Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

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This content was posted on  20 May 21  by   Douglas Rushkoff  on  Facebook Page
A renaissance does not mean a return to the past. We don’t go back to …

A renaissance does not mean a return to the past. We don’t go back to the Middle Ages, bloodletting, feudalism, or sword fights in the street. Rather, we bring forward themes and values of previous ages and reinvent them in new forms. Retrieval makes progress less purely linear — not so much a ladder as a spiral staircase, continually repeating the same pattern, but ascending all the way. Retrieval helps us experience the insight of premodern cultures that nothing is absolutely new; everything is renewal.

Our general lack of awareness about the values being retrieved by digital technology made it easy for status quo powers to co-opt our renaissance and reduce it to just another revolution. So, like a counterculture packaged and resold to teens at the mall, new, potentially transformative threads are exploited by those looking to win the same old games. The 1960s’ be-ins and free love communes were seized upon by lecherous men looking to leverage the openness of psychedelic culture for easy sex. The intellectual potential of the 1990s’ internet was exploited by stock traders looking to sell new stories to investors. The unprecedented possibilities for connection offered by social media in the 2000s were surrendered to the more immediately profitable pursuits of surveillance, data mining, and user control. And the sharing economy of the 2010s was handily put down by venture capitalists, who used these same principles to establish incontestable and extractive platform monopolies.

📚 Read more from Medium’s weekly Team Human serialization:

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Success in the future depends on bringing forward the values of previous ages

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