I sympathize with the systemic style of this perspective, but I think they’re looking at it the wrong way. No, we are not being attacked by nature for our sins — but this is a shared, collective illness. Covid-19 is an opportunistic infection, attacking the human organism as a whole.

I don’t look at it as a good thing — not at all — but it reminds me of how we get sick as individuals in real life. We get run down from too much work and stress. We don’t take any downtime for family and friends. We don’t have enough laughter in our lives. Or we do shift work, alternating days and nights with little regard for our biological clocks. We start drinking coffee or taking speed to keep going and then more medicine to deal with the depression.

We get the warnings: bad sleep, bad moods, and bad sex. We experience less satisfaction in general; our relationships decline. Then our body tries to warn us, too: We start feeling run down and get headaches that Advil won’t take away. Then something else stressful hits, and bam, we get sick. Does that mean germs and viruses aren’t real? That illness is entirely psychosomatic? Of course not. But the bacteria or virus is just the figure. It’s always there — or something like it is—ready to take advantage.

More important, though, surrendering to illness is our body’s last-gasp effort to resist the greater, environmental stresses. Getting sick is the last thing we do before either withdrawing from the stressors or collapsing altogether.

I’ve begun seeing the Covid-19 virus this way. It’s not a pretty thought, but what if this virus is our last-gasp resistance to the ravages of techno-capitalism? It’s not a good thing in itself — no. But it is addressing a real problem. Think of the virus as more like the President Trump phenomenon — an illness that reveals much bigger systemic woes and forces us to confront them. Only in this case, the virus is a weapon generated by life itself against the repression and exploitation of humanity by the market, technology, and other unchecked forces of death and destruction.

We were like a person working so hard and for so little nourishment in return that we had to take steroids to keep going. The market demanded growth from us collectively—more growth so that shareholders could passively extract more value from us. But they were taking our jobs and social safety nets away at the same time. We need to work more while earning less, patching together an income from three or four different gig jobs, each one with less support and security than the last.

This growth mandate — the one we’re supporting — has nothing to do with our survival or meeting human needs. The only ones who need the economy to keep growing—and for us to keep accelerating — are the bankers and shareholders passively extracting value from our labor, the people who are not on the ground working or creating value. But those of us on the ground have no way to push back. We have no way to slow the economy or to challenge its acceleration. China’s slaves keep making more cheap tech for America to keep deploying more surveillance and disaster capitalism.

The only way we humans could slow down the economy was to get sick. Just like the person whose body can’t take any more stress. It says “no more.” That’s what our collective body is doing. We couldn’t crash the market back in 2007, so now we are crashing ourselves.

The Chinese are in the same position. No, the transition of China from a farming nation to an urban slave metropolis didn’t work. Those colossal wet markets — where hundreds of species of living and dead animals fester all over each other and mutate new pathogens — that’s not some cultural tradition. It’s an artifact of rapid industrial expansion. And the transition of America from a worker/craftsperson economy to one of global digital extraction doesn’t work, either. It has decimated every other aspect of commerce and community. We’re dying here.

But if our conscious, political, social mechanisms are not capable of arresting this — if we can’t elect a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, develop sustainable local economies, or even bake bread profitably in a society dominated by the interests of corrupt global supply chains, then our corrective measures are going to come from somewhere else: the subconscious, like Trump. Or our biology itself, like Covid-19.

Remember when you’d get sick, and your parent or your partner would say, “You’ve been working too hard. I told you to take better care of yourself.” That’s your body revolting, saying “enough” — even if it does so in a self-destructive way. Well, in that sense, Covid-19 is our collective body saying “enough” and trying to do for us what our activism and politics and community organizing have failed to. Yes, some of us will die. That’s how desperate we’ve become. It’s a kamikaze attack of human biology against systems that threaten our very survival.

This is the intervention.

