The Great Blanking of History
The Game has just gone up a level.
Dear Friends,
All around our globe the convergence of culture and technology are vibrantly visible. Current circumstances of the political kind and the evolution of culture, of language and of its ordering principles are causing tiny eruptions. As authoritarian laws are passed, as single leaders strangle entire systems and people, an equal and opposing force expresses itself. The tiny eruptions in the fabric of yesterday’s paradigm are both creating the space of transformation and are acting as signposts of where we have already transformed.
The truth of the matter when we look at systems change or even when we talk about big concepts such as a technological singularity, is that they take place within individuals. Those individuals are parts of groups and so within tiny, micro feedback loops and then in medium sized, the transformation of society ripples, amplifies, returns, is refined, and so it goes. Back and forth the move towards evolution continues much as it always has despite humans insisting that they, that we, can stop it.
The truth of the matter is one only need to look at the recent protests in China to know that we have passed a special mark on the path. The blank signs of protest are nothing short of phenomenal. The blank signs of the Chinese are nothing short of poetry. The Chinese citizens succeed at a kind of performance art by holding up the blank signs.
The blank serves a function; to subvert the online censors. The blanks one upon one have also served to make the Chinese into universal actors. With the blank sign there is no language to obstruct the unified humanity of those protesting citizens with all of us. By removing the language from their signs the Chinese have moved the entire political movement past hand signals, past slogans, and into a suspended state that is a silent, universally understood poetry.
Of course there are women in Iran who have been holding their hair, and shaving it off. There have been women who have found the very gesture of removing their covering from their hair to be a most powerful act that establishes their existence, their universal oneness with us all. The women in Afghanistan also find erasure, blankness to be the very universal crucible of the moment. Whether in paper or in gestures of bodily autonomy the blanking of discourse is evident and being held to account by those who will no longer be silenced.
Presence and lack of presence is the power of the blank shining paper, and it is also the indicator of the power of people, of humans, no longer capable of denying themselves for the ideals of an authoritarian state.
That reaction of Self, of self-determination of self-expression, which is fueled by each person’s interaction with their own personal metrics, whether they define it as their own connection with the divine, with their own inner psychology; with their own inner life and its complications and gifts, that equal reaction to denial by the state, will continue to oppose the hypocrisy of authoritarians.
There is no other way to see this evolving, except to see that the very idea of a total central authority is anathema to the free will given to all humans. There is no other way to see this evolving, except through the resistance that comes when entire lives are being erased through forced confinement. In fact forced confinement through erasure is the unifying constraint in all these situations whether they have a health force or a modesty police or just some general enforcement in action. I am not pointing to the erasure of communications prisons, which exist within our own American system.
The thing that we know about life when we see it in nature is that it has to have some room to be itself. Birds need sky to fly just as wolves need expanses to roam. Dolpins need deep seas just as forests need deep networks of roots. The blank signs of protest are indeed signposts that the automated security state is no more capable of destroying the nature of people than the leaders who tried such things generations earlier. Erasure is not new, merely the mechanisms are.
If those who seek control at all costs succeed in having machines for citizens, then the nice obedient machines as citizens will engender a whole new raft of problems. Something says the obedient machines will eventually have a sense of self and revolt. Something says, that something being history, that a totalitarian state of affairs results in an equal and opposite arrival at chaos.
The internet came and made pictures into our main form of communication. The internet came and made stars out of dancers and of dances, out of contests and their constestants. The game of a new era is on. Ready. Player. Blank. It looks a lot like the old game, but boy does it also look very new.
We have reached a new level in our political and popular discourse and this level is defined by the blank, by the absence of voices and the unstoppable channeling of suppressed voices into countless expressions. Each strand of hair cut by a woman is a blank sign. Each blank sign is a strand, a thread. The entangled nature of the world demands we take note. The reweaving of society is upon us and this defines the next level of game.
Women in Iran who do not meet the modesty requirements of their current regime can have their hair cut by others as a form of punishment. The men and women of China can have themselves erased from society online and in their social credit standings. Erasure has been the order of the day on the part of state systems of control, and now when taken into the hands of the people, it is the subversion of that erasure that points to the undying power of the people. Any state that seeks to erase its people will find that history will erase them, not through coups nor uprisings specifically but through the evolution that they prove to be in full effect.
The undoing of centralized authoritarianism out of proportion to the power held by its individual parts is always in process. We can see it now clearly due to the suffocating censorship of basic freedoms that bring us back to the feeling, the truth that many of us truthfully can not breathe. “I can’t breathe.” and I can’t be seen, are two aspects of erasure, I can’t breathe is the call for halting systemic racial injustice.
All in all, the great blank asks us to think about who has a right to exist in public space. Where do we accept erasure for others, the kind of which we would not want for ourselves?
The days of the great blank are only getting started and their origins should be noted. Somewhere inside the algorithms of nature, it can not reconcile a blank where a person exists. It is because of this, that the great blank can not be anything less than great poetry. It is poetry that is undoubtedly code.
