Think Bigger

Whatever you might be thinking about the long-term impacts of the coronavirus epidemic, you’re probably not thinking big enough.

Our lives have already been reshaped so dramatically in the past few weeks that it’s difficult to see beyond the next news cycle. We’re bracing for the recession we all know is here, wondering how long the lockdown will last, and praying that our loved ones will all make it through alive.

But, in the same way that Covid-19 is spreading at an exponential rate, we also need to think exponentially about its long-term impact on our culture and society. A year or two from now, the virus itself will likely have become a manageable part of our lives—effective treatments will have emerged; a vaccine will be available. But the impact of coronavirus on our global civilization will only just be unfolding. The massive disruptions we’re already seeing in our lives are just the first heralds of a historic transformation in political and societal norms.

If Covid-19 were spreading across a stable and resilient world, its impact could be abrupt but contained. Leaders would consult together; economies disrupted temporarily; people would make do for a while with changed circumstances—and then, after the shock, look forward to getting back to normal. That’s not, however, the world in which we live. Instead, this coronavirus is revealing the structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades as they’ve been steadily worsening. Gaping economic inequalities, rampant ecological destruction, and pervasive political corruption are all results of unbalanced systems relying on each other to remain precariously poised. Now, as one system destabilizes, expect others to tumble down in tandem in a cascade known by researchers as “synchronous failure.”

The first signs of this structural destabilization are just beginning to show. Our globalized economy relies on just-in-time inventory for hyper-efficient production. As supply chains are disrupted through factory closures and border closings, shortages in household items, medications, and food will begin surfacing, leading to rounds of panic buying that will only exacerbate the situation. The world economy is entering a downturn so steep it could exceed the severity of the Great Depression. The international political system—already on the ropes with Trump’s “America First” xenophobia and the Brexit fiasco—is likely to unravel further, as the global influence of the United States tanks while Chinese power strengthens. Meanwhile, the Global South, where Covid-19 is just beginning to make itself felt, may face disruption on a scale far greater than the more affluent Global North.

The Overton Window

During normal times, out of all the possible ways to organize society, there is only a limited range of ideas considered acceptable for mainstream political discussion—known as the Overton window. Covid-19 has blown the Overton window wide open. In just a few weeks, we’ve seen political and economic ideas seriously discussed that had previously been dismissed as fanciful or utterly unacceptable: universal basic income, government intervention to house the homeless, and state surveillance on individual activity, to name just a few. But remember—this is just the beginning of a process that will expand exponentially in the ensuing months.

A crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic has a way of massively amplifying and accelerating changes that were already underway: shifts that might have taken decades can occur in weeks. Like a crucible, it has the potential to melt down the structures that currently exist, and reshape them, perhaps unrecognizably. What might the new shape of society look like? What will be center stage in the Overton window by the time it begins narrowing again?

The Example of World War II

We’re entering uncharted territory, but to get a feeling for the scale of transformation we need to consider, it helps to look back to the last time the world underwent an equivalent spasm of change: the Second World War.

The pre-war world was dominated by European colonial powers struggling to maintain their empires. Liberal democracy was on the wane, while fascism and communism were ascendant, battling each other for supremacy. The demise of the League of Nations seemed to have proven the impossibility of multinational global cooperation. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States maintained an isolationist policy, and in the early years of the war, many people believed it was just a matter of time before Hitler and the Axis powers invaded Britain and took complete control of Europe.

Within a few years, the world was barely recognizable. As the British Empire crumbled, geopolitics was dominated by the Cold War which divided the world into two political blocs under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. A social democratic Europe formed an economic union that no-one could previously have imagined possible. Meanwhile, the US and its allies established a system of globalized trade, with institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank setting terms for how the “developing world” could participate. The stage was set for the “Great Acceleration”: far and away the greatest and most rapid increase of human activity in history across a vast number of dimensions, including global population, trade, travel, production, and consumption. 

If the changes we’re about to undergo are on a similar scale to these, how might a future historian summarize the “pre-coronavirus” world that is about to disappear?

The Neoliberal Era            

There’s a good chance they will call this the Neoliberal Era. Until the 1970s, the post-war world was characterized in the West by an uneasy balance between government and private enterprise. However, following the “oil shock” and stagflation of that period—which at the time represented the world’s biggest post-war disruption—a new ideology of free-market neoliberalism took center stage in the Overton window (the phrase itself was named by a neoliberal proponent).

The value system of neoliberalism, which has since become entrenched in global mainstream discourse, holds that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and because of this, unrestrained free-market capitalism provides the best framework for every kind of human endeavor. Through their control of government, finance, business, and media, neoliberal adherents have succeeded in transforming the world into a globalized market-based system, loosening regulatory controls, weakening social safety nets, reducing taxes, and virtually demolishing the power of organized labor.

The triumph of neoliberalism has led to the greatest inequality in history, where (based on the most recent statistics) the world’s twenty-six richest people own as much wealth as half the entire world’s population. It has allowed the largest transnational corporations to establish a stranglehold over other forms of organization, with the result that, of the world’s hundred largest economies, sixty-nine are corporations. The relentless pursuit of profit and economic growth above all else has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: The world’s current policies have us on track for more than 3° increase by the end of this century, and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections, and thus place at risk the very continuation of our civilization.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, a continuation of untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Currently, our civilization is running at 40% above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed three of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to more than double by mid-century, with potentially irreversible and devastating consequences.

In 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.” They are echoed by the government-approved declaration of the UN-sponsored IPCC, that we need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disaster.

In the clamor for economic growth, however, these warnings have so far gone unheeded. Will the impact of coronavirus change anything?

Fortress Earth

There’s a serious risk that, rather than shifting course from our failing trajectory, the post-Covid-19 world will be one where the same forces currently driving our race to the precipice further entrench their power and floor the accelerator directly toward global catastrophe. China has relaxed its environmental laws to boost production as it tries to recover from its initial coronavirus outbreak, and the US (anachronistically named) Environmental Protection Agency took immediate advantage of the crisis to suspend enforcement of its laws, allowing companies to pollute as much as they want as long as they can show some relation to the pandemic.

On a greater scale, power-hungry leaders around the world are taking immediate advantage of the crisis to clamp down on individual liberties and move their countries swiftly toward authoritarianism. Hungary’s strongman leader, Viktor Orban, officially killed off democracy in his country on Monday, passing a bill that allows him to rule by decree, with five-year prison sentences for those he determines are spreading “false” information. Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu shut down his country’s courts in time to avoid his own trial for corruption. In the United States, the Department of Justice has already filed a request to allow the suspension of courtroom proceedings in emergencies, and there are many who fear that Trump will take advantage of the turmoil to install martial law and try to compromise November’s election.

Even in those countries that avoid an authoritarian takeover, the increase in high-tech surveillance taking place around the world is rapidly undermining previously sacrosanct privacy rights. Israel has passed an emergency decree to follow the lead of China, Taiwan, and South Korea in using smartphone location readings to trace contacts of individuals who tested positive for coronavirus. European mobile operators are sharing user data (so far anonymized) with government agencies. As Yuval Harari has pointed out, in the post-Covid world, these short-term emergency measures may “become a fixture of life.”

