The Fascist Atmosphere

It's less an ideology than an environment. A digital one.

I know many people right now are very concerned with what feels like the encroachment of fascism or authoritarianism on our government. And that fear – that reality – is definitely something to reckon with. I'm not suggesting it's not real, or that it’s not urgent, but I do think it's part of something greater. Something that might require even more of our collective attention at this moment.

I'm less concerned right now with fascism as a philosophy or a form of government than I am fascism or authoritarianism as an environment in which human beings are attempting to operate. The easiest way for me to express it is as a digital or quantized environment, where everything is one or zero, yes or no, right or wrong, us or them.

Now that sounds pretty old school tribal, yes. But it’s different. It hasn't been part of the air we breathe, the environment through which we walk, the logical systems we attempt to employ simply to think or to feel. That's what I'm looking to address here, this pervasive atmospheric quality that is biased towards these distinct boundaries between people and their feelings and their ideas and their origins. These are boundaries that are not real; they are artifacts of thought systems. Made all the more distinct by the digital.

While binaries and quantized units may have been useful in certain forms of math or science or engineering or even the law, when we apply them to our society as ideals rather than the oversimplified compromises that they are, they do a lot of damage. They erode the subtle connections and resonances between us, undermine our capacity for rapport, and transform solidarity from a way of connecting to a way of distinguishing one side from the other.

Reality is complex. And in that complexity come all of the subtle, unnoticed but essential collaborations for life to occur. It’s the tangle of root structures beneath the ground, the dance of pollens and insects in the air, and the thousands of subconscious cues our faces and our bodies offer to each other when we’re up close. You know what I’m talking about. There’s no words. Poets have been trying to put it into words - actually between the words - since poetry began.

There’s not much poetry today, though, is there? That may be because its fundamental premise - that there is more going on here than we can name or label - isn’t compatible with the metrics or values of this quantized world. Since Francis Bacon and empirical science (which sought to identify things by killing, labeling and measuring them) if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. Like in business - your goals have to be expressed in metrics.

And that’s where global non-profits and even the United Nations get into trouble. They’ve got exactly 17 sustainable development goals: clearly defined metrics that don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. At some point, it comes down to “just be caring, okay?” Love. It’s not quite on the lines, which is why it’s having trouble in the digital environment.

It’s hard to express the texture and values of the analog media environment to those who weren’t alive for it. I find it amusing: in the 90’s my job was explaining the digital to people from the analog era. Now, it’s explaining the analog to those in the digital era.

No matter how digital our media, the real world we live in is still analog, of course. Our technologies may have always been a bit digital, but - if you can believe it - until recently, our media and technology used to accommodate that analog sensibility. The channel selector on an old analog TV was a dial that had physical clicks at approximately each station. But then it had a “fine tune” knob to get you to the exact frequency of the broadcast. A radio was entirely like that - with a smooth, notchless tuning dial that would require you to listen in order to find the station.

Don’t get me wrong: digital tuning with buttons and numbers is a great thing. You get the exact frequency. It’s perfect. But it’s not a great model for tuning into other people. You lose something when you have to conform to that quantized line. The subtle resonances that allow one thing to find another thing here in the natural, complex, real world.

You don’t have to understand digital to get what I mean, here.

Think back to the invention of the piano, and what that did to our understanding of notes, compared to the voice or the violin. On a piano, the a-flat and the g-sharp are the same black key. But in music, they’re slightly different notes. That’s because when it’s an a-flat it has to fit perfectly into certain chords. But when it’s a G# it has to fit perfectly into other ones. But the piano turned analog, continuous human instruments into push-buttons, and had to make compromises. So you split the difference, and it’s good enough. That black key is somewhere between a-flat and g-sharp.

But the power of the chords - the relationships between all those notes - is diminished. The notes can’t find each other, and so the resonances - those magical octaves and harmonics and overtones above them won’t manifest. This compromised tuning is called “equal temperament;” but what it really means is less temperament. Less relationship. Less collective power. The support between the individuals and the chording is sacrificed to the quantizing of the notes.

Likewise, when everything is quantized - reduced to one/zero, yes/no - it too easily devolves into right/wrong, or us and them. We can imitate chords and collectivity, but there’s always some phase. We can’t get that magical feedback and mutual amplification. No additive harmonics. We can’t get close to anything tantric, at all. No true union.

We end up in individual survival mode. Alive or dead. And it prevents us from seeing the humans on the supposedly “other” side. This is hard to get. Or at least to see one’s own part in it. It’s taken me a really long time to admit how I do it in my own punk-ass, slacker, Genx, but ultimately bullshit way.

