How do all these cultures fit together?
By: Malian Lahey
Tags: Peace, Commodities, Supply Chain, Culture, Technology

Malian Lahey, InterLaced, Installation 2004, Chicago Art Zone

In 2004 I did a project called InterLaced at a gallery in Wicker Park. Inspired by the ideas of Bucky Fuller, I envisioned how this symmetrical dome, which distributes energy equally through the entire structure when a force is applied to it, is also a good metaphor for culture. I saw it as a distribution of communication, of stories, of social connection, and of wellbeing.

Not that I think the homogeneity of the structure would work for distributing cultural values; since geography is the foundation of culture it is impossible to successfully homogenize culture. Climate, water access, food sources, all that and more determine local culture in ways that are sometimes inexplicable even for people who live there.

Silicon Valley has defined tech culture all over the world. It is, in a way, the “inevitable” program that has raced across the consumer countries of the globe and now looks for new places to expand. What is important to keep in mind, is that from a survival standpoint, the world will be OK without the consumers, but it won’t be OK without the producers. Remember which side is indispensable.

Of course, there is a lot of money to be made and fun to be had; but it will have to happen at a much slower pace than what most people in this hypernetworked society find tolerable. The point again being, that producers’ culture arises from their relationship with nature. For example, a cacao producer whose farm has a particular geology will have specific ways of coping with that geology. Farmers historically have not made great margins selling their crops and any mistakes made due to the advice of an overenthusiastic tech company can have devastating financial consequences.

Particularly, although financial transactions can be made “trustless”, a successful farmer connects with plants through physiological electricity; meaning that to a greater or lesser degree, successful farmers have to have a good heart. Each of those are connected via electromagnetic fields that form a bond of communication between farmer, soil, and plant. We already know that salt based fertilizers, if overused, kill the microorganisms in the soil and that bond dies with the soil biology, eventually causing desertification and erosion of arable soils that take hundreds if not thousands of years to recover afterwards. We don’t want the cynical, trustless culture of Silicon Valley wreaking similar havoc upon the bonds of trust upon which production of our food and raw materials depends.

I feel like the reverse Jake Sully. Tech people, I want to say that I have come here to learn your ways and speak your language so that I could bring you this message, and that you would believe it. (ha ha ha). All jokes aside, Silicon Valley and tech in general have such immense hubris around being smart and rapidly garnering knowledge, that sometimes they can be extremely condescending when someone who they view as less tech savvy, less important, less wealthy, voices an objection or a need. That condescension is dangerous, because although proportionally, populations of rural producers may not be smart at tech, as wealthy, or as influential, there are more of them and they are smart about a lot of things consuming populations can’t know. And they know which of you is indispensable.

The InterLaced installation used a visual rhyme of the Bucky Dome with white lace crocheted by grandmothers in my family. It’s a visual rhythm that weaves together a Scottish great-great-grandmother, a Peranakan Chinese great-grandmother and a Peranakan grandmother, with a vision of global peace and economic security.

The author Philip Pullman uses a metaphor of science as a subtle knife, cutting the world apart. If anything is going to knit it back together it will not be the yang, outwardly driven, conquer and inseminate impulse, but the soothing, healing, nurturing yin of women connecting over children, of weaving stories together. This gentler, inward focus on the family is just as evolutionary as the outward impulse, if not more, when morphogenetic fields and epigenetics are taken into account.

My $2.00 (adjusted for inflation) is that the tech industry needs to consider trust to be more important. It will bring a lot of healing to the world and support the preservation of cultures and ecosystems of production. The stillness, the peace within, can become peace between two. It can become peace between parents and children, and between one family and the next. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.