science – P2P Foundation

Peer-to-peer-commons – The historical ‘third movement’ of radical science? It can only get better

Mike Hales — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Originally published 18 September 2018 at foprop.org

Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

Lucy Gao and I have just finished a project to research and build a presentation at 4S Sydney 2018, the annual gathering of the academic research field of STS. The theme of the conference session – Lives in STS as a series of failed political experiments – was generated from a comment that Gary had made, and Lucy and I took his ‘three movements’ as a frame for narrating two stories of experimenting and ¿failing? in two ‘lives in STS’ – hers of ten years and mine of forty-five. The conference presentation is posted in Youtube (mirrored at hooktube) and a bundle of related materials on radical science and radical professionalism – including a one-page outline of the two stories and a transcript of several hours’ interviews – has now been posted here in 3 History, at Lives in STS. For length, a part of that presentation had to be dropped: an analytical framing of . . Fordism/post-Fordism and P2P as a mode of production in waiting . . STS academia and radical science activism, and . . organic-intellectual activism in-and-against the professional-managerial class (PMC). I had thought of making a ‘directors’ cut’ after the conference. However, too much other work waiting. So … regard this present blog post as the synopsis of the absent footage.

Three things stand out for me about this Lives in STS project, and the place that I got to through working on it with Lucy. Lucy is an Associate Professor in STS, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was born 40 years after I was, and works in an academic field that burst full-formed upon the Chinese cultural world in the late 80s, with its churned and manifestly political (two-movements) history buried beneath a surface of glossy Westernism, managerialism and professionalisation.

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The first thing is my own sense that ‘radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science, and that where I have gone to with it isn’t essentially ‘science’ either. I saw, and see, a bunch of cultural formations within a broad and deep generational movement of radical professionals. This has been theorised – among other framings – as a history of the PMC in what once (40 years ago!) was called ‘late capitalism’. In the past generation – I would say, as an aspect of the post-Fordist regrouping of capital and forces opposed to capital – there has been an emergence of a profound and historically new politics, of the producing and mobilising of knowledges, on a mass, globally distributed scale. In the 50s it was ‘Big Science’ and the underpinning of ‘the military-industrial complex’. In the 60s it was the ascendance of ‘science policy’ and arguments about the public or privatisable nature of research production. In the 80s (alongside computerisation) there began to be talk of ‘a knowledge economy’ and in the 90s ‘knowledge intensive business services’ and ‘innovation services’ were subjects of research in ‘national systems of innovation’. In the 90s I was part of this, as an STS researcher (more to be posted in due course).

But all the way through, in my perception, the sub-plot has been one of #organicintellectual production (Gramsci’s term, from Italian Marxism of the 1920s and 30s) and the increasingly clear possibility of – and need for – organising the production of knowledges – on a mass scale, on a class scale – to facilitate quite different modes of production, forms of living and relationships between professionals and other people who are ‘not paid to think’. This on-going story of organic intellectual practice is the concern of the 4 History thread here in FoP RoP. It also is why the analytical frame for the pattern language in the 2 Commoning thread has at its centre the choreography of ’the dance of knowing’, and the question of the historically altered production of #labourpower. In FoP RoP I’m proposing this as one of three spheres of literacy (see here) that can, combined, constitute a cultural-materialist ‘take’ on the historical evolution and ongoing activist production of a P2P-commons mode of production and everyday living.

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The second thing I note is that, although I’ve understood myself for 40 years now to be conducting an enquiry within #culturalmaterialism – rather than any kind of received Marxism – the movement for P2P-commons may also be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified by the kind of neo- (not post-) Marxian, carefully hybridised frame that I’m setting out to articulate in FoP RoP, and specifically, in 2 Commoning.

The #materialism within the P2P-commons movement is very obviously present in the core attention given to . . open architectures of apps and the peer-to-peer production of free code . . distributed web infrastructures . . open data, linked data/data ownership/document ownership . . licensing, and to infrastructural technologies of coordination over distributed fields of action including cryptocurrencies and credit-accounting mechanisms, hashchains, open-value supply-chain accounting systems and open-ledger algorithms and architectures.

The cultural-historical orientation is a little less visible. But it’s clearly present for example in the anthropological perspective that led Michel Bauwens to see the historical-evolutionary, post- and anti-capitalist significance of commons, and to inaugurate the P2P Foundation. Likewise it manifestly underlies the scholarly, activist research and development work of Bauwens’ partners in the Commons Strategies Group – David Bollier, Silke Helfrich – on cultural-historical stories of commoning, past and present, presented in their collections of essays The wealth of the commons and Patterns of commoning and under analysis in their work-in-progress towards a pattern language of commoning. See here for notes on the relationship between this and my own pattern-language work here in FoP RoP.

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

The third thing I’m aware of is the way in which the P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – and expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in ‘the second radical science movement’ of the 70s. That was baby-boomers then. But now – although there are baby-boomers still on the scene – it’s another generation, who are discovering and enacting the organic intellectual mode differently. I began to see them only about 18 months ago. I’d been working on a notion of creating some kind of ‘college’ in which baby-boomer and twenty-something activists (and between) could engage in a cross-generation ‘legacy’ dialogue, theorising the ongoing practice of organic-intellectual, libertarian-socialist, activism. I sketched the idea in Humble origins 3 – Activists and the long march home. I’d decided the initiative called for an online platform of some kind (constituting a space for an ‘invisible college’) and had begun checking out the Loomio platform-for-deliberation www.loomio.org/. My ears pricked up here because Loomio was not only well-framed software with a wide and expanding voluntary-sector uptake across countries and cultures, but also because I clearly saw the attention to the #facilitation of group process that underlies the design. Here was a clear historical line, back to the discoveries and commitments of my own generation of community-oriented activism in the 70s (See ‘radical cultural R&D’ in 4 History and the Foreword/Preface to Location).

From Loomio the platform app, through Loomio the workers’ coop of developers, I came to Enspiral, the federation (family?) of post-Occupy activist hacktivist developers and cooperative entrepreneurs, among whom facilitation was a taken-for-granted dimension of activist culture. Thence, to Sensorica and an expanding world of anarcho-hackerist politics, Scuttlebutt infrastructure, a fediverse of code (and P2P producers of code and protocols); and wider formations of post-Occupy, anti-oligarch, direct-democracy research and development, ‘open-value’ value-chain accounting and ’agile’ post-Fordist cultural forms. This had all sorts of odd, contradictory resonances with my business-school experience of the 90s (when stealing the post-Fordist discoveries of Japanese and Italian flexible production systems was bread-and-butter for my colleagues in capitalist supply-chain innovation). Clearly, the histories were getting very mixed up, hybridising, rippling through, wave-fronts interfering. Clearly, there were younger radicals afoot now, in the teensies. who didn’t draw the same sorts of lines – between entrepreneurship and community, or solidarity and efficiency, or activism and technology, or politics and nurturing – that might have been problematic for an earlier generation, brought up in environments that were at once both more corporate, more professionally demarcated and careerist and more inclined to ‘design’ rather than ‘hack’ a solution. Then, it was corporate-competitive ‘right first time’, now it’s fail early, keep fixing and keep forking and federating.

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was (post-Fordism is far further on). Most directly, it’s a successor to the radical technology arms of that movement, all the way from the alternative energy community, committed to off-grid or anarcho urban-artisan living, to the ‘human-centred’ and participatory, labour movement-oriented design movements in corporate-industrial settings. Work on other things – ‘radical science’ history in 4 History, organising within the world of ‘platform cooperativist’ activism in 3 Platforming – is preventing me really getting to grips with the pattern language of commoning in 2 Commoning. But I’m in no doubt that that theorising venture is just as relevant (and on the same cultural-materialist basis) for today’s P2P-commons movement, as was 70s neo-Marxian labour-process theorising in the Radical Science Journal collective, for 70s radical professionalism. Except . . it’s a bigger field, the stakes are raised, the pluriversal cultural challenges sit more obviously and crucially on the face of things; and the Beyond the fragments challenge that faced baby-boomers at the end of the 70s has hatched many fresh forms. Things are on the move. Goodness knows what the ‘third movement’ will look like in China, where my STS colleague Lucy Gao is coming at things 40 years later, with no ‘second movement’, an established, otiose, first movement, and with all the waves of all the Fordisms crashing in a tsunami of history and economy, in the wake of the ‘Great Enlightenment’ of the late 80s.

