Perennials

(First published on Kiltr June 2017)

If you’ve read any of my recent pieces, you might realise I’m feeling a little low rent Obi Wan Kenobi here, a Geordie Kenobi, if you will. These may not be the words you’ve been looking for. My apologies, things change. They are words though, perhaps not what you want, with a slim possibility of being what you need.

What is there over the parapet? What lurks beyond the silo someone, somewhere keeps trying to corral your life decisions into? How do you map a path, an escape route, away from this seemingly unavoidable, prescribed eternity of dichotomised binary decisions, reforming your reality around you in quantum algorithmic ripples? It doesn’t seem real right? It has all the hallmarks of the bizarre, constructed, perceptual chicanery we know it to be. Yet still it informs, affects, controls, shepherds our lives.

We’ve had the perfect metaphor for those realities, those silos of data and information representing the totality of a lived experience, in Scotland, for hundreds of years. Scholars, archaeologists, anthropologists still debate and fail to reach conclusive agreement on the purpose of brochs.

Original interpretations by 19th Century antiquarians, favoured the notion they were defensive structures, places of refuge for community and livestock, sometimes regarded as the work of native Picts or migrant Danes. From the 1930’s to 1960’s, archaeologists regarded them as castles where local landowners held dominion over a subject population.

This latter theory fell from favour among academics of the 1980’s due to a lack of supporting archaeological evidence. It was just another theory, unproven.

New ideas emerged, suggesting defensibility was never a major concern in the siting of a broch, arguing they may have been the stately homes of their time. Yet again though, the burden of proof, of evidence, found archaeological objects of prestige, visible demonstrations of superiority, failed to materialise. The sheer numbers of brochs, sometimes in places with a distinct lack of good land or resources, made this theory problematic too.

The close grouping and profusion of brochs in some areas led to the only general loose conclusion being that they did in fact have a primarily defensive and occasionally offensive purpose. Some were sited beside precipitous cliffs, protected by natural or artificial ramparts. Often they are at key strategic points. Some archaeologists insist brochs should be considered individually, doubting there was ever a single common purpose for which they were constructed.

Imagine then, a vast perceived threat, of indeterminate force or duration, wherein a network of communities retreat into the silo, the bubble, the closed reality of the broch. A seemingly necessary martial presence enforces discipline and attempts to offer an extended psychological security to all within the enclosed walls. Supplies are rationed as others offer succour to the more vulnerable in the community. Others yet become restless, agitating to leave, insisting the threat has either dispersed or was imagined, or at least exaggerated, in the first place.

Tensions mount higher the longer the situation endures. Both seemingly unlikely and obvious divisions, as well as bonds, are formed between inhabitants.

The same process happens in the siloed, micro-targetted realities we live in now. Our brochs are constructed from barely perceived subtleties of bias, perceptual manipulation and votive offerings to the new gods of data. They corral our behaviours just the same. The injustices perpetrated by the (imagined, constructed or real) threat beyond the seemingly protective walls enabling, condoning, challenging for justification of almost all actions perpetrated within them. Maintaining conflicting versions of truth, cognitive dissonance becomes commonplace, part of the fabric of this new reality itself.

But somewhere, within each silo, there are those whose moral compass, whose instinct toward humanity, whose perceptual sense of what is actually occurring obstinately refuses to be swayed by any nascent mob mentality. They understand the shared sense of network/community all now have invested in this corralled reality, but they share more with the knitted eyebrows, the question ready to be spoken by another across the space they inhabit, than with the enforced spatio-temporal community at large facing a recurring, encoded problem, reaction, solution.

They comprise, those with the questioning looks exchanged, an inclusive enduring mindset, not a divisive demographic. They are of every generation and none. They are vectors who can spread ideas quicker than any single generation. They may share some values of communities they find themselves corralled into but they are not defined by them. Their behaviours, choices, cannot be predicted by algorithms or AI because they are innately defined by their humanity. They hold the keys to unlocking the seeming inevitability of siloed, adversarial, tribal realites.

Genuine tolerance feels unattainable when there are hard lines drawn between the decades, between the generations. Should other generations watch on redundant or react petulant, as they have done in alternating patterns, as the media’s gaze remains unduly focused on the Millenial timeline, with lights dimming for everyone else? When attitudes and habits reported widely to be millenial specific may actually be quite widespread among the generations?

Relevance belongs to every age not only during a generation’s ascension to it. But most paradigmatic relevance, new thinking and behaviours, emerge when there are no artificial divisions between generations at all, when relevance is shared and inclusive. When it doesn’t seem odd for a septuagenarian to have a best friend half the age of her daughter, simply because they share ideas, see the world in similar ways.

Gina Pell spent a year ruminating on an appropriate sobriquet to describe people based on psychographics not demographics. She was searching for a term which allowed for the choice of reality, based on shared values, compassion and humanity. A term which allowed a break out from silos, from brochs, from any faux constructs behind age, class or other manipulable demographic systems of classification.

In order to supplant constricting labels with one which better reflects civic reality, on or offline, Gina wanted a more human version of big data’s ‘recommendation engines’, the algorithms which target people based on behavioural data over outmoded generational stereotypes. Except it would define behaviour, not data representing it.

As Gina eventually put it, ‘being a millennial doesn’t have to mean living in your parent’s basement, growing an artisanal beard and drinking craft beer. Midlife doesn’t have to be a crisis. And you don’t have to be a number anymore. You’re relevant.’

You live in the present. You know what’s going on in the world. You stay abreast of current technology. You have friends of all generations. You get involved. You stay curious. You are passionate, compassionate, creative, global and local minded. You are not defined by someone else’s version of reality. You are not data. Your behaviour cannot be accurately predicted by an algorithm. You are part of an improbable, dispersed network. It has an innate power.

Use the keys. Step outside of the silo, beyond the broch. See them, the other nodes? Blooming as ever they were? Those are your peers. You are Perennial.

In the words of Keith Olbermann, resist. Peace.

...out.