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A year ago I wrote a post called American Crack-up, in which I argued that a good bit of the country had become completely divorced from Reality. It began with these lines.

When did it start?

When did America’s mass consensual hallucination begin? When did the boundaries between truth and fiction dissolve?

In these Post Newtown days, I am even more convinced that the American Crack up is like a continuing set of mass paranoid delusions. Here is the Mayo Clinic definition of the delusions associated with Paranoid Schizophrenia.

In paranoid schizophrenia, a common delusion is that you’re being singled out for harm. For instance, you may believe that the government is monitoring every move you make or that a co-worker is poisoning your lunch. You may also have delusions of grandeur — the belief that you can fly, that you’re famous or that you have a relationship with a famous person, for example. You hold on to these false beliefs despite evidence to the contrary. Delusions can result in aggression or violence if you believe you must act in self-defense against those who want to harm you.

Sound familiar?

Now it’s fairly clear that many of the Mass Gun Murderers were suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia and even Adam Lanza’s mother seemed to be somewhat paranoid. But what concerns me equally is the number of seriously delusional people who are in positions of power or influence. Take for instance Larry Pratt, President of Gun Owners of America.

During the interview on Hardball, Pratt argued that guns are necessary to “control the government.” When Matthews asked for an example, Pratt pointed to 1946, in Athens, Tenn., when townsmen took up arms against corrupt government officials.

Why is this guy walking into the TV studios of Washington rather than being treated for his paranoid delusions that he needs assault rifles to defend himself from the government? The problem is that since the FCC banned the Fairness Doctrine, paranoid loons like Glenn Beck can fill our airwaves with delusional crap that is accepted by imbeciles like Larry Pratt. People can live their whole lives with an alternative set of facts as if they were in a Twilight Zone episode. Climate Change is a Hoax, the Government has already been taken over by Communists who will enslave God Fearing, Gun Toting Americans, Women’s bodies reject the sperm of a rape.

I really feel like 30% of Americans are living in an alternative universe where they slowly get dumber every day. It is truly scary.

My friend and colleague John Seely Brown gave a speech yesterday that really lifted my spirits. He said we are in a Cambrian Moment with a whole new tool set consisting of Cloud Computing; Graphic processing chips/systems;Social Networks; Big Data Analytics engines that allow us to do extremely granular sentiment analysis; The rise of the second screen and the Ubiquitous computing environment that John and his colleagues at Xerox PARC described in 1991; Transmedia and its many logics; 5D Immersive Design. As John said, “each one of these is a big deal, but together they create awesome opportunities and also awesome disruptions.”

Unlike JSB, I am only an aspiring polymath, and so I had to research the Cambrian explosion that John uses as his metaphor for our current moment. The Cambrian Explosion was the sudden appearance around 530 million years ago of a huge number of forms of animal life. In other words an explosion of evolutionary progress.

Now I had been prepared for this burst of optimism late last week by a visit from our erstwhile correspondent Alex Bowles. Like John, Alex was brimming over with evolutionary optimism. He felt that technology (many of them on John’s list) would lead us to a new age of transparency where bad actors would have a hard time hiding from the 99%.That our ability to literally “see” how much carbon was pouring out the smokestacks of Koch Industries, would embarrass even the most heartless oligarch into cleaning up his mess.

As readers of this blog well know, I have been saying since 2007 that we are in an Interregnum, a period where “the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born”. It could be that JSB’s Cambrian Moment signals the end of the Interregnum. At the Lab I run, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, we have been working on most of the technologies on JSB’s list  and I would say we lead the field in three of his categories: Transmedia, Big Data Analytics and the Second Screen. But our challenge is to move beyond technology and create context for these new tools. As John said in his Stanford Commencement address

We are now, again, in a moment where we need to think of world building but now of a new kind. It is a moment that is not only about making amazing things. Perhaps, also, for the first time we can make contexts as easily as we make content/things. And as all of you here know, shaping contexts allows the emergence of meaning in powerful new ways – for better or for worse. But in addition to having a new arsenal of tools for shaping meaning we now have ways to create a networked imagination – one that emerges around joint action.

Well I hope JSB is right. That this sudden Cambrian explosion of new capabilities will lift us out of this paralyzing Interregnum. If he is right, I think a lot of the new ideas will come out of what my Dean, Ernest Wilson calls The Quad; creative partnerships between public, private, civil and academic sectors. If we take our task of world building seriously, the next few decades could be amazing.

A rainy Saturday in Los Angeles seems like a good time to put down some random thoughts.

The SOPA Battle

So SOPA is dead, and as I said earlier in the week, it was a fatally flawed piece of legislation. But before the Free Culture crowd gets too self-righteous, please consider your new hero and spokesperson, Kim Dotcom.

Kim’s a fun loving guy with 30,000 square foot mansions in three countries, a fleet of Ferraris all made possible by selling stolen content from artists around the world. A bunch of the musicians I worked with in the 1960′s and 1970′s, who made wonderful records that are still on everyone’s I Pod, have seen their royalties cut by 80%. Not enough for a retired 70 year old to live on. American’s are truly stupid when it comes to discussing this issue. The one thing we make that everyone else in the world wants to get a hold of–our music, our movies, our video games—the knuckleheads on the copyleft want to fight a death match to make sure they are free to the whole world. Of course these same people don’t mind paying an arm and a leg for their German car or their Japanese TV. Read more…

The leaderless Occupy Movement should quietly thank Mayor Bloomberg for ending the encampment in Zuccotti Park. As Ad Busters, the culture jamming magazine which first proposed Occupy Wall Street, suggested yesterday that there are two routes forward.

