Collins is a sociologist. In his book “Artifictional Intelligence – Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers”, out today from Polity, Collins does many interesting things. To begin with, he argues what qualifies him to have an opinion on AI.

Collins is a sociologist of science at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Part of his expertise is dealing with human scientific expertise, and therefore, intelligence.

It sounds plausible that figuring out what constitutes human intelligence would be a good start to figure out artificial intelligence, and Collins does a great job at it.

The impossibility claims

The gist of Collins’ argument, and the reason he wrote the book, is to warn against what he sees as a real danger of trusting AI to the point of surrendering critical thinking, and entrusting AI with more than what we really should. This is summarized by his 2 “impossibility claims”:

1. No computer will be fluent in natural language, pass a severe Turing test and have full human-like intelligence unless it is fully embedded in normal human society.

2. No computer will be fully embedded in normal human society as a result of incremental progress based on current techniques.

There is quite some work to back up those claims of course, and this is what Collins does throughout the 10 Chapters of his book. Before we embark on this kind of meta-journey of summarizing his approach, however, it might be good to start with some definitions.

The Turing test is a test designed to categorize “real” AI. At its core, it seems simple: a human tester is supposed to interact with an AI candidate in a conversational manner. If the human cannot distinguish the AI candidate from a human, then the AI has passed the Turing test and is said to display real human-like intelligence.

The Singularity is the hypothesis that the appearance of “real” artificial intelligence will lead to artificial superintelligence, bringing unforeseen consequences and unfathomable changes to human civilization. Views on the Singularity are typically polarized, seeing the evolution of AI as either ending human suffering and cares or ending humanity altogether.

This is actually a good starting point for Collins to ponder on the anthropomorphizing of AI. Why, Collins asks, do we assume that AIs would want the same things that humans want, such as dominance and affluence, and thus pose a threat to humanity?

This is a far-reaching question. It serves as a starting point to ask more questions about humanity, such as why people are, or are seen as, individualistic, how do people learn, and what is the role of society in learning.

Social Science

Science, and learning, argues Collins, do not happen in a monotonous, but rather in a modulated way. What this means is that rather than seeing knowledge acquisition as looking to uncover and unlock a set of predefined eternal truths, or rules, the way it progresses is also dependent on interpretation and social cues. It is, in other words, subject to co-production.

This applies, to begin with, to the directions knowledge acquisition will take. A society for which witches are a part of the mainstream discourse, for example, will have very different priorities than one in which symptomatic medicine is the norm.

But it also applies to the way observations, and data, are interpreted. This is a fundamental aspect of science, according to Collins: the data is *always* out there. Our capacity for collecting them may fluctuate with technical progress, but it is the ability to interpret them that really constitutes intelligence, and that does have a social aspect.

Collins leverages his experience from social embedding as practiced in sociology to support his view. When dealing with a hitherto unknown and incomprehensible social group, a scholar would not be able to understand its communication unless s/he is in some way embedded in it.

All knowledge is social, according to Collins. Image: biznology

Collins argues for the central position on language in intelligence, and ties it to social embedding. It would not be possible, he says, to understand a language simply by statistical analysis. Not only would that miss all the subtle cues of non-verbal communication, but, as opposed to games such as Go or chess that have been mastered by computers, language is open-ended and ever-evolving.

Collins also introduces the concept of interactional expertise, and substantiates it based on his own experience over a long period of time with a group of physicists working in the field of gravitational waves.

Even though he never will be an expert who produces knowledge in the field, Collins has been able to master the topics and the language of the group over time. This has not only gotten him to be accepted as a member of the community, but has also enabled him to pass a blind test.

A blind test is similar to a Turing test: a judge, who is a practising member of the community, was unable to distinguish Collins, a non-practising member, from another practising member, based on their answers to domain specific questions. Collins argues this would never have been possible had he not been embedded in the community, and this is the core of the support for his first impossibility claim.

Top-down or Bottom-up?

As for the second impossibility claim, it has to do with the way AI works. Collins has one chapter dedicated to the currently prevalent technique in AI called Deep Learning. He explains how Deep Learning works in an approachable way, which boils down to pattern recognition based on a big enough and good enough body of precedents.

The fact that there are more data (digitized precedents) and more computing power (thanks to Moore’s Law) today is what has enabled this technique to work. It’s not really new, as it has been around for decades, it’s just that we did not have enough data and processing power to make it work reliably and fast enough up until now.

In the spirit of investigating the principal, not the technicalities behind this approach, Collins concedes some points to its proponents. First, he assumes technical capacity will not slow down and soon reach the point of being able to use all human communication in transcribed form.

Second, he accepts a simplified model of the human brain as used by Ray Kurzweil, one of AIs more prominent proponents. According to this model, the human brain is composed of a large number of pattern recognition elements. So all intelligence boils down to is advanced pattern recognition, or bottom-up discovery of pre-existing patterns.

Top-down, or bottom-up? Image: Organizational Physics

Collins argues however that although pattern recognition is a necessary precondition for intelligence, it is not sufficient. Patterns alone do not equal knowledge, there needs to be some meaning attached to them, and for this language and social context is required. Language and social context are top-down constructs.

Collins, therefore, introduices an extended model of the human brain, in which additional inputs are processed, coming from social context. This, in fact, is related to another approach in AI, labeled symbolic AI. In this top-down approach, instead on relying exclusively on pattern recognition, the idea is to encode all available knowledge in a set of facts and rules.

Collins admits that his second impossibility claim is weaker than the first one. The reason is that technical capacity may reach a point that enables us to encode all available knowledge, even tacit one, a task that seems out of reach today. But then again, many things that are commonplace today seemed out of reach yesterday.

In fact, the combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches to intelligence that Collins stands behind, is what many AI experts stand for as well. The most promising path to AI will not be Deep Learning alone, but a combination of Deep Learning and symbolic AI. To his credit, Collins is open-minded about this, has had very interesting conversations with leading experts in the field, and incorporated them in the book.

