animism, tribes, plucking and hunting. 2. Religions and philosophies , kingdoms and empires, agriculture. 3. modernity , kingdoms and republics, industry and long distance trade. 4. postmodernity , highly creative and conscientious individual cells are interconnected within "small groups" that are interconnected with other small groups. Some see this whole societal architecture as a rhizome (Jeff Vail) Here are some videos that prefigure such a possible societal rhizome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avBmUXZCOXk Think About It | Daniel Pinchbeck http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8961434816683857494 Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within. I posted about this video in an earlier post http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A_5-Van9m4 Think About It | Hugo De Garis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIajoJ2l__g ELECTRIC SHEEP THROAT SING. MUSICK BY GODS OTHER DEVIL. VIDEO BY SCOTT DRAVES. December 27, 2006. 5 min. 12 sec.

Countdown to a Meltdown: Jan 26, 10:50am 4 reviews economics, politics, globalization, postmodernity, modernity
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows; Countdown to a Meltdown in The Atlantic by James Fallows
The hopes of our nation are bleeding away along with our few remaining economic resources. Here is the challenge: - Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals. - Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair. - Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power - and our military is still ahead of China's. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far. To deal with these problems once in office, we must point out basic truths in the campaign. ... But remember that the reality of the story reaches backward, and that is why I have concentrated on the missed opportunities, the spendthrift recklessness, the warnings America heard but tuned out. To tell it that way in public would of course only make things worse, and we can't afford the recriminations or the further waste of time. The only chance for a new beginning is to make people believe there actually is a chance. Countdown to a Meltdown January 20, 2016, Master Strategy Memo. Subject: The Coming Year - and Beyond READ THIS ARTICLE but be aware only to read it if you are not enslaved to our "infotainment-drunk society". It is a fiction, supposedly written in 2016, but its real subject is about the strategic economic blunders of the West between 1990 and 2008 that are now starting to explode in our faces. This is a real eye-opener on the stakes that are at play in the 2008 election. It makes no doubt that we are at a turning point in the economic and political history of modernity. But the subject of James Fallow's article has to be placed into perspective. What it describes is the short-term history of the US. Hereafter is a trial-sketch of the long history of the world in which this short term enfolds. More particularly an accelerating double process is at work that spans between the boundaries of two epochal periods on the ladder of the long haul history: 1. We are in the last phase of modernity (destructive late-modernity). What I mean to say is that the logic of capital and its ideology of rationalism have spread to the four corners of the earth. Capitalism is now putting in competition the citizens of the earth for the limited salaried jobs it makes available thus unleashing a process that acts like a great income equalizer: reducing incomes in the West and increasing incomes in the East and the South. This equalization on a global scale happens in an institutional vacuum. National states are no match indeed for what is going on, at best, they compete with one another to attract the localization of big capital's investments within their shores. A backlash against globalization is reaching its sketching phase in the West. How it will turn out is anybody's guess (protectionism, war?) but its consequences will be felt by all. In parallel to this more classic economic and political rebalancing goes a far deeper non-classic movement that will largely subdue the conflictual relationship wrought upon nations by the initial classic rebalancing. (side effects of modernity, peak resources, societal atomization) 2. We are in the early phase of postmodernity (constructive early postmodernity): Some trends are slowly emerging that reject the premises of modernity: 1. the logic of capital is incompatible with the principle of life. It has thus to be subdued by a set of rules, 2. reality is too vast to be accessible in its entirety by science, 3. science has to encompass itself within the value system of a postmodern foundational story, 4. humans feel a dire need to believe in a credible global worldview, 5. humanity's polarities have to be rebalanced (societies / individuals), and so on.

Sustainable Futures By Ashok Agrwaal: Jan 13, 11:00am 1 review society, postmodernity, modernity
http://www.countercurrents.org/agrwaal120108.htm; Sustainable Futures via TOD, in Counter Currents by Ashok Agrwaal
In fact, the European notion of expansion, growth, etc, along a linear path was wholly misconceived. This does not negate everything that they thought and did during this period. But it is not possible to make a selection from out of the millions of ideas that emerged from their mindset. The rejection has to be wholesale. The rejection is of linearity, which continues to rule the roost as a paradigm of thought and action despite the development of ideas negating it during the 20 th century, from within the European mind itself. This linear, non-contextual reality that we are in the grips of must be replaced with a non-linear, context sensitive world view; which is what the non-western people of the world have lived with for thousands of years and, which is now getting destroyed by "development", "growth" and "progress". Sustainable Futures Non-linearity is the essence of the animist worldview that has been shared by the whole of humanity along tens of thousands of years: - Observation of the vastness of the whole of our universe (whole, one,...) - Observation of the inter-relatedness of humanity with all the other life forms within the whole - Observation of overlapping natural cycles within the whole (change) - Observation of the need to balance the human polarities (societies and individuals) The advent of agriculture destabilized the tribal arrangement with the "shaman as man of knowledge" in charge of interpreting reality for his tribesmen. Where it arose agriculture gave rise to military and political power. Force being not sufficient to assure the control over the population the new powers forced their subjects to adhere to a belief system. The sharing of a belief system is what ultimately glues the citizens in the togetherness of their nation being it taking the form of kingdoms, empires, or republics. The advent of force using belief as a societal glue received two radically different applications: - From the Middle-East to Europe animism was brutally extirpated from people's minds and replaced with dualism that gave its foundation to the edifice of the religions of the word. - Further East animism was maintained as the foundational story only being adapted to the local circumstances by various add-ons. Linear development is a strategy derived from the dualistic worldview of the religions of the word: - Reality is conceived of as being what happens between beginning and end. It starts with the creation by God and it ends with the non-worldly after-life in heaven or hell. - This straight line between the creation and the ending of the world follows an arrow of "development, growth and progress. With the advent of modernity this dualistic worldview was automatically integrated into the ideology of rationality that was derived from centuries of practicing the logic of capital by the Western European elite. This is what today gives dualism its hegemoniac operational principle. The central most important question today for humanity is whether Chinese, Indians and the other people entering modernity will succeed keeping their animistic foundations alive. It's surely noteworthy to observe that they represent some 80-85% of the world population and the logic of capital is now entering their lives. What's most frightening is that nowhere have we seen the logic of capital sparing non-dualistic foundational stories. At this critical juncture of humanity's history the answer given to the question asked by Ashok Agrwaal could very well decide of humanity's fate. "How much of our past - the collective past rather than the European one - do we wish to carry forward into future?".

