We Are Our Own Gatekeepers. This is What We Can Do About It.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk
“the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” – from Ursula L LeGuin speech at National Book Awards, 2014
*this essay is part of a digital journal titled Alchemy. To download the entire journal use the link here --> https://influencercon.com/alchemy/
When I decided to examine what it means to be a gatekeeper or a gatecrasher I initially approached it from a common ideological assumptions. My first assumption was these concepts are opposed to one another. There is a gate i.e. a barrier of some sort that must be accessed by those on the outside. That access comes only through a gatekeeper, a person or institutional control designed to limit access to those who have power. My second assumption was to attach a psychological value to these roles. The gatekeeper is a protector of the status quo; as far as the status quo is something to be challenged the gatekeeper is on the side of the “bad guys”. The gatecrasher is the rebel or the upstart; think the plucky Rebel alliance of the original Star Wars Trilogy. So the gatecrasher role as a challenger of the status quo is heroic one. Like most assumptions they don’t quite bear up to serious scrutiny but it represents as good a jumping off point as any. Clearly our relationship to gatekeepers and gatecrashers is far more complex. In a 2014 essay titled “Gatekeepers versus Gatecrashers” I made the point that technology and digital media have gone to great length to establish a narrative that supports my base line assumptions. The old, traditional hierarchies are collapsing under the weight of their bloated history and inefficiencies. Everything is changing in the name of “disruption” and that disruption is coming from those who would consider themselves gatecrashers. Record labels were first challenged by piracy in the form of Napster, and then Apple legitimized access to downloads with Itunes. Spotify has taken that disruption a step further with streaming services which disrupts both labels and Itunes. The names and stories by now are familiar. Uber and Lyft take on the taxi and livery commissions. AirBnB takes on the hospitality industry. Charter schools take on public schools (and teacher unions). Technology has created an environment that seemingly democratizes access to the tools that we all need to be gatecrashers. The better, brighter, future is there for the taking if we can only continue to knock down the gates and build something new, democratic, and empowering but is that really the case? To even look at gatekeepers and gatecrashers as polar opposites is a flawed approach. Instead I would offer that gatekeepers and gatecrashers are descriptions of particular status that is in constant flux with situational bias. Rather than being portrayed as oppositional points along an axis I would offer they have a yin-yang relationships. Rather it is our connection to these terms that imbue them with power and explain how we relate to them. We have so democratized the idea of gatekeepers and gatecrashers it might be more a more realistic view that we are all gatekeepers, in one fashion or another. What needs to be contextualized is how we relate to these terms and how we use our newfound power as gatekeepers. The old way of thinking about and accessing the power dynamics of gatekeepers and gatecrashers is over and that leaves fertile ground for something new to flourish.
We are all gatekeepers. We all have the means to control access to something, even if that something is “only” ourselves. As our data becomes more important to corporations and governments alike, perhaps that is enough. But we’ll save that for another time. So if we are all gatekeepers where does that leave us? We must re-imagine our relationship to that nomenclature and ultimately to each other. The existing gatekeeper/crasher paradigm is an adversarial binary. It functions so well because it supports the existing scarcity model. Opportunities, access, financial resources are positioned as finite and scarce. If that is the status quo then gatekeepers are in possession of something powerful and valuable. Gatecrashers need those same resources and compete in order to gain them. On and on it goes. If that logic is turned on itself you begin to sow the seeds of change. If the world is an abundant place, with resources (however one measures them) for everyone then there is no need to compete in a zero sum framework. If we view each other as gatekeepers then we have a significant opportunity to alter that power relationship with each other. Our world should become one that is networked in order to support and help one another realize our potential. Our duty is to re-imagine a gatekeeper not as a point to block or obstruct access but rather as a point to gain entry. If each of us is a mode of influence in a networked system that is open and managed from a position of abundance it is possible to outweigh the monopolistic interest of institutional gatekeepers. Such a system requires that its participants are held to a high standard and we are self policing. The behavioral norms, expectations, tools of measurement, and relationship to power of traditional gatekeepers must be rejected. In a world where we are all gatekeepers we can leverage our collective networks to become more connected and build sustainable movements that serve our community and ourselves.