Whatever . . Yes Gary, there is a third (Marxism-inheriting) radical science movement! It can only get better.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.

Michel Bauwens — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 08:00:00 +0000

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.

Michel Bauwens: Historical change is complex and gives rise to conflicting interpretations, on the one hand, there are many doom-driven scenarios by environmentalists and those rightfully concerned about climate change; but a one-sided vision of negative developments can lead to paralysis and loss of hope; on the other side of this polarity, are people like Steve Pinker, who rightfully point to a dramatic slide in human violence (this seems well established), but in a context of a entirely positive story of capitalist and liberal development, which entirely ignores the shadowside of these extractive developments.

In the context of this debate, it is a very welcome fact to encounter the critical work of Jeremy Lent, who insists on the stories that Steve Pinker leaves out. We very strongly recommend reading his well documented rebutals and augmentations. My own conclusion is that capitalism, for a while tamed and regulated by the popular power of labour and other movements, did achieve a number of material improvements, at least for part of the world population, but at an increasing unsustainable material cost to the environment and the other beings we share the world with, while also bringing social tensions to a dangerous breaking point. The options are therefore not a simplistic continuation of the western development project, but either a significant drawdown of the human footprint, in the context of retaining the maximum of civilisational complexity, while extending basic health and other welfare services to every human being.

The work of Kate Raworth brings a very good summary of that conundrum, with her ‘doughnut economics’ bringing together material limits together with a clear vision of what still needs to be done to achieve a dignified life for every human being. At the P2P Foundation this summer, we will be working on mapping out environmental and social externalities, to create accounting and accountability for the production and maintenance of human life. What we need is a production system that internalizes both social and ecological externalities, positive and negative. Our economic system needs to become socially predistributive (not merely correcting inequalilties after the fact), and ecologically regenerative (not merely repairing the damage previously done). This article was originally published in Jeremy Lent’s blog and is reproduced here his explicit permission.

Jeremy Lent: In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18^th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.

His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation, sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian, laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)

In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He spoke to the world’s elite this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous response.

Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.

This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly, ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.

Graph 1: Overshoot

In November 2017, around the time when Pinker was likely putting the final touches on his manuscript, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warning to humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world’s resources, they declared, we are facing “widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss.” They warned that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Figure 1: Three graphs from World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

They included nine sobering charts and a carefully worded, extensively researched analysis showing that, on a multitude of fronts, the human impact on the earth’s biological systems is increasing at an unsustainable rate. Three of those alarming graphs are shown here: the rise in CO₂emissions; the decline in available freshwater; and the increase in the number of ocean dead zones from artificial fertilizer runoff.

This was not the first such notice. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world, calling for a recognition of the earth’s fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that “we all have but one lifeboat.” The current graphs starkly demonstrate how little the world has paid attention to this warning since 1992.

Taken together, these graphs illustrate ecological overshoot: the fact that, in the pursuit of material progress, our civilization is consuming the earth’s resources faster than they can be replenished. Overshoot is particularly dangerous because of its relatively slow feedback loops: if your checking account balance approaches zero, you know that if you keep writing checks they will bounce. In overshoot, however, it’s as though our civilization keeps taking out bigger and bigger overdrafts to replenish the account, and then we pretend these funds are income and celebrate our continuing “progress.” In the end, of course, the money runs dry and it’s game over.

Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity. Instead, he uses the blatant rhetorical technique of ridicule to paint those concerned about overshoot as part of a “quasi-religious ideology… laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.” He then uses a couple of the most extreme examples he can find to create a straw-man to buttress his caricature. There are issues worthy of debate on the topic of civilization and sustainability, but to approach a subject of such seriousness with emotion-laden rhetoric is morally inexcusable and striking evidence of Monbiot’s claim that Pinker “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.”

When Pinker does get serious on the topic, he promotes Ecomodernism as the solution: a neoliberal, technocratic belief that a combination of market-based solutions and technological fixes will magically resolve all ecological problems. This approach fails, however, to take into account the structural drivers of overshoot: a growth-based global economy reliant on ever-increasing monetization of natural resources and human activity. Without changing this structure, overshoot is inevitable. Transnational corporations, which currently constitute sixty-nine of the world’s hundred largest economies, are driven only by increasing short-term financial value for their shareholders, regardless of the long-term impact on humanity. As freshwater resources decline, for example, their incentive is to buy up what remains and sell it in plastic throwaway bottles or process it into sugary drinks, propelling billions in developing countries toward obesity through sophisticated marketing. In fact, until an imminent collapse of civilization itself, increasing ecological catastrophes are likely to enhance the GDP of developed countries even while those in less developed regions suffer dire consequences.

Graphs 2 and 3: Progress for Whom?

Which brings us to another fundamental issue in Pinker’s narrative of progress: who actually gets to enjoy it? Much of his book is devoted to graphs showing worldwide progress in quality in life for humanity as a whole. However, some of his omissions and misstatements on this topic are very telling.

At one point, Pinker explains that, “Despite the word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind.” That’s convenient, because any non-human animal might not agree that the past sixty years has been a period of flourishing. In fact, while the world’s GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, there has been a vast die-off of the creatures with whom we share the earth. As shown in Figure 2, human progress in material consumption has come at the cost of a 58% decline in vertebrates, including a shocking 81% reduction of animal populations in freshwater systems. For every five birds or fish that inhabited a river or lake in 1970, there is now just one.

Figure 2: Reduction in abundance in global species since 1970. Source: WWF Living Plant Report, 2016

But we don’t need to look outside the human race for Pinker’s selective view of progress. He is pleased to tell us that “racist violence against African Americans… plummeted in the 20^th century, and has fallen further since.” What he declines to report is the drastic increase in incarceration rates for African Americans during that same period (Figure 3). An African American man is now six times more likely to be arrested than a white man, resulting in the dismal statistic that one in every three African American men can currently expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. The grim takeaway from this is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Figure 3: Historical incarceration rates of African-Americans. Source: The Washington Post.

Graph 4: A rising tide lifts all boats?

This brings us to one of the crucial errors in Pinker’s overall analysis. By failing to analyze his top-level numbers with discernment, he unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phrase he unashamedly appropriates for himself as he extols the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the original instigators of neoliberal laissez-faire economics, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes, privatize industries, and slash public services with the goal of increasing economic growth.

Pinker makes two key points here. First, he argues that “income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being,” pointing to recent research that people are comfortable with differential rewards for others depending on their effort and skill. However, as Pinker himself acknowledges, humans do have a powerful predisposition toward fairness. They want to feel that, if they work diligently, they can be as successful as someone else based on what they do, not on what family they’re born into or what their skin color happens to be. More equal societies are also healthier, which is a condition conspicuously missing from the current economic model, where the divide between rich and poor has become so gaping that the six wealthiest men in the world (including Pinker’s good friend, Bill Gates) now own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the world’s population.

Pinker’s fallback might, then, be his second point: the rising tide argument, which he extends to the global economy. Here, he cheerfully recounts the story of how Branko Milanović, a leading ex-World Bank economist, analyzed income gains by percentile across the world over the twenty-year period 1988–2008, and discovered something that became widely known as the “Elephant Graph,” because its shape resembled the profile of an elephant with a raised trunk. Contrary to popular belief about rising global inequality, it seemed to show that, while the top 1% did in fact gain more than their fair share of income, lower percentiles of the global population had done just as well. It seemed to be only the middle classes in wealthy countries that had missed out.

