The Model Isn’t the Territory, Either

I was making a familiar argument lately, at least for me, about how we need to abandon oversimplified 20th Century style movement politics for something much more complex. It was talk called “from the movement to the moment,” in which I explained how simple stories where we keep our eyes on the prize and march toward a singular goal end up justifying a whole lot of bad stuff along the way. I brought up the early World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and Occupy Wall Street, which confounded the press and politicians because they were made up of so many disparate groups and causes. The media didn’t know how to cover such protests, because they couldn’t be explained in a simple headline or two-minute TV report.

The digital age seemed to promise a more nuanced, collaborative, and real-time approach to movements, and to everything. Where television was about globalism and unifying dreams, the internet would embrace the true complexity underlying distributed solidarity. We’d stop telling ourselves stories, and start enacting social justice from the bottom up.

And while I was explaining all this, another set of stories and visions started percolating in the back of mind. I remembered how digital technology and the early Internet looked to us in the late 80s. Some folks — mainly business types — were talking about the “digital revolution,” but for me and my posse, it was more of “renaissance.” We wouldn’t simply replace one elite with another. We were not, as a revolution implies, drawing a circle. Rather, we were — as “re-naissance” suggests — retrieving and rebirthing old ideas in a new context. Just as the original Renaissance increased our appreciation for dimensionality with perspective painting and circumnavigating the spherical world, our renaissance would increase our appreciation for dimensionality with fractals and holgrams, or orbiting the planet with satellites.