[p2p-research] call for debate: a reponse to digital maoism by Nikos Salingaros

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

This is a draft for an important article by Nikos, the p2p architectural
thinker, to be published later on the p2p blog,

Please send your reactions and don't forget to cc Nikos,

Michel Bauwens




On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 4:03 AM, Nikos Salingaros <salingar at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Michel,
>
> I have prepared this for your foundation. I don't want you to publish
> it yet, but would like to ask you to send it to friends who might be
> able to mark suggestions and changes on the manuscript. After I have
> received those comments back, I'll prepare a final version for you.
>
> Best wishes,
> Nikos
>



*P2P Themes and Priorities. Creating the thinking society. *

* *

*Nikos A. Salingaros.*





*Introduction.*

I would like to respond to Michel Bauwen’s article published on 3 April
2010, which examines the nature of a broad alliance that could be expected
to adopt a new P2P worldview. Bauwens correctly questions whether the old
Left/Right divide is still valid. It probably is, but it is certainly
neither the only nor the predominant divisor of society into groups with
opposing worldviews. I have been exploring contrasting viewpoints from the
perspective of art, architecture, and urbanism for some time, and would like
to suggest another view of contemporary problems. This approach may
hopefully yield insights that could be exploited in moving towards a more
humanly-adaptive P2P society.



*Partitioning society between individual and groupthink populations. *

Let me suggest a divide in worldview: that between personal validation,
versus the blind following of groupthink. On the one side, the individual
decides that he/she possesses enough biological capability to judge complex
events and structures in the world; on the other side, an individual
relegates the ability to judge to some expert. This second alternative is
influenced by the method introduced by science, where ordinary people do not
usually possess the scientific training that would enable them to make
scientific judgments. Science requires specialization, and its applications
in fields such as engineering, medicine, etc. also define domains of
specialization. The ordinary citizen simply does not have the training to
match experts in those fields. Even in economics, something as necessary as
tax-return preparation divides individuals who can accomplish it on their
own from those for whom the task is too complex, and requires paying a tax
expert to do it for them.

The authority of the expert is, however, commandeered by politicians and
other figures intent on building a power structure. With religion in its
most oppressive forms, an individual is told what to think. In the field of
art, architecture, and urbanism, with which I am involved, an expert class
of enormous extent and power has grown and now dictates group opinion about
what is right and wrong. Here we have a problem in that much of contemporary
artistic endeavor is felt (i.e. perceived biologically, psychologically, and
viscerally) to be noxious and damaging to our psyche. This direct impression
contradicts what the experts are saying, as it contradicts what a vast
economic infrastructure — consisting of contemporary art museums, heavy and
expensive picture books, courses in our universities, publications by
world-famous critics, international shows and competitions, prestigious
awards and prizes — uniformly supports.

The other, equally negative face of this phenomenon involves condemnation of
what the present artistic/architectural elite does not like (because it
reminds us of the past). What naturally appeals to a person on the basis of
evolved human physiology is very frequently dismissed as “kitsch” and is
harshly condemned as a sign of moral degeneracy and backwardness. I’m sorry
to say that much of the world’s traditional art, architecture, and urbanism
falls into this category of forms condemned by an immensely powerful
establishment. We therefore face a global phenomenon of cognitive
dissonance: what we feel is right is supposed to be wrong according to
authority, and what we feel is wrong is supposed to be right.

So who is justified, the expert supported by a trillion-dollar industry
centered in the world’s Art Capitals, or the folks who buy gaudy souvenirs
and paint their house interiors and exteriors with bright colors? Who can we
safely believe? I claim that it is the latter, and that we should trust our
own biological instincts above all else, not simply for any political reason
that should automatically side with the common human being out of
egalitarianism, but as evidenced by our own biology. Much of the research
supporting my claims is very recent and is contained, but is not limited to,
the new discipline of Biophilia. Science is coming to bear, not on the side
of the expert established through hegemony, but on the side of the ordinary
human being. The problem is that this clarification comes several decades
too late, only after a monolithic power structure has built itself up. The
power the establishment wields is enough to silence scientific results.



*Distinction between individual/groupthink and Left/Right partitions. *

The individual/groupthink partition defines another political divide
distinct from the old Left/Right partition. I will look for overlaps and
contradictions. Justifying the feelings of common people against an elitist
society that manipulates the media is a classic responsibility of the
political Left. But this same idea is just another side of the insistence of
the political Right that the individual should have the ability to decide
for him/herself, and not be bullied into accepting a generic world imposed
by the majority society which could represent the lowest common denominator.
In this crucial point of individualism, the Left and Right partially
intersect.

