Full Subscribers to FHN receive two emails per week: a Journal, with articles and analysis and ways to put emerging opportunities into action, and a Selection, which is something that I’ve either written in the past, or cribbed from someone else (with credit!)
I wanted to share a little taste of a Selection with free subscribers today so that you get a taste of what that second email is about. You won’t usually get this. If you’re interested in getting it, subscriptions are inexpensive and fun. Join us!
Today’s Selection is a little unusual - instead of written word, it’s a song - and a video from a guy explaining his song.
If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m a fan of Peter Gabriel - probably more for his life, his commitment to making an impact on human rights and technology than for his music. I knew Sledgehammer and all that stuff in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until more recently that I learned more about the incredible array of impacts he’s made. He’s kind of turned into a role model for me, of who I want to be as I age (except for the goatee — I don’t think I can pull that.) I think he’s as close to a fellow Applied Futurist as anyone I know of.
It’s been something crazy like 20 years since this guy did a full album of new music (Wikipedia can fill in that blank for you if you want). And this time he’s apparently he’s planning to use the usual trappings — album, tour, song promotion — as more of a vehicle for expressing the Big Ideas he’s been working on, than a way to get on a Billboard chart. I don’t know if that will work, but so far it’s been interesting to watch.
The first song from his new album was released last month, and it’s called Panopticom. If that word sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably from some liberal arts class you had in college. The PanopticoN (note the last letter) was an 18th century thought experiment on arranging a prison so that all of the prisoners believed they were being watched all the time, even when no one was actually looking at them. Michel Foucault and other late 20th century thinkers used that concept to talk about the rise of the police/surveillance state, and you still see it pop up in political discourse (the egghead type) every now and then. Not surprising **waves vaguely at the news**.
Gabriel, however, is turning that idea inside out. As he explains in the written announcement and the video that came out with the song, the same surveillance apparatus, accompanied by the proliferation of digital access to information, means that wrong doing is harder and harder to hide from the public eye, particularly when that wrongdoing comes from the people who supposedly control the situation. They may have weapons, but increasingly they can’t control the flow of information.
So Gabriel envisions a PanopticoM, a sort of great cloud of information above everything that’s going on, that people can add to, pull from, and use to fight for justice. In his comments, he references three NGOs that are doing some element of that - including one he founded. I don’t totally understand everything those organizations are doing, but they’re definitely worth exploring online.
This concept, his Panopticom, sums up the great macro-disruptive power, challenge and opportunity that the era that we’re moving into holds — and the core reason why our future will look so dramatically different from our recent past. It’s bigger than computers and AI and avatars. It’s about who has power, how power is disrupted, and how access to the levers of society radically changes from anything we’ve known before. We’re not there, of course, and it is almost certain to be a rough and dangerous road. And Peak Fusion Era will certainly have a whole new set of problems and failures and fights.
But a new table is being set. And the silverware looks like it will come from the Panopticom.
Here’s the lyrics and the song. The Gabriel’s own explanation of the song, and the names of the organizations that inspired the song, are below.
Enjoy.
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Peter-gabriel-panopticom-lyrics
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