I just
listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times’ interview with Martin Gurri, the
author of The Revolt of the Public. The book posits that our transition
to a “fifth wave” of (all-to-all) media technologies has swamped our earlier
hierarchical (one-to-many) broadcast systems, resulting in the erosion of
respect for elite knowledge, elite institutions, and rule by elite politicians
operating under the old rules of liberal democracy. Gurri argues that the
resulting chaos has left room for an upswelling of nihilistic thinking,
nihilistic protests, and nihilistic “resentment politics” around the world.
In the
spirit of this discussion, I have updated an earlier essay about the 2016 rise
of Trump as a manifestation of a fear-based reaction to the activation of fifth
and sixth chakra energies in our Infosphere as our consciousness continues to
evolve to higher states, and new media forms emerge to reflect it back to us.
For links
to the positive aspects of these activations, see my earlier blog posts.
I am finishing a new essay about our seventh (transhuman connectivity) and
eighth (AI and consciousness becoming self-aware) chakra activations, and hope
to post it soon.
Readers of Digital
Dharma (and this blog) are already familiar with the idea that our communications
technologies impact all aspects of our social, spiritual and cultural
life, and that most importantly, this impact is a two-way street. Our
technology is both a product of the evolution of consciousness, and a mirror of
this evolution. In my writing, I have used the metaphor of the chakras to
explore how the light and shadow of each new medium impacts our energy body,
our psychology, and our spiritual dharma, as well as our politics, culture and social
worlds. This dance of media-stimulated, media reflected, evolution and retreat
across all these domains is encapsulated in today’s headlines, and most
clearly, in the rise, fall and return (along with the unelected cyberbully, Elon
Musk) of Donald Trump.
While “connection
to all things” is the spiritual opportunity of the activated fifth (internet) chakra,
and “seeing beyond the veil” is the positive opportunity of the (digital
decoding) sixth, their shadow aspects are also reflected in our social media
and our politics. In many ways, from a digital dharma perspective, Trump’s
campaigns were built on this anxiety. His call to build border walls and
retreat from global alliances and global trade, and his attacks on the “deep
state” (and on the idea of truth itself), reflected these chakra fears.
His mastery of first chakra “security signaling” (via Twitter) brought him into
power in 2016. His recognition of the power of podcasting to activate third
chakra “identity passion” and his mockery of the fourth chakra “television values”
of diversity and inclusion drove his return in 2024. His embrace of the “tech
bros” fantasies of AI-driven government is perhaps another shadow reaction – this
time to the stimulation of our global seventh chakra, the cosmic library of all
knowledge. I will explore this theme in another post.
From
Television to Twitter to Trump
Back in the
late 1950’s, media scholar Marshall McLuhan watched as television swept across
Canada, ending the dominance of radio and print media, but more importantly,
changing family life, social norms, and even political expression. He coined
the phrase, “the medium is the message,” to get us to look at the impacts of a
communications technology form that had nothing to do with the programming
delivered on it. Scores of books and thousands of articles have analyzed
television through McLuhan’s lens, looking at the deep changes wrought by this
flickering “electronic hearth.”
In Digital
Dharma, I proposed that television was an extension of our fourth chakra’s emotional
heart: a medium of expression and feelings, stimulating projected romantic
attachment to those like us (or those we want to like us), sympathy for those
different than us, and an addictive hunger to suppress those new feelings by
stuffing ourselves with food, material objects and all forms of distraction. Philosopher
Ken Wilber has called this response “boomeritis” – utopian dreaming and
multicultural sympathies bordering on collective guilt for all the world’s
victims, mixed with unacknowledged attachment to material luxuries and high
drama.
Television’s
gift to the “boomer” generation was its face-to-face close-up view of the
world’s diverse community. Despite its menu of cowboys and Indians,
crime-fighters and often violent cartoons, TV also introduced us to the humanity
of outsiders of different colors, tribe and nation. It challenged us to see
our entire planet as one Spaceship Earth. It was the medium of human and animal
rights, the environment and holistic thinking. Balancing its diet of “hard
news” and glorified sports violence, it was also a medium of the intimate
family narrative and soap operas of personal disclosure, and it brought the
carnage of the Vietnam War into every living room. And, at the same time TV was
bringing the world to the developed west, it was exporting these values, and
the images of consumer wealth, to the rest of the world, destabilizing the old
regimes, and stimulating migratory dreams.
