ARE YOU BLIND?
Or is it just that you will not see the errors in the
Global Operating System?

by Kono Matsu


Here’s a party trick: Close your mouth and blow hard for 10 seconds.
Then exhale. You’ll produce a little puff of smoke - even if you
don’t smoke. That’s the diesel exhaust and other gases you’ve
quietly taken in all day.

Here’s another: Scarf down a double-burger and fries, wait an hour, then
go to the john. Your turds float. That’s from the fat content in the food.

Marvels abound on planet earth at the end of the 20th century. The frog
your kid caught in the lake - beside the fertilizer plant on the outskirts of
town - has a third leg: a show-and-tell frog. That’s the lake you used to
swim in. Your teenage niece in Des Moines is starving herself down to Kate
Moss proportions, in a country where a third of all women wear size men’s-extra-
large or larger. Mitsubishi is bigger than Norway. A guy who looks like
Lenin is living in your dumpster.

There’s a carnival of extremes to behold if you keep your eyes open. But
it’s getting harder to keep your eyes open. They sting by day’s end from the
UV radiation - the highest levels ever recorded - and from the smog.
Microwaves are passing through your body every second. There’s nowhere
you can go in the city to escape man-made sounds. The TV is on even in
your dreams.


Every day, in a thousand different ways, the world is
sending you a signal. This signal isn’t encrypted, or in some
tricky Slavic language. It’s not that hard to read. The global
system is sending you error messages that say, plain as day,
"General Failure".

The response of human beings to this message hasn’t
exactly been earnest and swift. We knew in the late ‘50s that
cigarettes were addictive and probably carcinogenic, but it
took us 30 years to put warnings on packs. We knew chloro-fluorocarbons
were depleting the ozone 20 years before the United Nations set 
limits on emissions. Did we sit on the pot for too long? Probably, only 
our children will know.

Last year, oil, natural gas and coal use set new records
(see graph below). At the Earth Summit in New York this past
June, the industrialized countries finally agreed to "significant
reductions" in carbon emissions (the extent of these reduc-tions
will be decided at the’ Kyoto Climate Convention next
December). In May, British Petroleum became the first of the
global oil giants to admit that there’s a consensus emerging
on global warming which it would be "unwise and potentially
dangerous" to ignore. By not dealing with this error earlier,
we may have knocked our planet out of whack for a thousand years.

What’s the effect of long-term exposure to radiation from
VDTs, transformers and kitchen appliances? Are they subtly
altering our brain or body chemistries in some way? Who
knows? What’s the psychological effect of life-long daily exposure
to thousands of commercial messages? Who knows?
Who cares? Apparently not us - there’s been little effort to
study these things.

Most of our global system errors so far have been cor-rectable
- with luck and with will, the ozone layer may eventually repair 
itself, greenhouse warming subside and the world’s population settle
at a sustainable level. But the genetic and biological diversity 
we are now losing is gone forever.

Human beings were born and have thrived within a vast
network of species and subspecies. But now, biological and
human economic activity are at war with each other. As biologist
Edward 0. Wilson points out in his The Diversity of life
(Harvard University Press, 1992), we humans have now triggered
the sixth major biodiversity extinction of the past 500
million years.

Yet who really gives a damn?

The scariest system error of all is the mental breakdown
of our own species: a creeping anxiety, a spreading mood disorder,
a dumbing down of discourse so gradual we don’t even
realize it’s happening. We sit motionless in front of the televised
parade of bizarre, extreme acts - home invasions, serial
killings, celebrity assassinations, genocidal wars - failing to
notice the widespread behavioral disorders, addictions and
ecocide that are the real news. We know, we feel that something
isn’t right, but we can’t quite muster the clarity of mind
to figure it out, let alone the energy to start doing something
about it.

The universe is not unfolding as it should. Details on the
ten o'clock news.

Here’s an unblinking look (if you can take it) at two of the
most significant errors threatening to crash our system.

S y s t e m E r r o r - Type 1945: PROGRESS
The past 120 years have been a time of never-ending
'progress.' Dazzled by the endless succession of wonder toys
-the telephone, radio, automobile, airplane, TV, the computer-
we booked our tickets to the promised land.

But after World War II, some of us started losing confidence.
The Holocaust rattled our spiritual foundations. The
utopian socialist dream soured. Then some of our wonder
toys started turning on us. The automobile, increasingly,
seemed like an agent of ecocide. TV was proving enormously
addictive and it wasn’t returning the love we showed it.
Then the American Dream lost its luster. The whole
idea of never-ending material progress suddenly seemed
ludicrous.

Finally came the psychological coup de grace: our beautiful
blue planet took on the dimensions of a cancerous
body - its cities metastasizing, its vital health curves clearly
out of control.

We badly need a new operating system to get us out of
this mess. Unfortunately, PROGRESS 2.0 isn’t on the market
yet. The world’s systems programmers-the artists, intellectuals,
scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians - can’t agree
on a design philosophy, or even about the need for a
new system.

Most of us in the affluent West live in denial. We cling to
the dream of never-ending material progress, trying to convince
ourselves that yet another golden age of growth and
prosperity is just around the corner. Look we say: we’re Number
One. Our liberal democratic and market capitalism operating
systems are installed in all but a handful of the nations in
the world. An explosion in trade and investment has produced,
over the past three years, a world growth rate (in
Gross World Product) nearly double that of the previous two
decades. The malls are packed. Stock markets are booming.
China is lifting off.

During the G-8 Economic Summit in Denver last June, an
ebullient President Clinton stood up in front of the world and
boasted about his 'new American approach' to economic
progress and held America up as a model for the rest of the
world to follow.

