In 2016, I published a dense little book book called Fixing Broken Robots. This work explored the relationship between people and technology, and began describing the epochal change into which our society has proceeded as a result of this relationship. The small, smart audience for whom I write responded favorably, and the project paid for itself via book sales within six months. My intention was to follow up in 2017 with another publication in the same format: a practical overview of the options accessible to average people for making sense of and navigating this epochal change while strengthening the connections that hold our society together.

Sounds good, right?

Unfortunately, after doing the research for such a follow-up book, and in light of current events, it turned out that I was no longer willing to actually pull the thing together and put it out as planned.

Specifically, I found that:

1.) Attempting to hold our society together through the transition that has begun no longer made much sense at all.
2.) Most people in the US so thoroughly misunderstood the systemic nature of what challenges we face that describing ways for average people to navigate these challenges seemed like a waste of time.
3.) Recent changes to our political and social structures had polarized thinking and rhetoric along lines that guaranteed very bad political and social outcomes. Most people would probably use their time and energy to produce these outcomes, and would be unwilling or unable to do otherwise for psychosocial reasons. Which meant that, if I accurately described my current perspective in a new book, this would either be misunderstood or strongly disliked by most people. And attempting to sell something likely to alienate so many potential readers appeared problematic from a marketing standpoint.

These considerations left me with a choice to make.

My options were to scrap the work entirely, redesign the book for commercial success by intentionally misrepresenting what I understood to be true, or totally revise the project to reflect my honest perspective. Since I'd spent too much time researching the work to just forget about the whole thing, and tossing ethics out the window to increase a book's marketability was not my idea of a good time, the third option was the obvious choice.

So I've decided to begin posting the new work, Power and Meaning, here on Steemit.

It is not yet clear if there will be enough interest in Power and Meaning to justify the work required to turn it into the kind of book I originally envisioned. So putting it out here on Steemit should make it easy to gauge reader interest in the project. It may well turn out that Power and Meaning is as unappealing to readers as the fictional novella I published in its entirety on Steemit a year ago proved to be. And yet, because the changes in perspective which forced me to radically alter Power and Meaning are honest responses to how things in broader culture have shaken out, it is also possible that this new work will resonate well with others who believe the time has come to begin meeting systemic problems with better solutions.

Power and Meaning draws heavily on core concepts described in its predecessor Fixing Broken Robots. Although you can buy this book on MagCloud, the following Steemit posts explain these core concepts well enough:

Also, while Fixing Broken Robots and this new work mainly focus on the US, and Steemit is thoroughly international, there are underlying themes in the perspective presented here that are relevant to what has been happening in many parts of the world, so hopefully some of what I have to say will be of interest to my Steemit followers in other countries.

Power and Meaning: Introduction

Our society is of one mind. The problem is that this mind appears determined to produce a future that does not work very well at all.

Year after year and decade after decade, led by short-sighted windbags and an insatiably greedy financial elite, people have been stealing important parts of the future and wrecking them. Now, it is the future, and the world is broken. Mainstream America is a soulless dystopia. Political opposition to this mainstream amounts to little more than an impotent and ethically compromised chorus of sycophantic personality cults. A massive swarm of interconnected, systemic problems ensures that it will not remain technically feasible to mend some crucial bits of this broken world indefinitely. And it no longer appears even vaguely possible for us, together as a society, to pull our heads from our asses and begin approaching our systemic problems with the manner of thinking required to solve them.

I do not know exactly when this possibility disappeared. My suspicion is that it happened after 9/11 and before the 2008 financial markets turmoil hit the news. But that is just my suspicion. I didn't quite grasp the fact of it until much more recently. At that point - sometime between the election of an ultrarich KKK-endorsed reality TV star to the American Presidency last November and seeing a report that quantified exactly how much financially worse off people in my generation are than our parents were at the same age - the disappearance of this possibility became too obvious for me to ignore¹.

Politically, of course, the situation had long been unacceptable². But this did not itself concern me very much³. What began to concern me was that it had become plainly impossible for us to address the major challenges our society faces as a society. These challenges sum to an epochal change⁴. Such a thing requires revising very basic assumptions about the world and our place in it. Which is a big deal.

