Our collective mental environment is in a pitiful shape. Bombarded with advertisements, jolted by commercial breaks and distracted by multitasking, our spirit is under constant assault by capitalism. And at a time when we face the confluence of unparalleled global crises -- climate change, financial collapse, war and widespread foreclosures -- we do not have the mental clarity to act. We do, of course, respond and react but that is precisely the problem. In our reactions we betray our inability to propose a fundamentally different course of history. We still believe that there will be a technological solution to the problems we face and by accepting this basic premise we insure that the corporations will continue to dominate the horizon. What we need is a movement of spiritual rebirth that rejects the capitalist-materialist disenchantment of the world and instead proposes a vision in which mystery has a place.

All that is wild about the world has been systematically penetrated, catalogued and destroyed. The explicit intention of the scientific mindset, to pierce the mysteries of Being, has led to a world empty of excitement in which not even endless consumption can fill the void. We are both cut off from the natural environment, enclosed in sprawling concrete cities, and cut off from any previous philosophical or religious conception of the world that celebrated possibility, contingency and mystery. How would it change things if we rallied in support of nature not because of climate change (an abstraction identified by science and therefore conceivably able to be "fixed" by science) but instead because the nymphs Socrates felt at the river are no longer with us.

Just look at the left's demands for a new world: we want "clean" energy, full employment, a middle-class standard of living for everyone and "green" corporations. To acquire these desires, we insist that more scientific research must be funded. All our dreams for the future rely on scientists, technocrats, capitalists and the highly educated. That is a fundamental error. Unless the revolution can be accomplished by us, each of us as we are right now, whether we be poor or rich, educated or not, literate or not, then we will continue to perpetrate the myth that only Western style progress is the way forward.

What we need now is a spiritual rebirth that grants the magic back to the world. Only then, through the development of a parallel culture, will we be able to see that the way forward may be to go back.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters magazine and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com

Attention: do you have a blackspot idea? I would like to print an occasional guest post on this blog and I am now looking for submissions, if you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 500 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.

An offline revolution is quietly retaking leisure from the videogame behemoths that dominated the gaming world in 2008. In the thirty years since their invention, videogame consoles have penetrated into half of television-owning homes in America by claiming to provide the ultimate gaming experience. And yet, a steady resurgence of screen-free gaming is taking place that promises to develop a viable alternative to the machines. A sense of excitement is building as fresh ideas are coming from a group of international game designers working within several genres. All are pushing towards a cultural shift by challenging the place of screens in our social interactions by having a fun time without them.

We are beginning to experience the effects of a global paradigm shift in game design that occurred sometime in the 1990s. It has taken a decade for their creative spark to be actualized in a playable format but a few independent geniuses, working alone and unaware of each other’s hard work, are now bringing their games to the market amid a groundswell of support. From the vantage point of a recent participant in this burgeoning scene one can see that the games as a whole represent a triumphant rebirth of face-to-face friendships. After all, the unifying characteristic of these groundbreaking games is that they do not, and never will, involve screens.

Game creators such as Klaus Teuber (Germany), Mark Rein·Hagen (Georgia), Andrew Looney (USA), Kris Burm (Belgium) and others are inspiring families and friends across the world to rethink the rites of leisure. Each has demonstrated that offline gaming is a viable alternative to violent and overpriced videogames. Simcity has been eclipsed by Teuber’s Settlers of Catan; Rein·Hagen’s storytelling World of Darkness is bringing imagination to bear against computer-generated visuals; while Looney’s Zombie Fluxx is taking on cardgames and Burm is overturning abstract strategy with Project Gimpf. Together these games are an affirmation of a future where the games we play positively change the world. The unstated hope of many ardent gamers in the new scene is that the dislocation in perspective accomplished by looking at one’s friends instead of a screen may offer a key to how we can relink our atomized communities.

Arguably, the most innovative game work currently being done is in the strictly imaginative genres. When played, these storytelling games exercise parts of the brain that otherwise lay dormant in the unimaginative or the visually bombarded. Storytelling games trace their genealogy back to the fireside stories that have been told since before antiquity. Currently breathing new life into the genre of storytelling games is Rein·Hagen’s World of Darkness. Each session of a storytelling game is entirely created by the players who act out the story by collectively imagining a haunted world similar to our own. The only equipment necessary is a handful of ten sided dice that can be used to determine the outcome of imagined actions. A good game is one in which the players have an enjoyable time sharing the burden of creatively imagining. Most first time players have the sensation that playing the game is mentally exhausting due to the work needed to lucidly dream without the aid of a television. The brilliance of storytelling games is that they enable players to look at the world askew, providing the creativity we’ll need to replay the world.

Guy Debord, the Situationalist philosopher, once thought that he would be remembered primarily as a game designer. An early visionary, Debord believed that games might provide the revolutionary impetuous and tactical training needed by a new generation of activists. In 1977 Debord founded the Society for Strategic and Historical Games and designed Kriegspiel (Game of War), a boardgame that simulates complicated, strategic battles. He was so optimistic of the game’s future that he once declared, “[Kriegspiel] might be the only thing in all my work--I'm afraid to admit--that one might dare say has some value.” Debord’s game failed for being untimely: the world wasn’t ready. But if the recent reissuing of Kriegspiel and the unexpected rebirth of gaming is any indication, times appear ripe for a game to come along that changes everything.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com

Attention: do you have a blackspot idea? I would like to print an occasional guest post on this blog and I am now looking for submissions, if you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 500 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.

Ask most university students in the United States how they afford their education and the answer will be "student loans." I once had a discussion with a professor at a film school in California. He said that his students take out student loans of tens of thousands of dollars in order to fund their final film projects but upon graduation are often only able to land unpaid internships in Hollywood. "How do they cope?" I wondered aloud. "Well," my friend replied, "each year a couple of them commit suicide on campus." It turns out that for some students, suicide is the only way they'll ever repay their loans. Student loan debt is a chain that shackles our brightest minds to the consumer society and forces them to use their education to make money rather than benefit society. Those who are unable to make their payments are afforded few protections by the law.

In 1970, Ivan Illich wrote "Deschooling Society" in which he challenged us to rethink the role of compulsory education. Illich explained his position thus:

"Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. [...] Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: 'The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.' There shall be no ritual obligatory for all."

If job discrimination was not permitted based upon previous education, but only upon ability to preform the task, then the drive to secure ever more expensive schooling would be undercut. Perhaps what we need is a movement to "deschool society" coupled with the formation of alternative, blackspot schools that impart knowledge in a radical (low-cost) manner.

What is your experience with student loans? How do you think we can revolutionize the educational model?

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com

Attention: do you have a blackspot idea? I would like to print an occasional guest post on this blog and I am now looking for submissions, if you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 500 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.