It is also important to point out that both Right and Left have also
historically encouraged the partition as I have just defined it. The Right
is often enamored with expensive things and the latest fashions, and this
consumerist urge is precisely what drives inhuman art, architecture, and
urbanism. Experts arise within, and are promoted by the unstoppable engine
of global consumerism, initially very much a phenomenon of the Right. There
is a lot of money to be made from promoting useless and even noxious
products, whether they be art objects, fashionable-looking buildings, or
entire new cities designed by a fashionable architect (who may in fact have
absolutely no grasp of the principles of urbanism). The media are controlled
by the market, which itself exists in a self-feeding cycle within the global
consumerist engine.

The Left is not blameless, however. For much of its history, it has fallen
prey to an ideology that falsely couples liberation and progress to abstract
images of a future modernity, even long after such images turn out to be
inhuman and dysfunctional in application. Well-meaning progressives bought
into the promise of mass-production, and its more noxious (and unnecessary)
aspect of the machine aesthetic. We are therefore still wedded to utopian
architectural and urban typologies of the 1920s, promised at that time to be
liberating for the oppressed working class, and implemented by both
democratic and totalitarian governments of both Left and Right. Every
application has been a dismal failure, yet our universities continue to
teach the “socially liberating” ideal of the Bauhaus aesthetic as it applies
to lamps, windows, buildings, and entire cities.

At the same time, traditional architecture and urbanism are condemned by the
creators of the groupthink society, and this is done in the harshest
possible terms. Applying negative meme encapsulation, the
globally-controlled media terrorize society with the warning that any
traditional-looking building, and historical-looking urban fabric, is an
immediate threat to liberty and even to technological progress. The majority
of people buy that lie because of media conditioning. The Left has been
unfortunately complicit in condemning traditional architecture and urbanism
because of a tragic misinterpretation that conflates social forces with
abstract images.



*P2P principles reinforce the individual society. *

Before continuing with my analysis of the individual/unthinking partition, I
would just like to mention in what way P2P practices and ideas help to
balance out the two sections in the partition. Readers will immediately
offer that improved education would prevent ordinary, intelligent people
from following obviously restrictive and oppressive ideologies. People
reason for themselves. And yet, we see the same phenomenon repeating
throughout history, where pseudo-religious cults and extremist political
movements drag entire nations along in a nihilistic frenzy. Many classic
cases involved societies with a highly-educated citizenry. Clearly,
education is not enough to combat the phenomenon of brainwashing, especially
as today, a major sector of Western economy (advertising and political
campaigns) is devoted to it.

P2P practices, on the other hand, have both the right appeal and the right
message to accomplish the job. Since its inception in the slightly
subversive world of open software, P2P has caught on with those who wish to
sidestep a monolithic power establishment. Education in the P2P arena offers
the perception that its content lies outside, and is thus potentially far
more valuable, than information pumped through the regular channels by an
establishment interested primarily in controlling the minds of citizens.
While this may be an extreme view, it nevertheless concords with the
open-source movement that liberates the tools of Information and
Communications Technologies so that the rest of the world outside the global
elite can profit from them.

The basis for P2P philosophy requires INDIVIDUALS helping each other, and
its idealization is achieved when this multiple connectivity finally creates
a “collective intelligence”. I hold the view that this type of collective
thinking process is very different from the psychology of crowds that occurs
when masses of people are driven by an ideology and groupthink. As
previously mentioned, the fierce individualism of conservative thought
combines to generate a higher-level of group intelligence that is
participatory rather than simply blindly reinforcing a single message. This
collective intelligence among peers hopefully possesses a vastly improved
analytical skill, which permits it to analyze social manipulation such as
being practiced today by the mass media. P2P society keeps its components as
individuals, whereas consumerist society converts them into one unthinking
mass.