In its
reflection of the “shadow” aspect of the heart chakra, television gave us
addictive emotionalism and disconnected connection – the glorification of
desire, and its fulfillment at bargain-basement prices. Instead of deep
compassion, it offered shallow pity (and for some, disdain for the parade of
the world’s “losers”), a half-response that eventually deepened viewers’ sense
of spiritual depression.
As media
technology changed, television’s worldview of naive optimism, self-pity and
addictive consumerism, became easier and easier to mock. Donald Trump’s network
producers understood this and brazenly used television itself to belittle its
soft emotional (feminine) side, offering in opposition, a parody television
masculinity: a loud-mouthed, unfeeling, phony self-made millionaire, sexist beauty-pageant
and wrestling promoter.
At the same
time “the Donald” was being introduced to the nation’s viewers, the Internet
was moving from a carrier of email and a place to “surf the web,” to the home
of Facebook, blogging, podcasts and all forms social media. If television was
an extension of the heart, then the all-connected, all-present online world,
was an extension of our skin, energetically connected to the throat chakra.
Fifth chakra over-connection, not fourth chakra over-emotion, would become
the new challenge.
While
television offered an opportunity to look at the multicultural world, the
internet brought us the gift of actually connecting with it. As Tom Friedman
wrote, “Suddenly connectivity became so fast, cheap, easy for you and
ubiquitous that it felt like you could touch someone whom you could never touch
before and that you could be touched by someone who could never touch you
before.” In this world, the “other” is not just a face on a screen out there,
but someone, invited or not, inside our personal space.
This was the
multi-cultural, globally-cosmopolitan, knowledge-based, world embraced by Barack
Obama – a place of multiple overlapping voices of minority peoples and cultures,
a place where everyone is speaking all at once. His campaign was based
on data-driven Internet organizing, and his Presidency was based on “managing
at a distance” the government of one (albeit powerful) node in a multi-polar
world.
It is no
surprise that this move into network-style governance would generate unease and
push-back from those hurt by all this connectivity: those left out of the
capital flows of the information economy, those whose jobs were outsourced to
internet-linked factories overseas, those frightened by the real or imagined
appearance of the “the other” at the door, and those who felt that their
(formally-unquestioned and dominant) voices were now being challenged by those
they could no longer shut down due to new codes of “political correctness.”
In the 2016 campaign, at a time of deep social division and
growing distrust of the new networked global financial corporations and
financial institutions, the Democrats offered a candidate steeped in
television’s aspirational fourth chakra memes (fairness and multicultural
“rights”), coupled with an unpleasant air of boomer entitlement. Donald Trump,
who rose to fame manipulating television’s shadow as the exemplar of me-first
materialism, crass cynicism and melodrama, easily embraced the role of anti-global,
anti-Internet avatar. Like many of the strong man nationalists coming to
power today, he ran as the anti-connectionist candidate.
He successfully tapped the deep anxiety that comes feeling
“data naked,” unprotected and overwhelmed by both incoming signals and the loss
of privacy. From massive data thefts and cyber-attacks on the technological
pillars of the information economy, the internet has made us vulnerable to the
darker side of being part of one web-linked world. This is reflected in our
heightened “fear of infection” (from the pandemics of Covid, AIDS, SARS and
Ebola), opening the door to Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and promise to
“build the wall.”
His attacks on the “fake news media” and his embrace of
various conspiracy theories was a response not only to the over-connected fifth
chakra, but also to the unease felt in our collective sixth chakra, or third
eye. This is the center that interprets reality, looking for patterns in all
the data we receive, guiding our intuition and insight. Social media exploded
during the Obama years, bombarding users with images, opinions and emotional
hooks that also triggered the second chakra’s desire for pleasure and cravings
for validation and the fourth chakra’s hunger for friendship. It is no wonder
that in a social media universe where much of everything is artifice, a place
full of bots, scammers, poseurs and grifters, Trump’s list of “alternative
facts” was accepted by many voters.