Lead Image: Lego DNA by mknowles

The post We Are Not the Virus. We Are the Kamikazes. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For instance, when a brand like Nike decides to make ads in favor of Colin Kaepernick, we want to push back. I get it. It’s blatant pandering to Black Lives Matter, right? It’s a dilution of the values of the movement. But it’s also an indication that a big company wants to show its support for an important cause.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good.

Or when Pepsi and Kendall Jenner do a zillion-dollar advertisement paying homage to some sort of Black Lives Matter rally, I know it’s inane. It reduces social justice activism to some sort of fashion statement. But it’s also a sign that Pepsi wants to be down with whatever this thing is as best they can understand it. It may have been a watered-down, issueless protest they were depicting, but no one could miss that they were trying to side with millennial angst and social justice in general — just as many millennials do. (As social satire, in some ways it reveals how a lot of activism is really a form of cultural fashion. Maybe that’s the real reason activists are so bothered by their hip representation in a Pepsi commercial. They know that — at least in part — they, too, are suckered by the sexy fun of protests and rallies, stopping traffic, and flummoxing cable news commentators and yet often have trouble articulating what about “the system” they actually want to change.)

No matter how superficial or self-congratulatory their efforts, however, what the corporations are trying to do is get on the right side of history. Think of it cynically, and it makes perfect sense: These giant corporations are picking sides in the culture wars. It’s not short-lived pandering; they can’t afford that. Unlike politicians, who often attempt to stroke and gratify different, sometimes opposed constituencies and appeal to a local base, corporations necessarily communicate to everyone at once. Super Bowl advertising is one size fits all.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good. It’s not simply a matter of employees or shareholders pushing management to do the right thing. No, it’s future forecasters telling the branding department where things are headed. Companies are realizing that their futures better be tied to whichever side of an issue that’s going to win.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke, the less progress we’re going to make.

Cynical? Maybe. But, despite the way the Supreme Court might rule, corporations are not people; they’re just corporations. They don’t have feelings; they only have power. They’re putting their money and reputations on racial equality and social justice over white nationalism. This alone should serve as a leading indicator of where things are actually going. A sign of hope.

Instead of rejecting such efforts, we should welcome them. Maybe think of corporations as dinosaurs that can be trained. Their help is worth more than the pleasure of perpetual righteous indignation.

I’ve been likewise dismayed by many progressives’ take-no-prisoners approach to people who working for social justice. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the person most responsible for bringing the Democratic Party home from its neoliberal vacation, recently became the object of contempt for having used the word “niggardly” in a speech 30 years ago. Though the discomfort is understandable, the word has nothing to do with race. It means stingy. It was on my SATs in 1979. And yet, we’ve now moved into an era where we don’t use such a word because it sounds like a racial slur. I get that.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke or, in Bernie’s case, before progressive standards changed, the less progress we’re going to make. Why agree that we should move beyond a certain behavior or attitude if doing so simply makes us vulnerable to attack? How can a D.C. politician, for example, push for the Washington Redskins to change their name when they know there’s footage somewhere of them rooting for the team or wearing a jersey with a Native American on it? Even though the politician may agree with the need for a change, they would have to resist or at least slow the wheels of progress lest they get caught under the cart. Intolerance and shaming is not the way to win allies.

Progressives are mad, hurt, and traumatized. But they’ve got to dismantle this circular firing squad and begin to welcome positive change rather than punish those who are trying to get woke. Truth and reconciliation work better than blame and shame.

The post Time for Progressives to Stop Shaming One Another appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The term “propaganda” originally referred to a 17th-century committee of Roman Catholic cardinals that sought to propagate the religion through foreign missions — the marginally and only temporarily benevolent face of European colonialism. In modern times, public relations guru Ed Bernaysrevived the term to describe the way Woodrow Wilson’s administration convinced Americans to support U.S. involvement in World War I. Propaganda was about telling the same story through so many media channels at once that there appeared to be only one story.

Today, however, the primary goal of government propaganda is to undermine our faith in everything. Not just our belief in particular stories in the news, but our trust in the people who are telling the stories, the platforms, and fact-based reality itself. Facts are, after all, the enemy of beliefs.