*Urbanism among the groupthink society. *

Beginning in the 1920s, the sleek, mechanical images of a new future defined
a built environment made of glass curtain walls, steel frames, reinforced
concrete, and the isolated free-standing high-rise building. Neither the
Left nor the Right questioned these inhuman typologies, as massive
construction put up prison-like apartment blocks from Magnitogorsk, to
Detroit, to Teheran. These stubbornly neat geometrical visions contrasted
with owner-built housing that is tailored to human sensibilities, though
most often constructed with very poor materials. Self-built settlements are
uniformly condemned as not conforming to the accepted image of progress (in
truth those of reformist 1920’s Europe). Governments of every political
orientation make it their determined objective to bulldoze informal cities
and replace them with neat-looking but inhuman tower blocks. This is one of
the most serious actions against P2P urbanism, since participatory building
occurs only when it is supported by local help and connectivity, and never
by implementation from above.

The Right offers a bulwark against this propaganda, as it continues to value
older, traditional forms. Perhaps valid for a subset of the right reasons,
conservatives maintain an appreciation of traditional things, and do not
rush to dispose of everything old just because a political ideology declares
that such a sacrifice is necessary for progress. Conservatives are more
immune to this urge to jettison all that has evolved in our past; they
maintain the belief that the past is connected to the living present and
cannot simply be thrown away. It is not necessary to convince those on the
Right of the sacred value of preserving the great human achievements of the
past, but less easy to underscore the value of folk art and architecture and
irregular urbanism. Those are too closely tied to the poor and so do not
often gain adequate support from the Right.

World production of vernacular art, architecture, and urbanism tends to come
from those on the Left, simply because they are less well off. But the
problem here is that the same people aspire to values instilled in their
minds by the globally-controlled media, and thus refuse to value what they
themselves produce. They are easily manipulated in a global game of
unsustainable consumerism that profits only the multinationals. The goal of
consumerism is to undervalue what can be produced in a P2P society, and to
create a dependence upon a proprietary product. Therefore, the world today
has almost entirely been taken over by an elite that is converting it into
the groupthink society, driving global consumerism and the economic engine
that supplies it. Most people have no qualms about the massive
indoctrination that is necessary to maintain the global consumerist society.
At the same time, however, we are wasting the earth’s resources.



*Protecting the natural resources of the world. Love and ownership of the
commons. *

I would like to explore the foundations of a P2P approach connecting to and
eventually protecting our world. First and foremost, the basic concept of
the commons needs to be established by physicality, not ideology. In my
experience with urban forms and spaces, people do not identify with a
particular place unless they feel they own it in some way. For that to
occur, they must take emotional ownership. I believe that this is possible
only if there is a shared feeling of love for the physical object, and even
then only when this feeling is quite intense. If we love something, we care
to preserve it. We can love something that is not exclusively ours, and then
it becomes a common good. Much of the time, we love something that we have
participated personally in creating.

Consider the urban square of a village built by its inhabitants, the small
church or temple in a village also built by its inhabitants, the great
cathedral that was nevertheless the common endeavor of the people in a city
for over a century. In all these cases, the users “own” the structure
because they helped to create it, and they love it for the same reason. They
will protect it against damage and destruction because they connect to it
emotionally, psychologically, and viscerally.

We don’t love the modern church designed by a “name” architect because it is
not part of us; it is alien. Its geometry and surfaces contradict its claim
of being sacred through an unmistakable visceral message that triggers a
negative physiological response in our bodies. It has been sold to us by a
corrupt media through indoctrination, in a political power game where a
servile group is proud to execute the wishes of the dominant elite. In the
same way, we don’t love the hard alien plaza designed by another “name”
architect, nor the giant and absurd abstract sculpture that occupies and
spoils what could have been a very nice urban space. None of these objects
can ever become part of the “commons”, despite the enormous media expense
trying to convince us of their worth in ideological terms based upon an
ephemeral fashion.

Another dimension of love and ownership develops over time, after several
generations have experienced connection to a particular place or building.
Our ancestors could have built it, so ownership and love of that place or
building runs in our family. Traditional societies value the continuity of
connection that establishes an indirect link with our ancestors, and the
same link continues into the future to include our descendants.
Conservatives place a high value on this continuity that links generations
of people across time through the intermediary of particular shared places.
Unfortunately, here the Left is less helpful because of its urge to undo
past society so as to move forward towards real or imagined progress. When
the past is seen as a barrier to emancipation and advancement, there is
little to do to convince a society of the value of preserving at least some
continuity.