If these, and other emerging trends, continue unchecked, we could head rapidly to a grim scenario of what might be called “Fortress Earth,” with entrenched power blocs eliminating many of the freedoms and rights that have formed the bedrock of the post-war world. We could be seeing all-powerful states overseeing economies dominated even more thoroughly by the few corporate giants (think Amazon, Facebook) that can monetize the crisis for further shareholder gain.

The chasm between the haves and have-nots may become even more egregious, especially if treatments for the virus become available but are priced out of reach for some people. Countries in the Global South, already facing the prospect of disaster from climate breakdown, may face collapse if coronavirus rampages through their populations while a global depression starves them of funds to maintain even minimal infrastructures. Borders may become militarized zones, shutting off the free flow of passage. Mistrust and fear, which has already shown its ugly face in panicked evictions of doctors in India and record gun-buying in the US, could become endemic.

Society Transformed

But it doesn’t have to turn out that way. Back in the early days of World War II, things looked even darker, but underlying dynamics emerged that fundamentally altered the trajectory of history. Frequently, it was the very bleakness of the disasters that catalyzed positive forces to emerge in reaction and predominate. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the day “which will live in infamy”—was the moment when the power balance of World War II shifted. The collective anguish in response to the global war’s devastation led to the founding of the United Nations. The grotesque atrocity of Hitler’s holocaust led to the international recognition of the crime of genocide, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Could it be that the crucible of coronavirus will lead to a meltdown of neoliberal norms that ultimately reshapes the dominant structures of our global civilization? Could a mass collective reaction to the excesses of authoritarian overreach lead to a renaissance of humanitarian values? We’re already seeing signs of this. While the Overton window is allowing surveillance and authoritarian practices to enter from one side, it’s also opening up to new political realities and possibilities on the other side. Let’s take a look at some of these.

A fairer society. The specter of massive layoffs and unemployment has already led to levels of state intervention to protect citizens and businesses that were previously unthinkable. Denmark plans to pay 75% of the salaries of employees in private companies hit by the effects of the epidemic, to keep them and their businesses solvent. The UK has announced a similar plan to cover 80% of salaries. California is leasing hotels to shelter homeless people who would otherwise remain on the streets, and has authorized local governments to halt evictions for renters and homeowners. New York state is releasing low-risk prisoners from its jails. Spain is nationalizing its private hospitals. The Green New Deal, which was already endorsed by the leading Democratic presidential candidates, is now being discussed as the mainstay of a program of economic recovery. The idea of universal basic income for every American, boldly raised by long-shot Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, has now become a talking point even for Republican politicians.

Ecological stabilization. Coronavirus has already been more effective in slowing down climate breakdown and ecological collapse than all the world’s policy initiatives combined. In February, Chinese CO2 emissions were down by over 25%. One scientist calculated that twenty times as many Chinese lives have been saved by reduced air pollution than lost directly to coronavirus. Over the next year, we’re likely to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions greater than even the most optimistic modelers’ forecasts, as a result of the decline in economic activity. As French philosopher Bruno Latour tweeted: “Next time, when ecologists are ridiculed because ‘the economy cannot be slowed down’, they should remember that it can grind to a halt in a matter of weeks worldwide when it is urgent enough.”

Of course, nobody would propose that economic activity should be disrupted in this catastrophic way in response to the climate crisis. However, the emergency response initiated so rapidly by governments across the world has shown what is truly possible when people face what they recognize as a crisis. As a result of climate activism, 1,500 municipalities worldwide, representing over 10% of the global population, have officially declared a climate emergency. The Covid-19 response can now be held out as an icon of what is really possible when people’s lives are at stake. In the case of the climate, the stakes are even greater—the future survival of our civilization. We now know the world can respond as needed, once political will is engaged and societies enter emergency mode

The rise of “glocalization.” One of the defining characteristics of the Neoliberal Era has been a corrosive globalization based on free market norms. Transnational corporations have dictated terms to countries in choosing where to locate their operations, leading nations to compete against each other to reduce worker protections in a “race to the bottom.” The use of cheap fossil fuels has caused wasteful misuse of resources as products are flown around the world to meet consumer demand stoked by manipulative advertising. This globalization of markets has been a major cause of the Neoliberal Era’s massive increase in consumption that threatens civilization’s future. Meanwhile, masses of people disaffected by rising inequity have been persuaded by right-wing populists to turn their frustration toward outgroups such as immigrants or ethnic minorities.

The effects of Covid-19 could lead to an inversion of these neoliberal norms. As supply lines break down, communities will look to local and regional producers for their daily needs. When a consumer appliance breaks, people will try to get it repaired rather than buy a new one. Workers, newly unemployed, may turn increasingly to local jobs in smaller companies that serve their community directly.

At the same time, people will increasingly get used to connecting with others through video meetings over the internet, where someone on the other side of the world feels as close as someone across town. This could be a defining characteristic of the new era. Even while production goes local, we may see a dramatic increase in the globalization of new ideas and ways of thinking—a phenomenon known as “glocalization.” Already, scientists are collaborating around the world in an unprecedented collective effort to find a vaccine; and a globally crowdsourced library is offering a “Coronavirus Tech Handbook” to collect and distribute the best ideas for responding to the pandemic.

Compassionate community. Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, documents how, contrary to popular belief, disasters frequently bring out the best in people, as they reach out and help those in need around them. In the wake of Covid-19, the whole world is reeling from a disaster that affects us all. The compassionate response Solnit observed in disaster zones has now spread across the planet with a speed matching the virus itself. Mutual aid groups are forming in communities everywhere to help those in need. The website Karunavirus (Karuna is a Sanskrit word for compassion) documents a myriad of everyday acts of heroism, such as the thirty thousand Canadians who have started “caremongering,” and the mom-and-pop restaurants in Detroit forced to close and now cooking meals for the homeless.

In the face of disaster, many people are rediscovering that they are far stronger as a community than as isolated individuals. The phrase “social distancing” is helpfully being recast as “physical distancing” since Covid-19 is bringing people closer together in solidarity than ever before.

Revolution in Values

This rediscovery of the value of community has the potential to be the most important factor of all in shaping the trajectory of the next era. New ideas and political possibilities are critically important, but ultimately an era is defined by its underlying values, on which everything else is built.

The Neoliberal Era was constructed on a myth of the selfish individual as the foundational for values. As Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” This belief in the selfish individual has not just been destructive of community—it’s plain wrong. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, a defining characteristic of humanity is our set of prosocial impulses—fairness, altruism, and compassion—that cause us to identify with something larger than our own individual needs. The compassionate responses that have arisen in the wake of the pandemic are heartwarming but not surprising—they are the expected, natural human response to others in need.

Once the crucible of coronavirus begins to cool, and a new sociopolitical order emerges, the larger emergency of climate breakdown and ecological collapse will still be looming over us. The Neoliberal Era has set civilization’s course directly toward a precipice. If we are truly to “shift course away from our failing trajectory,” the new era must be defined, at its deepest level, not merely by the political or economic choices being made, but by a revolution in values. It must be an era where the core human values of fairness, mutual aid, and compassion are paramount—extending beyond the local neighborhood to state and national government, to the global community of humans, and ultimately to the community of all life. If we can change the basis of our global civilization from one that is wealth-affirming to one that is life-affirming, then we have a chance to create a flourishing future for humanity and the living Earth.

