Spells and Prayers of Distributed Localism

Photo from Screaming Into The Future

Shopkeeper

The best time to establish alternative, non-algorithmic networks of communication & affinity was five years ago.

The second best time is today!

A premonition is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.

So, I am planning ahead, contemplating new (old) systems that might be better suited to the media ecology & economy of the 2020s & beyond. No grand launch here — just the quiet ignition, vroom, of a hopeful machine:

distributed localism:

What we’re counting on is a “local understanding” that’s shared across great spaces by internet protocols and the mail. Distributed localism.

(This is of course not true localism, but is a partial compensation for the loss of strong communities; also an aid and comfort to those who have strong interests and convictions that are not shared by many, or any, where they actually live.)

Spells and Prayers:

I often tell my students that whether Christianity is true or not, it is the most unnatural religion in the world. Even a cursory study of the world’s religions will show how obsessed humans are with finding some way to (a) gain the favor of the gods, or transhuman powers of any kind, and/or (b) avert their wrath. Religious seeking is almost always about these two universal desires: to get help and to avert trouble. But in Christianity it is God who comes to seek and save the lost (Lk 19:10); it is God who reckons with His own wrath, himself making propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2). The standard — or rather the obsessive — practices of homo religiosus have no place here. In Jesus Christ, the Christian gospel says, God has done it all.

I say: This may be true or it may be false, but it is the Christian account of things, and it is very, very weird — so weird that it is easy, indeed natural, for us to fall back on the standard model of religion and turn our prayers into spells. How often do we think, perhaps in some unacknowledged place deep inside our minds and hearts, that when we come to church and say the appointed words and perform the correct actions, we are somehow getting Management to take our side?

I’ve long been a fan of Alan Jacobs’s blog, but on opening my RSS reader today I actually saw Robin Sloan’s post first and thought, “Zines in the zeitgeist, for sure.”¹ Then I found Alan’s post on Mockingbird, another site I enjoy, via Sara Hendren, whose site I’d only recently discovered. Then I saw Alan’s post about Robin’s post. It was the kind of delightful intermingling of thoughtful bloggers I used to enjoy in the 00s.

I quoted them in the order above because what I’m observing and experiencing through posts like these, and the general vibes of these post-hope times, is the dissolution of techno-optimism, often expressed in a techno-nostalgia precisely like that I expressed in the previous paragraph. And those observations and experience of techno-theology mirror the religious.

The Jesus who promised his followers hardships, who actually described those hardships as blessings, whose followers sang in worship while jailed and awaiting execution, not because they thought it would save them from their persecution but because their (actual)² persecution proved they were righteous—that religion has been transformed into the spell-casting, God-as-Santa, money-as-evidence-of-blessing despite the clear statements of the person they claim as God saying precisely the opposite religion of modern America. In hindsight, it is obvious why that religion has aligned itself with the obscenely wealthy pontiffs of the techno-mythologies. It’s a story as old as time.

So yes, some seemingly unlikely edge-dwellers³ scattered around and connected via old tech are doing some of the real work of faith, in ways unknown or forgotten by those melting their gold, and that is real hope.