What many of us forget is that this new style of influence through disorientation is really an appropriation of the counterculture’s techniques. This is what the Situationists were doing. So were the hippies and “heads” of the 1960s.

Before Watergate anyway, it felt as if the press and the government were on the same side, telling the same story to us all. There was no way for the underfunded counterculture to compete with mainstream reality programming—except by undermining its premises. The flower children couldn’t overwhelm Richard Nixon’s National Guard troops, but they could put daisies in the barrels of their rifles.

Taken to the extreme, this sort of activist satire became Operation Mindfuck, first announced in 1968 by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus Trilogy. The idea was to undermine people’s faith in government, authority, and the sanctity of consensus reality itself by pranking everything, all the time.

The idea of Operation Mindfuck was to break the trance that kept America at war, blindly consuming, and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world. Destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion. Say things that may or may not be true — but probably not. But maybe. Levitate the Pentagon as an act of protest. Publish conspiracy stories about Jackie Kennedy walking in on Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the exit wound in JFK’s head when his body was being transported back to Washington, DC.

Can they cast spells on social media that change the way people think and vote?

Operation Mindfuck sought to suggest that anything anyone in the counterculture was doing at any time might just be part of an elaborate prank. This put outsiders in a difficult position: The only safe assumption was that anything a hippie was doing was part of Operation Mindfuck — some sort of trick or game. But because this could only lead to paranoia, one had to assume that whatever they were doing was probably harmless. They were, after all, just pranks. For their part, the counterculture agitators hoped the assumption that they were just jesters would keep them safe from any real persecution.

But over the ensuing decades, it was the progressive left whose ideas ended up becoming mainstreamed. Really, from All in the Family onward, it was progressive values in fictional TV — Maude to M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown to The West Wing. And as that became the dominant cultural narrative, Operation Mindfuck became the tool of the alt-right. Is the Cult of Kek — that Egyptian frog cartoon — real? Can they cast spells on social media that change the way people think and vote?

Or consider the president himself, releasing more decoys per minute than an Apache helicopter and forcing Americans to, at the very least, entertain the notion that the entire media is run by the deep state. Anything is possible, right? Climate change is a hoax. The earth may be flat, as an increasingly vocal minority are arguing. Easily misinterpreted videos on Twitter force everyone to stop and think twice before deciding they know what it is they’re really looking at. (P2P blog editors note: the video in this link is now unavailable; click here for a selection of contrasting videos illustrating the author’s point).

But the value of Operation Mindfuck isn’t just the opportunity to exchange one delusion for another. It’s not about replacing the fantasy of a borderless world with that of a walled nation-state or that of a free-market jungle with communism, but seeing all of them as extreme, ideological endpoints. These are reality tunnels — perceptual limitations and conceptual frameworks, shaped by our experiences and prejudices. None of them can be understood as absolute. But at the same time, we have to remember that some of these tunnels are a whole lot closer to reality than others. It’s up to us to choose the most constructive and compassionate ones to inhabit.

The post Operation Mindfuck 2.0 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’ve been taking the wrong approach to communicating about climate change. I get that the situation is dire. Really dire. But it goes way beyond the fact that every year is the hottest year on record, sea levels are rising, drought is forcing millions into refugee status, the Great Barrier Reef is almost dead, the oceans are 26 percent more acidic than preindustrial levels, our topsoil will be gone in less than 60 years, and we’re already at least 1.5 degrees Celsius toward the two degrees said to herald a real catastrophe. That’s all bad. The reality is actually worse.

By any rational analysis, civilization as we know it is on the brink of true disaster. And despite their outward messaging, even climate-denying, anti-scientific, messianic nations like the United States are quietly preparing for the coming storm. No, they’re not looking at how to mitigate climate change, but how to prepare for its inevitability. We’re building walls — not to keep out today’s immigrants, but to block tomorrow’s climate refugees. We’re being trained by our president and other leaders in the dark art of seeing people from other nations as less than human — a trick that will make it easier to watch as flooding and other climate catastrophes wipe out millions. “At least it’s them and not us,” we’ll be able to tell ourselves. This sort of alienation verging on sociopathy takes time to develop. But we’re working on it.