To this extent, the Covid-19 disaster represents an opportunity for the human race—one in which each one of us has a meaningful part to play. We are all inside the crucible right now, and the choices we make over the weeks and months to come will, collectively, determine the shape and defining characteristics of the next era. However big we’re thinking about the future effects of this pandemic, we can think bigger. As has been said in other settings, but never more to the point: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Lead image: City vibe / Ambiance urbaine #03 by Napafloma-Photographe

The post Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Early last week, when Republican Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested that the elderly should be willing to die from COVID-19 to get the economy back in action, something major shifted. If just briefly, the mask came off. Here was an elected official explicitly offering human sacrifices to appease the market. 

Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick went on national tv & argued elderly people should die for the health of the market. Capitalism is a system that priorities profits over people. This fight is literally a matter of life or death. Battle lines are being drawn. Which side are you on?

“Capitalism has always been willing to sacrifice life,” author and activist Naomi Klein told an audience of 14,000 people last week on an online teach-in hosted by Haymarket Books. “[It’s an] economic model soaked in blood. This is not a more radical version of capitalism; what is more radical is the scale.”

It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a global pandemic to reveal it, but the unprecedented crisis catalyzed by the coronavirus has exposed our capitalist economic system for what it has always been. From the early history of colonialism, slavery, the enclosure of the commons to the ravages of industrial capitalism, and into modern austerity regimes, capitalism has always put profit over people.

This is exactly why any calls for “returning to normal” are so misguided. “Normal is deadly, normal was a massive crisis,” Klein emphasized last week. “We don’t need to stimulate the death economy, we need to catalyze a massive transformation into an economy that is based on protecting life.”

In 2007, Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Her ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The thesis is fairly simple: When a crisis unfolds, disaster capitalists will try to create an opportunity to advance their nefarious agendas. One obvious example of this is the stimulus bill signed into law late last week which showers trillions of dollars onto Wall Street and giant corporations with minimal oversight or regulation. Nothing suggests a “return to normal” more than another corporate bailout that will never “trickle-down” to the rest of us. 

Instead, what Klein and others demand is a bottom-up bailout that goes well beyond simply surviving this acute crisis. Throughout the teach-in, Klein and her co-panelists Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, offered a variety of solutions that could be applied to both the short- and long-term crises of the coronavirus and capitalism — both relief and recovery. An example of immediate relief would be a moratorium on rent until the crisis is over, while an example of recovery would be passing policies that would guarantee affordable housing to everybody living in the United States. The former is a stopgap measure to mitigate immediate harm; the latter is systemic transformation.

Part of the economic recovery package which just passed congress includes a one-time payment of $1,200 to individuals making less than $75,000 annually. There has been quite a bit of criticism coming from many different communities suggesting the figure of $1,200 is too low. The number was likely derived from the federal minimum wage wherein a full-time worker making $7.25/hr grosses $1,160 per month. Rounded up, this explains the $1,200 figure that the Republicans and Democrats agreed upon. 

If we utilize the framing encouraged by Klein and others we can begin to see how the coronavirus pandemic simply reveals the more chronic disaster that is the Federal minimum wage. If $1,200 is not enough in an acute crisis, then it’s certainly not enough during “normal” times. 

Of course, affordable housing and an increase in the minimum wage are not new ideas. In fact, many of the structural policy proposals put forth by Klein and her co-panelists are ideas that have been on the agenda of the left for quite some time. “We need to reimagine in this moment,” Klein argued. “And the good news is that we aren’t starting from scratch.”

Policy proposals like the Green New Deal, universal health care, universal basic income, and labor protections such as raising the minimum wage to $15/hr and democratizing the economy, for example, have all — as Klein puts it — been “lying around” for quite some time. She borrows this phrase from the economist Milton Friedman, who argued that radical transformation can only take place during periods of acute crisis. It’s during these periods that the ideas “already lying around” will step in to fill the gaps. 

Friedman was an American right-wing economist whose ideas are largely responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and austerity politics that have shaped the last 40 years. He utilized a crisis in capitalism during the late 1970s to help usher in a sweeping transformation that ended the Keynesian, New Deal-era in the United States. 

“The scale of the coronavirus crisis is so profound that there is now an opportunity to remake our society for the greater good, while rejecting the pernicious individualism that has left us utterly ill-equipped for the moment,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained during the teach-in. “The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this vicious virus, unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table.”

The coronavirus is an unprecedented event, but it’s the sharpening of class divides, the gutting of our social safety net and the mentality of selfish individualism encouraged by capitalism which have turned this pandemic into an unimaginable crisis. 

Things like eviction moratoriums, stimulus checks, or extended unemployment benefits will not fundamentally address the conditions which allowed the coronavirus to unfold so disastrously. They also won’t address the many chronic disasters that plague capitalist society on a daily basis. As Klein and others argue, these things can only be addressed through radical, systemic transformation. 

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This article is part of our reporting on the community response to the coronavirus crisis:

• The People’s COVID-19 Response needs you
• The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever
• 10 ways to share during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
• 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine
• Things got a whole lot more local than I expected due to coronavirus
• My new pandemic routine
• How these US immigrants are giving back to their new community during the COVID-19 crisis
• Open-source medical supplies battle COVID-19

Lead image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Coronavirus demands radical transformation, not a ‘return to normal’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The invisible hand of the free market governs everything and the hardworking get prosperous while the lazy suffer poverty.

Sounds pretty familiar and very rational, doesn’t it…

But check it out again with the religious equivalents of the core terms replaced in:

God of the creation governs everything and the faithful get in heaven while the heathen suffer hell.

As you can easily notice, ‘Invisible Hand’ is a replacement for ‘God’, ‘free market’ is a replacement for ‘the creation’, ‘the hardworking’ is a replacement for ‘the faithful’ and ‘the lazy’ is a replacement for ‘the heathen’.

That’s because Capitalism is a Christianity replacement.

So much that it even replicates the Church organization of Medieval Christianity:

The economists (clergy) continually advocate (preach) free market economics (the faith) and interpret the economy (holy book) on behalf of the society (the believers). The critical economists (heretic priests) are outcast by the establishment, not given airtime, ridiculed or censored.

Whatever happens in the economy is interpreted and ‘somehow’ explained by the economists (clergy), and in those explanations, anything good that happens is due to free market economics (the faith), and anything bad that happens is due to straying away from free market economics (having any other faith).

According to the sermon, all that the hardworking (faithful) need to do is to work hard (have faith) and keep staying the course. Because ‘the invisible hand’ will fix all problems, crises, issues without them needing to do anything in particular. All they need to do is to have faith, and putting their trust in the religion by trusting the clergy of the church. Whose only solution to every single problem is more free market (more faith), and if a solution does not work at all, its because the society was not faithful to the free market enough.

