Most people recognise that the global financial markets have become too complex for us to control, which is why bear markets sneak up on us so unexpectedly. Now, thanks to social media, public conversation has become a similarly complex system that has escaped our control. The result of this exponentially more connected conversation is that thoughts and ideas can no longer be controlled by the people in power. This is one of the reasons why Brexit and Trump came as such a surprise. They are both the result of an unexpected bear market of political ideas.

Are we like sardines packed into a can?

More like bullets in someone else’s gun.

They say orange is the new black…

but I say stress is the new fun.

 

Personal truth has become a fiction,

in this plagiarised day and age,

where our souls are pressed into tablets

and swallowed three times a day.

 

But we’re the makers of this horror film.

This nightmare is of our design.

We craft it into being

with the spending of every dime.

 

Now we’re bought and sold like pork bellies.

We’re pixels on a stock market screen.

But there’s no point complaining…

 

Beneath the clamor of the media

no one can hear you scream.

 

So grab another branded sedative

from the blond with the gleaming smile.

Go ahead – swallow it hook, line, and bullshit,

it’s sure to numb you for a while.

Life is a perpetual journey towards a state of balance. Most of us never get there (and if we do, it is only momentary) but our actions and reactions are nevertheless motivated by this primal and often unconscious desire to achieve harmony.

The things we do in order to achieve this elusive state often elicit strange and unexpected reactions from the world around us, tipping us further into chaos. One of the reasons for this is that our existential quest for balance is actually driven by a single-minded pursuit of pleasure… a pursuit that almost invariably reaches its bounds and triggers some form of pain instead.

Just think of the sun. We bend towards it. We revel in its glow. We do this because it gives us pleasure… but we do it until it burns our skin and only when some of us die from it do we actually acknowledge that it is wrong. But painful and stupid as it may seem, this primal drive for pleasure provides us with a thruster button in our quest for balance.

We are lost. We have become unmoored, decoupled from our anchor, strangers to our true north. We wake each morning driven by the same unresolved obsessions that carried us over the threshold of the previous day. We strive to complete a list of ever-growing tasks, no longer sure of why we are striving to complete them at all. The rhythm of our lives begins to resemble the syncopated clatter of a production line rather than the sweet refrain of a melody.

I write this now knowing that it is little more than a desperate plea from the other side, a yelp at the passing flicker of the moon, a transitory glimpse of the celestial map that has been drowned out by the light and smog of the city, of modernity. And yet I write it still, drawn to the elusive memory of what could be.

We pass our days as cogs in a machine, as neurons in a network, as pawns in a game played by forces that have outgrown us. We invented money, and the markets, and the social system that now controls us. They were all part of a plan designed to serve the rich and powerful… but now even the richest among us are forced to bend to its will. People fear the rise of intelligent machines but the algorithms we created already control us.

We have been humbled by religion, controlled by capitalism, enslaved by consumerism… but the promise of freedom still exists within each and every one of us. You simply have to break the rhythm, jumble the pattern, turn off all the lights and find your path in the stars again. It won’t be easy – the sounds of modernity are loud and perplexing – but don’t be distracted by the expectations and false obligations of a society engineered to manipulate you. The dizzying sense of imbalance that you feel is not the result of some personal failure… but the symptom of a system that no longer serves you, an algorithm that has spiraled way out of control. Break free if you can. For your own sake, and for mine. Break free so that eventually the rest of us can break free as well.

Reality as we know it emerged from a single idea. The Big Bang wasn’t a giant explosion of knowledge; it was just the single droplet of an idea. But one idea contains every idea and so eternity was born.

At some point these ideas, through a familiar leap of consciousness, took shape and became manifest, and the physical world was born. Each atom, each wave, every element known and not yet known, is simply the particle of an idea.

As living beings we are capable of transmitting these ideas, helping them to mix and form. That is our primary purpose as human beings – to articulate these ideas and to amplify them – to give them the agency with which to further sculpt the reality they have spawned. That is why art is humanity’s most important endeavour.

Drugs are philosophies.

Psychoactive substances contain a concentrated code-base capable of re-programming the mind. They serve up the blueprint to a particular worldview, encouraging the user to see reality from a particular perspective. They are like chemical philosophies or ideologies; software for the consciousness.