These are the sorts of things people do when they feel powerless to effect any change. They see the future as fixed — as something to predict and prepare for — but utterly impervious to their intervention. It’s the posture toward the future assumed by most corporations. They hire futurists and scenario planners to tell them what is most likely to happen 10, 20, or 50 years from now so they can invest in whatever is going to be valuable in that environment. Back in the 1980s, the futurists started talking about the coming water crisis. That’s what turned water into a private commodity — accelerating and worsening the very crisis they predicted.

Likewise, any futurist worth their coverage in Wired is telling their corporate clients about the coming global climate crisis in stirring detail: which regions will be underwater; how temperature changes are likely to effect social unrest, politics, and violence levels; how and where the populations of Africa and Southeast Asia will migrate; and so on.

We’ve won the communications battle in the sense that the rich and powerful now accept the reality of climate change and are actively betting on it happening. They believe us. But we’re losing the war in that they don’t believe the crisis can be averted. As speculators, they’re more committed to betting on the most likely future instead of investing in the future they’d like to see happen. In the finance world, betting on what you hope for is derided as “emotional investing.” One is supposed to bet only on existing probabilities — not on one’s genuine goals or dreams. And this mentality is self-perpetuating. The more we invest in the inevitability of climate disaster, the more assuredly we bring it on and the more devastating a future we are creating for ourselves.

If we’re going to get business on our side (after which government is sure to follow), we have to convince them that the most likely future scenario is one where the whole world tries to get in on the bet that we can avert climate change. Or at least we can mitigate its effects. Slow it down. Build more resilience. We have to show that the world is on board and ready to do and pay for what is necessary to keep the planet livable for the vast majority of species.

As a thinker who is often mistaken for a futurist, the last thing I should be doing is standing in front of people and telling them how many millions or billions of people may die, how mass migrations will threaten the sanctity of nation-states, or how the oceans are on the brink of death. Because then my audiences will start betting on those outcomes.

No, the people who needed to hear the alarm bells have heard them. Those who didn’t — who couldn’t — respond to the warnings with anything but self-interested bets on shotguns, iodine tablets, water futures, and land in New Zealand? They need to hear a different message. They need to hear that climate change is about to be defeated. If they don’t get in on climate remediation now, on the ground floor, they’ll miss the opportunity. This is the chance to invest in organic agriculture and to sell short on Monsanto and Big Agra. This is the time to go all in on solar, wind, and geothermal.

And once they do — once the big money is really in — just watch as Wall Street starts lobbying for the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. Net-zero greenhouse emissions is not a pipe dream, but a plausible, positive, attainable goal.

Let’s start talking about our collective sustainable future in ways that make people bet on it.

Photo by tim_gorman

The post Selling the Green New Deal With Positivity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

My new book Team Human, launches today.  I’ve never written to everyone in my address book before, but this is by far the most important publication of my career: a manifesto arguing for human dignity and prosperity in a digital age.

Autonomous technologies, runaway markets and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. Yet the root causes for our collective disempowerment are based on some very old, false ideas about competition, individuality, scarcity, and progress. We needn’t embed these values in the digital landscape of tomorrow. They are obsolete. We must stop optimizing human beings for technology, and start optimizing technology for us.

It’s time we reassert the human agenda. And we must do so together – not as individual players  – but as the team we actually are. Team Human.

I would be grateful if you purchase this book, which also supports the Team Human podcast.

Video republished from Ted.com

The post How to be “Team Human” in the digital future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.

I tell the story in my new book, Team Human, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?

They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.

The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.

The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.

No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.

As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.

The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.

We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.

