The DNM

The Living Coliseum

"Theilliterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read andwrite, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. " ―Alvin & Heidi Toffler

In the 2000s, smart devices appeared all over the globe, and the desktop computer, fell by the wayside. Mobile devices lit up the world, like tiny bundles left by a new Prometheus, and an era spread. If the analogue nomad threatened the geographic control and exploitation of lands, these early digital nomads threatened the control of the emerging information landscapes. Neither set of nomads was necessarily engaged in a political project, but both found their existence politicized by the same system of power.

The mobile phone that gets the coffee grower a better price, the camera that snaps the video against violence, these are all part of the fires of our age, as much as the cat memes and the joyful sharing of a moment. Censorship, shutdowns and prosecutions of hackers, downloaders, file sharing, these are bridges we're crossing. As the old ways play out their death throes, they have no choice but to become barbaric, to show their ugliness and their hysteria, the basic resistance to death known to us all. The old structures will cling and persist, and they will do so at any cost, because that is what strains of culture do, just like strains, or limbs of any organism.

The old nomad ways, its very landscapes and resources, those are almost gone, but this new nomadism is emerging, and it is suited to the new frontiers of life, to working through stasis, to integration. Nomadism is necessary for diversity, for weaving together the micro cultures that will create the new macro. Today's nomadism is a type of pollination system for emerging culture. The nomad experience is part of our evolution, a part of the rebirth that transforms concepts of order and purpose.

Despite our best efforts, nations are crumbling, religions fighting, and all the potential said to be pushing us towards a singularity, where we combine with other autonomous thinking machines seems to be an attempt to escape rather than engage. How would we want to give birth to AI and put them in such a place when our social code is a mess of tyranny? We can try to define this new chapter through gadgets, apps, IPOs, ringtones, or various pop culture visions sold to us, but the story of shift is not in contained in any single detail, much less any single profit motive.

We receive social code daily, but this is only basic material. How we handle this code, is up to us. This is a game, an unfolding, and no one person writes the code of how we all evolve. Any other system for approaching evolution leads us to believe that someone, some particular chosen are steering this, but it seems inefficient, and unlike nature in some elemental form.

Evolution is an open source, open field system. We all play, and we all create the game, and sometime we hit the game's horizon, and it plays us. From us as individuals to the systems we inhabit, the hacking of old structures is both a self-starting proposition and a group dream. For us to continue the game, we may agree to abandon brutality not because we've arrived at utopia, but because the return on our actions will cost us dearly, individually and as a species. Our co-existence is dependent on expanding the scope of self-interest.

In this space of frontiers and flexible living, nomadism is not a scheme for retreat or toothless generalizations and nomadism is not defined by leaders. Nomad life is being lived right now by refugees and techies alike. Nomadism is being lived by the rich and the poor, the whiz kids and the average users.

In this in flux frontier we can extend the old ways only so far, before we must adapt them, to the models of our new technologies. We can not interact with robust, decentralized and non-hierarchical systems and remain a resigned, authoritarian, immature species.