Like philosophies, some drugs are good, while others are bad. There are those that open your mind to new possibilities and stretch you to the limits of your potential, while others seek to dominate you and force you into their dogmatic way of thinking.

Choose your philosophies carefully for they define you.

 

Recently, while watching Cartoon Network with my kids, I came upon an unexpected epiphany. Despite its childish guise, the cartoon we were watching was heavily charged with ideology. Hidden beneath its bubblegum wrapping was a worldview. I don’t remember exactly what that worldview was, or even whether I objected to it, but what remains indelibly forged into my brain is the realization that everything, even a simple cartoon, is designed to influence our consciousness.

Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer before him, believed that we are driven by a “will to power”, that as human beings we are bent on expanding our hegemony, our circle of influence. But on that night I realized that the many bloody wars our world has endured – the invasions and annexations, the air strikes and terror attacks – are just one small part of this “will to power”. They are neither cause nor cure; they are nothing but symptoms of a higher order battle – the battle to control our minds. It is a war of ideas, of values, of world-views, a sometimes hot and sometimes cold war that never abates. I call it the Hegemony of the Consciousness.

Seated in front of the TV on that fateful night, I discovered that we are ground zero of an ideological offensive. But I also realized that we are not simply casualties in this war – we are its foot soldiers. You and I, the citizens, the consumers, the general public, we are the boots on the ground, fighting in the trenches, and always directly in the line of fire. Every purchase we make represents a set of values and beliefs. When we spend money on something, we are helping to entrench a particular agenda… and our disposable income is the only real weapon we have to defend ourselves. With it we can define which ideas live and which ideas die. But we have to be discerning, we have to look beyond the coercive tactics employed by the cultural superpowers and pledge our support to a long term agenda, rather than simply satisfying our immediate desires.

We have always been complicit in this centuries-old battle but today our role in shaping its outcome is exponentially greater than before. Social media has armed each one of us with an arsenal of weapons that we regularly use to amplify one worldview or another. Every piece of content we share, every like, every re-tweet or comment, is a bullet fired into the fray. You can pretend to be an innocent civilian but your freedom to choose makes you a combatant in this war.

Jean-Paul Sartre said, “man is condemned to be free” but increasingly sophisticated forms of corporate and cultural coercion are undermining that freedom daily. It’s time to open our eyes, to acknowledge the forces of indoctrination that are being insidiously woven into the fabric of our pop culture. Don’t be an unwitting pawn in this battle to control our consciousness. The planet is on a dangerous trajectory. It’s time to set a new agenda, to wrestle back control from the powers that be. It’s time to grab your cursor, like the bayonet it is, and stick it somewhere meaningful.

Story is the organising principle of reality. The world around us is made of atoms – protons, neutrons and electrons – but it is with story that we give them their shape and their meaning. Story is the primary tool of self-awareness and as such the basis of our humanity. From the creation myths that form the foundation of every civilisation to the rich mythologies that define our culture, story sits at the heart of what it means to be human.

ARISTOTLE TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Two and half thousand years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle added structure to what had previously been a purely intuitive and primal form of self-expression. In his short treatise entitled Aristotle’s Poetics he outlined the principles upon which dramatic storytelling is based. Today, thousands of years later novelists, playwrights, screenwriters and even game designers still turn to Aristotle for the fundamentals of narrative structure. While many of these fundamentals have remained essentially the same, the tools with which we tell our stories have obviously changed.

The open air Theatrons (as they were referred to in ancient Greece) have been replaced by air-conditioned multiplexes, 3D television and IMAX. But these linear visual experiences aren’t really that different from the ancient Theatre of Delphi. Despite cinema’s ability to compress space and time even the most sophisticated viewing experience closely resembles the dramas of ancient Greece. But that doesn’t mean that storytelling will remain the same forever. In fact we have now reached a critical inflection point in the evolution of storytelling. Disruptive technologies like the Internet, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (technologies that we have only been experimenting with for the past 20 years) will change the shape of narrative forever.

Think about this trajectory for a moment: After waiting more than 2000 years for live theatre to evolve into cinema, computers came along and changed the canvas completely. Back in the eighties, personal computers introduced a new level of interactivity to storytelling (and non-linear narratives became possible); then in the nineties the Internet added the potential of global connectivity to any canvas (and massive, multiplayer participation was born); over the past ten years the ubiquity of smartphones has added a level of mobility to storytelling (making location-based stories a reality).