This graph, however, is virtually meaningless because it calculates growth rates as a percent of widely divergent income levels. Compare a Silicon Valley executive earning $200,000/year with one of the three billion people currently living on $2.50 per day or less. If the executive gets a 10% pay hike, she can use the $20,000 to buy a new compact car for her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, that same 10% increase would add, at most, a measly 25 cents per day to each of those three billion. In Graph 4, Oxfam economist Mujeed Jamaldeen shows the original “Elephant Graph” (blue line) contrasted with changes in absolute income levels (green line). The difference is stark.

Figure 4: “Elephant Graph” versus absolute income growth levels. Source: “From Poverty to Power,” Muheed Jamaldeen.

The “Elephant Graph” elegantly conceals the fact that the wealthiest 1% experienced nearly 65 times the absolute income growth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Inequality isn’t, in fact, decreasing at all, but going extremely rapidly the other way. Jamaldeen has calculated that, at the current rate, it would take over 250 years for the income of the poorest 10% to merely reach the global average income of $11/day. By that time, at the current rate of consumption by wealthy nations, it’s safe to say there would be nothing left for them to spend their lucrative earnings on. In fact, the “rising tide” for some barely equates to a drop in the bucket for billions of others.

Graph 5: Measuring Genuine Progress

One of the cornerstones of Pinker’s book is the explosive rise in income and wealth that the world has experienced in the past couple of centuries. Referring to the work of economist Angus Deaton, he calls it the “Great Escape” from the historic burdens of human suffering, and shows a chart (Figure 5, left) depicting the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which seems to say it all. How could anyone in their right mind refute that evidence of progress?

Figure 5: GDP per capita compared with GPI. Source: Kubiszewski et al. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress.” Ecological Economics, 2013.

There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material wellbeing in the past two hundred years, and Pinker documents this in detail, from the increased availability of clothing, food, and transportation, to the seemingly mundane yet enormously important decrease in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from wellbeing. In fact, GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP.

This divergence is played out, tragically, across the world every day, and is cruelly hidden in global statistics of rising GDP when powerful corporate and political interests destroy the lives of the vulnerable in the name of economic “progress.” In just one of countless examples, a recent report in The Guardian describes how indigenous people living on the Xingu River in the Amazon rainforest were forced off their land to make way for the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. One of them, Raimundo Brago Gomes, tells how “I didn’t need money to live happy. My whole house was nature… I had my patch of land where I planted a bit of everything, all sorts of fruit trees. I’d catch my fish, make manioc flour… I raised my three daughters, proud of what I was. I was rich.” Now, he and his family live among drug dealers behind barred windows in Brazil’s most violent city, receiving a state pension which, after covering rent and electricity, leaves him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter, and grandson. Meanwhile, as a result of his family’s forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil’s GDP has risen.

Pinker is aware of the crudeness of GDP as a measure, but uses it repeatedly throughout his book because, he claims, “it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing.” This is not, however, what has been discovered when economists have adjusted GDP to incorporate other major factors that affect human flourishing. One prominent alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), reduces GDP for negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution, loss of primary forest and soil quality, and social factors such as the cost of crime and commuting. It increases the measure for positive factors missing from GDP such as housework, volunteer work, and higher education. Sixty years of historical GPI for many countries around the world have been measured, and the results resoundingly refute Pinker’s claim of GDP’s correlation with wellbeing. In fact, as shown by the purple line in Figure 5 (right), it turns out that the world’s Genuine Progress peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since.

Graph 6: What Has Improved Global Health?

One of Pinker’s most important themes is the undisputed improvement in overall health and longevity that the world has enjoyed in the past century. It’s a powerful and heart-warming story. Life expectancy around the world has more than doubled in the past century. Infant mortality everywhere is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Improvements in medical knowledge and hygiene have saved literally billions of lives. Pinker appropriately quotes economist Steven Radelet that these improvements “rank among the greatest achievements in human history.”

So, what has been the underlying cause of this great achievement? Pinker melds together what he sees as the twin engines of progress: GDP growth and increase in knowledge. Economic growth, for him, is a direct result of global capitalism. “Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism,” he declares with his usual exaggerated rhetoric, “its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers.” He refers to a figure called the Preston curve, from a paper by Samuel Preston published in 1975 showing a correlation between GDP and life expectancy that become foundational to the field of developmental economics. “Most obviously,” Pinker declares, “GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.” While he pays lip service to the scientific principle that “correlation is not causation,” he then clearly asserts causation, claiming that “economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.” He closes his chapter with a joke about a university dean offered by a genie the choice between money, fame, or wisdom. The dean chooses wisdom but then regrets it, muttering “I should have taken the money.”

Pinker would have done better to have pondered more deeply on the relation between correlation and causation in this profoundly important topic. In fact, a recent paper by Wolfgang Lutz and Endale Kebede entitled “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve” does just that. The original Preston curve came with an anomaly: the relationship between GDP and life expectancy doesn’t stay constant. Instead, each period it’s measured, it shifts higher, showing greater life expectancy for any given GDP (Figure 6, left). Preston—and his followers, including Pinker—explained this away by suggesting that advances in medicine and healthcare must have improved things across the board.

Figure 6: GDP vs. Life expectancy compared with Education vs. Life expectancy. Source: W. Lutz and E. Kebede. “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve.” Population and Development Review, 2018

Lutz and Kebede, however, used sophisticated multi-level regression models to analyze how closely education correlated with life expectancy compared with GDP. They found that a country’s average level of educational attainment explained rising life expectancy much better than GDP, and eliminated the anomaly in Preston’s Curve (Figure 6, right). The correlation with GDP was spurious. In fact, their model suggests that both GDP and health are ultimately driven by the amount of schooling children receive. This finding has enormous implications for development priorities in national and global policy. For decades, the neoliberal mantra, based on Preston’s Curve, has dominated mainstream thinking—raise a country’s GDP and health benefits will follow. Lutz and Kebede show that a more effective policy would be to invest in schooling for children, with all the ensuing benefits in quality of life that will bring.

Pinker’s joke has come full circle. In reality, for the past few decades, the dean chose the money. Now, he can look at the data and mutter: “I should have taken the wisdom.”

Graph 7: False Equivalencies, False Dichotomies

As we can increasingly see, many of Pinker’s missteps arise from the fact that he conflates two different dynamics of the past few centuries: improvements in many aspects of the human experience, and the rise of neoliberal, laissez-faire capitalism. Whether this is because of faulty reasoning on his part, or a conscious strategy to obfuscate, the result is the same. Most readers will walk away from his book with the indelible impression that free market capitalism is an underlying driver of human progress.

Pinker himself states the importance of avoiding this kind of conflation. “Progress,” he declares, “consists not in accepting every change as part of an indivisible package… Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.” If only he took his own admonition more seriously!

Instead, he laces his book with an unending stream of false equivalencies and false dichotomies that lead a reader inexorably to the conclusion that progress and capitalism are part of the same package. One of his favorite tropes is to create a false equivalency between right-wing extremism and the progressive movement on the left. He tells us that the regressive factions that undergirded Donald Trump’s presidency were “abetted by a narrative shared by many of their fiercest opponents, in which the institutions of modernity have failed and every aspect of life is in deepening crisis—the two sides in macabre agreement that wrecking those institutions will make the world a better place.” He even goes so far as to implicate Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election debacle: “The left and right ends of the political spectrum,” he opines, “incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.”

Implicit in Pinker’s political model is the belief that progress can only arise from the brand of centrist politics espoused by many in the mainstream Democratic Party. He perpetuates a false dichotomy of “right versus left” based on a twentieth-century version of politics that has been irrelevant for more than a generation. “The left,” he writes, “has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” He contrasts “industrial capitalism,” on the one hand, which has rescued humanity from universal poverty, with communism, which has “brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.”