Making sense of this change in a way that empowers us to successfully navigate it seems like the kind of thing that should have been high on our list of societal priorities. And yet, when this great transition became visible on the horizon half a century ago, we chose not to come together and meet it properly. We then stuck with this choice throughout the intervening years, squandering an abundance of opportunities to prepare our society for the disruptions this transition would inevitably produce. And when some of the systemic problems we collectively refused to face began unpleasantly impacting more and more of our individual lives, we made poor sense of these, and still did not come together as a unified people to solve them. Instead, as our unsustainable status quo screwed a bunch of important stuff up, we doubled down on our bad decisions, splintered into a bunch of epistemologically-insulated adversarial factions, started fighting with each other more, saddled all public rhetoric with a bunch of highly politicized emotional baggage, and basically erased every possibility of our society as a whole coming together to meet the unique challenges of the day as a unified people.

And yet, through it all, every unsavory component of the epochal change now upon us - from the broken thinking that compromised our food supply to our society's refusal to get its act together while generation-crushing inequity became the norm - was produced by many coordinated human choices, amounting to cooperation on an unprecedented scale. It is true that some of this cooperation was forced by overt coercion. Undoubtedly, a great deal more was secured by the systematic hijacking of our instincts made possible by new technologies⁵. But mostly, people worked together willingly to create the world as it now stands, and appear dead set on continuing to do everything in their power to keep us on this mad path that we have chosen⁶.

If our society is thus united in a grand effort to manufacture systemic problems, as well as broadly committed to preventing these problems from being solved, then disunity is not The Problem. Clearly, underneath all of its theatrical bickering, our society is of one mind. The problem is that this mind appears determined to produce a future that does not work very well at all, and I - for one - see no good reason to attempt to participate in the new societal order now coming into being⁷. Furthermore, the last year has convinced me that the vast majority of our population - and something approaching one hundred percent of those given media attention as leaders in business, government, and civil society - are dangerously delusional, and are bound by habits of thinking and behavior that make it virtually impossible for them to do the right thing.

Consciously or otherwise, most people use their time and energy to serve the new societal order now coming into being. If this new order does not work for you, what can really be done about it?

In such a bizarro world, with a Total System that has compromised the integrity of important stuff like biology, our social fabric, and traditional sense-making procedures, we are far from powerless. There are options for meeting the unique challenges of this era with something better than more of the same. To identify or create such options, however, probably requires approaching these challenges in a genuinely different way than was called for by the challenges of former eras⁸.

First and foremost, it calls for making sense of power-as-power-operates⁹. Once the implications of how power operates are understood, it quickly becomes apparent that most strategies for solving the problems inherent to our anthropogenic quagmire are non-starters; that the control regime currently making these problems worse is not something that can be effectively fought, reformed or avoided. But there are ways to make this control regime less and less important. And there are ways to build resilience, equitable freedom, and radical honesty into our everyday worlds so as to make the systemic problems we increasingly face easier and easier to manage over time.

Notes

[1]

Financial Health of Young America: Measuring Generational Declines between Baby Boomers & Millennials Jan 2017 - http://younginvincibles.org/financial-health/

Key Idea: "Millennial net wealth is half as much as Baby Boomers when they were young adults; wages have also declined 20 percent for today’s young workers."
Precise figures can be found on this publication's 'Table 4.1'

In press: Millennials earn 20% less than Boomers did at same stage of life
AP/USA Today, January 13, 2017 - http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/01/13/millennials-falling-behind-boomer-parents/96530338/

[2]

Our political system in its entirety had for several decades proven itself consistently incapable of adequately regulating commerce, peaceably mediating disputes, sustainably maintaining infrastructure, protecting basic human rights, responsibly managing resources, or generally serving the common good. Then, in the first years of the 21^st Century, our government began shedding the popular legitimacy necessary to confer actual legitimacy to the exercise of power, and has been operating more as a loosely-coordinated network of social engineering programs and extortion rackets than as a government ever since. Fortunately, this mess is administered by a patchwork of ruthlessly territorial bureaucratic feifdoms whose endless feuding prevents our overall political system from functioning too efficiently. And there presumably remain enough good, competent people working throughout the public sector that, no matter how mechanically transgressive our government may be, it tends to retain the veneer of respectability necessary to hold its worst tendencies in check, and therefore appears unlikely to devolve into utter tyranny except in highly localized circumstances.

