The Middle East is undergoing revolution. The established view tells us people are finally demanding their liberation from autocrats and tyrants, a collective movement towards the fine ideals of the West. After all, it’s no coincidence this shift towards democracy has followed on the coat tails of the gradual ‘globalisation’ of the Middle East: As nations become richer, they too become more free, just like us, right?

And the entire world stands behind the embattled Egyptian pro-democracy protestors.

But what sparked off the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere?

For three decades the Egyptian people lived under the rule of Mubarak and his human rights abuses, well aware of the gap between peasant and wealthy-elite. And for that amount of time, we - the west - propped up the regime and its inequality, to the extent that Mubarak has a personal fortune conservatively estimated at $40 Billion. The Egyptians maintained their subjugation, and the rest of the World didn’t give a shit.

So what changed?

In January, for the seventh month in a row, food prices have sky-rocketed. They are currently the highest they have ever been since records began in 1990, and are only set to be exacerbated by the current major environmental upheavals in Australia, America, Africa and Asia.

And the driving force behind this growth in food prices?

With the global economic downturn, there has been a massive shift from investing in money to tangible commodities: gold, silver, minerals - but especially food. Having extracted all of the wealth in the financial market, the vampire squid is now looking to suck our resources dry. 

 

The same system and behaviour responsible for placing 40% of the world’s collective wealth in the hands of just 1% of the population - pushing the impossible divide between rich and poor even further - is now focussing on encouraging mass starvation to satisfy its  addiction to money. Currently 925 million humans are starving to death, up from 870 million during the food price crisis of 2007/8. With peasants in developing nations spending anything between 50% to 80% of their income on food, Wall Street speculation performed by banking drones bred empathy-free, and the mounting pressure from a crashing climate, means we will soon see Food Wars as the emaciated dead pile up.

The icing on the vampire squid’s bloody cake is the impending but much predicted Peak Oil. As oil becomes scarce, infrastructure will break down, inflation will go interstellar, and the bankers will make an even greater fortune to hide in their fortresses as the world falls apart.

The truth is the Middle East may get its democracy, and the unacceptable human rights abuses might draw to a close (there are many acceptable human rights abuses perpetuated by the west which they might like to share, such as torture camps, rendition, invasion, etc), but the peasants will only get poorer and hungrier, even as they aspire to buy useless crap and vote for their favorite stooge peeking out of the pocket of colonial economics.

Viva la revolution?

We are not heading toward one world united in consumerism and democracy. Having the vote is incidental; we are all victims of the same insane global governance system, and the poor of the world might revolt first, as they already are, but at some point it will be our turn to live as the rest of the world does: impoverished and hungry.

Tell me: during our revolution, what political system will we demand?

 

Tron marked the beginning of our head long rush into the digital revolution, an allegorical journey mirroring our own cultural descent into the digital world.

Tron: Legacy heralds our return, and just like a shaman who travels to another world to bring back knowledge and power, we have hopefully emerged wiser and a little less naive than when we dematerialised into our hard drives.

The shamanic vision always begins with what we want to see; it’s what spurs us on to leave the safety of what we know in exchange for the unfamiliar and new. So we were seduced by a digital utopia, spires of liberated information and the bright lights of democratic free expression. We would have the world’s collective knowledge available in the blink of a cybernetic eye; all the world would be our friend through connecting in ways prohibited by meatspace politics and geography. Soon there would be digital sex, virtual clubs, superhero avatars with fully customisable, predestined lives.

But just as a psychotic riding in his spaceship to Venus, our reality was actually playing with our feces in a collective sanatorium. Making a real life connection with someone half the world away was actually a throw away two minute exchange in a text box delivered with all the disconnected severity of an autistic; the multi-tasking hyper-digestion of terabytes of information was a shallow, quick succession of badly performed tasks and poorly retained trivial facts; the deeper connection with family and friends via social media was a silent dinner with illuminated faces, punctuated by beeps and vibrating cutlery.

The Great Empowerment is still a glassy-eyed dream for many businesses and artists. The vast majority of us only do with the internet what corporations allow us to do: to think otherwise is the delusion of a bum who believes he is the CEO of the multinational corporation whose doorway he sleeps in. We deliver the stats and figures to allow ourselves to be more efficiently targeted by advertising, all the while entertaining the illusion we are on the verge of realising the status of the mythic Internet Sensation.

But eventually comes the great satori: we’ve had our hopes pinned on an illusion, and what’s more, we were never hopeless anyway.

The definitive scene in Tron: Legacy sees Kevin Flynn (Geoff Bridges) turn to his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) to proclaim his folly for searching for perfection in the digital world, when it was right in front of him all along. Indeed, Flynn missed the best part of his son’s life as a result. 

It may appear as if we have simply returned to where we started; but all shamanic journeys end at the beginning, and yet the journey was necessary in order for us to return changed: with clear eyes to see how things really are, and how we might proceed as a tribe.

So what have we learned? Is the moral of the story to turn our backs on the digital world? Delete our Facebook and Twitter accounts, hurl our smartphones in the bin, sever our broadband connection and hit the ‘Off’ switch?

Although the social commentary found in Tron: Legacy is obvious, we should not miss the scope of its core message, which although might not have been intended by the scriptwriters, is most certainly a result of bringing Bernie Glassman onboard as a ‘Zen advisor’. The ‘perfection’ alluded to is not just the cliched, rosey vision of our offspring, but an intimate, existential perfection we miss each and every second because it is closer than close, and as a result we suffer by chasing after its reflection like a cat frantically pawing at a spot of light on the wall. The message is not just about losing contact with each other due to our digital fantasies or personal dreams, but about realising a truth big enough to contain all worlds, whether digital or not.

This message isn’t anything new, although its simple announcement at the heart of a major Hollywood film is certainly unprecedented; but as if to confirm the point that the truth of perfection is big enough to include all worlds, we see in Tron: Legacy the appearance of the ‘isomorphic algorithms’, a race of sentient programs who spontaneously emerged within the Grid: a genuine, digital life form. Flynn manages to save but one ‘Iso’, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), as Bridge’s deluded doppleganger, Clu, commits digital genocide by eradicating the race. 

Not only does Quorra become a disciple of the Zen Dude, but as the embodiment of all that is virtuous of the digital domain, her destiny is to be brought back into our world, with the promise of revolutionising science, religion and all that we know.

The Zen message tells us that nothing is bad by nature - in fact, quite the opposite - and Quorra’s story illustrates the fact that the virtue of the digital domain is really found in its liberation: By bringing the internet into our lives, instead of the other way round, the communications revolution can live up to its promise of genuinely augmenting our real relationships, keeping our families on different sides of the globe together, providing us with essential education and knowledge, and organising the like-minded into real world action.  

If we can learn to use digital technology and social media without it using us, it can help us to find what was here all along; and in its deepest sense, we can even begin to contemplate Transhumanist Zen, whether that takes the form of an enlightened human race genuinely enriched by the digital domain, or the possibility of sentient digital life realising its true nature alongside us. 

So the question is, can we live up to the wisdom we have brought back with us? 

Instead of disappearing into our hard drives, isn’t it time our hard drives disappeared into us?