Peter Barus: You Have More Power Than The President

Peter and I have been on-line friends for nearing 20 years, and recently he sent me a post initially sent to “friends and family”, included a blog post he published in Op Ed News.  The correspondence is sent along with his permission.  The letter and two links are very much worth your time.  Photo with Peter at end of this post.

Thanks, Peter.

“Happy Mother’s Day, you have more power than the President”

Dearest Friends and Family,

I hope and trust this finds you well, and creating the future with gusto!

I’ve written something and posted it on line for all to see, here.

It’s about a tough subject. But it’s hopeful. Or maybe I’ve finally lost it, I’d be the last to know.

It might be the foreword to a book that’s been rattling my brain for years, now called “Dodging Extinction at the Dawn of the Attention Age”. Or, it might be the whole book. It’s probably the best synopsis of this monster (well, I’ve got about 140 pages, more if it goes to press in the popular and handy 6″x9″ format).

There are a lot of famous writers up there with me, along with the cranks and poets and geniuses on OpEdNews. Naomi Klein has a very good piece there now [A High-Tech Coronavirus Dystopia] that is a very good followup to Professor Zuboff’s 2″ tome, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She is spot-on. Everybody should read this, both of these, prescient, timely and incisive works.

I’m not thinking about which character in A Night To Remember I want to be, as the deck tilts and the lights flicker. I’m thinking about a possible future in which we follow the excellent advice of Tolu Oni who lays out the real problem(s) and shows that they are not intractable at all.

A shift to sanity is possible and probably happening already. The media, of whatever stripe, are not going to make any money by reporting this. But most of us have abandoned the media as we’ve become more intimately connected on the new networks.

As Shoshanna Zuboff and Naomi Klein make clear, however, we have become intimately connected to a system that fracks us like oil and gas. The fracking salts are bots and trolls and memes that isolate us into tiny markets-of-one, and from there, we try to hold elections. This worked to their unimaginable profit, and our great detriment, unfortunately, but has gone about as far as the Masters of the Universe could take it. Their next project must fail, or our species surely will.

An imagination confined to a Marvel Comics paradigm is not going to get us much farther than what we see now. Too bad for them; Like an old bandmate of mine, who used to play lead guitar for Muddy Waters, would say: if you can’t keep up, take notes.

Stay tuned, and stay in touch!

love

Peter

Peter Barus, first row at left, Oct 23, 2002, Mastery Conference