By painting this black and white, Manichean landscape of capitalist good versus communist evil, Pinker obliterates from view the complex, sophisticated models of a hopeful future that have been diligently constructed over decades by a wide range of progressive thinkers. These fresh perspectives eschew the Pinker-style false dichotomy of traditional left versus right. Instead, they explore the possibilities of replacing a destructive global economic system with one that offers potential for greater fairness, sustainability, and human flourishing. In short, a model for continued progress for the twenty-first century.

While the thought leaders of the progressive movement are too numerous to mention here, an illustration of this kind of thinking is seen in Graph 7. It shows an integrated model of the economy, aptly called “Doughnut Economics,” that has been developed by pioneering economist Kate Raworth. The inner ring, called Social Foundation, represents the minimum level of life’s essentials, such as food, water, and housing, required for the possibility of a healthy and wholesome life. The outer ring, called Ecological Ceiling, represents the boundaries of Earth’s life-giving systems, such as a stable climate and healthy oceans, within which we must remain to achieve sustained wellbeing for this and future generations. The red areas within the ring show the current shortfall in the availability of bare necessities to the world’s population; the red zones outside the ring illustrate the extent to which we have already overshot the safe boundaries in several essential earth systems. Humanity’s goal, within this model, is to develop policies that bring us within the safe and just space of the “doughnut” between the two rings.

Figure 7: Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economic Model. Source: Kate Raworth; Christian Guthier/The Lancet Planetary Health

Raworth, along with many others who care passionately about humanity’s future progress, focus their efforts, not on the kind of zero-sum, false dichotomies propagated by Pinker, but on developing fresh approaches to building a future that works for all on a sustainable and flourishing earth.

Graph 8: Progress Is Caused By… Progressives!

This brings us to the final graph, which is actually one of Pinker’s own. It shows the decline in recent years of web searches for sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes. Along with other statistics, he uses this as evidence in his argument that, contrary to what we read in the daily headlines, retrograde prejudices based on gender, race, and sexual orientation are actually on the decline. He attributes this in large part to “the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream.”

Figure 8: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017. Source: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 2018.

How, we might ask, did this happen? As Pinker himself expresses, we can’t assume that this kind of moral progress just happened on its own. “If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down,” he avers, “it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down… That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely.”

Looking back into history, Pinker recognizes that changes in moral norms came about because progressive minds broke out of their society’s normative frames and applied new ethics based on a higher level of morality, dragging the mainstream reluctantly in their wake, until the next generation grew up adopting a new moral baseline. “Global shaming campaigns,” he explains, “even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.”

It is hard to comprehend how the same person who wrote these words can then turn around and hurl invectives against what he decries as “political correctness police, and social justice warriors” caught up in “identity politics,” not to mention his loathing for an environmental movement that “subordinates human interests to a transcendent entity, the ecosystem.” Pinker seems to view all ethical development from prehistory to the present day as “progress,” but any pressure to shift society further along its moral arc as anathema.

This is the great irony of Pinker’s book. In writing a paean to historical progress, he then takes a staunchly conservative stance to those who want to continue it. It’s as though he sees himself at the mountain’s peak, holding up a placard saying “All progress stops here, unless it’s on my terms.”

In reality, many of the great steps made in securing the moral progress Pinker applauds came from brave individuals who had to resist the opprobrium of the Steven Pinkers of their time while they devoted their lives to reducing the suffering of others. When Thomas Paine affirmed the “Rights of Man” back in 1792, he was tried and convicted in absentia by the British for seditious libel. It would be another 150 years before his visionary idea was universally recognized in the United Nations. Emily Pankhurst was arrested seven times in her struggle to obtain women’s suffrage and was constantly berated by “moderates” of the time for her radical approach in striving for something that has now become the unquestioned norm. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, with the first public exposé of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, her solitary stance was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Just eight years later, twenty million Americans marched to protect the environment in the first Earth Day.

These great strides in moral progress continue to this day. It’s hard to see them in the swirl of daily events, but they’re all around us: in the legalization of same sex marriage, in the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently in the way the #MeToo movement is beginning to shift norms in the workplace. Not surprisingly, the current steps in social progress are vehemently opposed by Steven Pinker, who has approvingly retweeted articles attacking both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and who rails at the World Economic Forum against what he terms “political correctness.”

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. Progress in the quality of life, for humans and nonhumans alike, is something that anyone with a heart should celebrate. It did not come about through capitalism, and in many cases, it has been achieved despite the “free market” that Pinker espouses. Personally, I’m proud to be a progressive, and along with many others, to devote my energy to achieve progress for this and future generations. And if and when we do so, it won’t be thanks to Steven Pinker and his specious arguments.

Photo by alex mertzanis

The post Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

GROW: a new online course to sense the world around us.

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 09:30:00 +0000

Want to discover the world around you? Then maybe it’s time you picked up a sensor.

This exciting online course on citizen monitoring and science starts today. The following introduction was written by Drew Hemment and originally published in the Grow Observatory‘s Medium blog.

This is an astonishing, precarious time to be alive. There are little things, close at hand, we can all do to make things better.

The planet is under severe environmental strain, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Yet at the same time, we have abilities to discover and learn about the world around us that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago.

People, like you and me, can join together with others like us to monitor the environment, to make positive changes locally, and contribute to solving problems globally. There are more and more people getting involved in citizen science, and sharing free and open data. People are coming together to organise at a local level, and to act together to solve issues we ourselves identify and define — we call this citizen sensing.

This is what we are going to explore in the upcoming online course, Citizen Science: Sensing the World.

Observing, understanding and predicting change on the Earth is the focus of ‘big science’ programmes. These include the latest European Space Agency satellite programme, Sentinel-1.

This is also increasingly the focus of community groups, individuals and NGOs, who are taking up newly accessible sensing devices, connected to the Internet, to create and share knowledge on the environment.

These tools are ever closer to hand. Small, hand held, low cost sensors are becoming more available, a growing number of people carry smartphones and tablets. There is also today a movement of people building open tools and platforms, often centred around FabLabs and Makerspaces.

This is inspired by the powerful idea that by making designs, technologies and data ‘free and open’, other people will be able to take our creations, build on them and improve them — and allow us to do the same in turn — so we all benefit.

There are other networks of people, who also care about the land, and who take a bottom up approach to sharing knowledge, and making changes to turn negative impacts into positive change in the environment. Growers and small scale farmers using permaculture and agroecology are examples, where peer to peer, grower to grower knowledge sharing has been central to their approach.

Working together, people who care about the land can make important contributions to science, by “ground truthing” observations by satellites in orbit high above the Earth.

The vision behind citizens’ observatories is immense. It is nothing short of changing humanity’s relationship to the planet we call home. We can all be part of a collective endeavour to understand and care for the planet. We can all be more aware, more knowing, more engaged, closer together as a community, understanding the global picture, and showing better husbandry for our local spaces and environment.

Ultimately this is all about adopting a more responsible relationship to nature. To do this we can nurture enquiring minds, discover a world of incredible knowledge, build our own tools, strengthen communities, and see the benefits of open and shared data and knowledge.

Until a few years ago, Some of the capabilities of satellites up above us, and networked sensors in the ground, were in the realm of science fiction. Suddenly we have the ability to observe what is happening around us at the microscale. We can browse, explore and zoom into the world around us as if it were a search engine or wikipedia for the natural world.

Citizen sensing is a journey not a destination, and still in its early days. There are real challenges in ensuring the quality and validity of the data, so it is trusted by the science community, and so there are tangible impacts people can see on the ground.

There is a lot of work to do to convince everyone it is worthwhile. That goes for the experts who might use this information to make decisions on policy or investment. And for the individuals who collect and also can benefit from the data.

The good news is we are seeing the positive impact on the ground. One example is another project by some of the people in GROW. In Making Sense, citizen scientists gathered data across three cities for 26 months. In Prishtina, Kosovo there is chronic air pollution, but no official monitoring by the government of air quality. Young people came together to monitor air quality and evidenced air pollution at twenty times the recommended WHO level. The direct outcome was a ban on cars in the city centre, and a change to the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, which now includes a right to clean air for citizens.