Technical understanding and Ideology

There are many more interesting details that could not possibly fit in a book review: Collins’ definition of 6 levels of AI, the fractal model of knowledge, exploring what an effective Turing test would be, and more.

The book is a tour de force of epistemology for the masses: easy to follow, and yet precise and well-informed. Collins tiptoes his way around philosophy and science, from Plato to Wittgestein to AI pioneers, in a coherent way.

He also touches issues such as the roots of capitalism or what is driving human behavior, although he seems to have made a conscious choice of not going into them, possibly in the spirit of not derailing the conversation or perhaps alienating readers. In any case, his book will not only make AI approachable, but will also make you think on a variety of topics.

And, in the end, it does achieve what it set out to do. It gives a vivid warning against the Surrender, which should be about technical understanding, but perhaps even more so about ideology.

Collins, Harry M. (2018). Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers. Cambridge, UK; Malden, Massachusetts: Polity. ISBN 9781509504121.

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You may remember Piketty’s analysts of the brahmin left vs the merchant right; but Bogdanov’s vision is also very pertinent in a Taubian context. So here is what I never say in public, as it draws catatonic blanks in western secular audiences: the next phase we are working on is a brahmin-worker synthesis, making real Bogdanov’s first failed attempts to merge work, self-governance and art through proletkult … now with the commons, the sociological conditions for this massive shift, have been realized. Thanks to Jan Krikke for this cogent and crystal clear presentation of Taub’s main message, he will be missed.

So if you want to know the ‘esoteric side’ of the P2P Foundation, it’s not just Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, it is also thoroughly Taubian.

Jan Krikke: In the 1970s, American futurist Larry (Lawrence) Taub gave a series of lectures in Tokyo and made what seemed at the time like outlandish forecasts. Mao Zedong had just died, the Shah of Iran was still ruling Iran, and Leonid Brezhnev was at the helm in the Soviet Union, but Taub predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, that an Islamic country would experience a religious revolution, and that China and its Confucian cousins would form the most powerful economic region in the world by 2020.

Taub based his daring forecast on three unique models that he synthesized in his book The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and the Last Caste Move the Future. He published the first English edition in the 1980s and an updated version appeared in the 1990s. A Japanese edition was published in the early 2000s and became a No. 1 bestseller in Japan. Shortly thereafter a Korean and Spanish edition appeared. Interest in the English edition remained limited, primarily because most Western readers are challenged by vantage points not based on a Western-centric worldview.

The Spiritual Imperative predicts not only what happens, but also where it will happen. Conventional futurists who came before him spoke in broad generalities applied to the world as a whole without offering specifics about particular regions and cultures. Fellow futurist Alvin Toffler described post-industrial society, but his model could not predict that China would become a dominant economic power. Samuel  Huntington predicted that the end of the Cold War would give way to a “clash of civilizations,” but he could not predict the Iranian revolution in the so-called religous belt.  Francis Fukuyama saw the collapse of Soviet communism as the “end of history” and the final victory of Western liberalism. His overtly ideological and Western-centric view of the world ignored that China developed a synthesis of socialism and free enterprise to become an industrial powerhouse to rival and even outflank the US and the EU.

Restoring the yin-yang balance

In the world of conventional futurists, women play no role in either the past or the future. In Taub’s macrohistory, women are a key driving force behind the changes in the world today. As he reminds us in his remarkable book, early human society, from its ancient animist past, was characterized by relative gender equality with a predominantly “yin-like” worldview. Patriarchies and a “yang-like” worldview developed from  600 BCE, during the age of Confucius, Plato, Jesus, and Buddha. Taub places the beginning of the end of the patriarchy in the 1970s, with the first wave of feminism.

Feminism changed not only the mindset of women but also of men. A remarkable diagram in his book illustrates the dialectic of sex, and how it plays a role today and in the future (see the diagrams in the page linked below). In about two decades, women will briefly become the dominant sex and restore the yin-yang balance that was lost in the patriarchal era. The female/male ratio of university students in many countries is one of many indications. By the middle of this century, the battle of the sexes will dissolve in what Taub describes as an androgynous synthesis.

The Spiritual Imperative is testimony to the enormous scope of Taub‘s knowledge of the world and his understanding of the human spirit. His models not only give pride of place to women, but also to the world’s three “source cultures” – China, Europe, and India. He shows that each has advanced the human condition and how they are shaping our future.

Links and Resources

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Diagrams from The Spiritual Imperative

The following three diagrams show The Spiritual Imperative in a nutshell. They show the enormous scope of Larry’s knowledge, his radical departure from a Euro-centric worldview, and the comprehensiveness of his macrohistorical model.

The post Remembering Lawrence Taub, the first feminist futurist (1936-2018) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Frase’s book builds on Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction a hundred years ago in the Junius Pamphlets that “[b]ourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Specifically, he sketches — in very broad strokes — two versions of socialism and two versions of barbarism as possible alternative futures all resulting from large-scale automation. As Frase himself admits, “my approach is deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types,” or “simplified, pure models…, designed to illuminate a few key issues that confront us today and will confront us in the future.”

Popular press treatments of automation, Frase notes, range from pessimistic predictions of technological unemployment to “liberal bromides” about “entrepreneurship and education.” But all of them are missing one thing: “politics, and specifically class struggle.”

This outlook ignores the central defining features of the society we live in: capitalist class and property relations. Who benefits from automation, and who loses, is ultimately not a consequence of the robots themselves but of who owns them.

In Frase’s presentation of the four possible futures of automation, class power is front and center: “the distribution of scarcity and abundance, …who will pay the costs of ecological damage and who will enjoy the benefits of a highly productive, automated economy.”