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Strategy #2 is the way to go. I don’t even think you need the “die-hards” to hold geography, because the movement is not about territory, but about ideas. What is needed over the winter months is a series of Teach-Ins like the epic events that made the Anti-Vietnam War Movement coalesce in the winter and spring of 1965. Now is the time on college and high school campuses to educate the wider public on the issues of economic inequality. The movement has a powerful meme–”We are the 99%”–which was in danger of being diffused by the inevitable crime and sanitation problems that come from putting a small cities in public parks all over the country. Out of these teach-ins should come some specific proposals that OWS would push during the 2012 election. Here are four suggested pillars:

1. A surtax on incomes over $1 million
2. A Tobin Tax on Stock Trading
3. End the corrupting influence of money in politics
4. Bring the troops home

One last thought. In the last few weeks I have often thought “What would Martin Luther King do in this moment?” Ultimately the great social justice movements in America like women’s suffrage, ending child labor or the civil rights movement have come about out of a strict adhesion to the loving principles of non-violence. Dr. King, who I marched with in Boston in April of 1965, consistently held up a vision of a better world that we would make through non-violence. His most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. I know that there is a small group of angry young anarchists trying to influence the OWS movement. Those of us with grey in our beards have been here before, watching the Weathermen subvert a non-violent peace movement. What we ended up with was Richard Nixon (running on a law and order platform) as our President.

We should not make that mistake again.

I’m lucky in that I get to work pretty closely with Apple at the USC Annenberg innovation Lab. So if I have anything to add to the reams of copy written this morning about Steve Jobs’ decision to step down as CEO of Apple it is this: “Culture eats strategy for lunch, everyday.” That’s a saying you hear around Apple a lot and it is one that needs to be understood in the halls of Congress, in other executive suites and in the society in general. Apple is the most innovative organization in the world, not because it has a strategy of innovation, but because it has a culture of innovation.

From my vantage point that culture has two elements: reward risk and marry science to art. In the long succession of hit products in the last decade, it’s hard to remember that Steve Jobs had some epic failures early in his career. Anyone remember the Lisa or the Newton? Both were total flops, but the Lisa morphed into the Mac and one could argue that the dream of the Newton ultimately was realized in the I Pad. So the culture rewards both risk, failure and the lessons learned from both. And then there is the marriage of science and art, at which Steve Jobs and his team excelled beyond his competitors. There is a bad tendency in this country to think our “innovation deficit” lies in what policy makers call STEM (science,technology, engineering and math). But Jobs understands that the magic formula is STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math). It is the basis of what we teach at The innovation Lab and it is the core of the Apple brand. Steve’s obsessive belief in the role of the artist goes way beyond his early fascination with typography. What makes each of his products so thrilling is that they are aesthetically pleasing just to look at, never mind how cool they are to operate.

So here are my take aways from Steve’s departure. We better start building a culture of innovation all over this country. That means we have to let lots of experiments happen at the state and city level in order to start putting people back to work. Some of them will fail, but hopefully we will all find the best practices quickly. In congress, they better stop thinking about strategy every morning and start thinking about culture. And in our schools we better keep teaching the arts and not just concentrate on math and science. As to the continuing success of Apple, I have no doubt. Because innovation was never a top down strategy, but rather a bottom-up culture, Apple will thrive. Steve’s vision will be missed, but he embedded the culture throughout the organization.

I have no idea what is going to happen politically in the next six weeks, but the victory for Tea Party wingnuts like Christine O’Donnell over the past few weeks says that the lunatics have taken over the Republican Asylum.

So I’ve been trying to understand where this “Don’t Tread on Me” anger stems from and I think Ayn Rand and her belief in radical selfishness is at the heart of the matter.

Ever focused on her own achievements, Rand always made time to cultivate elites who might help her, all the while oblivious to anyone, including her family, who could or would not. She explained in a famousPlayboy interview that “charity is not a moral duty,” and took to wearing a dollar-sign broach on her coats. A six-foot wreath of the dollar sign was at the head of her casket—the same symbol the character John Galt made over the world in the last sentence of Atlas Shrugged. Galt was her CEO-type savior. The dollar sign was a symbol of selfishness and material productivity that was to replace the cross, a symbol of sacrifice and eternal concerns. Read more…

I thought getting computers to poor kids was going to be the great equalizer.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.

“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

What’s going on?

I’ve been talking about “the New Frugality” for a while and Friday’s consumer credit stats bear out my thesis, that something profound has changed in our desire to live within our means.

Americans borrowed less for a 10th consecutive month in November with total credit and borrowing on credit cards falling by the largest amount on records going back nearly seven decades.

I don’t think we will ever return to the point where the average household will live with a debt to income ration of 160% as they did in 2006. So this will mean a transition towards an economy in which consumer spending plays a smaller part in GDP, kind of like Germany or France. Read more…

The psychologist Michael McCullough has written a new book entitled Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Though a strict secularist, his research has brought him to the conclusion that the main reason that religion has survived 5000 years of evolution is that it helps human self control.

“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”…Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”

Read John Tierney’s article and then let me know your thoughts?

USC/Annenberg School has put a new version of my America 3.0:Rebooting After the Crash up on their You Tube Site. Watch it in the High Quality Setting. It will be up on I Tunes U next week as a free download.