Making Sense has shared its methods and tools in a toolkit for citizen sensing you can download for free.

GROW itself has a big ambition. To improve the accuracy of climate forecasting on drought and floods, to widen use of regenerative food production and soil management techniques, and to help build a movement of people around the world collaborating on shared knowledge and positive action.

We will get there by many small steps. It takes people like you to pick up a sensor and join a citizen science community.

So join us! Learn all about sensing and Earth observation on the Citizen Science: Sensing the World online course from 26 March. Click below.

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Opposition To GMOs Is Neither Unscientific Nor Immoral

Charles Eisenstein — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Is the engineering of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) a dangerous technology posing grave risks to human and ecological health? Or are GMOs a potent new tool in the onward march of modern agricultural technology in its race to feed the world?

In a recent opinion piece – Avoiding GMOs Isn’t Just Anti-science, It’s Immoral – Purdue University president Mitch Daniels offers an impassioned plea that we embrace GMOs in agriculture. Daniels’ argument runs as follows: The health and ecological safety of GMOs is unquestionable “settled science.” Therefore, it is immoral to deny developing countries the agricultural technology they need to boost food production and feed their growing populations. It seems an open-and-shut case: the self-indulgent anti-GMO fad among rich consumers threatens the less fortunate with starvation. As Daniels says, it is immoral for them to “inflict their superstitions on the poor and hungry”.

But let’s look at some of the assumptions that this argument takes for granted: (1) That GMOs are indeed safe, and (2) that GMOs and industrial agriculture in general allow higher yields than more traditional forms of agriculture.

The ecological and health safety of GMOs is more controversial scientifically than Daniels’ piece asserts. The problem is that it is hard to know which science – and which scientists – to trust. In the United States, most university agronomy departments receive massive funding from agritech companies who, according to Scientific American, “have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.” Since GMOs are proprietary, those companies can and do restrict who can perform research on their products. When a study does document harm, it and its authors are subjected to intense scrutiny, career-ending attacks, and even lawsuits. Imagine yourself as a graduate student at, say, Purdue University. How welcome do you think a research proposal on the health hazards of GMOs would be?

Nonetheless, there is a large and growing body of research that casts serious doubt on GMO safety, mostly published in Europe and Russia where support for GMOs is weaker. For a methodical and comprehensive overview of the topic see GMO Myths and Truths, which with hundreds of citations of peer-reviewed articles cannot be easily dismissed as “superstition.”

Nonetheless, it is easy to see how from Daniels’ seat, opposition to GMOs is unscientific. By and large, the scientific establishment does support GMOs. To oppose them, one must also question the impartiality and soundness of scientific institutions: universities, journals, and government agencies. Opposition to GMOs only makes sense as part of a larger social critique and critique of institutional science. If you believe that society’s main institutions are basically sound, then it is indeed irrational to oppose GMOs.

Similar observations apply to the second assumption, that only high-tech agriculture can feed the world. Again, opposition makes sense only by questioning larger systems.

Certainly, if you compare one monocropped field of GMO corn or soybeans to another field of non-GMO corn or soybeans, keeping all other variables constant, the first will outyield the second. But what happens if you compare not just one field to another, but a whole system of agriculture to another?

Such comparisons show that the assumption that more technology equals higher yield may not be justified. One indication is that around the world, small farms far outperform large farms in terms of yield. First observed by Nobel economist Amartya Sen in 1962, it has been confirmed by numerous studies in many countries. The best-known recent study looked at small farms in Turkey, which still has a strong base of traditional peasant agriculture. Small farms there outproduced large farms by a factor of 20, despite (or because of?) their slower adoption or non-adoption of modern methods.

Yet it is also true that scientific studies typically show organic crop yields to be lower than conventional yields. Here again though, we must look at what these studies take for granted. The high yields of small mixed farms are hard to measure because they typically produce multiple crops that may not find their way to commodity markets, but instead are consumed locally, sometimes outside the money economy. Moreover, traditional forms of agriculture often employ multicropping and intercropping. So while an organic corn field will underperform a GMO corn field, what about the total yield of a corn field that also grows beans and squash, and is patrolled by free ranging chickens who eat the bugs? What about when insect-damaged fruit or vegetable seconds feed pigs or other livestock?

Optimal results come from long, even multi-generational, experience applied in intimate relationship to each farm. Comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture often use organic farms recently converted from conventional practices; rarely do they consider the most highly evolved farms where soil, knowledge, and practices have been rebuilt over decades.

Another overlooked factor is that organic agricultural methods are also constantly improving. Newer forms of organic no-till horticulture can actually match and even outperform conventional methods. One of the best known innovators, Brown’s Ranch of North Dakota, uses a complex mix of cover crops and multilayered intercropping to maximize sunlight utilization and establish synergies among various plants. Such practices are highly specific to local soil conditions and microclimate, making them difficult to standardize and therefore difficult to scientifically study. Science depends on the control of variables. If you want to study the efficacy of a certain practice, it must be applied uniformly to several test plots and compared to several control plots. But organic agriculture at its best would never treat two plots of land exactly the same.

For organic agriculture to work, the factory model of standardized parts and procedures must give way to a relational model that recognizes the uniqueness of every piece of earth. So-called “organic” practices that use the factory model are simply an inferior version of conventional agriculture.

Taking that model for granted, Daniels is right. We do need an endless succession of new chemicals and GMOs to compensate for the consequences of mechanized chemical agriculture, which include depletion of the soil, herbicide-resistant weeds, and pesticide-resistant insects. To keep the current system working, we need to intensify its practices.

The alternative is to transition to a truly organic system of agriculture. That is no small undertaking. For one thing, it would require far more people devoted to growing food, because high-yield organic practices are often highly labor-intensive. (On the bright side, labor on small, diversified farms need not involve heavy, routine drudgery, as is the case on large industrial-style farms.) Today, thanks to extreme mechanization, about one or two percent of the population in developed countries works in the agricultural sector. That number might need to increase to ten percent – about the proportion of farmers in the US in the 1950s. It would also require a lot more food to be grown in gardens. In World War Two, “Victory Gardens” in the United States provided some 40% of all produce consumed; in Russia to this day, small dachas produce 80% of its fruit, two-thirds of its vegetables, and nearly half its milk.

Gardening on this scale does not fit easily into existing consumerist lifestyles and mindsets. If we take for granted the framing of food security as “stocking the supermarket shelves” then again, there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted disengagement from land, soil, and place, then there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted continued rural depopulation in the less-developed world, then there is little alternative to the current system.

In other words, if we take for granted large-scale, industrialized agriculture growing commodity crops, then absolutely it helps to use the full complement of agricultural technology, such as GMOs, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, and so on.

Establishment science by and large takes these things for granted. Sentiments like Daniels’ are the sincere, exasperated protests of highly intelligent people doing their best to make the system work, according to their understanding of the world.

A different vision of the future is emerging however, one that takes none of the above for granted. It is a future where food production is re-localized, where many more people have their hands in the soil; where farming is no longer seen as a lowly profession, and where agriculture seeks to regenerate the land and become an extension of ecology, not an exception to ecology. The pro-and anti-GMO positions will remain irreconcilably polarized as long as these larger questions remain unexamined. What is at stake here is much more than a choice about GMOs. It is a choice between two very different systems of food production, two visions of society, and two fundamentally different ways to relate to plants, animals, and soil.

Photo by Jonathan Rolande

Originally published in the Huffinton Post

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Could Sharing Research Data Propel Scientific Discovery?

Shareable — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 11:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Ambika Kandasamy: Cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Madan says open-access data or data that is freely shared among researchers to use in their studies can not only save time and money, it can enable scientists to “skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it,” if the datasets they need already exist. Madan works as an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham in England, where he studies the impact of aging in the brain, focusing specifically on memory. He started using open-access data in his work about three years ago.