Add to this interactive, non-linear, participatory, location-based storytelling the total sensory immersion that comes with virtual reality technologies like the Oculus Rift, as well as the literally infinite plot-generating potential of an AI story engine, and you start to wonder where fiction ends and reality begins.

Helen Papagiannis, a Virtual Reality expert, claims that “Our Word is a hologram,” and then she challenges us with a provocative question: “Are our simulates realities are any less real,” she asks, “than the universe we live in?”

If story is indeed the organising principle of reality then it is not just storytelling that is about to be overhauled by technology but the very nature of reality itself.

TECHNOLOGY IS AN EXTENSION OF US

Terence McKenna describes technology as “the real skin of our species.” “Humanity,” he says, “is an extruder of technological material.” If technology is indeed the extension of our minds then story is the extension of our thoughts because Storytelling and Technology are inseparable. Laurie Anderson once described technology as, “the campfire around which we tell our stories”. Without technology stories cannot be told; and without story technology has no meaning. But not only are they inseparable from one another, they are inseparable from us because Storytelling and Technology are the most critical building blocks of humanity.

Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist and mythologist famous for writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces says, “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” People love metaphors because we are metaphor. Humankind is made of metaphor. We are preoccupied with the physical reality that we experience through our senses – our so-called objective reality – but this objective reality is just a metaphor for the intangible realm of consciousness from which all life emerges. According to the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” The purpose of storytelling is to reach beneath the surface of that physical experience so that we may shine a light on the more unknowable aspects of our humanity.  The greatest stories are not those that recount the facts of history but those that reveal the mysteries of being human, that illuminate the inexplicable contours of love, and hate, and triumph and jealousy, the more obscure dimensions of our being. As Arsitotle says, “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

IS THE UNIVERSE EXPANDING?

The universe of the “knowable” is expanding. Technology has given us the ability to see further and deeper. Every day scientists discover new species and molecules and planets and every day the universe of the “unknowable” shrinks. But as the mysteries of human nature disappear so too do the infinite dimensions of our potentiality for in ordering and naming and defining everything we eliminate the fantastical possibilities of our imagination… and our imagination is our true home for it is not just the source of our creativity… but the source of all creation.

Regardless of what story you tell and what technology you use to tell it, the primary objective must be to look beneath the surface of observable fact and into the mysteries of human nature where the deepest and most profound truths about our existence reside. “The aim of art”, say Aristorle, “is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

And herein lies one the potential risks inherent in these new technologies. When we create alternate realities, when we create immersive virtual realities, we risk abstracting our experience of reality even further from its original state of pure consciousness. Storytelling has always had the ability to reach beyond the physical, into the Jungian shadow world of the human sub-conscious, to explain the unexplainable. As we move towards increasing levels of technological mediation we need to ensure that our storytelling still reaches into the core of what it means to be human rather than creating barriers that distance us and disconnect us from who and what we really are.

We spend so much time looking into the beyond, pushing the boundaries of technology, searching for life on other planets, when in fact it is not outward that we should look but inward because the truth of what it means to be human does not exist in outer space or in ever-more complex realms of technological advancement but on the inside, closer to that originating point of pure consciousness. As we hurtle headlong into the technological minefields of our future we must use Story to journey deeper into the heart of who we are because we are not just the makers of our stories, we are made by our stories; and in telling our stories we bring ourselves into being.

Whether you follow the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics or are eager to test the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence, whether you are a marketer or a politician or a preacher or a poet, remember that the stories you tell create the world around you.

The stories you tell create the world around you.

 

I attended a seminar at Cannes Lions last week where Tim Berners-Lee, (the inventor of the World Wide Web) painted an eerily believable scenario for the future of Artificial Intelligence.

Berners-Lee believes that society is safe from AIs for as long as robots are subservient to us. We need to write the rules that ensure that sentient machines work for us rather than allowing ourselves to become enslaved by them. The only real dangers emerge, he believes, when robots are given the same rights as human being… and he doesn’t foresee anyone willingly granting robots such rights.