Most interestingly, this setup also mirrors the development of Christianity and its Church from their inception to late modernity:

While the economist community that is comprised of economists sanctioned by the religion acts as the clergy of the religion, modern media which took the place of individual church buildings as a medium of communication acts as their medium to preach the religion to the society. This setup is amended by the education institutions and scientific institutions which act as the appendages to the Church, where children are educated/indoctrinated to the religion and its tenets from an early age by instilling them with ideas of competition, consumerism, materialism based success and in general a complete worldview that is created based on the religion’s tenets. The higher education and scientific institutions continue the education/indoctrination, creating the subsequent generations of clergy to preach the religion and run the institutions.

Incredibly, this arrangement also replicates the relationship of the medieval church and the nobility

Medieval church in middle ages acted as the opinion-shaper which molded the society’s opinion and beliefs to comply with then-existing feudal/aristocratic system.

The church advocated hard work and poverty, material conservatism to its faithful. Whereas clergy, especially higher members of the church lived much more comfortable and wealthy lives compared to average population, to the extent that highest members of the church being de facto princes in their own right.

The church also acted as the agent which rationalized the power of the minority rich, who were the feudal aristocratic nobility: While the faithful needed to suffer poverty and work hard, the nobility could enjoy material wealth, luxury and live extravagant lives because it was their god given right to rule.

So the medieval church basically acted as the propaganda/conditioning organ of the establishment by conditioning the public to accept the existing arrangement and rationalize the power of minority elite over them. The people worked hard to create economic value while the minority rich elite collected most of that economic production as theirs without doing any comparable work, because they were the property-owners of the region. Their ownership of that property was rationalized as a god given, holistic right.

Which is exactly the case with modern church of holistic economics: The economic church continually rationalizes the existing system and excuses/explains the power of a minority extreme rich segment who controls the system despite the suffering of a large majority to create the wealth that concentrates in the hands of a very tiny minority. Just because they have been able to concentrate ownership of entire economy in their hands.

Which results in dysfunctional, broken societies.

The above infographic is not even up to date with the latest state of affairs, since now one needs an income of $500,000 /year to be able to enter top %1 in US.

Americans now need at least $500,000 a year to enter the %1

The income needed to exit the bottom 99% of U.S. taxpayers hit $515,371 in 2017, according to Internal Revenue Service data released this week. That’s up 7.2% from a year earlier, even after adjusting for inflation.

Since 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied under the slogan “We are the 99%,” the income threshold for the top 1% is up an inflation-adjusted 33%. That outpaces all other groups except for those that are even wealthier.

The role of the church of holistic economics is to justify that situation by advocating that the owners of the economy who amass ever increasing amounts of wealth solely due to their ownership/control of the economy, have that much wealth and control because of their ‘hard work’. Whereas the Church is tasked with also keeping the system going by continually advocating for the policies which created this picture of dysfunctional inequality.

The recipe from the holy book is always the same: More deregulation, more ‘free market’ (faith), more hard work for the faithful. Despite this would inevitably end up making the dysfunctional situation worse, more faith is the only thing the faithful should do.

And the church even affects the believers’ behavior towards others

The believer of the system of Capitalism does not even want to entertain any other idea or system – because if he or she does that, s/he will have broken faith, which means that s/he wont be able to attain salvation (get rich). Because if he entertains any other idea or system, he will lose faith in the religion, therefore he is going to be lost and he is going become a heathen (poor). The only way to salvation (getting rich) is hard work (having faith).

This also explains how people who are basically exploited by the system still keep ‘voting against their own interests’ as it is said – its because they believe that this temporary suffering will pass and they will get rich only if they keep faith.

It doesn’t stop there – the exact behavior of the faithful in Middle Ages against heathens and heretic ideologies is also replicated:

Socialism and similar non-Capitalist systems are heresies – a lack of faith – and giving any thought to any non-Capitalist (non-Christian) system is a lack of faith in God.

Furthermore, the poor (heathen) deserve poverty because they were not hardworking (faithful) enough, while the rich (the faithful) deserve all the riches they have because they were hardworking (faithful) enough. So the believers believe if they also work hard enough, they will be saved as well – and become rich.

Hence the brutal, medieval attitude of the believers of the Church of Capitalism towards the downtrodden or the poor in the society in places like US: Its because they are heathens, they deserve what’s coming to them. If only they were faithful, they could also do much better.

Even if the believer himself is not doing any better, that is…

The believer justifies his situation by just believing that he is doing better even if he actually isn’t doing any better – because, since he is hardworking (faithful), he has to be doing better, right? Because the belief says hardworking is rewarded.

Because recognizing the situation and admitting that despite working hard, the promised riches and comforts did not materialize would be a giant blow to the believer’s psyche, the believer just rationalizes and elevates his situation even if he is not doing well. Look, he is hardworking among the flock of the Church, and therefore he has various small amenities – like a car, an air conditioner, a rented house or a house which was bought at an opportune time point when one could easily buy a house.

By attributing these amenities which are pretty much standard in entire developed world to Capitalism, the believer not only reinforces his religion in his mind, but also thwarts off any potential heresy and the subsequent cognitive dissonance by validating the religion.

He has these things because the god of his religion gave them to him for having faith…

This is the underlying motive behind the tendency of not only the Church clergy’s, but also the ordinary believers’ tendency to attribute anything good that happens to Capitalism. Even if Capitalism had nothing to do with it. Its a self-defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The Crusades

Because Capitalism is the ‘true religion’, and because the elite which benefits from Capitalism wants to increase their riches, the religion must be spread.

Hence, the establishment and its church undertake great effort to spread the religion to any place that is heretic: The clergy incessantly advocate the religion to those who don’t believe in it, and whenever possible and if necessary, the establishment itself directly subdues heretics by force and commands their wealth.

This takes the form of never-ending propaganda by the Capitalist establishment to propagate the system to any country that is outside the system or strays afar from the system, like the immense funding that the private think thanks and the US state apparatus spend in funding different foreign movements and foreign political parties which are in alignment with Capitalism.

The propaganda done to these countries takes the same shape that it takes at home: Anything bad that happens in a heretic country is because of their heresy. And anything good that happens somewhere is because of their faith.

Which materializes in anything bad happening in those countries being due to Socialism or other heresies, whereas anything good happening being due to their scarce observance of Capitalism, the faith. So even if the US sanctions a country to starvation, the ensuing starvation is Socialism’s fault.

And if a country or a society does not heed the call through ‘peaceful’ means like these, then the crusades happen: The foreign country is subjected to sanctions, economic warfare, regime change operations and coups, escalated in that order. And if the foreign country is still non-compliant, the final stage is invoked – the foreign country is attacked or invaded in order to force a compliant capitalist government, aka forced conversion to belief.

Do they really believe what they say?

Akin to the people of those times, it is certain that a large swath of the the believers actually believe in their religion.

And in a similar vein, a large swath of the lower and mid to upper segments of elite (clergy and nobility), do believe what they are saying.

However, just like those times, the upper elite in the Church and nobility are definitely aware of the game that is being played, what is false and what is true, and they participate in the game and do what they do only to keep their power and wealth going at the expense of their own people. Except, a small minority of easily influenced personas among them who actually do believe in what they are told.

That explains the phenomenon of highly educated, intelligent figures in establishment saying incredible things which do not make rational sense – things which sound like what a village idiot would say. Those things appeal to the emotions and beliefs of the believers and enable and rationalize the policies and power of the very elite which repeat those incredibly unreasonable talking points.