Given the stiff competition for funding, scientists like Madan are turning to open-access data as a way to expedite their own research process as well as the work of others in the field. Madan says there are various benefits to using open-access data in research — namely, it provides researchers with large and diverse datasets that might otherwise be difficult to obtain independently. This pre-existing data could help them make inferences about generalizing the results of their studies to larger populations, he says. Making research data freely available, however, isn’t such a straightforward process. In some cases, especially when researchers use patient data in studies, they must take steps to anonymize it, he says, adding that “we also need to have balance, so we don’t become too dependent on specific open datasets.”

We spoke with Madan about how he uses open-access data in his research.

Ambika Kandasamy, Shareable: I attended a talk you gave at the MIT Media Lab in August about some of the benefits of sharing research material such as MRI datasets with other researchers. What compelled you to move towards this open and shared approach?

Christopher Madan: To some degree, I’m more a consumer of open data than adding to it. The main plus is that the data is already there. Instead of, I have an idea and then I have to acquire the data — both applying for grants or somehow getting the money side sorted and then having a research assistant to put in the actual time to get them — people to come in and be scanned. Scanners are kind of expensive. All of this would take, on the optimistic side, I’d say several months or more into years, if I wanted to get a sample size of like three, four hundred people.

But for the sake of just looking at age, datasets exist. It can take a few minutes to download, maybe into hours depending on which one and how much other data I have to sort through to organize it into a way that is more how I want the data organized to be analyzed. It’s still in the scale of hours and maybe days versus months to years. Then the analysis on that going forward is the same at that point.

In an article in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal, you wrote that “open-access data can allow for access to populations that may otherwise be unfeasible to recruit — such as middle-age adults, patients, and individuals from other geographic regions.” Could you elaborate on that?

The maybe more surprising one of those is the middle-age adults. People in their 30s to 50s could generally have jobs and families and are busy, so it’s harder to get them to be in research studies. If we’re interested in aging, getting young adults that are effectively university student age, they’re relatively easy to be recruited in university studies because they’re walking down the halls of the same places that the research is done. Older adults, to some degree, can be easier to recruit. … But middle age adults have a lot less flexibility of their time. Even if they’re interested, they have a lot of other commitments that they have to balance. It’s just harder to get them into research studies. Now, it’s not that they’re impossible to get. It’s just effectively lower odds for that demographic. If people have already spent the effort of trying to get them in, then we should take advantage of that data and not just use it for one study and that’s it, but answer multiple research questions and try to get more out of the same data that’s already been collected.

In the article, you also mentioned that you keep a list of open-access datasets of structural MRIs on GitHub. Have other researchers contributed to this list?

Yes, they have. I initially made a list of basically just stuff that I knew. One morning, I was like, “maybe I should do this.” I was keeping track of things, but every so often, new datasets get shared. How much can you keep in your head or keep the PDFs related to these in a folder? It’s not that great of an organization. So I thought, maybe I’ll make a list where I’ll say the name — some of them have shorter abbreviations, so a spelled out version, a link to where that data actually is, a link to the paper that kind of describes it, some notes about what kind of MRIs are with it or how many individuals are included in it, the demographics — is it all young adults or old adults — that sort of information. I basically just made a list of it and put that online. Other people found it useful. Some people needed parts of that but not others, or generally didn’t think about open-access data as much until that point. Here’s a list of them. You can look up what’s there and what might be useful to you and take advantage of it.

Since then, some that I basically didn’t include, that I didn’t know of or didn’t think of or whichever, that other people are involved in, they requested to add themselves to the list, and I approved that. Other ones, people that aren’t just involved in the data collection of it, but knew of that weren’t in the list, contributed to it. It’s grown a bit since then, particularly I’ll say from other people’s additions, which also shows other people are looking at it and making a note of it. At least you can have people favorite it for later. I think it’s about 2,000 or so people have. I think maybe eight, nine people have actively added new things to it, so it’s growing a bit. Again, it is a bit of a specialized topic and resource, but other people have found it useful, so that does kind of show that it’s not just a list that I made for myself, but other people have found some benefit in this as well.

How could this kind of open-access data accelerate the process of scientific discovery?

I think the main thing is just after having some idea about what datasets exist — as soon as you have some sort of research idea and you can match it onto something of that sort — you can just download the data. In some cases you have to do an application, so maybe there’s a week or something when someone needs to approve that you’re using this for valid purposes, but you can skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it and writing up a research paper if it went somewhere, rather than having things be drawn out for probably several years.

From your own experience, have you noticed any trends over the years in data sharing among researchers?

There’s definitely more open data now than there used to be. That’s great, both in terms of more people using it, but also just more people sharing whatever data they’ve been collecting anyway. From more personal analysis, talks with researchers that have not shared data yet, but have been thinking about it for data they’ve already been collecting — can they share it because in terms of consent of what the initial participants gave? Would that include sharing of their data when that wasn’t explicitly asked? Even if that doesn’t and they’re working with more medical kind of patient data, then you can still plan forward and say, “okay, what do we need to add?” A couple of extra sentences to the consent form to allow for this at this point forward even if we can’t do it retrospectively. People are thinking about it even beyond just what’s kind of more apparent in terms of what data is actually available today — little more behind the scenes. The field is shifting in that direction. It’ll just continue along that trajectory.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Photo of Madan [top] by Dan Lurie and [left] by Yang Liu. This is part of Shareable’s series on the open science movement. Further reading:

How the Mozilla Science Lab is improving access to research and data

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EU “copyright reform” threatens freedom of information, open access and open science

Commons Network — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:00:00 +0000

Here we would like to express our alarm at the direction EU copyright legislation is taking. We are profoundly concerned that a number of proposals, including Article 11 and Article 13, will mean disproportionate restrictions on the fundamental right of freedom of information as well as the creation of new and costly barriers and administrative burdens for adopted EU policies mandating open access, open education and open science.

Frankenstein reproduction right

With the original objective of “protecting equality, press and informed news”, the proposed “publishers right”, or “ancilliary copyright” could very well turn into an unbounded and unrestricted ‘frankenstein reproduction right’ that goes far beyond existing copyright’s “orginality requirements”. The proposed “reproduction right” is radically different from existing copyright law where the originality requirement prevents the appropriation of facts, ideas and non-original expression which are usually not considered to be protected by copyright. Many amendments on the table today before the Legal Affairs Committee aim at prohibiting the use of even the smallest bit or snippet of any text, image or sound from a press article, from public information or from an academic text without the prior permission of the publisher. The negative impact on access to information, access to knowledge and scientific scholarship could be devastating. We are facing a clear attack on our democratic rights as European citizens.

It should be noted that this new layer of copyright does not exist in the US nor in international copyright law.

“Closed science”, “Closed access” and “Closed data”

Many elements of articles 11 and 13 constitute a frontal attack on open science programmes as supported by the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.

New filtering, policing, monitoring and payment obligations would significantly weaken access to valuable research content produced through public funding by creating extra costs, bureaucratical burdens and legal uncertainty for the academical community. These new legal obligations of intermediary liability would enter into direct conflict with the open science and open access policies that are being widely adopted in Europe and around the world. The aim of these policies is to increase access to research results in order to maximize the use and benefits of science across all sectors. To support open access and open science, universities, libraries and research organisations manage repositories in which researchers upload scientific articles, publications and research data so that everyone can benefit and use the results of research, including other researchers, industry and the public. A new filtering and payment obligations would significantly inhibit through legal uncertainty access to valuable research content produced through public funding, and greatly slow the progress of open science.

Crippling academic “open access” repositories

This new attempt at the enclosure of knowledge threatens the movement towards widespread availability of scientific results for the good of all, and the existence of over 1250 repositories that non-profit European institutions and academic communities use to disseminate academic output. It is important to note that, in the context of academic research, the creators of the content -the scientists- do not receive any financial compensation for their articles, yet publishers often demand that researchers sign over their copyright to the publishers.