Image from Wikimedia Commons – New Planet, by Konstantin Yuon

The post Russian Cosmism and how it informs today’s religion of technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For authors of business how-to books, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want to brag that Google is taking their business advice? For me, it was a little different. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus was about the inequity embedded in the digital economy: how the growth of digital startups was draining the real economy and making it harder for people to participate in creating value, make any money, or keep up with rising rents.

I took the gig. I figured it was my chance to let my audience know, in no uncertain terms, that Uber was among the worst offenders, destroying the existing taxi market not through creative destruction but via destructive destruction. They were using the power of their capital to undercut everyone, extract everything, and establish a scorched-earth monopoly. I went on quite a tirade.

To my surprise, the audience seemed to share my concerns. They’re not idiots, and the negative effects of their operations were visible everywhere they looked. Then an employee piped up with a surprising question: “What about UBI?”

Wait a minute, I thought. That’s my line.

Up until that moment, I had been an ardent supporter of universal basic income (UBI), that is, government cash payments to people whose employment would no longer be required in a digital economy. Contrary to expectations, UBI doesn’t make people lazy. Study after study shows that the added security actually enables people to take greater risks, become more entrepreneurial, or dedicate more time and energy to improving their communities.

So what’s not to like?

Shouldn’t we applaud the developers at Uber — as well as other prominent Silicon Valley titans like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, bond investor Bill Gross, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman — for coming to their senses and proposing we provide money for the masses to spend? Maybe not. Because to them, UBI is really just a way for them to keep doing business as usual.

Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.

When it’s looked at the way a software developer would, it’s clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that’s fundamentally flawed.

The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you’re doing something wrong or “leaving money on the table.”

Back in the 1500s, residents of various colonized islands developed a good business making rope and selling it to visiting ships owned by the Dutch East India Company. Sensing an opportunity, the executives of what was then the most powerful corporation the world had ever seen obtained a charter from the king to be the exclusive manufacturer of rope on the islands. Then they hired the displaced workers to do the job they’d done before. The company still spent money on rope — paying wages now instead of purchasing the rope outright — but it also controlled the trade, the means of production, and the market itself.

Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps.

Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely. Instead of merely rewriting the law like colonial corporations did or utilizing the power of capital like retail conglomerates do, digital companies are using code. Amazon’s control over the retail market and increasingly the production of the goods it sells, has created an automated wealth-extraction platform that the slave drivers who ran the Dutch East India Company couldn’t have even imagined.

Of course, it all comes at a price: Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.

To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.

Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.

Meanwhile, UBI also obviates the need for people to consider true alternatives to living lives as passive consumers. Solutions like platform cooperatives, alternative currencies, favor banks, or employee-owned businesses, which actually threaten the status quo under which extractive monopolies have thrived, will seem unnecessary. Why bother signing up for the revolution if our bellies are full? Or just full enough?

Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.

No, income is nothing but a booby prize. If we’re going to get a handout, we should demand not an allowance but assets. That’s right: an ownership stake.

The wealth gap in the United States has less to do with the difference between people’s salaries than their assets. For instance, African-American families earn a little more than half the salary, on average, that white American families do. But that doesn’t account for the massive wealth gap between whites and blacks. More important to this disparity is the fact that the median wealth of white households in America is 20 times that of African-American households. Even African-Americans with decent income tend to lack the assets required to participate in savings accounts, business investments, or the stock market.

So even if an African-American child who has grown up poor gets free admission to college, they will still likely lag behind due to a lack of assets. After all, those assets are what make it possible for a white classmate to take a “gap” year to gain experience before hitting the job market or take an unpaid internship or have access to a nice apartment in Williamsburg to live in while knocking out that first young adult novel on spec, touring with a band, opening a fair trade coffee bar, or running around to hackathons. No amount of short-term entitlements substitute for real assets because once the money is spent, it’s gone — straight to the very people who already enjoy an excessive asset advantage.

Had Andrew Johnson not overturned the original reconstruction proposal for freed slaves to be given 40 acres and a mule as reparation, instead of simply allowing them to earn wage labor on former slaveowners’ lands, we might be looking at a vastly less divided America today.

