Skip to primary content

Circuits of Change | Feb 04 2003

I just went to Google to do a search, I’ve already forgotten what of, and you know how Google has this practice of garnishing the “Google” logo with cutesy crap like a turkey on Thanksgiving or a moose on Canada Day or god knows what? Well, this time there was a bomb above the two o’s in “Google,” and this bomb was heading straight between the two o’s, and underneath the two o’s were what looked like tiny Iraqi children. I’m looking at it again and it’s not clear that the children are definitely Iraqi, but it seems like they must be Iraqi because they’re wearing tiny turbans and have olive-colored skin and of course we all know what’s happening in Iraq, or what’s about to happen in Iraq, so I assume they’re Iraqi. Anyway these children, whoever they are, are looking up and pointing at the bomb that’s coming between the o’s and that they can evidently see coming—a fact that at first struck me as dumb but that now seems truer than true.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit what I thought when I first saw this, but I’ll say it anyway: Holy fuck, there’s reason for hope. Because just last week I was talking with some friends about hope and I was saying I have absolutely no hope and haven’t had any since the day in the fifth grade when I polled a bunch of kids at recess about who they would vote for if they could, Nixon or McGovern, and most said Nixon. This was crushing to me, but as crushing as it was it was also eye-opening, as though every part of me got crushed with the exception of my eyes, which were forced open due to the crushing of the other parts. I mentioned my schoolyard poll to my friends last week, and everyone told their own “political awakening” story, and then I said what I always say, because it’s really what I think, which is that we’re in a car careening down a cliff and this car has no brakes and no steering wheel and no driver and anyway even if it had these things it wouldn’t matter because the car is careening down a cliff. Then I said the other thing I always say, I really only have a few things I ever say, which is that we are no stupider, collectively, than people have ever been, we’re just ten thousand times more powerful, which means we can do ten thousand times more damage, which is what we’re busy doing, people have always done as much damage as they could, more or less, and so our only hope is to become, collectively, ten thousand times smarter, smarter in the sense of wiser, which isn’t going to happen because we, collectively, are crushingly stupid, it’s a biological fact written into our DNA. Not that there’s a gene for collective stupidity; it’s just that each person is programmed for enough self-interest to guarantee that collective action, by which I mean the actions of individuals considered together, lacks what Gregory Bateson called “knowledge of the larger circuit of change.” This was Bateson’s definition of wisdom: knowledge of the larger circuit of change.

As I look again at the Google logo with the bomb and the Iraqi kids, I nearly feel like crying, because whatever it lacks in sophistication, not to mention prudence, it’s going to get a ton of media coverage. Everyone is going to be talking about it. Because it’s one thing for left wing intellectual hippy freak art fags to oppose the war (or oppose anything), and another for Google to attempt to say something more significant than Happy Canada Day. And what it makes me think is that maybe there’s something I haven’t grasped, some possibility I haven’t considered, because lord knows I never dreamed that Google would do this, just as I never dreamed that a group of fanatics would hijack several commercial planes and fly two of them into the Twin Towers, thereby reducing the World Trade Center to an enormous hole surrounded by tourists with video cameras. Neither thing would have seemed possible, the Google thing even less so, and now both have happened and I’m starting to wonder (granted I’m a bit worked up and will probably regret having said this) if maybe it’s time to come up with some new things to think.