Many universities maintain that a new intellectual property right for academic publishers would do “untold damage to the ability of researchers to share their findings and reference the world of scholarship in their published works” (LERU 2016).

Building walls around open data

Open data means that there are no legal restrictions to access to or use, modification and sharing of information for any purpose, subject at most to an obligation to attribute the source. ‘Open’ also means there are no technical restrictions to access and use, e.g. the data is offered in machine readable formats, and in open format rather than in a proprietary format. In contrast, Articles 11 and 13 directly and indirectly restrict the use of open data as well as difficulting open access which are flagship strategies of the EU and its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework.

Restricting freedom of information

A key rationale that underpins freedom of expression is that the free flow of information is indispensable as it helps ensure that the best democratic decisions are taken. The right protects not just the imparting of ideas and information, but all phases of the communication process, from the gathering of information including a right to access sources, to the communication and reception of it. The legal implications of articles 11 and 13 could mean barriers to the access of citizens to news, public interest information and institutional data, all necessary for informed democratic debate. The public sector might very well automatically own a great deal of publishers intellectual property within its own publicly owned publications. To create exclusive rights in information for publishers will necessarily interfere with the freedom of expression of others. It should be noted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights upholds a strict standard of scrutiny in the case of news and other public interest information.

In general the EU’s copyright reform has been hijacked by the publishing industry lobby and has been turned into copyright counter-reform that aims at further enclosing knowledge at the expense of our scientific, academic and cultural commons.

Photo by Mark Deckers

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Make Medicines for People Not for Profit

Ann Marie Utratel — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 08:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (uaem.wufoo.com)

Towards an Agreement on Biomedical Research and Development for the Public Benefit:
Academia’s Urgent Call to Action

As members of the international academic and scientific community, we call upon the member states of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to negotiate a much overdue global research and development (R&D) agreement to ensure innovation and access to affordable vaccines, medicines and life-saving technologies for all.

In an open letter in 2008, leading academics, researchers and scientists, including many of us, urged universities and research institutes to set policies for research and technology transfer that serve the public good, while calling on the WHO’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation, and Intellectual Property to find new mechanisms to address a failing system of R&D on medicine and health technologies.

In 2012, the WHO’s Consultative Expert Working Group on Research and Development: Financing and Coordination (CEWG) stated that the way to truly address the systemic issues causing the crisis in global health today would be to work towards a legally binding global biomedical R&D agreement. This recommendation was supported by many member states. However, opposition by a few led to the subsequent World Health Assemblies postponing the discussions of an agreement until an unspecified date.

After over 10 years of debate at WHO, a number of initiatives have been developed and put into practice proving that a different way of implementing biomedical R&D is possible. Projects like the the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative have shown that patient-driven innovation is possible at affordable cost and show that claims that it takes $2.56 billion to produce a drug are a myth. The Medicines Patent Pool has shown that a collaborative approach to intellectual property can speed up the availability of affordable HIV medicines in resource poor settings.

Yet the current system continues to fail people. New Hepatitis C cures are marketed at an exorbitant $1,000 per pill. A generic drug treating toxoplasmosis saw a price increase of 5,000% overnight. Breast cancer patients in the UK are unable to access treatment and we are proving unable to stimulate real innovation to combat antimicrobial resistance. The current biomedical R&D system is no longer just failing the poor, it is failing us all.

There is a lack of sufficient research funding for neglected tropical diseases (such as sleeping sickness, and Chagas’ disease), chronic diseases, and diseases for which return on investment cannot be guaranteed (such as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis). The international system is going in the wrong direction by strengthening intellectual property rights – with the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement as a lead example – that further advance corporate control over biomedical R&D. Preserving patent monopolies as the primary incentive for medical R&D results in exorbitant prices for medicines and medical technologies which endanger public health budgets and impoverish families.

Innovation has slowed as the overproduction of “me too” drugs has been incentivised, and legal restrictions have proliferated impeding the free flow of information for scientific progress. Patent monopolies increasingly enable rising drug prices, without any corresponding increase in innovation. We have witnessed stagnation in the face of public health emergencies. In the case of the tragic Ebola epidemic, governments and private companies allowed potential vaccines and treatments to remain in preclinical development for over a decade prior to the outbreak because there was no market incentive to invest in treatments for diseases limited to poor countries. As noted by the WHO-commissioned Report of the Ebola Interim Assessment Panel in July 2015, it was “a defining moment for the governance of the entire global health system.”

A different system, based on principles of open access, open knowledge, open sharing and fair price, as well as incentives and mechanisms to encourage research and development of essential medicines according to needs of people worldwide, is possible. There are mechanisms being used that show great potential including prize funds, patent pools, and open collaborative approaches. However, the initiatives are fragmented and lack coherence. A global agreement for an equitable biomedical R&D system can provide a much needed structure. It can provide guiding principles which can move us to a system that incentivizes research and technology transfer based on global health needs and recognizes the human right to health.

Now, more than ever, we must act. As academics, researchers and scientists it is our responsibility to generate and transmit knowledge. We have a unique role to promote innovation in many fields and to ensure that our innovations are used to benefit the public. In no field are the moral imperatives to do so as clear as they are in medicine. At a time of huge progress in scientific research we are deeply concerned about the ability of the existing system to translate investment into better global health.

We are therefore calling on WHO Member States to seriously address this urgent situation. Future meetings should advance and inform discussions on an agreement that will support a coherent, sustainable and needs-driven approach to biomedical research and development for all.

Please note, this text was first published in November 2015 and was slightly updated in November 2016 to ensure ongoing use.

Signatories

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate, Member of the National Academy of Science, Corresponding Fellow, Royal Society.

Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society

Prof John S Yudkin MD FRCP, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University College London

Warren Kaplan, PhD, JD, MPH: Center for Global Health & Development/Boston University School of Public Health

Prof Brook Baker, Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law

Amy Kapczynski, JD, MA, MPhil, AB: Professor of Law; Faculty Director Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale Law School

Benjamin Coriat, Professeur des Universités Faculté des Sciences Economiques. Université Paris 13. Sorbonne Paris Cité, France

Michael Hopkins, PhD, Senior Lecturer (SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit, Business and Management), Sussex University, UK

Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Ulf Landegren, Professor of Molecular Medicine, Uppsala University, Sweden

Philip Oxhorn, Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of Institute for Study of International Development, McGill

Dr. E. Richard Gold, Associate Dean (Graduate Studies), Vice-doyen aux études supérieures

Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, Professor of Practice, ISID, McGill University

Prof Madhukar Pai, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology, McGill University

Dr. Aaron Kesselhiem, MD JD MPH Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Faculty Member at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

View the current list of over 450 Academic Signatures of the letter

View all current Signatures of the letter

See original post and sign to call on the WHO to negotiate a global R&D agreement now!

Photo by National Institutes of Health (NIH)

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Mutiny of the Soul, Revisited

Charles Eisenstein — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 08:24:46 +0000

Over the years, I’ve probably received more mail about Mutiny of the Soul than any other essay I’ve written. The idea of the article has been hugely validating for many readers: that depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc. aren’t chemical malfunctions of the brain, nor spiritual malfunctions of the mind; rather, they are forms of legitimate rebellion against life structures that are unworthy of one’s full participation or attention. They are more symptoms of a social illness than of a personal deficiency. As Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I’ve also received my fair share of criticism for the article, mostly along the lines that it is dogmatically anti-medication. These critics say that pharmaceutical meds, while probably overprescribed, have an important role, and it is irresponsible for a layperson like myself with no psychiatric training to flout scientific consensus when people’s lives are at stake.