A segment of educated mid to upper class professionals also are true believers – because despite their rational, and even in certain cases, atheist outlook which does not accept actual religion, they have taken up Capitalism as a Christianity replacement in order to have a belief which explains the world and gives them promises of a better future that is in their hands. While at the same time rationalizing and explaining the suffering and poverty that they see around them, to ease their conscious.

As seen, Capitalism is a direct replacement for Christianity. It replicates not only the core beliefs and explanations of Christianity, but also replicates the church system and the feudal aristocracy. It functions as a vehicle to keep the power of a minority elite over the society while justifying and sanctifying their position of power and wealth at the expense of rest of their countrymen.

What’s the problem?

The problem is that medieval Christianity and Church kept the society stagnant, backwards, kept its people suffering and helped a non-working or minimally working elite hoard the society’s resources. They kept those resources from being used for betterment and prosperity of society and instead used those resources for their extravaganza. A waste. Modern religion of Capitalism does the same to modern society.

It keeps majority in poverty, in a state in which they are ever harder-working but are receiving little from the economic value they generate. Then it gives that economic value to those who own the economy, who will just hoard that wealth as personal power instead of actually investing it to better the society as was promised. On top of that the same elite use their control of the economy to subvert politics through election funding and corporate media, to take over government and implement more policies that will remove limits to their power and ownership of the economy. This further worsens the economic inequality, impacting entirety of the society.

In the end you end up with large segments of people – actually the majority – suffering in poverty, overworked, disenfranchised, uneducated, not even able to feed their children, not having any hope of breaking out of their situation through education because they cant even access education, dying if they cannot pay for exorbitant privatized healthcare, losing all trust in the society and hope for the future, feeling the need to put their faith in actual religious extremism, extremist movements, ultra-nationalism and in some cases, anything that will just shake the system even if it would be destructive.

Endless numbers of youth who could receive education to become scientists or researchers who could bring great advancements to society, to cure diseases, to fix problems, instead waste their talent away working underpaid jobs without being able to pay for their education…

Hard working people receive only a small fraction of the actual economic value they generate, with the majority of the value going to non-working majority shareholders as profit, ending up people having to overwork in stressed jobs and leaning on pharmaceuticals to keep themselves going, being able to get nowhere near what their parents’ generation was able to get in terms of life standards and security of future…

Even the small to medium businesses go bankrupt because population at large doesn’t have money to buy products or services. This is amplified by the pressure which large players that control concentrated wealth put on small and medium businesses because large players can easily out-compete them, and this pressure speeds up the devolving cycle of concentration of wealth…

This causes the system to start using actual religion and to propagate religious extremism in order to keep the society passive. This stems from the need of the people seeking a relief from their misery, but it greatly speeds up due to establishment’s efforts to use it to protect the status quo, bastardizing the religions and turning them into a tool and violating the sanctity of those actual religions’ core tenets to exploit them for self gain. This ends up in an increasingly radicalizing and reactionary populace which starts to become dangerous for the modern social fabric…

So much that the eventual result even hurts those who benefit from the system, with a religious or extremist segment rising from among the population and gaining power, and subduing or prosecuting anyone who does not fall in line. Including anyone from among the incumbent rich elite – forcing these people either to give up their beliefs, their lifestyle and obey the new dominant extremist societal worldview, or suffer the consequences…

The damages which a belief-based mechanic of societal control for self-aggrandizement does are varied and innumerable. Societies throughout history either fixed the economic injustice which created these, or they collapsed in a myriad of ways.

So what can be done?

The foremost thing to do is recognizing the above mechanics and behaviors and observing them at work in the society and daily actions of the ordinary people and the elite.

This brings in the necessary awareness to deal with the problem, independent of where the person is within the social strata.

The non-elite

If you are a member of lower segments of the society, you must realize that hard work will not bring prosperity in a system that was designed to work unfairly, and even if it brings some material rewards, the rewards will be much less than the actual hard work done. It is an unjust system – its not even ‘rigged’ in that way, the system is just what it is – unjust.

Instead, you must follow a route of pushing change through all means possible, voting for pro-people politicians and parties which fight against inequality to put them in positions of power in all levels of society ranging from municipal seats to parliaments, congresses to presidency. And if possible, you must also join grassroots people’s movements for effecting that change. Because grassroots movements, just work.

Anything to address the unfair system and change it to a more egalitarian system will make everything phenomenally better. Advocate change, criticize the existing unjust and destructive system. Help others see the unjust system as it is.

Buy from cooperatives, work in a cooperative if you can. Support organizations and groups which seek to address inequality, do your business with them and solve your problems through them. Become the change which the society needs.

If you are a member of higher segments of the society, especially as a member of educated white collar professional segment who works in private enterprises, you must realize that even with better, and in some cases noticeable compensation which you may be receiving, you are still getting only a fraction of the actual economic value you generate. The situation gets much better if you actually have a share in the company you work, like the stock options that are so popular in places like Silicon Valley, but even in that case the people who work in such enterprises are estimated to be receiving only up to 10% of the economic value they generate.

Increasing inequality and the lack of purchasing power of the general public not only hurt the prospects of the company where you currently work, but also they diminish the chances of the startup which you may attempt to start in future.

At the same time increasing inequality creates a rift in between you and your society, alienates them from you and pushes you into becoming a minority within the society you live. Even if different urban or suburban regions separate you from the disenfranchised majority, eventually the cows would come home when the society falls into extremism and seeks targets to persecute.

Therefore both for your own benefit and for the benefit of the society, you must fight against inequality by not falling to the trap of the religion that justifies this outrageous state of affairs.

Similar to other segments: Vote for politicians and parties that fight inequality. Take action and volunteer for groups that seek to bring change. Prefer to work in organizations that have less inequality or in organizations which seek to bring a more egalitarian distribution of generated economic value. In your workplace, use your technical knowledge and if possible and legal, the means of the organization you work for, in order to push for a more just economic system. Try to address and diminish the power of religious advocacy of the establishment in conditioning the masses.

Work in cooperatives, or in enterprises which have more egalitarian structures. Any company which gives its employees an acceptable share in the ownership of the company and a say in how it is run, is much better. Any company which does even at least a bit of that is a better choice compared to private organizations that are run as private tyrannies.

You as an educated professional, have a lot of impact when you attempt to change the society. Use it to full extent. Without your compliant cooperation, the existing system cannot continue, and with your participation in movements of change, a more egalitarian and futuristic system can rise.

THE ELITE

If you are a member of the current elite, though you are currently the beneficiary of the current system, you must realize that the system is self destructive, and no amount of self-reinforcing pseudo-religious philosophy can change the system’s internal mechanics.

As you can understand by researching the histories of societies which have fallen into extremism after the collapse of societal contract due to rampant inequality and disenfranchisement of the majority, the existing established elite rarely escapes the resulting fallout.

In the wave of rising extremism, the elite must either follow suit and subscribe to the extremist beliefs and practices, or suffer prosecution, even death. This happens the same even if you are an actual subscriber of such beliefs – as the society becomes more extremist, you are expected to follow suit, else you are perceived as non-compliant and eventually end up being targeted and getting persecuted.

