[Note: I'll embed links here later on, in a hurry...]
Summit Series DC10 - MoodVid, 13/05/10 from patkane on Vimeo.
A fascinating first day at the Summit Series in Washington. I have to say it was a somewhat minatory beginning. The SuperShuttle bus takes you on a long drive from Dulles Airport to Pennsylvania Avenue; and on the way to the classically-architected government buildings, poking up through the forest, you pass the tombstone office blocks of the military-industrial complex, ushering you into the seat of American power. (For the record, by increasing order of proximity to the White House, it goes Gruman Northrop, Oracle, Unisys, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin).
Which means that when you arrive at the MT Marriott, the scenes of loose and happy youthful revelry are quite a relief. Summit Series began as a 90-strong charity fund-raising ski-trip put together by a young events organiser called Elliot Bisnow: with Mercedes Benz, Microsoft and Blackberry as main sponsors, the entertainment-industrial complex is driving the bacchanal.
New York Times described the first two Summit Series as “MTV meets Davos”. And as you can see from my little iPhone captured mood-video above, there's a distinct anthropological behaviour to be described there. So far, it's tribes of handsome young beta-males (I'd say gender split was 80% masculine, and all aiming to match the Platonic idea of Jake Gyllenhal on the cover of the complementary GQ), gripping their beers in tricked-out bars and velcroing themselves to passer-bys, who bear equally sandwich-board-like conference passes. The encounter ritual involves about five minutes of elevator-pitching on their commercial or social enterprise, then a click of our MingleSticks to exchange contact information by infrared (intended to replace the bizcard, but only if you fill in the template: I'm sticking to wood-pulp-and-ink for now), and then falling back into the melee.
Is this the kind of hellish networking nightmare I'm usually dialling a helicopter to be lifted out of? No, not really. To be fair to the organisers, they've set out a list of very communitarian guidelines for behaviour here – “go on a learning safari, be cool, make lifelong friends, embrace Summit Series”. The excited hubbub of the evening reminds me forcefully that the Millenial generation, for all their technologically-enabled distance from, and discrimination about, the old demands of the work ethic, still need collective experiences to affirm their freelance status, their post-organisational lightness of being. There is a pleasing openness to most of the participants here – an implicit sense that everybody here is to some degree in process, rather than commandingly authoritative. I actually like it (even though, as my play-self struggles with my residual Catholic-Calvinism, I can't always respond equally).
The social enterprise mantra of “doing well by doing good” is absolutely presumed here. As you'll get from a sample of the video above, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons switched unconcernedly between R'n'B-inflected corporate ambition (“yeah I got a Maybach, I'm selling my financial services company, I build brands”), hard-core spiritual inquiry (he works with David Lynch to promote Transcendental Meditation), and a range of education-oriented good works in the ghettos of America and Africa.
On an education panel, the soul singer and social entrepreneur John Legend [bit blurry in the vid, but you can hear him] came over to me as what we would recognise in the UK as an educational conservative – keen to “root out bad teachers”, as if educational attainment was only about poor pedagogy (Micheal Gove may be on the line to you soon, John). As a spectacle of African-American enterprise leadership in the age of Obama, Simmons and Legend were indeed something to see. They were a challenge to this surrender-monkey European social-democrat, though I suspect entirely consonant with the new UK centre-right government, with its enthusiasm for social enterprise over the state.
But there's one other thought in my mind I'm struggling with as I get ready for the second day (my panel is at 12.00pm, EST). The outrageously leftist but critically useful Slavonian philosopher Slavoj Zizek once wrote an article in 2006, observing the Davos circus at its peak. In it he called the emancipatory pronouncements of the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros (and no doubt, tonight's Bill Clinton) as a kind of “liberal communism”. Zizek sums up their mantra:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9.You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend
10.You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
I'd guess that these principles would be taken up as a rallying manifesto by the vast majority of these participants (I quite like it myself). But Zizek, ever the demystifyer, thinks this is the most seductive and enveloping of smoke-screens. The emphasis on philanthropy means that you have to get it all before you give it away, thus keeping basic structures of general exploitation in place (meaning the outsourcing of manual labour, developed “us” “helping” under-developed “them”).
There is a dimension of this at Summit Series – seminars from frankly creepy people like David Rubenstein from The Carlyle Group, at least two session on “outsourcing your life”, and of course the great and troubling triangulator himself, Bill Clinton, speaking tonight. But what's interesting about this particular event, and what sets it apart from the grim, pinched determinations of a Davos-style elite, is that it also embraces a vision of human material abundance accessible to all, which any trad Communist – even Zizek – would surely approve of.
The technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil did a keynote on the Singularity at last night's dinner (some of which is on the video below). Now no matter what you think of the solidity or reliability of Kurzweil's predictions about the inevitable and exponentially-explosive power of technological innovation – and there are dissenters – he undoubtedly draws our attention to that most human of faculties: our linguistic, rational powers of transformative invention. We are gripped in a great paradox, a version of which Jeremy Rifkin tries to point at in his new book The Empathic Civilisation. Exactly at the moment where environmental limitations may enforce upon us something which at best could be Tim Jackson's “Prosperity without Growth”, and at worst something much more brutal, we may be about to witness a convergence of biological, nanotechnological and computational powers that redraw the very boundaries of what we understand as “energy”, “materials”, “sustainability”,”health”, “nutrition”, even “consciousness”.
My conduit to this community, Jason Silva (who I'm just about to meet, I better hurry) urges us to remember the old Whole Earth mantra: “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it”.
I've always agreed with that. My own struggle – which the phrase the Play Ethic sums up, and which I'm increasingly concerned with in my writing and research – is to reconcile our innate human powers of transformation and invention, our ability to “melt all that is solid into air” as Marx said, with the kind of robust collective structures that can ensure the good, inclusive society (see my previous post here).
So I'm going into the second day with an open mind, looking for clues (and fellow soulitarians!) with whom I can have these conversations. Any Summitteers who get this post from the internal tweets, I'd love to hear your responses, and seek me out if you'd like to talk at [email protected]
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