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1174.html: Feb 6, 2007 9:09am 1 review globalization, postmodernity, modernity, worldviews
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1174.html; Falling prey to relativism in Sign and Sight by Paul Cliteur
For many years, the official credo of the Dutch government was multiculturalism, an approach that fitted well with Dutch history and culture. Multiculturalism is nowadays affiliated with a postmodern outlook. The pivotal ideas of this vision of life are relativism (cultural relativism, in particular), a negative attitude toward Western political tradition, the cultivation of collective guilt for the transgressions of the colonial past, and other real or presumed black pages in Western history. Falling prey to relativism Paul Cliteur is a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Freedom cannot be decreed There are many reasons why it would be desirable for Muslims, or anybody else, to feel free to reinterpret their religious texts. But this surely is not the business of the state, for that opens the way to authoritarianism. By Ian Buruma Mr Buruma's stereotypes Turkish German author Necla Kelek responds to Ian Buruma in the debate on multiculturalism and integration in Europe. Modern and mythless: Turkey today Zafer Senocak looks at the mythological vacuum in a Turkey that remains divorced from its past.
This is a suite to my post Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists? I guess my commentary in this last post takes an even higher significance the more this European debate advances. In sum "the human way" does not change but one thing is clear modernity does not offer an answer to "the human way" and this is how modernity is confronted today by fundamentalism... Zafer Senocak's article about Turkey best illustrates modernity's fundamental flaw. Yes, even in a rationalist environment, people still long to believe... hey hey... in what rationality does not succeed to explain to them... The ignorance or the rejection of that basic fact of life does not help rationality. And so the question of the formation of a postmodern worldview, that would offer to all citizens of this earth at least some acceptable "truths", appears the most centrally important question that confronts humanity in this age of fast change at a global level... And in the US... Dispatch From Gomorrah, Savaging the Cultural Left

Presidential Lectures: Fredric Jameson: Excerpts: Sep 12, 2006 3:08pm 1 review arts, postmodernity, modernity
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/excerpts/postmod.html; Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts by Frederic Jameson Mandel's intervention in the Postindustrial debate involves the proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx's great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. ... I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the "ultimately determining instance" either of our present-day social life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is, of course, ultimately at one with the post-Marxist notion of a postindustrial society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital itself. URL: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

I tried hard to follow the thread of Jameson's thinking. What I understand is... that Jameson tries linking economics, culture, art, psychology in order to understand our present. The reference to Ernest Mandel's late capitalism seems determining all the rest . What Mandel says, in substance, is that capitalism needed to find new roads to expand profits. One road was to expand the presence of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas (water, music, and so on and eventually soon the air we breathe...). The other road was to expand the geographical area where capital could impose its hegemony. This is what is now called globalization. The radical push in science and technology of these last decades can be analysed at the light of this expansion of capital to all remaining enclaves of freedom and the ensueing drastic reduction of freedoms for all of us on this earth, for sure, have an impact on our psyche (schizophreny) but it is a far shot to say that this ultimately leads to the "disappearance of the individual subject". This last conclusion could only be reached from a cultural isolated standpoint. What I mean is that history is not, and will not in the future, be following such a straight line projection out of an exclusively Western perception of reality. This late stage of capitalism will be brutal and devastating. It is not as if big capital, the actor of this capitalistic expansion, were one and unified. Western big capital holders (to make it short, the thousand families) will indeed be confronted to Chinese state capital and the Indian alliance between state and private capital and eventually "Muslim" capital... The least we can say is that the outcome here is not so sure. See for exemple my post US Banking System Collapse in 2008?. Furthermore, whatever our belief in the myth of scientific absolute prowess, the fact is that ressources are finite and that the impact of our poisoning our environment is becoming uncontrolable and so on. Now a last remark. Late capitalism corresponds to late-modernity which can't be confused with post-modernity. Postmodernity is what comes after all the world has integrated modernity. In other words the expansion of the logic of capital to the four corners of the world shall conduct us directly into obliged structural changes. What Marx termed socialism will be imposed upon all of us not through the will of some of us (Leninism) but rather through the urgent necessity to find solutions in order to make possible our survival as a specie? But this is too long a subject for a SU comment. I spent 308 pages writing about all that in artsense

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