It only became clear to me a couple of weeks ago when I asked to speak at a feel-good business conference. Now, these were nice enough people. Very loving, quasi-buddhist business people who really want to do regenerative stuff and steer their businesses toward social good. Or maybe they just want to do their penance for a weekend and then go back to their social media plans on Monday morning. Probably both.

And so they slotted me in for late the first night of the conference, to do an improvisatory response to the rest of what was discussed that day. They called it Douglas Rushkoff: Standup. I know what they meant - like, stand-up comedy, or maybe even stand-up philosophy. An entertaining and maybe thoughtful nightcap. But I figured I’d take the term “standup” in the other sense: stand up to power. Stand up for what I really believe.

I started by saying if what I said was too harsh, they should consider it standup comedy, and not worry about it any more than a king listening to his jester. Then I proceeded to tell them how I’m just allergic to business. I blame business for commandeering the Internet and turning it from a psychedelic playground into an extractive feudal empire. You know the story by now: I discovered the Internet along with people like Timothy Leary, who saw in digital technology an opportunity to unleash the collective human imagination. To create totally new possibilities for connection and imagination and novelty.

Then a few Dutch libertarians came to Silicon Valley to launch Wired magazine, which reframed the whole thing as a business opportunity. And so tech development went from increasing human possibility to increasing human predictability. We humans became rats in a digital maze. Instead of getting a new psychedelic reality, we got the bad trip we’re in today.

But to be honest, it wasn’t business itself that was the problem. It’s that Wired and its digital libertarians were promoting a certain kind of business. They weren’t simply trying to do commerce; they were committed to exponential growth. Google, for instance, wasn’t doing much damage as a search engine; it was kinda cool, and the company’s motto was still ‘don’t be evil.’ It only got awful when the VCs funding the company demanded more exponential growth, and then they had to start mining our data and using algorithms and addicting us to YouTube.

It was this “meta” approach business - the need to grow the business rather than simply doing commerce - that turned technology from creative to destructive. They were doing financialization - selling stocks and derivatives and other abstractions of a business rather than some goods or services to actual people.

My critique of business may have been valid, but to be honest, the aspects of the digital society that I valued instead weren’t intrinsically any more pro-human. That’s been my big mistake, and I’ll own up to it: I thought of psychedelics as intrinsically liberating. That’s because pretty much everybody I knew in college who tried mushrooms or LSD had similar realizations. We’re all connected! Life is love! The trees can feel us! The planet is alive!

But the world’s wealthiest tech bros take psychedelics - and they’re having an entirely different trip. It’s showing them dreams of monarchy and feudalism and leaving the earth behind. Sadly, I’ve had to accept that when a tech bro takes acid, he is just a tech bro on acid.

That’s because psychedelics are what we could call Non-Specific Amplifiers. They amplify whatever you put in.

Technology is, too! College professors, Deadheads, and fantasy role-players saw digital technology as a way to model new realities. And they built one sort of playful, imaginative digital landscape. But a lot of the boys developing technology saw it as a path to safe isolation and perfect individuality. They made an iPhone, not an usPhone. They were using the “set and setting” of Francis Bacon to quantify and quantize an otherwise scary, unpredictable and messy reality.

Reality was really complex, but digital technology would render it merely “complicated.” Problems that could be solved. Reduced to that one A-flat on the piano. Technology, like finance, would be a way of going meta on this complex cesspool of fecund life. Like Peter Thiel’s book title, it would allow them to elevate From Zero to One.

So neither technology nor psychedelics are intrinsically pro-social. They are non-specific amplifiers. Depends what you bring to them. What you intend. And in explaining all that (actually, figuring out live on stage while I spoke) I decided to grant my life-long nemeses the benefit of the doubt. I accepted that business, too, is a non-specific amplifier. Mike has a Sushi restaurant, and cultural appropriation aside, he loves making sushi and serving it to people, and it’s fine that he gets paid for it. That’s a business. The guy who sponsors my podcast, Tom, makes dryer sheets - and even aside from the biodegradability and his dreams of saving the earth - he sells them for a profit. That’s commerce. Not bad.

Many business people mean well at first, but if their intentions pivot, and they go “meta” on their business, that’s when things go awry. It’s that abstraction that makes any pursuit vulnerable. We focus on the figure instead of the ground. Metrics, quantities, and quantized units instead of holistic complexity.