There is little chance that your worldview and lifestyle will fit any potential extremist movement which may rise in your society. What’s worse, even if your worldview and lifestyle fit the philosophy of the rising extremist movement at the start, in the long run you would find out that you somehow ended up being viewed as a ‘moderate’ who is not compliant with the creed. You first get reviled by your non-compliance, then you get persecuted if you don’t comply.

Your choices would be either complying by dropping your current beliefs and lifestyle and obeying whatever the mainstream of the increasingly extremist society comes up with, or leaving everything behind and escaping abroad. That is, if you can find any reasonably developed society which escapes the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent social collapse which Capitalism is effecting on all developed countries…

The better choice is taking just a few steps back. Taking just a few steps back by allowing a percentage of the immense wealth that is concentrated in the hands of your minority to be channeled to address the rampant inequality through social programs, social services, investments, through putting concentrated wealth back into the economy by distributing it to majority of people in quantity, through distributing it to people who will spend that money to generate actual economic activity which will end up benefiting the businesses and organizations which you hold a stake in…

You don’t lose anything in the process either – you very well know that after a certain point, that kind of wealth cannot be used, cannot be spent for personal purposes in any meaningful manner, and it can only exist in the form of control of economic organizations through ownership of stocks and investments.

It’s a power scheme. It exists as the relative power which you have compared to other players in the form of wealth. And the relative power of the wealth you have compared to all other players would not tangibly change if every player loses a given percentage of their wealth. Even a large scale distribution of a fraction of that wealth would not upset the cards which the players among your segment hold.

So, choose the better option by taking a few steps back by merely not objecting to the political and social movements which seek to address this unworkable state of affairs, and even by directly supporting them to fix this chasm in the society together.

Conclusion

Leaving the self-reinforcing religious belief that enables and propagates the societal breakdown is in the interest of everyone in the society. There is no logic in insisting in continuing a self-destructive system which is destroying itself in front of your eyes in a predictable manner due to its internal mechanics.

No amount of justification, self-delusion or religious mythology, no amount of belief in the system will change the system’s internal mechanics. Its internal mechanics will continue dragging the system towards its eventual self-destruct, irreverent of the belief which you may put in the system. There are even worse potentials than societal collapse due to our civilization having very powerful weapons of mass destruction at this point in history. Extremism and different forms of societal collapse carry the potential of igniting conflicts which may destroy parts of the world or even human civilization.

Instead of believing in the pseudo-religion of holistic economics, we must believe in ourselves, the people.

We must work together to create a better society by putting our faith in ourselves, by putting our faith in our society, by putting our faith in a better future.

Because we can make such a future happen.

This article has been reprinted from Ozgur Zeren’s blog. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: “All-religions” by uttam sheth is licensed under CC0 1.0 

The post Capitalism is religion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The post AGRICULTURE 3.0 OR (SMART) AGROECOLOGY? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Manuel Castells The Information Age Trilogy has been one of the most influential works to understand the societal change in the awake of the digital revolution of the last decades. It is, as Frank Webster (2002: 97) points out, one of “the most illuminating, imaginative and intellectually rigorous account of the major features and dynamics of the world today”. The theory of the network society developed in these books “open[ed] up new perspectives on a word reconstituting itself around a series of networks strung around the globe on the basis of advanced communication technologies” (Stalder, 2006: 1). Indeed, the work of Manuel Castells has influenced a generation of scholars, shaped a research agenda and has got important repercussions beyond academia (Bell, 2007).

Yet, more than two decades after the launch of his theory, the network society and the information age have been developing at a faster pace that anyone suspected in terms of: socio-technological and economic transformation (e.g. platform capitalism, sharing economy, robotization, algorithmic driven society, artificial intelligence and IoT, etc.), power geometries, new identities and socio-political contestation (e.g. populism, indignados, gilet jaunes, alt-right, technopolitics, buen vivir, #meetoo, LGBTIQ, black-lives-matters, youth for climate change, etc.) and new geopolitics and geographies of inequality and power (the rise of China as global power, multipolarity, the emergence of the Global South, the uneven impact of environmental crises, etc.).

At the same time, during the last decades a number of theoretical and epistemological trends have developed or consolidated in the social sciences that can be read as either influenced by or challenging the Trilogy position. Among others, the rise of network theories, mobilities paradigm, communication and power theory, technopolitics, post-colonialism or the relation between digital societies and nature.

In this regard, as 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells’, it is time to revisit the trilogy and explore the relevance of Castells’ pioneering work in the light of the current state of the network society and of the ways to research about it. Thus, our aim is to gather together scholars from a wide range of disciplines – Including Castells himself – to engage with the Trilogy and debate on its contributions, legacies but as well shortcomings and new developments not envisioned at the time of its launch to try to develop a critical perspective on future trajectories of the network society and the information age.

We welcome contributions that sympathetically and/or critically engage with the Trilogy in any theoretical, methodological or empirical topic around the contemporary developments of the network society. Examples of areas and themes that we would like to discuss (but are not limited to) are:

• Information, data, datafication and the (new) sources of economic value;
• Networks, space-times, economy and society;
• Contesting the network society power configurations: politics, social movements and new identities;
• The network society in the world: uneven geographies and geopolitics of the information age;
• The Trilogy of the Network Society in front of the new turns in social sciences;
• The influence on the epistemic communities either geographically (e.g. Latin America, Europe, Asia…) or disciplinary (Sociology, media, geography, STS…).

Important dates

Workshop: Barcelona, 10-11 June 2020

• 23/06/2019 → Abstract submission. 500 words + up to 5 keywords
  Submit your proposals to [email protected]
• 23/07/2019 → Communication of abstract acceptance
• 20/3/2020 → Full paper submission: 5.000 – 8.000 words (mandatory). Papers will be the basis for the comments and discussion during the workshop. They will be submitted to a special issue / edited book

Practical Information

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Prof. Manuel Castells (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, University of Southern California)
• Prof. Fernando Calderón (FLACSO, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional San Martín Argentina) 
• Prof. Ida Susser (The City University of New York) 
• Prof. John Thompson (University of Cambridge)

The workshop is free of charge. Food will be provided at the conference for presenters. Accommodation and transportation are not included. 

The workshop presentations should be the basis for a special issue in an international peer-review journal by 2021 to discuss the work of Manuel Castells in the 25th anniversary of the launch of the first volume.

 Organization Committee (IN3)

• Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol
• Ramon Ribera-Fumaz
• David Megías

 Organization

This workshop is organized by the IN3 – Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia. The workshop constitutes a central part of the IN3’s 20th anniversary.”

Further info and queries: [email protected]

The post Call for abstracts: The Network Society Today 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.

Executive Summary: Electric utility (re)municipalization is gaining popularity as a strategy to shift away from a reliance on fossil fuel extraction in the context of combating climate change. Across the world—from Berlin to Boulder—communities have initiated campaigns to take back their power from investor-owned (private) utilities and create publicly owned and operated utilities. Moreover, such efforts are increasingly taking on the perspective and language of energy democracy.

