By Richard Thieme

In “Islands in the Clickstream: Telling Time by a Broken Clock,” I said:

All organizations are morphing into forms appropriate to the digital world. In retrospect, we will see our current structures the way Christians see remnants of what they call “pagan” myths in their stories.

The miraculous is another name for that which is unpredictable from inside the old model. Trying to understand what’s emerging using old words or images is like telling time by broken clocks. We are riding a ship on the river of time as the ship is being built. It will take time to finish that ship, and when we do, we will already have been becoming something else.

A friend responded:

“On the Mayflower, the Pilgrims brought over a printed copy of the Geneva Bible. On the good ship Digital, what form do you suppose the ‘Bible’ will take?”

Not only scriptures but all significant texts will morph into dynamic forms that are interactive, modular, and fluid (like this one)… self-modifying structures that respond to responses from all who engage with its multitude of faces. Everyone encountering that 3D space or fractal narrative will change and be changed by it.

Real canons are open evolving and free … including canons (we see now) that seemed to be fixed in print but which in fact evolved in the consciousness of readers, changing every time they were read.

Sacred digital space will look more like a flowing mobile than a straight-line text, except that the nodes of the mobile will be mobiles too. But as I said, printed texts are like that too (we see now), the text rewritten by each reader’s experience: our linked modular minds the framework of the text which flows like electric words on a sign through the bulbs of our brains.

By Richard Thieme

Back in the good old days of a Spain ruled with an iron fist by General Francisco Franco, everyone who mattered always knew where everybody else always was.

Every means of transportation was watched by two members of the Guardia Civil, the state police known for their three-cornered patent leather hats. On every train, every bus, a pair of the police searched the crowd for “special” faces.

I rode a train one day from Cordoba to Grenada and found myself in a compartment with two Guardia Civil. I had lived in Madrid long enough to carry on a conversation. Nobody else in the compartment spoke.

One of the police suddenly asked if I knew why they must be so vigilant. I shook my head. A moment later, he was sitting next to me, showing me a book he said they studied every night. The book consisted of photographs of heads, shot stabbed crushed or beaten.

“This is what the enemy will do,” he said, “if we do not remain vigilant.”

When I returned to Madrid, the street door to my apartment was locked. Because I was a foreigner, I didn’t have a key. I clapped for the serreno.

The serreno was responsible for several square blocks. He had keys to the outer doors. When my door was locked, I clapped and clapped, the sound of my clapping echoing down the late night street. From wherever he was – usually inside one of the “closed” bars – the serreno came running to open the door.

His real job was to report anyone out of the ordinary to the state police.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation recently proposed a regulation requiring insured nonmember banks to develop and maintain “Know Your Customer” programs. The regulation would require each nonmember bank to develop a program designed to determine the identity of its customers, the sources of their funds, and the normal and expected transactions of its customers. Banks are to report any transactions that look suspicious.

We were always safe on the late night streets of Madrid. The Guardia Civil, who questioned criminal suspects, were always assigned far from home, lest sentiment interfere with their work.

Nor does sentiment interfere with surveillance cameras in city centers, biometric identifiers, or the work of the FDIC. Privacy always dies for good reasons, always in the name of security and safety.

And unlike the serrenos in Franco’s Spain, we don’t even have to tip.

The political campaign this year was claustrophobic, pressing us up against the simplistic misrepresentations and distortions that pass for debate in the digital world.  Much of the time, it felt like a small elevator, stuck between floors.  But the day after the election, there’s a breath of fresh air that reminds me of one definition of a schlemiel, that when he finally leaves the room, it feels like someone we like came in.

It’s been years since we stayed up late to learn who won. This year, it felt like it mattered. We want to believe that ideals to which we once committed our lives still count. We can get a little cynical, after all, and at the least, we want to bequeath a legacy of possibility and promise to the next generation.

And that’s how it felt when Russ Feingold won reelection as a Senator from Wisconsin. What made the difference? The defeat of a guy we saw only in digital images, funded by outside interests? No, I think it was more the feeling that Feingold pretty much maintained his integrity from one term to the next and presented himself pretty much as he really is. His commitment to campaign reform and his personal and public behaviors are congruent, and that’s what a lot of us voted to affirm.

Feingold is not a saint, but his presentation of the various levels of truth about himself was seamless. His re-election was a vote for an image of transparent integrity. That’s what kept us up last night, the desire to see reaffirmed that most people in possession of most facts will pretty much make the right decisions pretty much most of the time.

An article in this week’s Space News notes that “the coming surge in supply of commercially produced high-resolution satellite imagery threatens to siphon talent from U.S. and European defense departments.”

Once upon a time, those incredible close-ups belonged to intelligence agencies. Now, anyone can buy them. But the data doesn’t speak for itself. With 28 private-sector initiatives for selling satellite imagery, there aren’t enough well-trained imagery analysts out there.

