A Fable. When the Americans massed and started westward in 1846, it was the beginning of a new kind of cultural growth. It did not have to do with European philosophy or cultural traditions. It was a dynamism of a new kind. The Americans were irresistible, like a wonderfully sexy creature or like cancer. Even when the country was still insignificant by objective measures, the Americans—Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and even Dickinson in her retirement from public life—knew they were different and differently fated. Americans were also innocents, and like all innocents they were cruel to others and to themselves—destructive. Their world was violent, a world of energy that obeyed its law to burn.

America was hardly a culture and would never become one. Cultures build traditions and hold to tried and proven conventions. America is about power, speed, and information—abstractions of little content.

America is about style—the pure destructiveness of style, a force of nature that year by year, rather than repeating the seasons, produces a new world, a new fad—television, the twist, hula hoops, the World Wide Web, products that relate only to abstract need. These are all fads, and there is no accounting for their relative significance. Americans do not belong to a race or a nation; they belong to earth only in a superficial sense (earth is a limit of space and resources, not a place or even a form); they are pure abstractions—ideas about ideas that can manifest as matter and energy and flip back again to ideas. America is about machines, not just this or that machine, but the universal machine, machines that are instantaneous and everywhere, at the speed of light. We, as Americans—and Americans of all countries—are hated by the world, and the world wants nothing but to become like us, because it appears that we may be, with our technology, becoming immortal, and immortal creatures are hateful and everyone wants to be one.

When the Olympic Torch arrives in Beijing in 2008, the last stage of the Americanization of the world will have begun. Colonel Sanders, Kobe Bryant, McDonald’s are already all over Beijing. Soon all of the Wall Street brokerage firms will be there. America is not a nation or a people: it is complexity itself. The simplicity of culture is everywhere giving over to complexity. This process cannot be explained in terms of a root story or a root belief. It has only incidentally to do with the wonderfully rich real estate the Europeans began to settle in the seventeenth century. It was global from the beginning. It’s not just American; everyone everywhere wants Nike shoes. There is no American epic or American philosophy. It is shoes and jeans. The libraries are full of Columbiads, Washingtoniads, and such, but there is no story. Whitman called it democracy, the rule by the people. He thought, however, that they ruled by their vote; as it turns out, they rule by their hunger, their ability to consume, and their ability to create debt.

There is no American working class. The American social structure is not determined by classes of production but classes of consumption. It is the job of an American not to work but to consume. Henry Ford realized he had to pay his workers well so they could buy Model Ts, and to this day workers in the auto industry make better money than college professors and most lawyers. The class distinction is based on consumption: there is a class that drives Fords and a class that drives Lincolns. The number of bathrooms in one’s house is also a determinant.

To create debt, debt to themselves, is the American’s secret. The American society is not capitalist but debtist. By debt, the majority of Americans became homeowners; by debt, not capital, most businesses are started and expanded. It is the technique for bringing the future into the present. Monetary debt, of course, is only the ghost of the real debt. Americans borrow most significantly not against future wealth, but against the future itself.

Information technology is important for this reason: it is now possible to reduce our matter and energy debt and to increase our information debt. Information is in abundant supply. It is time to exchange matter and energy for intelligibility and meaning. This is a necessary correction. The alternative is environmental disaster.

I was asked to write an article for an issue of a magazine devoted to the theme of "a better world." Let me take a wild stab at a thesis: creating information debt is the way to create a better world. It is the process of evolution itself. The possibilities that are preconfigured by nature or culture are, in effect, already known and hopeless; they have been already, as it were, figured into the price. Debt to the future is the mechanism of creativity; and at this late date, it is only information that we can hope to pay back.

America is the name of a place with no past for the people who discovered it while looking for some other place. Mistaken from the start, it loomed out of the Atlantic as a realm beyond time, space, and logic. It was complexity itself as a possibility of knowledge. It is global, the Empire.

Let’s say, as a place to begin, a better world is measured in terms of complexity. Most of what passes for complexity is confusion—counterfeits or replications that undermine complexity. (See Fable 2.)

"The past," Kodwo Eshun notes, "arrives from the future," and it enters the present not as a cause or the consequence of axiomatic preconditions, but as our input to the logic of the future from which it arrives. All the deep forms are circular. All that was implicitly sought in the reverential address to origins must now be found in a vigorous and imaginative address to the consequences of our acts, which demand the same attention and ritual care as the origins, though the gods to which we are responsible have not yet appeared (and may forever recede). There is no beginning. The knowing agent now is at once an autonomous producer and processor of information and a component of multiple statistical cells. We enter a time of global redundancy, parallel processing, and multitasking, at once subject to various models of the world, producing models of our own, and transforming the models by our participation. A new orientation is required—not retrospection, representation, or repetition, but projection, prophesy of a new kind, not only self-fulfilling prophesy, but participatory prophesy, prophesy as creative anarchy—"anarchy," etymologically, "without beginning or rule"; thus, an improvisatory emergence not from the past but from the next moment.

* * *

Another fable. According to tradition, there are two Bibles—God’s and Satan’s. They are exactly alike, but one is counterfeit and one is true. When one acts upon the precepts of the true Bible, the results are good and lead toward salvation; when one acts on the precepts of the other, the results are evil and lead toward damnation.

The two texts are identical, and they exist in indistinguishable volumes. Some scholars have been able, they claim, to detect a difference by smell, but they have not been able to produce consistent results. Moreover, there has been little agreement about which acts are good and which are evil.

Indeed, I do not know now how I learned of this tradition. I am not sure that it is a tradition at all, or if the convocation of scholars who sniffed the books—holy and unholy books—was called by the Archbishop of Mainz in the thirteenth century (or if there is an Archbishop of Mainz), or if I made the story up to make a point that I do not now recall.

There are two memories—one is God’s and one is Satan’s—and they are exactly alike, but one is false and one is true.

The ancient texts in stable times are great and necessary guides. These, however, are times not of concentration but dispersion. A new attention for a better world is required. One samples and remixes the flow of information, knowing being known in many simultaneous zones, paying many attentions. One remembers the future. We read and love the ancient books so they can be forgotten. They are part of the mix. The Bible and James Brown, the Koran and John Coltrane, the Bhagavad Gita and Little Richard. Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom. We take their words but not their meanings. Their meanings will arrive in time.

Don Byrd is a writer, poet, and sound artist, who lives in Albany, NY.
His most recent books are The Poetics of the Common Knowledge and The Great Dime Store Centennial, which is being published in a new edition in September, 2001.