Energy democracy seeks not only to solve climate change, but to also address entrenched systemic inequalities. It is a vision to restructure the energy future based on inclusive engagement, where genuine participation in democratic processes provides community control and renewable energy generates local, equitably distributed wealth (Angel, 2016; Giancatarino, 2013a; Yenneti & Day, 2015). By transitioning from a privately- to a publicly owned utility, proponents of energy democracy hope to democratize the decision-making process, eliminate the overriding goal of profit maximization, and quickly transition away from fossil fuels.

Utilities are traditionally profit-oriented corporations whose structures are based on a paradigm of extraction. Following the path of least resistance, they often burden communities who do not have the political or financial capital to object to the impacts of their fossil fuel infrastructure. Residents living within three miles of a coal plant, for instance, are more likely to earn a below-average annual income and be a person of color (Patterson et al., 2011); similar statistics have been recorded for natural gas infrastructure (Bienkowski, 2015).

These utilities are in a moment of existential crisis with the rise of renewables. From gas pipelines to coal power plants, their investments are turning into stranded assets, as political leaders and investors realize that eliminating fossil fuels from the energy mix is paramount to creating healthy communities and stemming climate change.

Unfortunately, often publicly owned utilities in the United States have similar energy generation profiles to their privately owned counterparts (American Public Power Association, 2015). This paper explores the extent to which publicly owned utilities are reticent to take on the new energy paradigm and evaluates their ability to provide energy democracy compared to investor-owned utilities. The results of this study not only identify what principles of energy democracy currently exist in publicly owned utilities, but also provide strategies to reorient and rebuild publicly owned utilities with strong foundations in energy democracy.

Five utilities in three states—Virginia, Ohio, and Nebraska—were selected as case studies to represent a range of regulatory, political, and geographic contexts. Data was gathered through 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews as well as additional primary and secondary sources.

Results show that publicly owned utilities meet more of the conditions for energy democracy than investor-owned utilities, but still fall short in many respects. However, their structures provide a better platform to change their orientation to an equitable, community-controlled utility.  The results of this study not only identify what principles of energy democracy currently exist in publicly owned utilities, but also provide strategies to reorient and rebuild publicly owned utilities with strong foundations in energy democracy. By looking to the strengths and pitfalls of these studied publicly owned utilities, energy democracy activists who take on (re)municipalization campaigns can intentionally build out energy democracy and create a more just energy future.

Outlined below are some of the major findings, categorized by energy democracy’s energy portfolio, political, and economic conditions:

Energy Portfolio: The publicly owned utilities studied in this paper have higher levels of renewable energy than private utilities. While one of the publicly owned utilities gains the majority of its renewable energy generation from wind, a significant amount of the publicly owned utilities’ renewables come from large-scale hydro power, which has significant environmental and community repercussions. To further energy democracy, publicly owned utilities should enable much more ambitious renewable energy goals from such sources as solar and wind.

Political: Community members’ lack of understanding of their utility’s decisions and the energy system as a whole is a pervasive problem with all utilities studied, though to varying degrees. This has a direct negative impact on participation in democratic actions—like voting or public meetings—and is particularly troubling from an equity perspective because it leaves an elite few to make decisions. Investor-owned utilities use their economic power to further capture political systems and implement their desired policies. Publicly owned utilities allow for a much larger scope of people who could participate and therefore limit elitism, while still suffering from some inequalities. To further energy democracy, publicly owned utilities should identify ways to increase community understanding and counter elitism by increasing the participation of diverse voices. This could be accomplished through such methods as input from local neighborhood assemblies and diversifying utility boards through seat allocations.

Economic: Neither utility structure studied has expansive decentralized renewable energy in their service area. A system based on decentralized renewables would require a drastic change from current business models, but this shift is much more manageable for publicly owned utilities than for investor-owned utilities that pursue profit for shareholders through constant expansion and capital-intensive—often fossil fuel-based—infrastructure projects.

The publicly owned utilities studied that own renewable energy are going through processes of partial privatization. Existing regulation has led them to rely heavily on power purchase agreements (PPAs) with large corporations—even investor-owned utilities—for their renewable energy needs. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, PPAs with for-profit entities can increase the long-term costs of renewable energy for a community (i.e. over the long run, it could be significantly cheaper to use bond financing to build and own renewable energy infrastructure directly). On the other hand, PPAs could be used to further distribute ownership of renewable energy if utilities entered into contracts with local community members. However, none of the utilities studied are currently pursuing this strategy.

Revenues from publicly owned utilities studied are generally paid to local governments and not shareholders, allowing profits to benefit local communities directly. This aligns well with energy democracy values, specifically keeping value local and redistributing wealth within a community. Publicly owned utilities also distributed wealth internally in a more equitable fashion. The highest-paid employees at publicly owned utilities studied never makes more than ten times the average lineman, while the highest-paid executives at investor-owned utilities makes more than one hundred times as much.

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About the Symposium

We are delighted to invite proposals for papers for the International Research Symposium on Post-Automation? Towards Democratic Alternatives to Industry 4.0, taking place at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, 11-13 September 2019. The Symposium uses a workshop format to explore the idea of post-automation, critically and constructively. Theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded papers are invited that address what a “post-automation” vantage point might bring to ongoing debates about how societies produce and consume, in light of social concern for sustainable developments, dignified work and social justice, and a business-led push for Industry 4.0 and circular economy.

Post-automation is a concept in the making. The idea is sparked by the observation that, globally, groups of people are appropriating and hacking digital technologies for design, prototyping, and manufacture that were implicated initially in successive waves of automation: code, sensors, actuators, computer numerically controlled machine tools, design software, microelectronics, internet platforms, 3D scanners/printers, video, etc. Yet, in place of work through typical in automation, such as enhanced appearing simultaneously productivity, managerial control, economic growth, people are subverting these technologies for other purposes – human creativity, dignified work, and sustainable production and consumption – and situating these activities in non-industrial and new-industrial spaces. The Symposium will interrogate these technological turnarounds: from their human-displacing and human-disciplining origins, through to the creative experiments and prototypes today. In short, exploring post-automation possibilities.

Clues and hints about post-automation emerge in diverse places: hackerspaces, makerspaces and fablabs; citizen monitoring platforms and open science projects; open hardware platforms and grassroots innovation initiatives; new crafting practices; repair, repurposing and upcycling workshops; libraries and educational institutes opening technology to popular experimentation; citizen laboratories and DIY urbanism; workplace struggles for human-centred, democratic technology. Many of these places work through networks that cut across conventional categories; appearing simultaneously to constitute a movement and infrastructure for social relations with technology radically different to the depopulated visions of cyber-physical systems in Industry 4.0.

An Interdisciplinary Call – Who Should Submit

This call is an invitation for diversity and plurality. Applicants from PhD students to senior Professors are welcome from science and technology studies, sociology of work, social anthropology, engineering, innovation studies, design, geography, sustainability studies, and other relevant areas. The key is to provide an explanation of how your proposed paper can contribute to an open, engaged and collaborative exploration of the idea of post-automation, and to see what work can and cannot be made of that idea. You can propose questions (and answers) that you think should be central to a post-automation research agenda. These might include, for example:

• How can post-automation alter perspectives, understandings and practices in technology-society relations?
• What methods can bring insight, facilitate dialogue, and assist developments in post-automation across the scales of projects, workshops, sectors and societies?
• How is post-automation manifesting in different places and circulating between places, for example across the global North and global South?
• How might social theory in post-automation reframe public debate and move policy beyond reactions to automation, and into proactive alternatives for sustainable technology-society relations?
• How post-automation might help to re-imagine an economy based on commons goods?

