18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

===No Living Heroes===

This brings us to a final issue, which I think is incredibly important, which has to do with why there are no living heroes. In effect, we almost don't believe in heroism. As soon as somebody starts to make us excited about the world and what is possible for the individual, we come to start feeling terrible about that person, unless they're trapped inside of a Marvel movie, or something like that. If you go back to the history of ticker tape parades, you will see that there were many ticker tape parades given for individual aviators, individual explorers, ships captains who put their ship at risk to rescue the crew of another. And, in fact, this pattern largely stopped.

My contention is that the difficult case of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh Charles Lindbergh] may have marked a turning point. In Lindbergh's case, he had flown solo to Europe from the United States and come back a hero, I believe in the late 1920s. Now, Lindbergh was a very difficult human being to deal with, because he was an authentic hero, and he was also somebody who believed in America First, and in isolationism, and given the Nazi Menace in Europe, I think it's almost an unforgivable position. Nevertheless, the fact is that Lindberg commanded tremendous popularity, and that popularity could have been used to keep the U.S. out of a war.

We have been frightened about individuals coming to rival our institutions, in terms of power. And that's what's so great about the new revolution in long-form podcasting, and all of these other forms of social media. Now, we have a great danger in that most of these platforms are mediated. We saw what happened to Alex Jones. It's quite possible that if these powerful institutions come to believe that a particular individual should be removed, they can always choose to enforce the rules in a different way. We saw recently the advent of Terms-of-Service changes to include deadnaming. Now if I say that Walter Carlos composed the album Switched-On Bach, or performed the album Switched-On Bach, that is a true statement. But because Walter Carlos became Wendy Carlos, I have no idea whether or not I can be accused of deadnaming. Now imagine that you have a hundred such rules, rules that are never spelled out, never clear, that can be enforced any which way to deny someone access to the major platforms. This is the great danger with this moment. We have unprecedented access, but we also have a gating function, which can be turned on at any time if we fall out of line with the institutions.  

I want to read you one tweet that has been on my mind for quite some time. This tweet came from a contributor to The Washington Post, who is a professor at the Fletcher School and it said, "Good Morning Eric"—I'm going to leave out the parentheses—"So I read up on a few of your notions, and I have some thoughts, but my basic conclusion is simple: What's true isn't new, and what's new isn't true."

I think it's fantastic. I was stung by it, because at first I was under the impression that we were still living in a world in which the Washington Post, New York Times, Harvard, Stanford, what-have-you, control the major conversation. But, coming off of a recent date at the Ice House in Pasadena, which was a live gig with Peter Thiel, I've started to realize how powerful this new movement is. We can reach anyone, anywhere, and I think that the Gated Institutional Narrative deserves to have the battle that it's been bruising for.