End of an Era: Public, Private and Shared Spaces

And then the world changed. I look back at 2008 and see it as if it were a million years ago. We seem to have crossed over into something new - something frightening but new nevertheless.

I campaigned a little bit for Obama and endured epithets such as "I ain't votin' for no f**king terrorist" and again, this seems such a long time ago. The financial crisis tsunami hit, propelled Obama past the finish line, and now here we are.

There are too many commentaries worth recommending for how we got here. Two stand out. Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor for a daily dose of sobering reality and Michael Lind's "Obama and the dawn of the fourth republic." The second essay, while somewhat sophomoric in its adherence to numerology, draws an irresistable overarching pattern which is worth describing and distilling.

Lind claims that the US has had three republics: i) 1788-1860, ii) 1860-1932 and iii) 1932-2008. Each republic had a period of Hamiltonian infrastructure building and government consolidation followed by Jeffersonian free enterprise and de-regulation. And like the Matrix and Lagash, each republic ends in over-reach and hubris and has to be rebooted. If we accept Lind's pattern, we are about to enter the fourth republic of the US.

But consider: The US is not alone in facing a financial crisis at this point in time. The globalized world is going through many of the same problems and all advanced (UK, Western Europe), developed (Russia, Argentina, etc.) and advancing (China, India, Brazil) economies have been hit hard. It is now clear that all banking institutions are sitting on 50 trillion dollars of bad paper (mortgage securities, credit default swaps etc.) and all talks of a "bailout" are probably fundamentally flawed since we can't even sort out the good from the bad paper. It will take years to resolve this mess and meanwhile the real economies are going to contract with millions losing their jobs and others losing their way of life (which has been taken for granted for a loooong time).

What's the upside of all this? Every crisis presents opportunities for something new to emerge. Something new which could not have seen the light of day when the previous era was in full swing. And this possibility may allow us to break out of Michael Lind's Hamilton versus Jefferson deathmatch. Prior to 2008, when I discussed politics with someone, I typically got a knee jerk adolescent Ayn Rand libertarianism or a fairly standard social engineering liberalism - both of which are now dead. We don't need to ask "Who is John Galt?" or shout that "All that is solid melts into air". We need something new.

My very strong feeling is that Shared Spaces are the way out. If you look at the conflicted relationship between government and corporations, what stands out is the way both try and grind the ordinary citizen to dust. But in the information age that we are surely in, it is the second person, P2P, social networking or the shared space culture in general that is ascendant. Unfortunately, we are still technologically way behind the curve in terms of the user interface infrastructure necessary to foster the building of shared spaces - with the sorry state of virtual worlds and social networking sites (like this one) helping me buttress my opinion. And, we don't even know how we build up culture or the second person in general when you remove traditional structures such as family, tribe, church and team. This is likely to be a bigger stumbling block before we can realize that the space between public and private is vast and encompasses both.