How to Apply

I. Please send a 500-word maximum paper abstract and 100-word bio for each author (including contact details and affiliation) as a single document. In both sections, please explain how you relate and contribute to the idea of post-automation. Please email your abstracts as a Word file to [email protected] stating the Symposium title in the subject area of the email. The deadline for abstracts and bios is 20 March 2019.

II. Selected participants will be required to produce a 4,000-5,000 word paper in advance of the Symposium by 15 July 2019 and present it for discussion there. At the Symposium we will read and discuss all the papers, and there will be group activities that map and explore emerging themes.

III. The Symposium will run from 11th September to 13th September 2019 at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Symposium papers will be circulated amongst participants only.

IV. Once papers are accepted, the organisers will negotiate a special issue on post-automation with a leading scientific journal. Participants will contribute revised versions of their paper to the issue, drawing upon insights arising in the Symposium. Revised papers will be submitted to the journal.

V. The Symposium has no fees. Lunch, coffee breaks and the social dinner will be covered by the host organization. The organisers are able to cover the travel and accommodation costs for one author per paper only.

Upcoming Deadlines 2019

• 20 March: Abstracts Submission and Review
• 15 April: Decisions on Abstracts
• 25 July: Papers Submission
• 11-13 September: International Research Symposium
• December: Revised Papers Submitted to Journal for Peer Review”

Organisers

Adrian Smith – Science Policy Research Unit

Mariano Fressoli – Fundación Cenit

More info on this event can be found here.

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Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

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Hazel Henderson: Billions are spent by governments, corporations and investors in training computer-based algorithms (i.e. computer programs) in today’s mindless rush to create so-called “artificial” intelligence, widely advertised as AI. Meanwhile, training our children and their brains (already superior to computer algorithms) is under-funded, schools are dilapidated, sited in run-down, often polluted areas while our teachers are poorly paid and need greater respect. How did our national priorities get so skewed?

In reality, there is nothing artificial about these algorithms or their intelligence, and the term “AI” is a mystification! The term that describes the reality is “Human-Trained Machine Learning”, in today’s mad scramble to train these algorithms to mimic human intelligence and brain functioning. In the techie magazine WIRED, October 2018, we meet a pioneering computer scientist, Fei-Fei LI, testifying at a Congressional hearing, who underlines this truth. She said, “Humans train these algorithms” and she talked about the horrendous mistakes these machines make in mis-identifying people, using the term “bias in—bias out” updating the old computer saying, “garbage in—garbage out”.

Professor LI described how we are ceding our authority to these algorithms to judge who gets hired, who goes to jail, who gets a loan, a mortgage or good insurance rates — and how these machines code our behavior, change our rules and our lives. She is now back at Stanford University after a time as an ethicist at Google and has started a foundation to promote the truth about AI, since she feels responsible for her role in inventing some of these algorithms herself. As a celebrated pioneer of this field, Professor LI says “There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, it’s created by people and more importantly, it impacts people”.

So how did Silicon Valley invade our culture and worldwide technology programs with its short-term, money -obsessed values: “move fast and break things”; disrupt the current systems while rushing to scale and cash out with an IPO? These values are discussed by two insiders in shocking detail, by Antonio G. Martinez in “Chaos Monkeys” (2016) and Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in “Brotopia” (2018). These authors explain a lot about how training these algorithms went so wrong: subconsciously mimicking their mostly male, misogynist, often white entrepreneurs and techies with their money-making monopolistic biases and often adolescent, libertarian fantasies.

I also explored all this in my article “The Future of Democracy Challenged in the Digital Age”, CADMUS, October 2018, describing all these issues of the takeover by AI of our economic sectors; from manufacturing, transport, education, retail, media, law, medicine, agriculture, to banking, insurance and finance. While many of these sectors have become more efficient and profitable for the shareholders, my conclusion in “The Idiocy of Things” critiqued the connecting of all appliances in so-called “smart homes” as quite hazardous and an invasion of privacy. I urged humans to take back control from the over-funded, over-invested, over-paid computer and information science sectors too often focused on corporate efficiency and cost-saving goals driven by the profit targets demanded by Wall Street.

I have called for an extension of the English law, settled in the year 1215: “habeas corpus” affirming that humans own their own bodies. This extension would cover ownership of our brains and all our information we generate in an updated “information habeas corpus”. Since May 2018, European law has ratified this with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that individuals using social media platforms, or any other social system do indeed retain ownership of all their personal data.

So, laws are beginning to catch up with the inhuman uses of human beings, with our hard-earned skills being used to train algorithms that then replace us! The computer algorithm trainers then employ out of-work people surviving in the gig economy on Mechanical Turk and Task Rabbit sites, in minimum, hourly- paid data entry tasks to train these algorithms!

Scientist Jaron Lanier in his “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now” (2018) shows how social media are manipulating us with algorithms to engineer changes in our behavior, by engaging our attention with clickbait and content that arouses our emotions, fears and rage, playing on some of the divisions in our society to keep us on their sites. This helps drive ad sales and their gargantuan profits and rapid global growth. Time to rethink all this, beyond the dire alarms raised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking that these algorithms we are teaching will soon take over and may harm or kill us as did HAL in the movie “2001”.

Why indeed are we spending all this money to train machines while short-changing our children, our teachers and schools? Training our children’s brains must take priority! Instead of training machines to hijack our attention and sell our personal data to marketers for profit — let’s steer funds into tripling efforts to train and pay our teachers, upgrade schools and curricula with courses on civic responsibility, justice, community values, freedoms under habeas corpus (women also own their own bodies!) and how ethics and trust are the basis of all market and societies.

Why all the expensive efforts to enhance machine learning to teach algorithms to recognize human faces, guide killer drones, falsify video images and further modify our behavior and capture our eyeballs with click bait, devising and spreading content that angers and outrages — further dividing us and disrupting democracies?

Let’s rein in the Big Brother ambitions of the new techno-oligopolists. As a wise NASA scientist, following Norbert Weiner’s Human Use of Human Beings (1950), reminded us in 1965 about the value of humans: “Man (SIC) is the lowest-cost, 150 pound, nonlinear all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by un-skilled labor”, quoted in Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2015, p. 11. Time for common sense!

Hazel Henderson© 2018

Hazel Henderson D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, is founder of Ethical Markets Media, LLC and producer of its TV series. She is a world renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, consultant on sustainable development, and author of The Axiom and Nautilus award-winning book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and eight other books.

Her editorials appear in 27 languages and 200 newspapers syndicated by Inter Press Service, and her book reviews appear on SeekingAlpha.com. Her articles have appeared in over 250 journals, including (in USA) Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor; and Challenge, Mainichi (Japan), El Diario (Venezuela), World Economic Herald (China), LeMonde Diplomatique (France) and Australian Financial Review.

Photo by Ferrari + caballos + fuerza = cerebro Humano 

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