Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (8 page)

Our impatient disgust with politics as usual combined with our newfound faith in our own gut sensibilities drives us to take matters into our own hands—in journalism and beyond. In a political world where ideological goals are replaced by terror and rage, it’s no wonder the first true political movement to emerge out of present shock would be the Tea Party. This is the politics of PTSD, inspired by a no-nonsense brand of libertarianism espoused by Texas congressman Ron Paul. Taking its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists dumped British tea into the harbor in a tax revolt, today’s Tea Party movement shares the antiauthoritarian impulse of its namesake and then expresses it as a distrust of government in all forms. While the Tea Party may have originated as an antitax movement, it has been characterized over time more by a disdain for consensus and an almost deliberate effort to remain ignorant of facts that may contradict its oversimplified goals.

Tea Partiers, such as Michele Bachmann, either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented the concept of a debt ceiling as a vote to authorize additional spending (when it is actually a vote to pay what has already been spent). The solution to the seemingly perpetual debt crisis? Shut down government. Healthcare system too complicated? End it. (Except, of course, for Medicare, which doesn’t count.) Russia and China are evil, Arabs are scary, Mexicans are taking Americans’ jobs, and climate change is a hoax. As Columbia University historian Mark Lilla has chronicled, the combination of amplified self-confidence and fear of elites is a dangerous one. In his view, the Tea Partiers “have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.”
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If the Tea Party is to be disparaged for anything, it is not for being too conservative, too right wing, or too libertarian, but simply too immature, quick-triggered, and impatient for final answers. Traumatized by the collapse of the narratives that used to organize reality and armed with what appears to be access to direct democracy, its members ache for harsh, quick fixes to age-old problems—something they can really
feel
—as if fomenting a painful apocalypse would be better than enduring the numbing present.

More intellectually grounded conservatives and GOP regulars fear the Tea Party more than they fear Democrats, for they understand that this knee-jerk race to results undermines the very foundation and justification for representative democracy. As former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum laments:

A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to
American Idol
to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
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Representative democracy has a hard enough time justifying itself in a digitally connected world where representation no longer means sending someone on a three-day carriage ride to the capital. Having cynically embraced the Tea Party as a means to an end, Republicans now face erosion of party integrity from within. Meanwhile, as if aware of the role that the twenty-four-hour news cycle played in having generated this phenomenon, CNN partners with the Tea Party to arrange televised presidential debates. For the one thing the Tea Party appears to want more than the destruction of government is to elect Tea Party members to positions within it.

The impatient rush to judgment of the Tea Party movement is only as unnerving as the perpetually patient deliberation of its counterpart present shock movement, Occupy Wall Street. Opposite reactions to collapse of political narrative, the Tea Party yearns for finality while the Occupy movement attempts to sustain indeterminacy.

Inspired by the social-media-influenced revolutions of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street began as a one-day campaign to call attention to the inequities inherent in a bank-run, quarterly-focused, debt-driven economy. It morphed into something of a permanent revolution, however, dedicated to producing new models of political and economic activity by its very example. Tea Partiers mean to wipe out the chaotic confusion of a world without definitive stories; the Occupiers mean to embed themselves within it so that new forms may emerge. It’s not an easy sell. The Tea Party’s high-profile candidates and caustic rhetoric are as perfectly matched for the quick-cut and argument-driven programming of the cable news networks as the Occupiers are incompatible. Though both movements are reactions to the collapse of compelling and believable narratives, the Tea Party has succumbed to and even embraced the crisis mentality, while Occupy Wall Street attempts to transcend it.

This is at least part of why mainstream television news reporters appeared so determined to cast Occupy Wall Street as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. As if defending against the coming obsolescence of their own truncated news formats, television journalists reported that the movement’s inability to articulate its agenda in ten seconds or less meant there was no agenda at all. In a segment titled “Seriously?!” CNN business anchor Erin Burnett ridiculed the goings-on at Zuccotti Park. “What are they protesting?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.” Like
The Tonight Show
host Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American history, Burnett’s main objective was to prove that the protesters didn’t know that the US government had been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. More predictably, perhaps, a Fox News reporter appeared flummoxed when the Occupier he interviewed refused to explain how he wanted the protests to end. Attempting to transcend the standard political narrative, the protester explained, “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue.”
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In this sense, regardless of whether its economic agenda is grounded in reality, Occupy Wall Street does constitute the first truly postnarrative political movement. Unlike the civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign, it does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, it does not express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals, nor does it understand itself as having a particular endpoint. The Occupiers’ lack of a specific goal makes it hard for them to maintain focus and cohesion. The movement may be attempting to embrace too wide an array of complaints, demands, and goals: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity, and so on. But these many issues are connected: different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system—and they believe they are all experiencing symptoms of the same core problem. But for journalists or politicians to pretend they have no idea what the movement wants is disingenuous and really just another form of present shock. What upsets banking’s defenders and traditional Democrats alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That’s because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama and subsequent youth disillusionment), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. It is not about winning some debate point and then going home. Rather, as the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion. It is not about scoring a victory, but groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement that wins and ends; it is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion and creates as many questions as it answers. The urban survival camps they set up around the world were a bit more like showpieces, congresses, and beta tests of new ideas or revivals of old ones. Unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies, and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It is both inspiring and aggravating.

