I am busy translating and revising the contents of a series of documents that will make up the renovated version of a massive web site (Constellation W – towards a knowledge-sharing society). The Constellation W site will present the work of Michel Cartier, in my opinion the francophone world’s version of a cross between Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan.
Here’s the introduction …
Are You Ready For The 21st Century ?
Understanding the mechanisms of our societies in order to change more effectively
by Michel Cartier
December 2008
Translation by Jon Husband
Where are we going ?
We are not living through an economic recession. We are living through a societal reorganization which may last four or five (or ten) years.
TABLE OF CONTENTS :
1- We are living through a massive rupture
2- The mechanisms which govern us
3- What will our new world look like ?
4- After Internet 1 comes Internet 2
5- A North American model of the information society
6- SUMMARY : strategies for the 21st century
A synthesis of current research
This appendix summarizes how various researchers anticipate the future of our society.
Half-baked ideas
This appendix outlines a series of hypotheses which should be discussed in various networks in order to be validated (or not).
It is an invitation to action.
The trust between the different participants in our society has disappeared. Unconsciously, many people today feel that our world is becoming something different, something new that we don’t know much about. In this new world, which holds both significant threats and marvelous promise, we have to create a new New Deal, a new Bretton Woods-like agreement, and probably a new Social Contract
Today, our cautious leaders are announcing a recession whilst others, more courageous, know and understand that a fundamental reorganization of society as we know it is underway. Finding our way out of a recession is relatively easy ; all it takes is injecting our money to re-inflate the capitalist system even if it is now past its sell-by date. This continuation of the past seeks nothing more than to continue and conserve the gains and assets of the existing economic elite. Moving beyond the current crisis will be much harder because a fundamental re-organization demands important behavioural changes both by citizens and by our society’s decision-makers ; this perspective is based on the belief that today’s post-industrial society is going through a fundamental and irreversible rupture with the past.
0- Today’s dead-end
Recently, the meltdown of financial markets was a seismic shock which has revealed the dead-end towards which our society is heading. We need to ask ourselves good questions if we want to develop new strategies that are adequate for our collective future.
• A continuity or a re-organization ?
The best way to come to terms with the approaching dead-end is to envision some form of continuity with the past.
Is the transition from the industrial era to the post-industrial era only a transition, or is it a fundamental rupture with the models we have been using (schema p. 7) ? How do we think from now on, in the context of a rupture ?
• The short term or the long term ?
Not only are our current decision-makers thinking only in terms of continuing with the past, but they are incapable of developing strategies that look out beyond four years into the future and offering those longer-term strategies to their constituents.
Should we not use new forms and tools of governance ?
• The capitalist system ?
One of the mechanisms which has brought us to a dead-end is the current form of capitalism. The economic elites have not known how to resolve the challenges of sharing goods and services to the benefit of all members of society ; rather, they have exacerbated the divide between themselves and the poor.
How do we begin to build a replacement for the current form of capitalism adapted to the conditions of the 21st Century, a model which is based on a more demanding and more fair moral framework ?
• Personalisation (or individualisation
) ?
Another mechanism that bears some primary responsibility for today’s dead-end is the strong trend of personalisation imposed on us by capitalism, which it uses to derive large amounts of profit.
Individualised human rights were made sacrosanct during the 2nd industrial era and are now acting to paralyze democracy. Collective society is coming apart at the seams and is being deconstructed ; today the human being is more free than ever before but has no fixed address. His or her SELF is afraid of truly being free, and is in search of an US to which to belong.
After the « silence » imposed by mainstream mass media, how can we reclaim our voice ? What should be the role of social networks in reclaiming that voice ? How can we build and sustain a participative democracy ?
• The mass media system ?
Another mechanism which bears some responsibility for our dead-end is the widespread presence of today’s model of mass media. We create understanding and meaning from information by processing and distributing that information. So, tainted by the personalisation offered by the mass media, that corporate mass media seeks to convert citizens into consumers through one-way message-driven communication. This does not enable the exchange and synthesis of information between people but offers a platter of infotainment wherein virtually all messages are subordinated to the images, to the emotions and to the laws of the market.
This process is managed by a media elite which is effectively a feudalised instrument of the economic elite. The challenge lies not so much in the daily distribution of large amounts of information but in the concentration of sources imposed by private interests.
This situation presents us with a second handicap. The technologies of communication in use (cinema, television, magazines, newspapers and DVDs) are borrowing their signs and symbols from American culture. In this situation, not only are non-American societies threatened by inevitable acculturation, but each of those cultures must wrestle against the laws of the market dictated by an economic elite which impose their marketing on our lives.
What model should we develop collectively to take back our voice and our being ? How should we create for ourselves a participative democracy ?
The New Deal was developed by Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1936, and consisted of a series of programs aimed at ending the Great depression in the USA
The current monetary system was negotiated at Bretton Woods in the USA in 1944. It resulted in the US dollar becoming the international currency of exchange and led to the birth of the IMF and the World Bank. Today it’s a question of updating or modernising Bretton Woods and reforming the IMF which should become a means of monitoring and sounding the alarm when agreed-upon systems do not function as they should.
The Social Contract is a set of theories which in the 18th century defined the role of the state in the western world; it was a core element of the origins of democracy.
The West has known four stages of globalisation :
• the romanisation of the Mediterranean basin by Rome (from the second half of the IIe century BC to the year 395 AD) ;
• the westernisation of the Atlantic by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (in the XVIe century) ;
• the europeanisation by England and France (during the XIXe century) ;
• the Americanisation since approximately 1980.
The current political class will accept almost anything in the name of job creation. By living from one election to the next, its vision does not exceed at a maximum the 4 years that it will govern, The adoption of a short-term horizon means the use of a logic of urgency which actually creates the future crises. How can we prepare for the
The liberal creed was that the concentration of wealth would translate into the enrichment of all of society (today this promise is contradiced by the OECD’s economic indicators. Fully one-half of all Americans account for only 2.5% of all the national wealth; the wealthiest 10% own 70% of the national wealth (according to the Wall Street Journal). It’s the confrontation between the speculation of the wealthy and the indebtedness of the poorest which is provoking today’s economic crisis. The problem is not the mechanisms for monitoring and regulating the free market but rather the existing mechanisms that enable the disparities and inequalities to continue to grow.
Today, non-conformity is the accepted norm for our society. Obsessed by the celebration of our indiduality and the ongoing search for ways to rebel against traditional institutions, we are frolicking about. in all directions while crying out “”Celebrate me, celebrate me”. The cult of me has found an amplifier; from tele-reality to the blogosphere and through YouTube etc., all the apparatus of popular culture has been transformed into a thundering form of karaoke which for each individual can fulfill Andy Warhol’s promise of 15 minutes of fame. Hal Niedzviecki, Hello, I’m Special.
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this writing by michel cartier is really interesting. thanks for posting it. will there be more? is there going to be an entire book of his translated writings? very interesting and hope to read more. thanks, hal niedzviecki.
Yes, there will be more .. quite a bit. As noted in the blog post, this is a re-girding of the loins, or more accurately preparation for the re-launch of a website named Constellation W.
We have often discussed publishing the material as a book, and probably will do so .. it’s basically all written, just needs to be structured into the proper “shape”, if you will.