The Information Age Is “Weaponized”

What is it like living in a world of billion dollar lies? Where the social worlds we occupy are fragmented and insular, giving rise to echo chambers of fake news and a lack of ability to discern what is real? All the while, global humanity moves toward a future nobody wants and sacred knowledge — like that of all scientific progress in the last 500 years, is in jeopardy with the looming ecological collapse of the biosphere.

I ask this question because it seems too many activists working to create positive change are oblivious to just how compromised our communication systems have become. They seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will find the memes that spread and come to dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists!

Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while forgetting just how big, diverse, and fragmented the world truly is. We saw this last year in the “Democratic Party Bubble” of support for Hillary Clinton that was utterly clueless about the churning seas of hatred and fear that coalesced into a Trump tsunami when election time arrived.

Even more insidiously, there are groups like the Kremlin in Russia and rogue networks of alternative media outlets engaging in information wars to keep us confused and fighting shadow enemies across these siloed communities. As I have written elsewhere, the real state of power is culture and so far the majority of humanity is losing on this battleground of stories and meanings.

What we need is a science of cultural change that separates wheat from chaff — enabling those of us working in support of healthy communities and the living systems on which they depend to see through the smoke and mirrors. I have called this culture design and have written about it here, here, here, and here. In short, it is an approach that applies the tools of cultural evolution, complexity science, and the cognitive/behavioral sciences to social change as it emerges in real time.

Why is this so important? Because too much is at stake (the planet is going through the death of capitalism and feels like a global “Easter Island” right now) and time is desperately short. According to the Stockholm Resilience Institute, we have already passed at least four of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating range for global civilization. We are in overshoot-and-collapse as I type these words to the page.

My collaborators and I are laying groundwork for bringing together social scientists, community leaders, designers and artists, activists and policymakers. Everyone who has a stake in the future and wants to help birth a new world compatible with life will be able to get involved. But first, we have to understand the scale of the problem. It is now the case that at least $24 trillion is hidden away in tax havens (imagine if we pulled just a portion of this out to fund the transition to sustainability) and far too much of this shadow money is being used to keep the status quo systems of wealth hoarding in place.

Increasing amounts of these resources are being “weaponized” to spread lies and confusion so that the walled cities of the future become fortresses to protect the massive wealth of today’s elites and their families. Everyone else is a pawn in their game. The sooner we realize this, the faster we can mobilize to reclaim our true rights to health and well-being in the post-capitalist world that will either come after a planetary crash-and-burn or by the “soft landing” approach of guided transition.

Are you ready to do your part? Wake up to see who the real enemies are. They are not political partisans (all major parties are complicit in the logic of wealth extraction) or ethnic opponents (even though things like structural racism are still chronically real). It is those who seek to divide us that must be put in their place. We must come together and rally as a collective humanity. Or perish together in ecological collapse.

The future will not be determined by any one of us. It will be those who tip the scales in aggregate force of vision and intentionality that set the course for where we all will go. So which side are you on — that of the wealth hoarders? Or those who nurture the continuation of life? Choose now. For we are in a time of consequences.

Onward, fellow humans.