A good idea solves a problem and makes some people happy. A great idea solves a huge issue and makes half of the planet cheer.
One of today’s biggest issues is our sense-making crisis. Without good sense-making, it’s hard to live a meaningful life.
Solve this, and you’re Gandhi for the next century.
Through reasons I’ll sum up below, it has become increasingly difficult to make sense of our world.
Do you remember the times you believed every word in your newspaper? Stories written by honest journalists reporting in good faith what they had witnessed.
What a beautifully simple world the 60ies, 70ies, 80ies, and to some degree the 90ies have been. Looking back from our present abnormal.
Then the W.W.W marched into our lives.
The internet has become your eye to the world, changing everything for good, and worse. Your reality has changed 180 degrees with the speed of information sparking neurons in your monkey brain up to a gigabyte per second.
I have a small-scale part of the solution for our present-day sense-making crisis. It’s about going back to the concept of unbiased real-world reporters. I’ll bring it to you at the end
First, we need to understand the problem better, to actually see the value of this micro solution that can have a big impact.
We live in a hyper culture
Just realize for a moment that your brain is hooked to a screen for hours a day. For some 7 up to 14 hours a day.
What you see out there in bits-and-bytes land is not real.
It’s real for a part of your brain, but not for your senses. Your sensual tentacles can’t touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it. We call it online, or virtual, or Metaverse.
Big tech is trying hard to give you a sensory experience while wearing your Oculus, wandering around in virtual. They are experimenting with wind blowing past your skin, and more of that nonsense that costs billions. It’s not the real thing.
Most of the information and input coming to us outside of our direct sensory experience are hyper objects these days. Timothy Mortin, the author of a book about hyper objects, defines climate change as a hyper object.
My gist is that more than 50 percent of your conversations with people to make sense of the world consist of hyper objects. I mean, how much do you know about Trump while you never met the dude?
The only reference you have is the internet, and things you learned in school, saw on television, read in newspapers. All the stuff the people that control that information like you to believe.
The first big reason for our sense-making crisis is this new hyper-reality born out of the internet.
Bring your reality back to simplicity, what you directly can sense, and you’ve got one part of a solution.
I love it when you support me while receiving extra paid content. These are weekly extra podcasts. And guess what? You also receive a free copy of my e-novel “The Wisdom Keeper”.
Only today, Friday 24th of September, you get a 50% discount for a 12-month subscription ($60 or $30 with discount).
Follow this personalized link for the discount or subscribe for the free content
We live in the age of information warfare and misinformation
Information warfare is a very bad habit of crony capitalism
Information has become a tool for warfare.
We all have different reasons to give meaningful information or polluted or diluted information. Philosophers call this signal or noise.
Maybe it started with our Fred Flinstone stone age grandparents. When somebody found a well, he or she had the possibility to be honest about it and tell others. Or they directed them to a dry place and kept the water for themselves. Or they asked something in exchange, giving them water but keeping the location secret.
Happily for these stone agers, they didn’t do that. There was natural abundance and people in clans don’t think about themselves all of the time. This only started with, roughly, Capitalism. (I’m oversimplifying here to make a point)
Capitalism forced us to take from the commons and sell it back to the commons, to pay for the interest on loans.
To stick with the water example; In the alps, water is free. Humanity can potentially choose to distribute water for free, for everyone. We don’t. We create artificial lack and sell it back to people because our financial system loves to ruin the planet. I bet ya, the information cartels are making as much money as possible from climate change, feeding you disaster images to maximize your time on sight and alarming your fight and flight part of the brain by calling out war against everything.
It’s the nature of the beast. To keep you hooked on screens and sell more ads. Do you see how devastating information warfare actually is for humanity?
Nobody really knows anymore how bad the coral reefs are doing, until you go out swimming above the great barrier reef yourself.
Then came marketing and psychology in the 70ies. We figured out that blue or green labels work better than red ones to sell water. We started to manipulate people’s brains to make them buy often useless stuff.
See, the information you get is not all Madonna singing like a virgin in a white dress.
To round up things. Exponential tech like Facebook using A.I and 5000 data points on each of the 2 billion individuals (users) on this planet have made information war exponentially worse.
It’s bigger than world war II since it can kill way more people globally. Just by steering our minds through information.
Potentially.
To set up people against each other because information told one biased group that those other clan members on the other side of that virtual fence are walking biohazards.
The idea
To get you out of your depression after reading this. Here is my idea.
It’s a good habit not to focus too long on what is broken but to create something new with our unbound human creativity. Since we’re meaning-giving monkeys, our brain needs to make sense of the world around us. Else, we won’t survive.
Hyperreality and information warfare has made this close to impossible. For this reason, many have outsourced truth to authorities that should know. In other words, they’ve become slaves to a system that is becoming increasingly totalitarian, abusing the trust once given by the commons.
Let’s take our power and information back, that’s part one of the solution. How to take our information back? How to give only signal, and no more noise?
My idea is called Real World Reporters.
And it’s blatantly simple.
Go out in the world with your pen and camera, where you can — report what is alive and real, beyond propaganda. Share it decentralized. Don’t frame, Don’t market. Become that unbiased eye to the world again.
Go swim above coral reefs and report. Go talk with farmers around Fukushima, and report. Go talk to Brazilian Indians in the Amazon and report.
Become like the 70ies reporters with high ethical and moral standards, willing to die to give you the truth. About the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Or what about Nick Ut photographing the Vietnamese Napalm girl? He managed to bring this photo to the world and more importantly, save the life of the girl.
Become unbiased in a decentralized way
The decentralized part is important. Tech is getting ready for it. Useful platforms are emerging.
The making money or getting followers and likes objective needs to be completely removed from this intention.
Become your own media platform. One without an agenda to get as many followers as possible, for example, by blaming other Podcasters for spreading hell knows what.
That’s information warfare too in the name of truth-finding.
Move beyond the borders of information war zones, and report, with an open heart and clear eye. New pure information heroes are more needed than anything else in this world.
This idea goes beyond becoming a blogger with a fancy studio.
It’s about going out there, in the real. Using your senses, and making sense of it all for the people at home craving for truth beyond crony capitalist perverse incentives or Instagram influencer porn.
I am getting ready with my car to drive through parts of Europe in the near future, to give you my unbiased impressions, as pure as possible, coming from conversations with locals, with photos and videos, reports and impressions, beyond Autumn 2021 Covid closed down borders.
It’s my universal and inalienable right. And yours too.
Together we can bend this age of information pollution to a shared truth that is grounded in senses again, not dollars.
Lucien Lecarme
More about hyper culture here
I would love it when you support me while receiving extra paid content. These are weekly extra podcasts ( I call them complot-casts), and guess what? You also receive a free copy of my e-novel “The Wisdom Keeper”. Only today, Friday 24th of September, you get a 50% discount for a 12-month subscription ($60 or $30 with discount).
Follow this personalized link for the discount or subscribe for the free stuff by clicking this button;
Ideas to solve the Sense-Making crisis/part 1