Bizarre ideas and strange concepts keep infiltrating my thoughts. No, it’s not like I’m hallucinating, and I’m not experiencing thought broadcasting, either. It’s just that I can’t seem to find the right words to describe how I’m feeling right now. My brain is topsy-turvy, and I hoping to find somewhere to land and set myself aright, but I’m afraid of losing momentum, of crashing down and facing grim reality.

(How did I think it would end, anyway? Could things have been different?)

The problem is simply a failure of the imagination. If I could picture where I wanted to be, then I could make some plans, but everything that I imagine is either ridiculous fantasy, or some circumscribed, hopelessly limited version of what I imagine would be ideal.

(Man, don’t you love how I always use circumlocutions? And never directly talk about the concept at hand?)

I am still reeling from how the American public managed to take back their country. Part of me kept imagining something catastrophic would happen, that somehow the fascist bastards would be able to clamp down and steal the franchise. Now I’m not imagining that things are going to turn into utopia any time soon. But it’s interesting. People as disparate as Pat Buchanan and posters of the Daily Kos are asking if this is the end of the conservative movement. I had prophesied that the conservatives were on their way out like the conservatives got kicked out of the U.S.S.R. In the same way that communism collapsed, the neocon agenda has crumpled like an empty aluminum can. I’ve always argued that the neocons are relics from an era long past. These fools are still reacting—a little too late—to the social revolutions of the 1960s, in the same way that the die-hard regime in the U.S.S.R. were trying to pretend that the 1980s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall never happened.

In that sense, I kind of imagine Gorbachev and Clinton having parallel roles. While it may be misleading because Clinton is a Democrat, he was never a leftist. At most, I would give him center-left, but mostly, he was pretty centrist about things. Of course, he had to deal with an antagonistic legislative branch (though maybe in the next two years, we’ll see what it really means to be antagonistic) and so he had to make a lot of compromises, plus the right-wing attack machine was pretty well honed.

In another parallel, maybe W’s erstwhile presidency is comparable to the hard-line commies’ failed coup attempt back when the U.S.S.R. was disintegrating.

Although what this means, economically-speaking, is a little frightening.

But I dig it. A call to look forwards, not backwards (upwards, not sideways, and always twirling, twirling…) We’re done with the 1960s and the resultant backlash. We are not going back to the 1950s. It’s been half a century already, for God’s sake! It’s the 21st century!

There are new challenges to face. It’s not this simplistic dichotomy that the neocons were hoping to preserve. There is nothing useful about the labels conservative vs. liberal, capitalist vs. socialist. Divisive paradigms are not viable.

Completely randomly, I think of the Internet as a paradigm. Yahoo and others first tried organizing the net with hierarchies of categories, trying to delimit things into one category or another. This was initially useful, but the net got too big, and the categories became too constraining. This is the problem of divisive, splitting paradigms. It doesn’t scale. So fast-forward to the Web 2.0, and look at del.icio.us and flickr, and think of tags. We’re done with trying to pigeonhole ideas into a single slot. We let strict distinctions fade away, allow random and sometimes bizarre connections to persist. This gives us a more powerful environment with which to organize our information. And the other thing is that, instead of the power to classify lying in the hands of a few, in the hands of the site builders, tags are purely democratic. You get to choose, and just by sheer weight, consensus manages to form.

Now don’t get me wrong. Democracy, by it’s very nature, is messy, and sometimes not a little bloody. (Just remember what Jefferson said about watering the tree of patriots.) But we have the tools, we just need the talent.

Fuck dichotomy. We are living in world that is way too complex for binary thinking. We need to think in tag clouds, in associative networks. Categories are not hard and fast, but arranged by convenience. Don’t assume that just because something is old means that something is worthwhile. Dogma must stand the test of use.

This world is far too complicated to be able to just suck on the tit of ignorance. You are an active agent in all of this. You have freedom, whether you want it or not. No one is going to tell you how to live your life. It’s up to you to create your living space.

The is the post-post-modern world unfettered, people. Ignorance is the enemy, and it must be destroyed quite utterly.