[3]

Many people will go along with whatever a perceived leadership group says is the right course of action - even if they personally believe this course of action to be wrong - and so have no political will of their own. For most of the rest, so long as the American Dream appeared somewhat achievable and it remained theoretically possible to vote our way into a better future, our unacceptable political situation could itself be accepted, because the illusion that 'we the people' could someday come together by traditional means and right our system's wrongs remained intact. As the American Dream became obviously unachievable and this illusion dissolved, many of these people became increasingly concerned with politics. What they found, and will likely continue to find, is that is that their ideas, opinions, and beliefs are not so widely shared as they once imagined, because our society is increasingly diverse.

My own acceptance of our unacceptable political situation comes from a slightly different place. As my person has proven to be politically irrelevant, and as I view our government's issues as minor symptoms of far more pressing underlying societal problems, I have simply found it increasingly unproductive to worry too much about politics. For someone with as little power as I have, worrying about politics is about as useful as worrying about the weather in space.

[4]

It may be helpful to conceptualize this epochal change as two great shifts into which we have proceeded as a consequence of our relationship with technology - which is to say reproducible anthropogenic systems. The first is a catastrophic unraveling of the biological, psychosocial, and other core systems on which our society depends. The second is a socio-evolutionary leap into entirely unmapped territory, wherein the pluralistic nature of experiential reality becomes unavoidably visible, which renders the stories underlying most thinking inapplicable to current circumstances. This makes traditional social norms dysfunctional, and causes all sorts of other problems, too.

[5]

It is no secret that our unconscious motivations tend to override our conscious beliefs. This simple truth has been thoroughly studied, and is well understood. The corporate world uses it to subvert reason for profit. Politicians shamelessly exploit it. Social manipulators intuitively bring it into the service of their petty bullshit as a matter of course. And yet, however foundational to the mechanics of coercion which turn people against their own interests this simple truth may be, we often ignore its implications in the context of our brave new world. Consequently, the overall impact of many narrow interests using increasingly sophisticated technologies to subvert the thought processes of many large, overlapping groups of people throughout our society increasingly distorts thinking, and does so in a way remains unexamined as a whole thing.

[6]

Am I suggesting that there is no hope? Not at all. Hope is what becomes of optimism when sufficient cause to envision a good outcome is subtracted from imagination. And the world is filled with imaginative people.

[7]

Although an overwhelming majority of people in this country have long behaved as if they believe that our future should be a place with no place for a person like me in it, so long as it was theoretically possible for the differences between us to be overcome by the likely necessity of cooperation in solving the problems inherent to our nascent epochal change, I felt obliged to work towards creating a future that we could all enjoy. But this possibility has disappeared in recent years, which eliminated the last remaining bits of common ground capable of convincing me to regard these people who treat me as an enemy as potential allies with whom to amicably meet our brave new world's grim challenges. Consequently, the sense of obligation that previously constrained my thinking has given way to less charitable sentiments.

[8]

To clarify: I do not mean more of the same, rebranded.

[9]

Although many people imagine that they know all about power and how it operates, I have found this subject to be widely ignored, disagreed upon, and generally misperceived.

In the most basic sense, power is control over the information that tells a system how to direct energy. Practically speaking for the purposes of this text, there are two kinds of systems that must be understood in our modern world to make sense of how power operates within it: the individual person and the social organism. Like all systems, individual persons and groups of people have defining static, dynamic, structural, and genetic qualities which allow them to be made sense of without getting bogged down in minutiae at every turn.

Hope you've enjoyed this first installment of Power and Meaning. As always, I would love to know what you think.

Power and Meaning: announcing a new writing project