Communications. Communication rests at the heart of everything. How we communicate our truth to the world is how the world interprets us and how we are able to flow in and out of communal settings and find where we belong in this world.
Narratives. Our stories are both a blessing and a curse. Where do the narratives that drive how we view the world originate? Are they derived from our parents, our mentors, our leaders, our peers, our media, our academics? Are our narratives trickled through filters of patriarchy, colonialism, fear, scarcity, separation, trauma or violence? Are our narratives generational; passed down through our DNA from our direct ancestors or kept alive by our elders through storytelling.
Do we have enough self-awareness to question the narratives we hold dear because they were passed on to us by our elders who were serving to protect and guide us? Do we, as leaders or elders, have the self-awareness to release or end the destructive narratives we see swirling around us that we know, in our hearts, are no longer serving us or the collective?
As a person who has spent a lifetime of communicating professionally, through images, words, videos and conversations, I am wired to study narratives. I can listen to a stranger talk and instantly know where his information comes from. I can scan a timeline and pull the threads of dialogue that reveal the source or ideology the talking point was sourced from and then witness how the community responds to talking point and how it circulates through a population-- and why. I honed this skill at journalism school where one of my mentors created “Media Agenda Setting Theory” which is a playbook for identifying media bias and propaganda. Noam Chomsky ran with some of the concepts in Manufacturing Consent and demagogues use these theories and Grievance Narratives to rally the masses and, well, manufacture consent at scale for things like wars, us versus them policies and the violation of rights against marginalized populations.
I have always been fascinated by how a tiny belief or seed of an idea can be dropped into the right community or network setting and it can grow into a movement that can drive large numbers of people to action. This is the power of the written word. This is why billionaire apex predators are scooping up massive media properties and re-wiring the way narratives are delivered to the masses-- literally.
And many people in our society are vulnerable to dark narratives right now. Entire populations of young men and women grew up with smartphones as their connection to the outside world and the visions of success displayed to them through these weaponized algorithms are ones of the dominant apex predators. They control the network effect. They are showing young people that success looks like “choose rich,” toxic masculinity and tribal isolation while resource hording. That success is defined by how you isolate your resources and how you destroy for the sake of destruction itself. Just look at the leaders in our government right now. Or in our corporations.
Our elders have fallen victim to the same weaponized network effects through legacy media channels and algorithms they had no business consuming. I watched in despair as the elders in my own family, people I spent my winters with in RV desert towns, embraced into racism, fear, separation and violence because they could no longer properly process the media narratives they were consuming-- and why. Many left this planet in fear and isolation and it is beyond heartbreaking to witness.
My journalism and polisci friends shared many a pitcher of beer during the Bush/Cheney years speculating on the collapse of society and what it would look like. None of us ever chose the slow demise version of apocalypse. We assumed a Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies story narrative arc and then we’d spitball on the safest way to navigate it all and still publish dissent. It’s a main reason I joined a hacker space. I wanted to know how to publish dissent under authoritarian rule.
We are now realizing that the collapse is actually a slow boil until we wake up one day and see that we are fully contained in collapse itself. I fear we aren’t far from this reality.
But, and there’s always a but-- I have hope. Our work in blockchain provides the opportunity to create technical tools to navigate many aspects of societal collapse and transition; coordination, governance, value exchange, autonomous archival storage, communications infrastructure and solutions we haven’t even thought of yet, but will soon as our tech continues to rapidly evolve.
Some of us are technologists. Some of us are communicators. Some of us are builders. Some of us are artists. Each of us carries the responsibility of our narratives; how we understand them, how we deploy them and how we evolve them.
In order for our communities to survive and carry us through the chaos of now, we must be cognizant of the narratives pulsing through our networks, often well hidden, and how they manifest into collective action. Are the leaders in your network looking to perpetuate stories of separation and scarcity to the point that you’re seriously contemplating gray uniforms with tribal badges of belonging, private police forces that pledge allegiance to your tribe and swipe cards to protect your private property? Or are the leaders in your network speaking of regeneration, co-habitation, equity and bio-mimicry along with kindness, empathy and consciousness?
Of those two narratives-- one of militarization and one of regeneration-- which one do you want your children or their children to grow up within? Choose wisely, because the blockchain is mirroring our beliefs back to us with a harsh light of humanity and the declarations you make now will live onchain for your children and their children to explore and examine which option you chose-- violence or compassion. Again, choose wisely.