This not a conventional venture in what’s commonly referred to as “futurism.” “Rather, it is an attempt to use the tools of social science in combination with those of speculative fiction to explore the space of possibilities in which our future political conflicts will play out.” And on the speculative fiction side, Frase’s work is closest to those forms of science fiction like Star Trek which “take their world-building seriously” and root their characters in “a richly and logically structured world.”

The four exercises in building alternative automated future scenarios represent the possible combinations of two variables with two values each. The ecological crisis will either be solved at relatively low levels of environmental damage and cost of energy transition, or it will not. The issue of class power will be resolved either by confronting and defeating inequality, or the rich will maintain their power. In the latter case, “they [will] enjoy the  benefits of automated production, while the rest of us pay the costs of ecological destruction….”

So the four possibilities are abundance with equality (Communism), abundance with hierarchy (Rentism), scarcity with equality (Socialism), or scarcity with hierarchy (Exterminism).

To return to Luxemburg’s framing, “[t]he starting point of the entire analysis is that capitalism IS GOING TO END.” And along with that assumption, “a central structuring theme of this book” is the existence of a capitalist ruling elite “that will try to preserve itself into any possible future.” So Frase’s world-building exercises are “an attempt to make sense of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.”

“Communism” is a moneyless economy of total or near-total abundance, in which the consumption of goods and services is divorced from labor.

Using Vonnegut’s Player Piano as a foil, Frase notes that an automated economy needn’t be centralized, mass-production or planned by a managerial elite. “Technologies like 3-D printing (and for that matter the personal computer) point in [the] direction” of a decentralized, less management-intensive economy.

This amounts also to a critique of models like Jeremy Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society, which posits extremely thick, smart infrastructures like the “Internet of Things” and, by implication, a rather large amount of production for the global market even if production itself is decentralized.

For me the most interesting part of Frase’s chapter on Communism was his speculation on how we might get there. Like Mason, Holloway and others in the autonomist tradition, he devotes relatively more attention to gradualist, evolutionary models (analogous to the transition from feudalism to capitalism) than to insurrectionary models. That means, namely, strategies that “build the alternative to capitalism before it is completely overturned,” and “giving people the ability to survive and act independently of capitalist wage labor in the here and now….” Such strategies will take the form of what Andre Gorz called “non-reformist reforms” — for example, the Universal Basic Income.

He describes a scenario in which the introduction of a Universal Basic Income, tied to some percentage of GDP, leads through a sort of invisible hand mechanism to a moneyless or near-moneyless communism.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemicaly viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure.

Frase bases the specifics on a 1986 essay by Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism.”

If the UBI is sufficient to fund basic subsistence needs, it will likely lead to the withdrawal of labor altogether or coupled with a demand for higher wages in the jobs that are currently the most unpleasant and lowest paid (e.g. fast food work). It will also mean that people have freedom to seek out more fulfilling kinds of work that pay less. As a result, the wages of the most unpleasant and demeaning forms of work will be driven up, and pay for pleasant and fulfilling work will be pushed down. So a growing share of unpleasant work will be automated, and a growing share of labor will be shifted either into fulfilling jobs with lower pay, and many will withdraw from wage labor altogether and into the informal and social sector. Much of the labor force shifts into lower-paid but socially meaningful work. Many more will choose to live entirely on their UBI and volunteer their efforts in the informal and social economy, perhaps participating in commons-based peer production — and perhaps even with some non-monetary support in-kind from others similarly producing outside the money economy.

The long-run trajectory… is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced freely and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary cooperative activity rather than waged work.

So the money economy and the Basic Income, reductions in the one leading to reductions in the other and vice versa, both eventually wither away and societies approach full communism.

“Rentism” is a social model in which post-scarcity technologies are fully developed, but scarcity is nevertheless maintained artificially maintained through property rights. The technologies for pure abundance are available, “but stymied by ossified class structures and the state powers that defend them.” Frase anticipated rentism in 2010 with a blog post on “Anti-Star Trek,” in which replicators and all the other technologies of abundance from Star Trek: The Next Generation existed — but rentier capitalism was enforced through patents on the replicators themselves and on the molecular patterns of the goods which they reproduced.

The U.S. Security State is all too aware of the central role “intellectual property” plays as the main source of profits in the capitalist global economy. An article by Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, in a 2010 Foreign Affairs article (“Defending a New Domain: The Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy“), predicted that the “threat to intellectual property” would be “the most significant cyberthreat the United States will face over the long term.”

The third possibility, “Socialism,” is basically the full communism of chapter one, but with the addition of natural resource scarcity and other constraints resulting from environmental damages from climate change and pollution. Or to put it another way, Chapter One is the socialism of Chapter Three with such factors abstracted from it. So for me the difference between them isn’t really that dramatic or interesting. It’s hard to imagine any plausible post-scarcity economy without some birth scars from our degradation of the natural environment. And his “Socialism” strikes me as pretty abundant, regardless of natural resource constraints.

Given the energy savings from eliminating planned obsolescence, guard labor, and waste production, and the radical shortening of distribution chains attendant on relocalization, renewable energy (perhaps including safer and democratically controlled fission power, and eventually even fusion power) would be more than sufficient to support an economy of abundance. Closed-loop recycling of bottleneck natural resources, and eventually robot asteroid mining, would likewise minimize resource constraints.

Generally speaking, technologies of abundance (i.e. those which maximize the production of use-value per labor input), tend to also be ephemeral (in the sense of minimizing the consumption of other resource inputs and the ecological footprint as a whole).

To the extent that repairing environmental damage is a major consideration, Frase’s Socialism reminds me a bit of the world of Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time — certainly a humanly appealing post-scarcity world by our standards. The same is true of areas under the control of the Acquis networked society in Sterling’s The Caryatids.

Frase’s Socialism scenario strikes me as a bit pessimistic in its vision of a command economy for allocating energy and scarce resources and coordinating the repair of environmental damage (“some kind of centralized, state-driven project that can mobilize resources and labor in a way that is beyond the capabilities of either the free market or the communist free-for-all of Chapter 1”). He envisons enormous projects for rebuilding infrastructure, and and central planning rationing scarce energy supplies.

