Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

P4K spent the past month examining the dirty mechanics of global inequality. For weeks we researched, presented our findings, played games, and debated. Students searched the Web to learn about challenging world issues that even many “scholars” have never heard of. How many TV pundits defending or criticizing the current administrations know about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program? How many school principals could describe the observations of John Taylor Gatto? Where in New York can we sit around and debate the dangers of Predator drones? We spent a month in the muck at Playing 4 Keeps. December was for sifting through the waste Civilization produces as it churns along. We live in times when the powerful privileged can access every object their hands could desire, while the world’s other 90% fights for scraps. The elite preserve this relationship with bread, swords, and circuses.

We spent a month in the muck in Canarsie. One afternoon, orders wafted through the halls like the flu, telling us our workshop was cancelled because of a “rapid dismissal.” Teachers hustled to the auditorium while kids hustled for the door and police in the jammed hallways relaxed. The fire alarm was turned on to make the environment unpleasant and motivate stragglers to leave. In the audition, men in suits told the assembled staff that Canarsie was receiving a brain transplant. Shock therapy. The current freshman, the class of 2011, will be the last students to graduate Canarsie High School. Every year until then, more space, money, and energy will devoted to small charter schools operating in pockets of the school building.

In the ensuing weeks, our students adjusted to the news that their school was being phased out, and learned about the ideas of John Taylor Gatto--who, I’m pretty sure--would not be surprised by the Department of Ed’s strategy. Gatto was a New York City Teacher of the Year for three consecutive years before quitting to investigate the public education system. His books, including the Underground History of American Educational and Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. In his latest article for Harper’s Magazine, Gatto wrote:

“What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?”

I’ve been thinking about these questions all month. What if the System isn’t broken? What if it works really well, but at cross-purposes to the majority’s interests? I watched an amazing documentary online this month. I encourage everyone to find a free video site and watch The Century of the Self. It’s an Adam Curtis film from 2002 that examines how Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis techniques have been exploited by the power elite and implemented on a mass scale to transform America and the world. As one Wallstreet investor quoted in the film plotted, “"We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

Consumerism breeds limp passivity. It is a toxic addiction that enslaves the mind and destroys the environment. Ad men, using the models and tools of psychotherapy, have perhaps permanently disfigured the American character. While America has always been fraught with iniquity and abuse, it was also a nation of dreamers and adventurers. Unassuming grandmothers, young girls, and new fathers steeled themselves against the cold and made brave decisions to seek a better life here. Those who succeeded were survivors. Americans were hard workers and resourceful innovators. Intrepid, dignified men and women can be threatening though. They make demands on their employers and politicians. They assert their independence. They rebel if abused.

The tragedy of the Twentieth Century is that we were tricked into trading dreams of a better life for dreams of a better car. Politicians promised a progressive paradise micromanaged by a spit-shined technocrat class. Corporations dazzled us with visions of plastic convenience and better living through chemistry. In time, however, much of the public’s awe turned to lamentations. We learned cigarettes are dangerous and children shouldn’t play in DDT spray. Eisenhower’s Interstate System fostered suburban sprawl, and the New Deal was the seed for the bloated corporate cleptocracy our government has become. The tragedy of the Twentieth Century is that everything works pretty well, just not for the purposes we were led to believe. Loopholes weren’t found, they were planned. The government is less incompetent than many liberals like to think.

Games are safe spaces where we can explore meaningful choices with mitigated risk. Our current danger is that video games are rapidly becoming one of the few places where one can make meaningful choices. Modern global economic structures and strategies are designed to coerce people into stupidity by stimulating unconscious emotional urges in the human mind. Consumerist messages in the media and in the ambient environment of everyday life deceive people into believing that disposable consumer goods offer emotional, social, personal, and sexual fulfillment. As consumers, we are told we lack the ability to express ourselves emotionally or creatively without the guiding hands of the corporations. Everyday, people in the US are bombarded with sophistry proclaiming that objects are the keys to well being. There is Prozac in our drinking water because so many people have been prescribed the drug our sewer treatment plants can’t filter enough out.
We have been systematically robbed of meaningful choices because a sedated, distracted populace is docile and non-threatening to the powers that be.

Last month, I worked with teenagers researching how Coca Cola is stealing the ground water and poisoning the wells in India. We debated Abu Ghraib and torture, and stared wide eyed at footage from the short film Disaster Capitalism. The great majority of the world is penned in by a soft cage. This news is depressing. But there is hope.

This month we also learned about the great work of the Black Panthers. We learned about how these proud men and women banded together to uplift their communities, feed school children, and stand up to police violence. I’m reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina these days, and while that catastrophe is a story of the government failing the public, it is also a story of the public helping itself. In the thick of disaster regular people became heroes. Mothers and sons labored in terrible danger to protect their families, to rescue strangers, and to save stray pets. While the media banged a racist alarm and bellowed lurid tales of gang rape and random death, the truth was communities banding together for survival. People reclaimed their autonomy and asserted their humanity.

In the design world, William McDonough and other advocates of the Cradle to Cradle movement are asking challenging questions and offering inspiring solutions. They are demanding to know why we make toys poisoned with lead and carcinogens. Why do we walk on carpets made from toxic chemicals? The book Cradle to Cradle argues that "the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design."

At the 2000 Bioneers conference McDonough posed the design challenge, “How do we love all of the children of all of the species for all time?” “When do we all become indigenous people?” he asked. It is time to start acting as if we belong to the earth. Our current way of life binds our grandchildren to our mistakes. We have designed systems so that the world is owned by the dead. This has to stop. Economist Kenneth Boulding once said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.” Our culture is infected by wastefulness and selfishness, but we are also capable of doing much better. We have done so, we are doing so, and we simply need to do more.

The world is full of bad news. It is also full of good people. Humans are meant to be free, not bound by the shackles of manufactured desire. Every day in countless small ways, and in the occasional grand gestures, people push back against the chocking fog of consumerism. They make meaningful choices to be strong and compassionate. It is unpleasant to study the carnage the ship of state leaves in its wake. I do not enjoy immersing myself in the daily crimes against humanity. It is necessary, however, to know what’s gone wrong in the world so that we can make it right. We must study the chains that bind us in order to find the weak link. We must liberate ourselves before it's too late.