And yet, this kind of economic one-upmanship ultimately
rings hollow. In fact, every year the Summit feels more and
more like a charade. If we’re on the right path, if the global
economy is in such fine shape, why are fisheries around the
world vanishing? Why is the soil eroding? Why are deserts
spreading? Why are 'floods of the century' happening in such
alarming numbers? Why are we still burning so much fossil
fuel? Why are we losing biodiversity at an exponential rate?

Why don’t the G-8 leaders have a problem with all of this?

The answer lies in an outdated economic operating system
called NEOCLASSIC 2.1. We’ve been using it since 1945 to
run our economy and to measure its performance. This
wicked little piece of software leaves all 'externalities' - the
social and environmental costs of our way of doing business -out
of its calculations. Year after year, it keeps telling us that
the Gross World Product is going up, that we’re growing and
making progress - when in fact we’re living off the death of
nature and the backs of future generations.

What’s to be done? It’s pretty clear: we need a new economic
operating system. Out with the old, in with the new,
starting with:

BIONOMICS 1.0
Introducing a revolutionary software package complete with
the following killer apps:
*Confrontation: Look your economics professors in the
eye and ask them how they measure progress. Air 30-second
TV 'mindbombs' on CNN Headline News asking that same
question.
*Imposition: Cool down hot money with a UN-adminis-tered
World Tobin Tax (WTT) -a l/4% levy on all international
financial transactions.
*Agitation: Stage a worldwide TV spectacle during next
year’s G-8 Economic Summit in Birmingham, UK. The scenario:
heads of state pass through an impassioned gauntlet
of protesters wearing death masks and waving signs that say:
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS A DOOMSDAY MACHINE, IMPLEMENT
THE TOBIN TAX NOW, and ECONOMISTS MUST LEARN
TO SUBTRACT. Distribute a video news release, featuring
interviews with ecological economics luminaries and stunning
footage of planetary distress, to TV stations around the world.

That night on the evening news, we dump NEOCLASSIC
2.1, reboot, and start anew.

System Error - Type 1934: FREEDOM
Communism was a soft systems error that stifled individual
freedom. Gorbachev rebooted just in time. Now Eastern Europeans
are busy upgrading their system software.

FREEDOM has been one of Western civilization’s most
powerful applications. First developed in Greece with the
notion of 'rule by the people,' it took a mighty leap forward
with the Magna Carta in England and then spread to the
colonies, where it inspired the end of slavery, universal suffrage
and the slow climb toward equal status for all people,
regardless of race, sexual orientation or age.
In the communications realm, FREEDOM was continually
upgraded, from freedom of opinion (first guaranteed in ancient
Greece) to freedom of expression (first guaranteed in the English
Bill of Rights) to freedom of the press (first guaranteed in
the US constitution).

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
drawn up by all nations after World War II, says, in part:
Everyone has the right...to hold opinions without interference and
to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any
media regardless of frontiers.

Article 13 of the 1979 American Convention on Human
Rights reads, in part:
The right of expression may not be restricted by indirect methods or
means, such as the abuse of government or private controls over
newsprint, radio broadcasting, . ..or any other means tending to
impede the communication and circulation of ideas and opinions.

And yet, despite such seemingly ironclad protection,
freedom today is far from secure. It’s under attack on two
major fronts:

First, corporations (which, since an 1886 Supreme Court
ruling have had the same legal status and constitutional liber.
ties as real persons - in retrospect, a very serious system
error) are using their First Amendment legal rights to shape
elections and the content of media, extend commercial
speech and their control over media outlets and protect their
'right' to advertise and sell harmful and even deadly products.
This meteoric rise of the great corporate 'person,' with
rights and powers well beyond those of real people, is a corruption
of the First Amendment that, if not stopped now, may
overwhelm us.

The other great threat to freedom is a nasty virus that has
slowly infected our communications software. This so-called
COMMERCIAL infovirus is a virulent replicator that inhibits the
Free flow of ideas in three ways:

First, it turns up the noise level in the system.

Then it starts filtering the news and information.

And finally it blocks citizen access.

The COMMERCIAL virus has already corrupted
and television, partially corrupted newspapers
radio and  magazines, and it’s now replicating furiously in cyberspace.
Left unchecked, it will corrupt the whole global communications
infrastructure.

Clearly, we need some kind of virus protection.
Introducing: MEDIA CARTA 1.0, a brand new communications
package with the following built-in safeguards:
*Canadian Charter: Assert the right of all Canadian citizens
to walk into their local TV stations and buy 30 seconds of
airtime. (A precedent-setting legal action against the CBC network
is currently winding its way through the Canadian court
system. The next court action is on Oct. 8 in the British
Columbia Court of Appeal.)
*First Amendment: Take legal action against the NBC, CBS
and ABC TV networks, which have routinely refused to sell airtime
to the Media Foundation and other activist groups since
1991. (This action will start winding its way through the US
court system next March.)
*Phoenix: Launch a grassroots media reform movement
that breaks up the media monopolies, saves cyberspace from
going the way of TV and reasserts democratic dominion over
the mental commons.
*Universal: Enshrine the 'right to access' and the
'right to communicate' as fundamental human rights in the
constitutions of all free nations and in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.

The battle for MEDIA CARTA is shaping up as the great
freedom fight of our information age. Good luck, jammer!
Take a deep breath, drag FREEDOM 1.0 over to the trash can
and be done with it. Now RESTART. Don’t blink. And whatever
you do, don’t get Bill Gates involved.

Guerrilla tactician Kono Matsu is a regular
contributor to Adbusters.