In regard to scaling back energy consumption, he underestimates what can be done purely on a decentralized, stigmergic basis, by such means as pricing natural resource inputs at true cost. My guess is that, absent subsidies to fossil fuel extraction (including preferential access to deposits on public land, eminent domain for pipelines, subsidized long-distance transportation, subsidies to sprawl, wars for access to foreign oil reserves, and taxpayer-subsidized naval protection for oil tanker routes), and absent subsidies and protections for all forms of waste production, greenhouse gas emissions would rapidly fall far below 1990 levels. And there’s far more low-hanging fruit for achieving such reductions than Frase imagines:  the shortening of supply and distribution chains, through import substitution by local micro-manufacturing and recycling of local scrap; shifting remaining long-distance freight to trains and airships; transition to local mixed-use economies through developing mini-“downtowns” in suburbs and adding walk-up apartments and other cheap housing in downtown areas; elimination of most business air and train travel by telecommuting and teleconferencing; etc. Rather than large-scale retooling to greenwash the transportation system via high-speed trains (“Green New Deal,” in Jill Stein’s phrase), it would make far better sense to reduce the need for such transportation in the first place.

Frase also suggests the Basic Income as the means for allocating whatever scarce inputs remain under socialism — not the output of the Star Trek replicators themselves, but of the scarce inputs that go into them. My guess, as already stated above, is that closed loop recycling would go a long way towards addressing this need. But the use of a price system to ration remaining scarce goods is an expedient common to many post-scarcity utopias — e.g., “whuffie” in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In this regard, the actual boundary between “Communism” and “Socialism” once again blurs.

The fourth, and darkest scenario is “Exterminism.” In this scenario, the capitalists automate production within their own luxury enclaves (gated communities, offshore platforms like those envisioned by the techno-fascist Peter Thiel, or perhaps enormous space-colonies like in the movie Elysium), rendering human labor obsolete for serving their needs. Disposable humanity is locked out to starve in an overpopulated, polluted world — to be policed by automated hunter-killer drones, or possibly eliminated altogether through some kind of large-scale democide to eliminate the burden on the ecosystem.

Fortunately, both barbarisms — Rentism and Exterminism — strike me as utterly implausible.

One issue that Frase neglects, in framing the the dystopian scenarios of Rentism and Exterminism, is the extent to which the technologies of abundance themselves undermine the class power of capitalists. To a considerable extent, the very technologies of abundance themselves are reducing the enforceability of the legal monopolies that rentism depends on.

In the informational realm, the technologies of circumvention — encryption, cracking DRM, etc. — are generally several steps ahead in the arms race against technologies of artificial scarcity. Look at what file-sharing has done to record company profits. Anyone who wants to badly enough can get a copyrighted album free from a download site, at minimal risk. As a result, the price of songs on iTunes has been driven down to a nominal level just equivalent to the convenience of getting a copy of guaranteed authenticity with minimal searching around.

In the physical realm, CAD/CAM files stripped of DRM, and downloaded by local garage factories for production with open-hardware CNC tools, will probably have a similar effect. And low-cost patent enforcement, historically, has assumed the production of a small number of product models from a handful of oligopoly corporations, marketed through a handful of nationwide retail chains. The dispersion of production into tens of thousands of neighborhood economies will raise the transaction costs of patent enforcement well well beyond sustainable levels.

The question is whether the capitalists can prevent everybody else from adopting technologies at least of soft, if not hard abundance.

As for Exterminism, our irrelevance to automated capitalist production is beside the point. If they don’t need us, we don’t need them either. Barbarism — particularly Exterminism — is unlikely because of the inability of capitalists to prevent grass-roots adoption of technologies of communist abundance. Exterminism is possible only when capitalists own the machines. When the machines themselves are ultra-cheap, their power to exclude disappears.

Even if the capitalists own expensive robots, the availability to ordinary people of the next-best alternative of cheap, open-source, small-scale CNC tools will prevent a capitalist monopoly on access to the means of production and subsistence. And as Frase himself says, total automation is somewhat hyperbolic anyway. The “next-best” alternative would require very little labor — probably no more than, if as much as, Keynes’s prediction of 15 hours a week. When we talk about “who owns the machines,” we must remember there is more than one model of super-abundant machines — and one of them is not amenable to capitalist monopoly.

For that matter, an economy of 15-hour weeks at worker-controlled craft production or in the community garden, perhaps largely divorced from consumption rights and engaged in production for consumption within communistic social units like multi-family cohousing projects or micro-villages, might be more appealing than fully automated robot production. Although human effort would not be abolished in such an economy, toil would be — with the remaining effort analogous to Adam and Eve tending the Garden, and hard to distinguish between other forms of purposeful creative and social activity.

Frase notes that work, in Marx’s terms, “is still the realm of necessity and not of freedom.” But people still putter in their gardens or workshops after work and on the weekends. And he himself also quotes Marx on the higher, communist stage in which “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” That would mean, Frase says, “erasing the distinction between what counts as a business and what counts as a collective leisure activity…. Then we could all obey the injunction to ‘do what you love’ — not as a disingenuous apology for accepting exploitation, but as a real description of the state of existence.” As it is now, Frase points out, millions of people garden, or engage in paid labor they find socially fulfilling even at the cost of taking large cuts in pay, because they derive some inherent fulfillment from them. When “bullshit jobs” http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ like guard labor and production for planned obsolescence are done away with, and some of the more unpleasant tasks are automated, it may well be that people sort themselves into the remaining hours of labor based on affinity and enjoyment on the model of Bob Black’s “abolition of work.”

Frase closes by reiterating the choice between socialism and barbarism, and calling us to action for the former. As he said in the Introduction, his goal in writing this book was to help make the dystopian prophecies self-defeating, and make the utopian ones self-fulfilling.