An immense mass of data is filling our screens. The more data, the greater the number of concentric circles defining levels of abstraction. The interface is everything, and the interface – while assisted by pattern-matching computers – is defined by human need.

In society as a whole, too, we need people who can see meaningful patterns, select and connect the relevant dots, people who know how to build the Big Picture and bring it down to street-level needs.

It is said that George Bush, because he headed the CIA, understood the value of intelligence better than most presidents. He knew that gathering information was easy, but using information to understand a person’s motives or intentions was difficult. That required wisdom.

The Cincinnati Inquirer just paid Chiquita Brands International ten million dollars because a reporter hacked their voice mail system and used private messages to write a story. These days, anybody can be a spy.  Hacking the system is easy. Using the information to leverage one’s advantage without signaling the opponent that the information has been replicated is trickier.

It is said that Winston Churchill allowed the Germans to bomb Coventry rather than communicate that the Allies had cracked their code. Microsoft seems to have a sixth sense about a competitor’s next move. Marketers link and data-mine the pattern of our actions. Imagery analysts, all, in short, who understand that interlacing images constitute human identity in a digital world.

Increasingly dire predictions about Y2K flash across the Internet. This morning it was Canadian Naval captains who were told their ships may have to be docked to serve as power plants, field hospitals, soup kitchens.

And power grids in third world countries? Don’t even ask.

Hoping to find an intimation of rationality in our species, I browsed a September issue of Science News. But the chaotic swirls of our fractal world, macro and micro, were also in disarray.

A committee is investigating 87,000 chemicals for their potential to disrupt hormones in human and wildlife because “endocrine disrupters” are generating widespread deformities in animals.

And a new strain of HIV appeared in Cameroon. And a common pesticide is clobbering amphibians. And giant storms on Jupiter remind us of the weather’s indifference. And a newly discovered valley in the South Pacific may mark the place where the earth’s outer shell has started to tear. And antidotes to anthrax, the biological weapon of choice, are ineffective. And … why go on?

So was there any Good News?

Well, when flocking birds are looking for food, it’s best not to be near a glutton. The bully birds grab all the good grub. And, a study suggests, smart birds know which piggy-birds to avoid. Dominant siskins, for example, have larger markings on their chests, so savvy siskins look for birds with smaller spots. When they eat next to a less aggressive neighbor, there’s plenty to go around.

That’s something to remember as the Y2K bug begins to make inroads (it’s already starting). I’m going to hang with slender vegetarians who are willing to share, friends who live in modest houses, drive smaller cars. Humans who know that enough is a feast. Maybe come the millenium, the meek who stick together really will inherit the earth.

In the television game show Jeopardy, contestants are given answers and asked to come up with the right questions. Wired Magazine provides a similar feature, juxtaposing statements by dead technocrats – a recent issue interviewed Nikola Tesla, for example – with modern questions.

At first it felt like a disconnect, plugging questions into answers. But then I thought of how we do history. I was taught that “history” was fixed, as objective as laws of thermodynamics. Then revisionist history hit the streets. New heroines and heroes were uncovered and linked to different questions. The kaleidoscope turned, the pattern of the past dissolved and reformed.

Those in the dominant culture often had a hard time hearing challenges to patterns of meaning they thought were immutable. A white male Christian heterosexual New Englander told me he was trying to understand the various ethnic groups but it was difficult when you didn’t belong to one yourself.

The World Wide Web has millions of web sites. Thousands more ignite and glow like new stars every day. It isn’t a glitzy interface or twirling animations that matter most but the depth of the content they contain. A map of the Web weighted according to relevance would look like a planetary map, with giants in the foreground and lots of little rocks in outer orbits.

We would all draw that map differently. The pattern of the Web flows into colors and contours that only a moment ago would have been unthinkable. The relevance of sites on cancer, say, or Y2K, is determined by our questions, not by their intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is a function of our life situation, which shades and arranges the data. The Web has billions and billions of answers, but the pattern of our questions connects those luminous dots into constellations.

That’s the title of a recent study of participation in newsgroups by psychologists who discovered that “online gatherings matter most to participants in marginalized but concealable groups.”  That probably isn’t news to you, if you’re reading this on-line, because you have long known that life on the margins is richly textured, nuanced in subtle and rewarding ways.

Life began in brackish waters, after all, in marshes and tide pools, where things were a little murky. We prefer blurred margins where animal and plant are difficult to distinguish, where life dissolves into its constituent elements. We thrive on ambiguity and complexity, which seems to do justice to life fired point blank from the barrel of a gun, as Ortega y Gasset said, in all its immediacy and nowness.

The root of the word “Hebrew” was habiru, which meant a rag-tag motley assemblage of slaves from various places that made common cause building pyramids for pharaohs. The fusing fire of their desert journey turned that word around, making a proud name of what had been used as an insult.