The Left/Right divide dissolves in a dangerous manner when the groupthink
society is brainwashed into a fanatical hatred of its own past. In a
phenomenon that is now referred to as Ecophobia, both Left and Right have
turned against their built heritage and unthinkingly embrace images of
buildings that are totally inhuman. The simple necessity of demolition in
historic city centers in order to erect these new structures has spawned a
propaganda war against historical and traditional built form, with the aim
of replacing them. All the techniques developed in the advertising industry
are applied in a clever manner to promote alien images of new buildings,
while at the same time the complementary techniques of negative meme
encapsulation, developed in the military rather than in Madison Avenue, are
applied to condemn historical and vernacular architecture and urbanism. The
“outdated” geometry is marked for elimination, and the people are convinced
by the media of the necessity of introducing as rapidly as possible the new
“signs of progress” that are the products of the global architectural elite.




*Problems with political and moral corruption. *

Today, most world governments support the dominant cultural elite without
any reservations; indeed, the most powerful governments (the US, Western
Europe, Japan, etc.) put their own considerable economic might behind the
indoctrination machine. Other nations in the world fall roughly into three
groups. 1) Nations that receive financial and military assistance from the
West go along so as not to jeopardize those sources. 2) Nations that are
openly hostile to the West react to its world domination by rejecting its
commercial arm. 3) More independent countries which try to play both sides.
The second group correctly perceives the danger that Western brainwashing
poses for their own tradition and culture. There is hope that P2P solutions
can be developed in those countries that do not wish to lose their heritage
to Western consumerism. In some cases, however, a P2P solution for them is
no closer, because their society has a top-down power structure that is not
very different in essence from the Western model.

This scenario turns into a tragedy that transcends the P2P society, for the
following reason. The West has some enormously useful lessons to teach the
rest of the world in terms of democratic systems of government with built-in
checks and balances. When the lessons of democracy are accompanied by the
selling of consumerist images and products, however, those willing to
embrace the first are turned off by the second. How can you ever trust a
world power that is trying to sell you glass-and-steel skyscrapers, which
you know are extremely expensive to run and maintain in most climates, and
which will destroy the traditional urban and social fabrics of your society?
In many cases, the situation is even worse: corrupt and totalitarian states
eagerly make deals with the global consumerist sector while carefully
keeping democratic messages out of their country. They import the worst that
the West has to offer.

Political affiliation of individuals has nothing to do with professional
politicians. Having followed closely top-down inhumanly-scaled projects that
continued through changing administrations, I can vouch for the fact that
politicians are concerned primarily about power. They will therefore
initiate an inhuman project in order to satisfy a large local building firm
or an international consortium, and this leads to disaster. The motivation
behind monstrously-scaled projects follows because the larger the project,
the more power there is to concentrate. This is the opposite of the P2P
philosophy. As long as this practice of gigantism continues — and I see no
indication that it can stop — P2P will remain an elusive dream. In more than
one instance, I have witnessed a government fall in part because it
sponsored a monstrous building project against popular opinion, and the
opposition was elected on the promise of stopping it. Once in power,
however, the new administration pursues the old project with the same zeal,
simply replacing the previous government in a cozy deal with the
builders/contractors.

The proposals we (architects and urbanists who work with P2P principles)
make for human-scaled social housing, preserving the historic city centers
from alien intrusions, micro-surgery in the sprawling European, Asian, and
Latin American suburbs to create living urban fabric on the human scale, are
so far ignored. Participatory design is simply not on the agenda of the
powerful local construction companies and hence it is uninteresting to the
vast majority of politicians that are beholden to them. To truly implement a
P2P urbanism, we will have to change the unhealthy concentration of brute
economic and political power that now controls all such projects.

I do not see at this time how the political system could be re-aligned so as
to support P2P urbanism. The disappointing examples I refer to above
occurred in separate European democracies, so evidently having an elected
system of government is not enough to apply P2P principles. Of course, in a
totalitarian system, the situation is far worse, yet we don’t normally
expect any progress under those conditions. Paradoxically, where we see some
hope for the present is in nations or specific regions that have very little
central government control, so that P2P principles can be freely
implemented. This is already being realized in the developing world. Many
regions in the world where this one condition is met, however, suffer from
lawlessness and instability as well, which preclude any stable society from
functioning.



*The threat from the deception of high-tech sustainability. *

The global power system has learned ever more clever and deceptive
techniques with which to continue its world hegemony. Perhaps the greatest
threat faced by P2P urbanism today lies in the nightmarish “sustainable”
cities and urban projects proposed and built by the power elite. The global
system has picked up our own sustainable vocabulary and has used it to
re-package their extraordinarily expensive and fundamentally unsustainable
products (glass and steel towers, monstrous buildings, industrial-style
cities in the middle of nowhere) as “sustainable”. The trick consists of
using some technological gimmicks, and coming up with numbers for energy
saved through having some solar panels and double glazing on the buildings’
glass façades. But this is a fundamental deception, since the city or
country that buys one of these eco-monsters becomes totally dependent on the
consumerist energy system.

