The Model Isn’t the Territory, Either
Digital complexity doesn’t mean it’s reality.
I was making a familiar argument lately, at least for me, about how we need to abandon oversimplified 20th Century style movement politics for something much more complex. It was talk called “from the movement to the moment,” in which I explained how simple stories where we keep our eyes on the prize and march toward a singular goal end up justifying a whole lot of bad stuff along the way. I brought up the early World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and Occupy Wall Street, which confounded the press and politicians because they were made up of so many disparate groups and causes. The media didn’t know how to cover such protests, because they couldn’t be explained in a simple headline or two-minute TV report.
The digital age seemed to promise a more nuanced, collaborative, and real-time approach to movements, and to everything. Where television was about globalism and unifying dreams, the internet would embrace the true complexity underlying distributed solidarity. We’d stop telling ourselves stories, and start…
