Having read Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent appraisal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I felt I would like to add some thoughts.

There is a new consciousness crystallising, and  Rushkoff said something which (as usual) was very insightful, in that the mainstream media are having trouble getting to grips with the (r)evolution because they can’t see it, it just looks like a jumble of different causes all mixed together, and the people at the heart of it refuse to discuss it on the mainstream media’s terms, and reduce everything to black and white and soundbites.

Check out the Fox News interview he links to on there and you can see the new and the old paradigm meeting.

Old: binary (right or wrong)
New: inclusive (everyone has a facet of the truth, including the so-called ‘enemy’)

Old: soundbite
New: conversation

Old: Simplified
New: In depth

Old: Judgemental
New: Non-judgemental

Old: sensationalist
New: realistic

Old: dreaming (our actions have no consequences)
New: awake (our actions do have consequences)

Old: newspapers, tv
New: social networks

Old: top-down politics
New: bottom-up organising

Old: secrets, cover-ups
New: open source, transparency

Old: protest (asking for a favour from those ‘above’)
New: occupy (taking what is rightfully ours in a peaceful way)

Old: News of the World
New: Wikileaks

Old: separation, fear
New: inclusion, love

This new paradigm has gradually, almost gently, emerged and it is still in its fragile early stages. But I imagine that reading back this blog post in a year or two’s time, what I am saying here will seem so obvious as to make people wonder why I even bothered to mention it at all; the consciousness will have fully established itself and will have totally changed the ‘conversation’  we are having about any important issue you care to mention in Western industrialised society.

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