Reflection

I posted this on the Identity Gang list back in October. Dick Hart made the assertion that there was no such thing as post post-modernism. I had to chime in.. because it does indeed exist and it relates to identity.
Modernism has its origins in the enlightment ‘rationalism’, absolute
structure and finding ‘the truth’.
Post-Modernism is a critique to modernism. In this structure, there
are no laws maintained to define hierarchical culture. Post-modernism
that asserts that there no hierarchies and that all points of view are
equally valid (except that this is a hierarchy itself putting
non-hierarchy above hierarchy)
Today you have the emergence of Post-post-modernism. It rejects the
“flat” – everything is equal point of view of of post-moderninsm but
not super structured rationalism like Modernism. You might call it a
Polyarchy. Polyarchy was a term that I first heard when Drummond and
Kim were talking. Keep reading through the links…
As if Post-Modernism is not bad enough, reporter Alexandra Jacobs of
the New York Observer claimed her experience aboard the Jet Blue
flight that made an emergency landing at LAX on Wednesday night was
Post-Post-Modern. She said tvs on the plane were showing Fox News and MSNBC coverage of their own demise.
You can hear her talk about it on last week’s This American LIfe
“Back From The Dead” 10/7 – Episode 299
However, some differences are emerging that mark a new phase of
counter culture. One of the most obvious sign of this is the
reemergence of massive protests making flesh the networking of
cultural players who formally would have nothing to do with one
another. Examples of this abound: “teamsters and turtles,” garment
workers of the developing world with college students, anti-war
Republicans. Some may refer to what is going on today as post-post
modernism or hyper-post modernism, others might refer to it as the era
of Globalization.
In the polyarchic system, world politics is no longer essentially
“international” politics, where who gets what, when and how is
determined on the basis of bargaining and fighting among the
nation-states; rather, the international system is now seen as one of
subsystems of a larger and more complex field of relationships.
Panarchy, Polyarchy and Personarchy indicate that what is aimed at is:
– a worldwide open framework free from territorial sovereignties.
– a variety of voluntary systems of personal and social organization,
like parallel autonomous societies, even within the same territory.
– full freedom of association, circulation and action for each and
every human being.
mmm… sounds like people empowerd with their own identities and the
ability to use them to organize and empower themselves in civil
society and the marketplace.
I first heard the term Polyarchy when Drummond, myself and Paul
Trevithic were in Kim’s Cameron’s enjoying a glass of wine. Kim and
Drummond began bantering back and forth about this critical consept
that perhaps defines the what is ‘new’ and a critical underlying
principle in the coming identity layer of the interent.
There is no standard way in generic URI syntax to express “cross
hierarchy” relationships, a directory concept known as polyarchy. Yet
those of us working on the OASIS XRI TC have found polyarchy (which we call cross-references) as essential to the “internetworking of
multiple identifier schemes” as TCP/IP packet exchange is to the
internetworking of multiple LAN protocols.
Kim Cameron is a co-author of this paper on polyarchy.
We describe a new information structure composed of multiple
intersecting hierarchies, which we call Polyarchies. Visualizing
polyarchies enables use of novel views for discovery of relationships
which are very difficult using existing hierarchy visualization tools.
So there is post-post modernism – it is polyarchical. Polyarchy is a
critcial if little talked about property of emerging identity
protocols.