The reason there are four futures, and not just one, is because nothing happens automatically. It’s up to us to determine the way forward.

Climate justice activists are currently fighting for socialist rather than exterminist solutions to climate change, even if they wouldn’t put it that way. And those fighting for access to knowledge, against strict intellectual property in everything from seeds to music, are struggling to hold off a rentist dystopia and keep the dream of communism alive.

The post Book of the Day: Four Futures by Peter Frase appeared first on P2P Foundation.

You’ve heard it before: Things have to get worse before they can get better. It’s a doctrine many of us learn first from our parents, as children, when they’re trying to teach us the unintuitive notion of delayed gratification. Tighten your belt, build character, learn your lesson the hard way. You’ll be rewarded in the end.

Then you grow up, and you read the newspaper. You live through its contents. You’re told to learn the same lesson again, but this time they call it economics, or creative disruption, or homeland security. This is the way of things; this is reality. “Things have to get worse before they can get better,” the politicians say.

To scratch this kind of talk is to reveal an old heresy beneath the veneer of common sense. And the need has never been more urgent to refute it.

An illustration from “Dispensational Truth or God’s Plan and Purpose in the Ages” by Clarence Larkin, courtesy of preservedwords.com

When I and several hundred thousand people demanding action on climate change marched through Midtown Manhattan on September 21, 2014, apocalypse was on our lips. We were marching to save the world—to change everything, as the propaganda beckoning us to participate had said. Wave after wave of marchers paraded through the city, carrying hand-painted banners and giant puppets, hopeful and joyful despite the likelihood of more political inaction to follow.

After a few hours in the streets, we could hear each other’s tired voices wondering what it might take for real change to happen. Things would have to get worse in certain places—drier droughts in California, maybe, or more catastrophic hurricanes in New York City. A few thousand of us, dressed in blue, made that point visible the next day by clogging up traffic near Wall Street, likening ourselves to a flood of rising seawater.

The COP 21 summit in Paris last year seemed to corroborate the overall story. That dismal number, 21, marked the number of years that the world’s leaders had failed to take seriously the rising temperatures, the worsening storms, and the droughts feeding geopolitical mayhem in places like South Sudan and Syria. After 21 years, at least, things had started to become bad enough. Even the Pentagon and Michael Bloomberg were voicing worry about how the climate crisis would affect their business-as-usual. The negotiations in Paris produced a deal, though one inadequate to prevent many of the catastrophes that computer models predict. Once again, it seems that things will have to get worse before they can get better.

Things? What things, and whose? Worse for whom, and better for whom? In times like these it’s hard not to see that there is apocalypse in the air, but the question that really matters is what kind. That’s the trouble; that’s the scam. There are many kinds of apocalypse stories. One can wait for the climate apocalypse to come, or one can see that it is happening already, especially in the pockets and places far from centers of power, where people live closest to the earth. These people are already on the brink. Things can get worse before they get better, but who says that they must?

Dispensationalist Dogma

This doctrine has a history. It has appeared in many places and times. But for American culture, it is through dispensationalism—a wildly popular, yet little-discussed, kind of Christian theology—that the idea of things getting worse before they can get better has been hidden in plain sight.

Dispensationalist theology first took hold in the United States thanks to a man who hit rock bottom. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War then started practicing law despite a lack of formal schooling. He made enough of a name for himself that President Grant appointed him the U.S. attorney to Kansas. But he drank more than was good for him, got divorced and probably wound up in jail. By and by, he found Christ in 1879 and, in 1883—again, with no formal training—became pastor of a church in Dallas. His charisma swelled it from tiny to enormous. He expanded his ministry to a prominent church in Massachusetts and then to an empire of Bible correspondence courses and colleges and conferences through which his ideas spread. His chief legacy, however, would be a collection of annotations for the Bible, a firm-handed guide through the bewilderments of scripture.

Along the way, Scofield encountered the writings of a marginal Irish preacher (and fellow lawyer), John Nelson Darby. Scofield, following Darby, taught that God governs and manages the world according to a sequence of distinct ages, or dispensations, each with distinct sets of rules and expectations. Each meets some kind of catastrophic end. In the Bible, as in Scofield’s life, things always got worse before they could get better—for instance, by Noah’s flood, or the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple, or whatever social degeneracy we observe around us. Fear not, for God is in control. The job of believers is to accept whatever dispensation they’re in and await, like eager spectators, the next catastrophe.

Understanding sacred history like this has consequences for the present. Justice and peace need not be strived for now; we’re not in the right dispensation yet. Dispensationalists have held that even the beloved commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount can be neglected—love your enemies, give what you have to those in need, do for others what you’d have them do for you.

As one of Scofield’s later followers reasoned, “Every businessman would go bankrupt giving to those who ask of him.” Dispensationalism permits a dose of pecuniary sense to some of the Bible’s more demanding social teachings.

This theology spread in tandem with modern corporate capitalism, aided by Gilded Age benefactors like California oilman Lyman Stewart. A later follower of Scofield’s imagined that Christians who persevere through the present tumult will get to serve as a “ruling aristocracy, the official administrative staff” of Christ’s corporate kingdom to come. The bureaucrat, thus, is the model believer: Play by the rules you’re given, as excellently as you can, and even as the planet is engulfed in flames rest assured that all is well.

Few authors have been so influential in U.S. intellectual history as Scofield while winning so little credit from the intellectual establishment. Especially after the apocalypse of World War I, the Scofield Reference Bible became the best-selling annotated Bible in history and probably the most successful book Oxford University Press has ever published.

Since Scofield, dispensationalism has lived on in U.S. evangelical culture’s fascination with predictions of Rapture, Armageddon and the Antichrist. But it is far from just a religious heresy. Dispensationalism is at work whenever we conclude, in conviction and resignation, that things have to get worse before they’ll get better. It amounts to acceptance of eventual self-destruction as a tolerable path to be on, and blindness to the most vulnerable among us who are already being destroyed.