As the companies selling these industrial products are the major
multinationals tied into the power of Western states, it is extremely
difficult to counter the stream of propaganda that is devoted to their
promotion. Also, the selling occurs at the highest government levels, far
above any decision-making that can be influenced by ordinary citizens. Even
in the few cases where no obvious corruption takes place, the client nation
blindly trusts the giant Western-based multinationals to deliver a
sustainable product. At the same time, the controlled media acting as a
mouthpiece for the multinationals is directed to praise the client nation
for its “great foresight” and its adoption of “progressive urbanism”. Since
national pride is involved here, even the most blatant urban disaster will
not be discussed openly. Maybe we will read of a new city that proved to be
totally dysfunctional, or too expensive to run, after several decades have
passed, but certainly not sooner.

The Left was (and is) enamored of large-scale industrial solutions,
industrial cities, massive five-year building plans, etc. Despite all good
intentions, these proved to be totally dehumanizing because of their
ignoring human psychological needs and the human scale. Those are now
re-appearing as neo-imperialist urban applications, with a newly-polished
high-tech glamour. I’m sure that many persons continue to support these
projects as a continuation of the false promises of technology solving every
social problem (a dangerous proposition but not fatal in itself) made toxic,
however, by skewing everything towards the very largest scale. Old-style
centralized industrialization is the antithesis of P2P.

By contrast, P2P sustainability uses small-scale technology linked in an
essential manner to traditional socio-geometric patterns that connect a
society to itself and to its place. This approach enjoys the natural kinship
of bottom-up entrepreneurial initiatives such as the Grameen Bank. We begin
from the smallest scale and move up through increasing scales. P2P empowers
the individual to work and act within a society in a way that benefits that
society. Just as in any stable complex system, different layers of
functionality are added on increasingly larger scales, yet the working whole
requires a balance of mechanisms acting on all scales, interacting
horizontally as well as vertically. The new techno-cities, tragically, are
designed to work on only one scale — the largest scale, designed as an
abstract sculpture on the drawing table by a fashionable architect — in
which case they may not work at all.



*Conclusion: towards a new alliance. *

I hope to have helped make clear part of what is required for a P2P society.
Doubtless, we are only at the beginning of thinking about this effort,
making plans for the first implementations, and there is much more that will
need to evolve and develop. But we can summarize the first steps to take
towards this goal. My discussion has been ranging between urbanism and
politics, and certainly does not include the other significant components
that are crucial for a P2P restructuring of institutions into a thinking
society.

The conclusion is obvious: a consumerist frenzy driven by a massively global
economic-political establishment is eating up the earth’s resources. In
order to function, it had to create a groupthink society, and it continues
to do so through its absolute control of the global media. This much is
immediately grasped by part of the Left, which eagerly embraces P2P ideas
because it sees in them an alignment with its own anti-establishment ideals.
Nevertheless, while these points are necessary they are not sufficient to
develop a new P2P society.

The other component of P2P is the re-utilization of patterns of geometry, of
socio-economic actions, of tradition, which have worked in the past. Most
(though certainly not all) of these traditional patterns are intrinsically
sustainable because they arose out of necessity, and apply on the human
scale. Here we are in the traditional domain of the Right. The Right
preserves the essential respect of traditions by making them sacred. The
cultural baggage of conservatives includes not only an essential
understanding of what is worth saving, but also the worldview that gives an
individual the strength of character to oppose the massive brainwashing that
is converting the world into a groupthink population. The Left might be
surprised to realize that it needs essential tools from the Right in order
to complete the basic requirements for a P2P society.

We can profitably argue the viewpoint that the world has been divided
according to a new partitioning, which is non-political. The old Left/Right
partitioning is not very useful in implementing a new P2P society. Any
component of either side of the old political divide that supports P2P can
and should be incorporated into a new worldview. As soon as the world
realizes this, it will become easier to cross over the old political divide
in order to implement new ideas towards a sustainable society.



*Acknowledgments*: Without including references, let me mention that my
principal influences are Christopher Alexander, Michel Bauwens, and Roger
Scruton.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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