Likewise, if Silicon Valley’s UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future’s Marina Gorbis. As she points out, in Denmark — where people have public access to a great portion of the nation’s resources — a person born into a poor family is just as likely to end up as wealthy as peers born into a wealthier household.

To venture capitalists seeking to guarantee their fortunes for generations, such economic equality sounds like a nightmare and unending, unnerving disruption. Why create a monopoly just to give others the opportunity to break it or, worse, turn all these painstakingly privatized assets back into a public commons?

The answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is because all those assets are actually of diminishing value to the few ultra-wealthy capitalists who have accumulated them. Return on assets for American corporations has been steadily declining for the last 75 years. It’s like a form of corporate obesity.The rich have been great at taking all the assets off the table but really bad at deploying them. They’re so bad at investing or building or doing anything that puts money back into the system that they are asking governments to do this for them — even though the corporations are the ones holding all the real assets.

Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running. They don’t see the economic operating system beneath their programs, and so they are not in a position to challenge its embedded biases much less rewrite that code.

As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It’s the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they’ve sexually harassed. It’s hush money.

If the good folks of Uber or any other extractive digital enterprise really want to reprogram the economy to everyone’s advantage and guarantee a sustainable supply of wealthy customers for themselves, they should start by tweaking their own operating systems. Instead of asking the government to make up the difference for unlivable wages, what about making one’s workers the owners of the company? Instead of kicking over additional, say, 10% in tax for a government UBI fund, how about offering a 10% stake in the company to the people who supply the labor? Or another 10% to the towns and cities who supply the roads and traffic signals? Not just a kickback or tax but a stake.

Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.

Photo by tokyoform

The post I Used to Argue for UBI. Then I gave a talk at Uber. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
Team Human, the book, is ready for Pre-Order! Don’t be shy. Everyone who has emailed to ask what can they do to help? Preorder the Team Human manifesto!

———-

Douglas Rushkoff

http://rushkoff.com

Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.

Team Human – my new podcast!

Sign up for RushkoffMail to get updates and newest writing

Photo by ashokboghani

The post Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human today, recorded live on the floor at the Personal Democracy Forum 2018, are Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff. Moira and Ben will be showing us how the tech industry’s promise to build less harmful products and programs is just capitalism’s way of proving that love means never having to say, “I’m sorry.”

Moira and Ben co-wrote the brilliant feature article in the Guardian, “Why Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Itself”

Just last week, Ben’s exposé and interview with an anonymous worker/organizer at Google revealed the internal fight led by workers against Google’s contracting with the Pentagon on Project Maven, a weaponized use of Google’s AI and cloud computing technology. The interview, published June 6th, can be found at Jacobin magazine: Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.

Ben’s articles in the Guardian and Jacobin have been disrupting tech industry gospel for the past decade. He is also the author of The Bohemians.

Moira Weigel is a postdoc at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her recent book Labor of Love; The Invention of Dating looks at the commodification of courtship under consumer capitalism.

Moira and Ben are editors of Logic, a print and digital magazine which features thought provoking journalism on technology. Like Team Human, Logic strives to host a “better conversation” about technology… learn more and subscribe here: https://logicmag.io/

Douglas opens the show with a monologue unpacking the bizarre news of the past week; G7, trade wars, and North Korea.

On today’s show you heard intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord records, R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time, and a Team Human original by Stephen Bartolomei.

You can sustain this show via Patreon. And please leave us a review on iTunes

Cross posted from Teamhuman.fm

Photo by hellocatfood

The post Team Human: Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff “Humane Tech or Capitalism Rebranded?” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle’s narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn’t just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero’s solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep – the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths – but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimately destructive?

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea – say, that agriculture was a wrong turn – and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story.

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment – imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way – not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths – if that’s our nature – then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story – and sharing one’s own – but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it’s more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it’s for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making – and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do – without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people’s myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all? Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice.

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen.

Photo by giveawayboy

The post Do we need a new myth, or no myth? appeared first on P2P Foundation.