It turns up on every part of the political spectrum, from followers of Karl Marx to those of Ayn Rand. We tell ourselves a dispensationalist story each time another economic crisis comes around, when “the economy” gets saved and an official sigh of relief is breathed while millions of people suffer foreclosures and layoffs that tear apart families and impoverish communities. For now, at least, in this day and age, this is what must be done. These are the rules.

“Apocalypse does not loom before us equally,” Catherine Keller writes in her study of the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse Now and Then. Keller, who teaches theology at Drew University, points to a way of imagining apocalypse that is very different from the dispensational kind, one that better suits our ecological challenges. But her analysis begins with the Bible.

In Revelation, figures like the seven-headed Beast and the Antichrist have been interpreted through the centuries as representing strongmen, or nations controlled by men, who engage in wars that men will fight. “The revealing gaze is male,” Keller writes. The upshot: These are the characters in the world that matter.

The stories of women and others on the receiving end of power don’t play more than supporting roles in this grand story; these are the kinds of people who have to endure while things get worse before they get better. In the meantime, proto-apocalyptic corporate empires are free to go on, in Keller’s phrase, “manfully sucking the planet dry.” Every century reinterprets the figures to fit its reigning principalities. But what else might the text mean if we’re not asking it for a story of imperial politics?

The Coming of the Counter-Apocalypse

Some feminist scholars have sought to forgo apocalypse entirely, but Keller does not. What she proposes instead is that we allow ourselves to notice instances of “counter-apocalypse”—the struggles and revelations constantly taking place among those whom the masters of the present age deem insignificant.C

For Keller, the Book of Revelation is actually a model for how to “sustain resistance to destruction without expecting to triumph.” The hallucinogenic creatures and symbols that appear in its text aren’t members of a governing bureaucracy, as the Scofields of the world would have it. Rather, they’re a palette of visions for people craving hope in the midst of what appears to be crisis and powerlessness.

John the Revelator first penned this prophecy during a time of apocalypse imposed from Rome. The strange, diverse images he conjured show how even that apocalypse had many sides—the trumpeter angels, the Lamb, the woman in the pangs of birth. He preached to the churches of seven cities, each with their own story to live through and to tell. Scofield’s system proffers an overall unity in the mayhem, a reassuring coherence; Keller cleaves to the multiplicity.

Among the Johns of today are native communities whose treaty rights are being revoked so crude oil can be extracted from under their feet; farmers who live in perpetual debt to corporations that produce the seeds they’re forced to use; those in places prone to worsening storms who are unable to leave or rebuild. These should be crises for all of us. The way to respond to their counter-apocalyptic stories is not to keep on pushing papers for the status quo, waiting for a bigger crisis to come. This is when the Sermon on the Mount is most needed, when the meek on the front lines should be the light of the world. The rest of us can let ourselves see their light. We don’t need to wait for the big climate apocalypse; the counter-apocalypses are here.

Apocalypses are already happening, but the rulers of the present dispensation would prefer that we not notice; there is resistance happening, too, and they would prefer that we not join. They would prefer that we obsess about the cataclysm of their choosing, the one always just over the horizon. Waiting for more crisis is a luxury most people on this planet can’t afford, and it’s a heresy none of us should allow to fester.

Those who long for crisis, and who imagine that it is necessary, betray their privilege. They are willing to believe crisis is needed because, on some level, they know they’re well-positioned to ride the tremors and come out ahead.

Environmental advocacy has tended to be a boutique faith for those who can afford it, those with enough comfort and leisure to contemplate a hegemonic mega-narrative to the exclusion of everything else. People of color in the United States are more likely to accept the reality of climate change, but caricatures of a largely white, affluent climate movement still hold too much truth. There are those who await a mythical “paradigm shift,” a “consciousness-raising,” for only then will the public be awake enough to take action. Meanwhile, too many of us are content to carry out small-scale acts of ecological piety—choose your own fashionable eco-local-green examples—while awaiting our eventual vindication when Manhattan and Dhaka are flooded for good.

In his ecological encyclical “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis warned, “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” He outlined an “integral ecology,” a call to environmental action inextricable from justice among human beings. Stewarding the planet, Francis argues, should begin from the experience of the poor and the peripheries, not the anxieties of the powerful.

Listening at the Margins

When the native-led Idle No More movement spread across Canada in late 2012 to protest fossil-fuel extraction on tribal lands, few south of the border even noticed. No one stirs in North America as Chinese cities and towns rise up against the pollution of factories that feed our craving for cheap goods, or as Pacific islands sink. People living among the refineries of Houston’s East End, at the terminus of what remains of the Keystone XL pipeline, have been largely on their own in demanding the right to breathe clean air. These struggles are taking place at focal points of the power structure; this is where the present dispensation is susceptible to acts of love and to the support of outsiders who can lend it. In places like these, the possibility of a better kind of world can be unveiled.

Front-line communities, at least, were at the head of the big 2014 climate march, and they were the ones who called for the next day’s sit-in at Wall Street. The climate movement is learning. The crisis it faces is not singular, but plural—not a single story everyone should be paying attention to, but a collection of stories that we all can be gathering, hearing, honoring and living out. Until then, the movement will remain small and boutique because it won’t realize how large it really is. Frustrated people will continue whispering that things have to get worse before they can get better.

Wherever we are, those facing apocalypse at the margins can be our guides, and our hope. We can learn about their stories and share them. We can support their efforts. And we can learn from them about how to better steward our world before things get even worse.

Against the doomsday landscape of Detroit, and until her death last year at 100, activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs was heralding the kind of counter-apocalypse Catherine Keller writes about. Boggs and other Detroiters have been resisting the distant investors trying to take over their city, not with claims that the end of everything is near, but with urban farms and manual skills. “Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community,” Boggs writes, “we need to do the opposite—begin with the needs of the community and create loving relationships with one another and with the earth.”