Occupy’s General Assembly methodology, for example, is a highly flexible approach to group discussion and consensus building borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Unlike parliamentary rules that promote debate, difference, and decision, the General Assembly forges consensus by stacking ideas and objections as they arise, and then making sure they are all eventually heard. The whole thing is orchestrated through simple hand gestures. Elements in the stack are prioritized, and everyone gets a chance to speak. Even after votes, exceptions and objections are incorporated as amendments.

On the one hand, the process seems like an evolutionary leap forward in consensus building. Dispensing with preconceived narratives about generating policy demands or settling the score between Right versus Left, this process eschews debate (or what Enlightenment philosophers called “dialectic”) for consensus. It is a blatant rejection of the binary, winner-takes-all, political operating system that has been characterizing political discourse since at least the French National Assembly of the 1700s. But it is also a painstakingly slow, almost interminably boring process, in which the problem of how to deal with noise from bongo drummers ends up getting equal time with how to address student debt. It works well for those who are committed to sitting in a park doing little else with their days and nights, but is excruciating for those committed to producing results. Engaged with this way, the present lasts a whole long time.

The ambiance and approach of the Occupiers is more like a university—one of life’s great pauses—than a political movement. Both online and offline spaces consist largely of teach-ins about the issues they are concerned with. Young people teach one another or invite guests to lecture them about subjects such as how the economy works, the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, possible responses to mass foreclosure, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, and even best practices for civil disobedience.

The approach is unwieldy and unpredictable but oddly consistent with the values of a postnarrative landscape. The Occupy ethos concerns replacing the zero-sum, closed-ended game of financial competition with a more sustainable, open-ended game of abundance and mutual aid. In the traditional political narrative, this sounds like communism, but to the Occupiers, it is a realization of the peer-to-peer sensibility of the social net. It is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that—like a massive multiplayer online game—is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.

INFINITE GAMES

Computer games may, in fact, be popular culture’s first satisfactory answer to the collapse of narrative. Believe what we may about their role in destroying everything from attention spans and eyesight to social interactions and interest in reading, video games do come to the rescue of a society for whom books, TV, and movies no longer function as well as they used to. This is not simply because they are brighter and louder; the sounds and imagery on kids’ TV these days have higher resolution and are even more densely packed. Video games have surpassed all other forms of entertainment in market share and cultural importance because they engage with players in an open-ended fashion, they communicate through experience instead of telling, and they invite players into the creative process. While video games do occur over linear time, they are not arced like stories between a past and the future. When they are off, they are gone. When they are on, they are in the now.

Although religious historian James Carse came up with the concept of “infinite games” well before computer games had overtaken television, music, and movies as our dominant entertainment industry, his two categories of play help explain why electronic gaming would gain such favor in an era of present shock. Finite games are those with fixed endings—winners and losers. Most every game from tennis to football works this way. Victory is the scarcity: there can be only one winner, so players compete for the win. Infinite games, on the other hand, are more about the play itself. They do not have a knowable beginning or ending, and players attempt to keep the game going simply for the sake of the play. There are no boundaries, and rules can change as the game continues. Carse’s point is to promote the open-ended, abundant thinking of infinite games. Instead of competing against one another and aching for the finality of conclusion, we should be playing with one another in order to maximize the fun for all. Instead of yearning for victory and the death of finite games, we should be actively enjoying the present and trying to sustain the playability of the moment. It’s an approach that favors improvisation over fixed rules, internal sensibilities over imposed morals, and playfulness over seriousness.

While there is no such thing as a perfectly infinite game (except maybe for life itself), there are many increasingly popular forms of play that point the way to Carse’s ideal. For anyone but professional performers, improvisational storytelling usually ends with early childhood and is replaced with books, television, and organized play. But beginning in the mid-1970s (right around the time that TV remotes became standard features), a new form of game emerged called the fantasy role-playing game, or RPG. Inspired by the rules written for people who play war games with medieval miniature figures, Dungeons & Dragons, the first published RPG, was a simple rule set that allowed players to imagine and enact adventures on a tabletop.
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Unlike conventional games with sides and rules and winners, Dungeons & Dragons was really just a starting place for interactive storytelling. Less like a performance than one of artist Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” D&D provided an excuse and a context for people to gather and imagine adventures together. Each player began by creating a character sheet that defined his identity and attributes. Some attributes were purely creative (a dwarf with blond hair who wears a red hat), while others determined a character’s abilities in the game, such as strength level, magical skills, or intelligence. A Dungeon Master led the proceedings and refereed interactions. Beyond that, characters went on adventures and engaged in conflicts as fanciful as they could imagine.