We can all do that. Even those of us on the pro-cultural weird fringe do. I had reduced business people to single pole of anti-cultural yuppie scum who had to be stopped, rather than a complex group of humans with an infinity of different intentions. I had succumbed to the same abstracted, binary thinking of this digital, fascist atmosphere.

It’s easy to in a digital environment - where the other notes on the piano have been reduced to quantized approximations, no longer free to find their resonance with each other. It’s a world where we operate by reducing complications rather than embracing complexity. A world of traffic lights dictating stop or go, rather than traffic circles that allow us to orchestrate our intentions into a cooperative swirl.

It drives us toward an almost eugenics-like outlook, wherever everything is better or worse, right or wrong. We use our technologies to amplify “selection” - natural or otherwise. And it has generated the environment in which we live. We are each in touch with something real and vital, but it is not recognized by the supposedly “other” side.

What if we applied this sensibility to the middle east conflict? Two “sides” warring because the obsolete, boundaried institution of colonial nation states (created through cynically drawn partitions by a dying colonial empire) is not up to the task of enabling the self-governance of a multitude of people? Or tariffs? Wasn’t it us progressives arguing for limitations on international trade at the WTO protests of 1999, or Occupy Wall Street in 2011? These are not simple binaries.

Our current inability to engage with the subtleties, the paradoxes, and the contradictions - the COMPLEXITY - is a symptom of our quantized state of mind. And it makes us vulnerable to the authoritarian or totalitarian urge to take a no-compromises approach to the civic and political spheres.

We’ve been through this once before. The peak of the industrial age brought us to the punch cards of IBM, which allowed people to be sorted numerically. We got industrial-scale extermination, at both Auschwitz and Nagasaki - and millions of people rationalizing what their nations were doing - succumbing to the eugenic mindset that allows us to see the other side as less than human. As in a different category altogether.

The same way, this digital reductionism of human complexity and spirit, makes us all vulnerable to the Trump mindset, apocalyptic thinking, and the battle of wills. Compromise is off the table.

Compromise isn’t even the right word. It’s as unsatisfying as centrism - an attempt to navigate a path that neutralizes both sides. That’s more like a yellow light. And like the color yellow suggests, it reeks of cowardice. That’s because it’s not about leaning into one side or the other - or finding some perfect compromise between them. They’re all abstractions; “sides.” If we’re going to be on a side, we want to be on the side of the people. Of living things.

Breaking down politics and social justice into “issues” - or even the UN Sustainable Development goals - is totally well-intentioned but a product of this industrial age, digital model. Find the metrics to measure, so we know if we are doing well. But it short circuits our intuitive sense of whether and how we are acting out of compassion.

It’s what leads to extreme forms of utilitarianism, justified with math, like effective altruism, which argues that the trillions of post-human life forms that will one day inhabit the universe matter more than the mere 9 billion humans who are alive today. Just use an AI instead of a Politburo to make the calculations. We can treat this world and its people as fuel for those who are wealthy enough to get to space and seed the heavens. Some of the folks who think this way are hanging out in the White House right now.

And their thinking is setting the tone for the rest of us. In fact, the abstracted digital environment in which their authoritarianism thrives disables the very features of our humanity that would allow us to transcend these binaries. Their power over us depends on their ability to keep us divided and fearful or even hateful of one another.

We still have to fight against the injustices being done to other people right now. We cannot allow folks to be snatched off the street and sent to detention camps. No matter how ‘other’ or dangerous they are made out to be. But the bigger job before us is to rehumanize our environment by dissolving the quantized, abstracted, separated nooks into which we have been filed. It prevents us from finding our resonances with other people, who may not happen to reside in the same nook.

Rather, we need to unite around practical, real-world activities and mutual aid (if that sounds too commie, call it “favors” or “helping out”). It’s so easy to break faith over our perspectives on issues, binaries, and metrics. But if we know our neighbors as people first?

And watching the news? Yes, stay informed, but the picture we see of “the other” on the screen is an intentional reduction. The clips of our adversaries - and I don’t mean our leaders, who are crazy, but real people - are chosen for their ability to inflame and radicalize. That’s because the abstracted business models of media companies (tech companies), have little to do with providing us with the news we need to understand much less resonate with one another.

Because if we learn to resonate, we have power. Politics may be downstream of culture - as Gramsci and later Bannon observed. But solidarity is downstream of rapport.

And we only get to that rapport if we recognize fascism or authoritarianism or eugenics less as an ideology to fight than an environment that affects us all. We can feel it. It’s an atmosphere. But we do not have to submit to its terms.