This is basic Sermon-on-the-Mount stuff. And it bears a simple and utterly non-dispensational revelation: Things will get better if we make things better for each other now, if we survive and love our neighbors where those who rule the present age want us out of the way. This is our calling, and it means no longer waiting for things to get worse. This is an apocalypse worth having.

The post Are You Ready for the Counter-Apocalypse? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A guest post by our friend and colleague Silke Helrich and written for her keynote at the recent City as a Commons Conference, held in Bologna, Italy.

I was delighted to give a key-note talk at the First IASC Thematic Urban Commons Conference last week in Bologna. Here are my speech and the slides. The most beautiful ones were produced by Nikolas Kichler.

In 2040, one generation from now, I will be more than 70 years old and hopefully surrounded by my first great-grandchildren. What I’d like to share with you this morning is how I imagine* the Urban Commons will be by then – and how I’d like my grand- and great-grandchildren and me to enjoy them and care for. Actually, first of all: While rethinking the issue of this conference, I realized that it should read: Imagining the “Rurban Commons.” Because this seems to be one of the most important patterns: Interconnecting Urban and Rural. The so called Urban Agriculture or rural Maker-Spaces like the OTELOs throughout Austria are pioneering this inter-connection.

• THE SLIDES: Imagining the (R)Urban Commons in 2040
• (The effects of the presentation have unfortunately gone with the conversion to pdf.)

So, to share how I imagine the future of the rurban commons, I’d like to invite you to take a collective walk with me – a walk through an environment that we can co-create, that in fact can only be co-created. Step by step and adapted to the local circumstances. Designing such an environment doesn’t automatically ensure or guarantee “urban commons”, but it can provide the conditions and infrastructures for commoning.

This is crucial for the insight that Peter Linebaugh phrased as follows: There is no Commons without Commoning. I believe, that the most challenging and indispensable factors, which make commons come true, are to (learn how to) think like a commoner and practice “how to common” at the same time. And this, in turn, requires a specific attitude. An attitude based on the recognition of a simple truth: We are all related to each-other!

“I am because you are”, or “I am through the others.” Also known as ubuntu. Just have a closer look at the word “I“. This is a relational term. Saying “I” doesn’t make sense if there is no “You”. This is at the very core of the paradigm shift that the commons-debate contributes to. To put it differently: Human beings are free in relatedness but never free from relationships. That’s the ontological bottom line. Relation precedes the things being related to, i.e. the actual facts, objects, situations and circumstances. Just as physics and biology are coming to see that the critical factors in their fields are relationships, not things, so it is with commons.

From this insight, we can then see that, commoning can be conceived as a way of living. It is a life-form that (potentially) enacts freedom in relatedness, which is a sometimes hurtful, mostly bumpy and always complex social process. And a process that requires us to constantly swim upstream, against all odds, because in a capitalist society we tend to systematically disregard the capacities and skills we need for it.

Anyway: Commoning means: take collective action to enact the Commons. The more consciously and self-consciously this happens, the better.

To what extent is this relevant for this conference?

One of the aspects that distinguishes the modern commons-debate from the debates 150, 40 or only 20 years ago is, that there is more and more interest in exploring and understanding how free cooperation (commoning) works among strangers, and how it can be made stable and durable. People also want to understand how commoning might work in nontraditional communities; in networks, in the digital world, in multiethnical contexts, among “nomadic citizens” such as hackers and migrants, and so on. The bet is: this is perfectly possible…

• if the Patterns of Commoning are as well understood as the (Ostrom) Design Principles for Commons Institutions;
• if they are appropriated and cultivated and become an embodied experience;
• and if we dispose of (free) communication tools to enable our cooperation.

Commoning is beyond the just “being together” (more than Geselligkeit, as we would say in German). In fact, it may be the only way in which we can systemically confront the dysfunctions and corruptions of the market/state system that now govern us.

Now, let’s beam into the year 2040 and start our walk.

Picture the city you live in or a city you know well. Focus on a certain neighbourhood and remember the bustle in the streets. Remember how this place sounds and smells like and what people are doing there…. A city is fluid, which means that such a neighbourhood is changing constantly. People move in and out. Buildings are bought and sold, shops close down and others open up. Infrastructures change sometimes more quickly than we wish them to do. Once there was a factory. Now there is a cultural centre. People disconnect from traditional work-places; they work at their home office or in the co-working space next door. Each change of the kind is also an opportunity to “commonify” the city.

You may find this an odd statement. So let me show you what this might look like. First and foremost: The main focus is on rethinking use. In fact, a commons approach can make new constructions unnecessary. There are surprising solutions to underuse. Everywhere. “Zwischennutzung” (in-between-use?) is only one of them.

Or apartments can be converted into co-housing projects (yes, this is different from Airbnb). Co-housing means; sharing basic housing infrastructures according to peoples needs, in a self-determined and durable way, not renting a flat every now and then. This has two major effects: it helps people to become more independent from the housing market. And this in turn helps to “free” the houses or apartments from concentrated market control, speculation and artificially high prices.

Of course, there is an endless number of legal forms from housing cooperatives to community land trusts. But the crucial point here is to make sure that once something is in the commons, it shall remain in the commons and not fall back into the market. In Germany, there is a robust and growing institution called “Mietshäusersyndikat” (sth. like the Federation of Housing Commons). It has more than 25 years of experience in co-facilitating the self-organization of hundreds of housing units all over the country. They co-created a solidarity and co-financing network among housing projects. But what makes them really special is the legal tweak, the smart legal arrangement they’ve developed to protect the buildings/houses themselves as a commons. It has been done in such a way that it is very difficult to resell a co-housing project back into the market. What the federation of housing commons is basically doing is: to elevate the freedoms of commoners at the expense of investors, speculators and often, governments. They protect the freedoms that money can’t buy.