Trump effectively channeled his “Build the Wall” attacks
against the metaphors of connectivity using not just his television persona,
but even more radically, by mastering a communications medium whose technology
form is aligned with our earliest electrical signaling system, and its
energetic metaphors with the first chakra’s concern with security and survival:
the command and control, one-way declarative
text-based mini-telegrams of the Twitter feed, a rejection of holism and
its complexities – the perfect medium of “winner take all” competitive narcissism.
For much of the Trump’s first term we saw a flood of daily imperial
text pronouncements, many of them without substance, governance by rage and
complaint, dissolution of international commitments, and disastrously at the
end, a failure to understand the “network effects” of the COVID epidemic.
The Biden-Harris interregnum offered a respite from the reactivity
of the Trump years, but the impact of social media on the chakras and our culture
continued to generate distrust of the old institutions, social unease, and despair.
The 2024 Harris campaign offered voters a continuation of the old
(non-networked, analog) heart-centered order focused on unity, empathy and
care, with a vision of shared sacrifice for a Green New Deal to save the
planet. While Trump roared back with a third chakra assertion of power, control
and freedom. He rehashed the security fears held in the lower chakras, with a
collection of unfinished resentments against “outsiders” – migrants, foreign
nations, global organizations and foreign aid, along with an even stronger rejection
of the heart chakra value empathy and throat chakra’s openness to deep connectivity.
All the while, the transformation of the Infosphere into a
distributed, grid-based cloud continues unabated, offering a model in silicon
and fiberoptics of our seventh chakra’s evolving access to our shared spiritual
database, interconnected mind, and channeled knowledge from other dimensions –
a true “deep state!” President Trump has continued to rage against the nation’s
establishment seventh chakra knowledge institutions (such as elite universities,
the courts, and government research centers), believing on an exoteric level
that their destruction will somehow protect us from the overload of our “deep
seeing” and “deep knowing” technologies.
In a world of millions of YouTube videos, constant exposés of
leadership failures, drone-taken images that take us over every wall, we are
indeed seeing more than our separate selves can handle. Yet this same
technology also offers a physical manifestation of the spiritual truth that we
are part of an evolving whole where no one is separate. Where our cameras that
take us to the outer reaches of the universe and into the workings of the
smallest cell remind us that we are part of nature. And the face of the Other reflects
our shared divinity.
Trump’s turning over much of government to unelected “masters
of technology” who are using AI to purge agencies of their employees and feed
the “surveillance state,” is a shadow response to eighth chakra activation. Deep
computation and pattern recognition can take us further away from our earth
connection, but they can also open our awareness to the complex processes of
the natural world. The tools of “big data” are already powering a new “ambient
awareness,” tracking myriads of complex data streams, synthesizing their impact
and displaying them in easy-to-understand interfaces. One example is a
“cyber-cat” whose tail changes color as electrical consumption increases and
whose purr is replaced with a sad grumble as more carbon-based power is added
to the supply mix.
As we learn to monitor our physical environment through such digital
intermediaries, we will be challenged to pick inputs that represent our highest
selves. What if we insisted that we use this planetary ambient awareness to
electronically track and share the encroachment of the deserts, the thinning of
the Ozone Layer, the decline of the ocean’s diversity? Not just the condition
of our investment portfolio, but the number of malnourished children in the
world? Not just status updates from “friends” we hardly know, but reports from
our adopted whales, sea turtles, giant redwoods or tiny mushrooms living in the
Amazon?
The eighth chakra is also the portal to cosmic knowledge. In
a future blog post I will look at these technologies as reflections of
consciousness itself: are we separate beings or part of one larger global
brain? Are we stand-alone processors, or nodes on a giant “thinking network”
that includes all the data inputs from our past and future lives, other galactic
beings, angels and spirits?