Berners-Lee encourages us not to think of a world in which Artificial Intelligence necessarily takes the form of humanoid robots. Most AI today exists in the form of algorithms and intelligent software systems. We can all imagine a future in which Artificial Intelligence is used to assist in the business world. It is conceivable, for example, that we will utilise intelligent software systems to establish companies, buy shares into those companies, and essentially create wealth on our behalf.

But this is where the danger comes in. While Berners-Lee is confident that we will never purposefully grant robots the same rights as human beings, in the USA corporations already have the same rights as individuals and, by extension, society could “unwittingly” grant such rights to AIs.

The complex web of cause and effect outlined in this scenario is a great illustration of how we may end up outmanoeuvring ourselves. One has to wonder whether there isn’t already some latent sentient presence urging us in that direction. It certainly seems like there is some unseen hand shifting us towards this inevitability.

I remember watching the Gulf War on CNN. I had just moved to New York where 24 hour news was already well established and I spent days glued to live coverage of Operation Desert Storm.

I had never seen anything like it before. Using satellite technology, camera-equipped weaponry, and infrared photography CNN broadcast dramatic images of tracer fire illuminating the night sky over Baghdad and missiles destroying their targets. It was like watching a Hollywood movie. Although I was a South African living in New York, the spectacle of war created by CNN made it difficult not to become an American patriot.

Twenty years later, war continues to rage in the Middle East but we are now experiencing it in a whole new way. This time, the message is not being controlled by major media corporations, but by millions of ordinary people shouting their personal opinions across Facebook and Twitter. While this may seem like a more democratic way to cover the conflict, social media is becoming a giant amplifier for the fear and hate that is fueling the conflict in Gaza.

This war was bad enough when it involved just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but now, thanks to the immediacy and ubiquity of social media, it has begun to spread across the planet, causing millions to “unfollow”, “unfriend”, disavow and generally turn against their colleagues, family members, and closest friends. Ideological skirmishes are breaking out in every corner of cyberspace, fueling the animosity, anger, and momentum of the conflict. I scroll through the battlefield that my newsfeed has become and I fear that the democratization of media has created a cacophony of dissenting voices that could tear our world apart. Amplified through the lens of social media, the tiny Gaza strip has expanded to consume our global psyche, becoming a kind of Liquid War that is spreading to every corner of the globe. Like the Cold War, this Liquid War is polarizing the world, creating enemies out of complete strangers, spawning confrontation and threatening to thrust the entire planet into war.

Edmund Burke famously said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” While it is true that we can not stand idly by and watch people kill each other, by broadcasting our opinions on a conflict that most of us do not fully understand we are becoming complicit in it, enabling it to grow and spread, fueling the hostility rather than contributing to a solution.

I have always believed in the egalitarian nature of the Internet. I firmly support the democratization of media and I celebrate the rise of a digitally empowered citizenry… but with this power comes commensurate responsibility. We are no longer passive consumers of mass media. We are the creators and disseminators of popular culture and it falls to us to modulate the conversation. Using Facebook or Twitter as a soapbox to broadcast your personal opinion about the war will only serve to exacerbate the conflict. Every tweet, every post made in defense of one side or the other is an ideological missile launched into the fray. And as we have seen from this bloody war in Gaza, every missile begets another. War breeds war. Animosity breeds animosity. For every pro-Palestinian post there are a hundred pro-Israeli responses, for every anti-Israeli tweet there are as many anti-Hamas retweets.

Isn’t it time that we called a cease-fire?

Growing up, we were taught that the more we talk about an issue, the more likely we are to resolve it. But the incessant buzz ringing in my ears is forcing me to question this conventional wisdom. I believe that Social Media has the power to amplify important issues. I was enthralled by the role it played in the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement. I was impressed by the support that the Kony video managed to drum-up from people who generally don’t give a damn about what happens in Africa. But what I also learned from the Kony case study was that people weren’t only motivated by the issue at hand. They were also motivated by their own newfound power.

Not long ago, there was a rainbow that went viral… but in the same way that social media can make world news out of small miracles, it can also transform a regional conflict into a world war. The interconnected nature of our modern mediascape isn’t necessarily a force for good… it is simply a mirror that reflects and magnifies our collective psyche. If we focus it on the right things we can enhance our ability to solve problems and make the world a better place. But if we aim its awesome power at our dark shadow we might just plunge the world into blackness.