We’re better and worse than ever in America. We’re haves, but we’re have-nots. Technology has gleefully led to a decentralization of media power, and science is accomplishing what was once sci-fi. Hollywood can barely keep up with the world, let alone predict it, as the Dream Factory has been outpaced by reality, However, we’re also deeply narcissistic, most often using our amazing technology merely like mirrors, distracted by our distorted sense of self, so much so that we seem unable to address a political and economic system that has run aground. And the mainstream culture is irredeemably stupid, all “housewives” and halfwits. If you want to see how much we’ve slipped in that regard, just have a look at an issue of People magazine from the 1970s, when pop singers and public intellectuals shared the pages. You can’t blame the People people for a culture that has become saturated with stupidity. They’re just taking the pulse.

But could a revolution of some sort wipe all the inequity away? I doubt it, because we love being entertained by clever toys and reflecting pools. Of course, if personal power and narrowcasting become political and writ large, that could change. Occupy Wall Street, despite being derided as a short-lived, fashionable failure, actually framed a Presidential election. But can such a movement do more than frame? Can it break the glass?

From “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse,” David Graeber’s new Baffler article:

“Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.”