The blackmarket info economy

Increasingly my information comes from the internet and not mainstream media. I hesitate to call what I read and listen to “news”  because it’s not hourly or daily happenings that I’m looking for. I want context for what’s happening in the world and I want commentary that shares my world view. I don’t find that in the Globe and Mail or the New York Times.

I was thinking this watching Lynn at the computer reading The Archdruid’s Report, John Michael Greer being one of a number of writers and thinkers I keep tabs on. She, like most of our friends  get their info from thousands of different perspectives on the net; mainstream is just one of them.

Collectively we act like the black market economy in a country – say Peru – that’s strangled by official regulation and inefficiencies. Human ingenuity simply finds its way around the obstructions and that’s just what we’ve done.

This is happening everywhere in the internet world and you’re part of it too – you’re reading this! And what would be the equivalent of this post thirty years ago?

The power of the blackmarket information economy isn’t diminished because one doesn’t believe in it. Just as a driver has no choice but to respond to different traffic patterns, so we all must react and respond to the different information flows our there. Buying patterns, networks and affiliations, time spent on civic projects, the very structure of what’s out there in the world changes as the info economy changes. Everyone comes up against it wherever they are on the political spectrum.

The gap is widening between the two info economies. By and large daily papers and mainstream television make the following assumptions (though many of their writers and editors individually may not):

• that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about democracy and service rather than access to oil
• that continued growth is possible and desirable
• that peak oil is far away
• that power equals political power
• that money and political power aren’t wedded
• that the move for change comes from the top down rather than the bottom up

By omission then, the whole phalanx of possibilities that become visible when you no longer assume the above are invisible within the context of the mainstream news. So as a reader, my perspective – and I myself – become invisible. The result is that I only read the paper now to flash through for human interest. I read it like someone would look at a magazine in the waiting room, as a diversion. To use an even worse insult, as bathroom reading. And I’m less interested in diversion than I used to be.

Increasinly when I see someone reading the paper at Tim Horton’s (doughnut shop), I think of her as I would a cigarette smoker, as a holdout from a dysfunctional lifestyle, someone who hasn’t grasped what’s available here.

The gap between the two economies is hard to measure because the two don’t officially exist. Nonetheless they’re real. I’m in the unofficial reality right now writing this, and so are you Good Reader, reading it.