The edge is the new center. Those who know how to live on the edge thrive in a world moving at the speed of life. Next year’s doctrine or seminar topic is this year’s horse laugh. Yes, the Net is indeed a haven for those into illicit drug use, sexual spanking, and everything else, as the study said. We few, we happy few, we band of eccentric netizens do rejoice when we look into the digital mirror and see more than our own face reflected.

Oh, give me the margins, where voyeurs, epileptics and incest survivors can reinvent themselves beyond categories created by social scientists holding onto their labels for balance as they lean in from the edge to have a good look.

An email friend asked, “How’s your spiritual journey?”

Then a friend called who I had just seen at a National Speakers Association convention. NSA is a huge circus tent into which all of us talking animals come prancing and dancing and making our various noises. One of the “center ring” presentations was overtly religious, and my friend called to say he had been upset at the man’s presumption, that the guy felt he had the right to advance his personal views that way.

I often write and speak about what I call techno-spirituality, by which I mean our diverse ways of being fully human in a wired world. Our spiritual quests are linked to the imagery of our traditions and how we couple with them. Mental artifacts couple with digital ones. The digital world is becoming the “space” in which we live and move and have our being. Because digital imagery works differently than writing or print, our ways of holding ourselves as possibilities for action in the world (one definition of spirituality) are transformed.

Our religious structures are subsumed in the spiritual awakening of not only humankind, but all sentient beings that inhabit the millions of planets that orbit a billion suns. As Gandhi said, “God has no religion.” Nevertheless, religions abound, most of them “good enough” vehicles to get us where we’re going. They’re airplanes that self-destruct just as we touch down at our final destination.

My spirituality? It’s OK, thanks. It’s there and it’s not there. Once our spirituality becomes Everything, it becomes Nothing. Context is content, the medium the message.

Life unfolds like a flower. The “spiritual journey” is merely its scent. A rose doesn’t have to say it’s a rose, it merely has to be one, letting its pale fragrance do the talking.

I seldom return to something I’ve written before, but the Islands in the Clickstream column called “Life in a Nudist Colony” is appropriate to the week’s events.

“Behaviors,” I wrote, “that used to be called “back-stage” are brought into our living rooms twenty four hours a day. The internet and satellite and cable television are really one thing, a single medium that fuses news and entertainment.

Anchors  on the “nightly news,” speaking with the pinched tones of those who hold the high moral ground, rush every snippet onto the screen ”

Now the collusion of government and media is out in the open. Against all precedent, Congress plastered the juicy details onto the Internet – “splat!” – and representatives who recently decried the sexual content of the Net shoveled with gusto. The war was on.

But this is a war that takes no prisoners. Today Henry Hyde joined the lengthening parade of the naked, his former political pieties juxtaposed with a picture of a bimbo sitting on his lap.

“Why don’t you guys use what you know about Senator X?” I asked a political operative a few years ago. We had been talking about the stories about our governor and one of our senators.

“We’d kill each other,” he said. “We know too much. Nobody will fire the first shot.”

But somebody did. And because we live in a nudist colony now, in which everybody can see the details of everyone else’s life, we had better find a way to call a truce.

We have to act as if we’re still wearing clothes, even though we’re all naked. Civility – as William James said of wisdom – means knowing what to overlook.  The boundaries between public and private life must be intentional, or they won’t exist.  And leadership – which requires some distance in order to be exercised – will become impossible.

The earth is one huge dysfunctional family and now and then it just has to act out.

Most of the time, our species more or less manages. Yes, there are excesses, but the lack of immediate feedback lets them persist. We keep sweeping dirt under the carpet and walking uphill.

Humanity lives inside a great luminous bubble that floats above the biosphere like an immense balloon. A head detached from its body. When the body wants the head to listen, however, it finds a way to get its attention.

Our global economy is a patchwork of cultures in which economic behaviors are deeply embedded, but we wanted to believe we were one happy family frolicking in a free market.  Frightened governments rush to wall off their economies and currencies like the Taliban banning televisions, fleeing denial for deeper denial, searching for the right cave in which to hole up.

And we haven’t even mentioned Y2K.

Good news and bad news. A single political economy will win in the long run, but only after we deal with the truth of who we are. That can take a while. And that truth feels at first like the pain of abrasion instead of the truth that sets us free.

The earth needs a good therapist, but who could work with such a huge group? Maybe a 12-step meeting on the Internet is better. Acknowledge our mutual complicity in the inability to think more than ten minutes ahead, then use that moment of redemption and communion as leverage, bootstrapping ourselves to the next level.

None of us is all of it. All of us are part of it. Humility, in short, is a better fuel than greed or fear. Humility, derived from “humus,” earth, in which we had better be rooted when the winter winds begin to blow.