To me: Mietshäusersyndikat is kind of the Copyleft for Housing projects.

Why is this important? Because doing this means widening the sphere of the commons with a long term perspective. And widening the sphere of the commons entails shrinking the sphere of the market and vice versa. So, remember: Each Commons needs protection!

Let’s walk on

Everybody needs not only shelter but also something to eat. And a decisive part of the reintegration of rural and urban functions is certainly more food production in the city. In my great-children’s Rurban Commons, there will be spaces for experimental gardening and herb commons – you might already know the concept of an edible city. All this would be part of.

There would be a bee and wild bird yard, the already famous community gardens and intercultural gardens. There would be flower fields, fruit tree zones … you name it. And, of course, CSAs. CSA means Community Supported Agriculture. This is crucial, because – as in the co-housing case – the functioning of many CSAs successfully disconnects food-production from the imperatives of the market and instead initiates a kind of “pool & share” approach.

As you might have noticed, for me, the commons is much more than a concept of togetherness: it also describes a new mode of production. Of potentially everything: housing and food, software and hardware, furniture and machines, health and educational services; if possible in a distributed (not decentralized) way. Decentralization is better than centralization, but still a top – down approach. A distributed scheme of production is different. This is what we can learn from the P2P communities.

One could say: We are witnessing a worldwide field try, and an expansion of locally proven models of this new way of production. Open hardware projects are mushrooming, as CSAs do. They often use different concepts and wordings. This is part of why the common DNA of all these experiments, the patterns of commoning, often remain unvisible.

Let’s have a closer look.

In the place I will live in 2040, there will be a repair-café, a laundry saloon, outdoor workshops for whatever purpose, a tool lending library, fab labs a building physics workshop, a hackerspace, a fabric sharing & tailoring space, and so on.

The infrastructure will be controleable and controlled by the neighbourhood: there is (distributed) renewable energy production, a sewage purification plant, Open Wifi and Open Network. There are fire brigades, health & first aid associations and much more. There is a common pattern (I refer to patterns as used in the Patterns Theory and Pattern Language approach by Christopher Alexander) in the kind of infrastructure I think of: platforms are/platform use is free of discrimination.

Such platforms are based on the principle that more money doesn’t entail more use rights (compare it to the concept of net-neutrality; you could call it platform-neutrality).

Let’s continue strolling around the neighbourhood:

There are the cultural spaces for the unfolding of cultural activities, reading circles, an open theatre, a contemplation area, a library, an open permaculture and a commoning school and so on. Many of them are simply open spaces for non determined uses. And finally, we need to get around within and beyond the neighbourhood. I imagine mobility in a rurban commons as a combination of bikes, p2p car-sharing and good connectivity to public transportation.

So, is this realistic? Or is it utopia, that is: a “non-place”?

I think it is something that the German philosopher Ernst Bloch calls: “Concrete Utopia”. We can already grasp such a transformation. The experiences are there, still scattered, and named in great many different ways. But they are there. The needs are there as well. And the commons is a needs-based approach (more than a rights based approach). From where what is now “individual property” [and a tragedy of the anticommons – the fragmentation of property rights, and thus a social and economic paralysis] can be transformed into shared possession, according to people’s needs and decisions.

That’s what the commons framework is all about: in essence it’s a way to meet people’s needs at all levels. It’s a way of provisioning that doesn’t need to be achieved through:

• individual property as default position
• nor mediated through the so called “market mechanisms”. (In fact, mechanistic metaphors are very misplaced when we try to understand and address the complexity of social relationships)

So, how do we get there?

Let’s go back to the year 2015 and have a look at where it all began: part of this emerging Rurban Commons era was the First IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons.

And let’s have a look at what’s out there.

OMNI-COMMONS

You see, the experiments are there, the concepts are there. And even mapping tools to make visible what’s still invisible.

We need more than an Omni-Commons everywhere. We need to discover the common patterns of the initiatives that experiment with a rurban commons approach and we need to help to connect them – not necessarily in physical terms, but mentally and politically. Because one thing is for sure: we are not just for dealing with “the left overs”, or in urban terms with “vacant terrain” – or what used to be called “wastelands.” It is not about the peripheral undefined edges of the city. It’s about rethinking the rurban environment as commoners. Social and cultural realities are not facts, they are something we co-create.

So: connect commons ? confederate the hot spots of commoning ? create commons-neighbourhoods ? commonify the city. In short: Widening the space for the commons while shrinking the space of the market is feasible. It needs to be enabled, done and (politically and academically) supported. Of course, such an approach needs a consistent framework, so that people feel mirrored in it, so to speak.

This is where commoners on the ground need the help of scholars, of engaged scholars as you are. Scholars who don’t just study what they do and what they don’t do, but co-facilitate the co-creation of a free, fair and sustainable society. As Ezio Manzini put it last night:

“Commons are fluid forms. To enact them we should focus on enabling conditions, not on fixed designs.”

That was precisely what I was trying to do: take you on a walk through a non-fixed design that is meant to create the enabling conditions for commons in a rurban environment. A “design” that is open and allows for constant adaptation. It was called: CITY OF WORKSHOPS. And it was not me who did it. But two young participants of this conference who care for commons and the creation of enlivened rurban environments: Nikolas Kichler and David Steinwender from Austria.

So, there is hope, not only for one generation from now but within the next generation.

There is power in the Rurban Commons if there is Power in the Communities, that make, care for and protect them. Therefore: Keep calm and Keep Commoning.

*words in bold are illustrated on the slides.

Update Nov. 13: Blogpost with more information on the Conference: The City as a Commons by David Bollier

Images by Nikolas Kichler and Brian (Ziggy) Liloia: Main image “Botanical apartments in Phuket Thailand”, author unknown.

The post Imagining the (R)Urban Commons in 2040 appeared first on P2P Foundation.