While I had seen a little of the science casting doubt on psych meds, I was in no position to make a strong argument against them. My piece was coming from an intuitive place: “These can’t be good.” But now the cracks are spreading in the foundation of pharmaceutical orthodoxy. I recently came across the work of one renegade psychiatrist, Kelly Brogan, who argues that depression and anxiety aren’t unlucky chemical imbalances in our brains that can be magicked away with medication, but are symptoms of something deeper. In Suffering: Who Needs It? she writes:

The entire pharmaceutical model of care is predicated on the belief that it is us against our vulnerable, dangerous, broken, annoying body. A body that needs to be chemically managed and put into its proper place of subservience relative to our prized functionality. We are prescribed to suppress and eliminate signs that are actually meaningful messages about our state of dis-ease. We don’t ask “why”, we don’t look to the roots of these symptoms. We just want to get back to work. To feel “normal.”

Later, speaking of psychiatric medications, she writes, “We are told that these medications are ‘fixing a chemical imbalance’ when they are doing anything but. They are suppressing consciousness and creating imbalance.”

Kelly Brogan also has a book coming out called A Mind of your Own that presents a devastating and well-referenced scientific case against the premises and practices of psychotropic medication. Her assessment: the drugs are worse than useless. Although I had been aware of weaknesses in the scientific justification for SSRIs and other meds, I was shocked at the degree of malfeasance, corruption, and cover-up the book details. It is an indictment not only of conventional psychiatry, but, implicitly, of our current system of knowledge production; i.e. academic research, increasingly corporate-funded, and the political and economic apparatus surrounding it.

Given that modern psychiatry, with its dominant pharmaceutical model, is very much part of said system of knowledge production and borrows its status and legitimacy from that of established social institutions of science and medicine, we should be wary of making too much of Dr. Brogan’s credentials. We should examine, therefore, any tendency we may have to take a book such as this one more seriously just because it is written by a credentialed psychiatrist. To say, now we can reject psychopharmaceuticals because an actual psychiatrist says so, still reinforces the same mindset of deference to medical authorities that led us to believe in psychopharmaceuticals to begin with. Why, to play on the book’s title, are our minds not our own? We (the American public) have abdicated our psychological authority to credentialed experts, diagnostic labels, and standards of sanity and well-being that coincide with submission to prevailing structures of power and privilege. We need to think for ourselves again.

That said, this book has the potency of an insider’s critique, all the more powerful because the author was once a believer herself. It is not the first exposé of its kind, but it is an unusually engaging and methodical one.

The embedding of pharmaceutical psychiatry within larger political and economic structures is apparent from the response to the book, which is backed by a major publisher (HarperCollins). Dr. Brogan described to me the consternation of its publicists at the mainstream media blackout (canceled TV appearances etc.) of the book. Perhaps they should not have been too surprised, given Big Pharma’s heavy advertising budget. Can you imagine a message that psychiatric medication is worse than useless, followed by a commercial suggesting, “Have you asked your doctor about ____?”

It would be a mistake, though, to blame direct financial conflict of interest for the establishment’s resistance to the book’s message. As an important element of the establishment itself, the mainstream media is most fond of crises and scandals that reinforce the legitimacy and the methods of existing authority. A new virus , an E. coli outbreak, an incident of terrorism, an escaped criminal, a university cheating scandal… all these underscore the need for better systems of control. The media takes them up without reservation. The response to issues that threaten the core narratives of our society are a different matter entirely.

Our world-defining stories have a kind of immune system that protects them from information that would disrupt them. The media exercises this immune response by attacking, marginalizing, or ignoring any critique that cuts too deeply. From the perspective of someone standing in the dominant story, these critiques indeed seem crazy; no wonder, because that story sets the boundaries of what is and is not real. Likewise, it seems crazy to question the narrative of “when you are sick, you go to the doctor and he or she makes you better, using the ever-expanding arsenal of modern medicine,” because so much else hinges on that narrative. Question that, and you also must question the political apparatus that is married to that story, as well as the deeper ideology of the onward march of science toward more complete knowledge and the onward march of technology toward more complete mastery. It isn’t just the financial self-interest of television networks and drug companies that is at stake.

The primary narratives of our culture form together a mythology that interweaves the very fabric of normality and tells us what is real. The simplest response to Dr. Brogan’s book is basically that she herself has gone crazy, and in her derangement is irresponsibly attacking the foundations of her profession. She is unhinged, hysterical (yes, this storyline is abetted by the fact she is a woman). There is then no need to directly address the arguments in her book, however trenchant they may appear. If they contradict established truth so violently, then we know, a priori, they must be wrong.

The reader will notice a parallel between the pathologizing of dissidents like Kelly Brogan, and the pathologizing of our personal impulses to resist or violate established social norms. If we take for granted the rightness of the world as we have known it, then to withhold full participation can only be a dysfunction, whether we label it with colloquial terms like laziness or psychiatric diagnoses like ADHD, depression, and so forth. The same fate befalls those who challenge that assumption on an ideological or political level.

What is true for critiques of the existing system also holds for alternatives to it, especially when those alternatives draw from a different basic worldview. On a personal level, the life choices people make outside normal professional pathways seem to others naïve, unrealistic, or, again, crazy. What, you left your Ph.D. program to learn permaculture? You dropped out of medical school to study acupuncture? Those who advocate such choices attract the same hostile incredulity from those who are ideologically threatened by them. If unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture, functional medicine, herbs, and thousands of other modalities actually work, what does that do to the credibility of the systems that have denied and suppressed them for so long? What does that do to the self-image and future status of those holding high positions in those systems? It is hard to admit one was wrong, especially when one has built a career and livelihood around being an authority. Therefore, paradigm-disrupting alternatives (and not only in medicine) provoke a degree of hostility that only makes sense when we recognize how much is at stake on the level of narrative. “Scientifically unproven” is the favored epithet with which to dismiss them; a neat rhetorical trick which casts their advocates as anti-science while ignoring the influence that money and ideology exert over the institutions of scientific research and knowledge production.

At best, alternative and holistic approaches to depression or anything else are kept in a safe compartment called “complementary,” tolerated perhaps, but certainly not taught in the medical schools, supported by insurance companies, or mandated by school systems. Acupuncture is welcomed, for example, as an adjunctive therapy to chemotherapy. But if someone forgoes the chemo entirely and opts to visit a cancer cure facility in Mexico, well that’s just – you know what I’m going to say – crazy.

A Mind of Your Own offers the equivalent by going beyond critique to offer a multi-dimensional holistic protocol for treating depression, involving diet, body ecology, exercise, and other practices. Clearly these subvert the dominant pharmoneurochemical paradigm, but it may not be immediately clear that they are part of a broader radicalism. After all, whether you “fix the patient” with chemicals or with other methods, aren’t you still helping her adjust to a “profoundly sick society”? That is a criticism frequently levied at so-called holistic treatments for depression. I asked Dr. Brogan to respond. She said:

My whole premise is that depression is an opportunity for transformation and that this transformation is best engaged, for many of us, through sending the body signals of safety; i.e. diet, movement, sleep, meditation/relaxation response. This isn’t a symptom management program. It’s a root-cause-resolution endeavor that seeks to illuminate connections between different bodily systems heretofore conceived of as separate. Acknowledging and accepting this invitation also begets a level of consciousness around bodily integrity that extends to engagement with the medical system, consumerism, and fear around adversity.

Clearly, this approach is not so simple as replacing a Prozac pill with a St. John’s Wort pill. In our culture of separation we like to divide the physical from the psychological, and, depending on our orientation, demote one or the other to secondary status; hence on the one hand the disparagement of certain conditions as “psychosomatic,” and on the other hand, the prejudice against treatments for depression that are “just physical.” In fact, somatic-level changes that require volition and commitment, such as radical dietary changes, may necessarily involve profound changes in the way one engages life and sees the world. Psychological state is not separate from lifestyle state, relationship state, work state, dietary state. Neither are cause and effect separable. Does poor diet cause depression? Or does depression cause poor diet?

The prescriptions in A Mind of Your Own encode a shift in basic worldview, not only diet and lifestyle. It pinpoints a major source of depression in chronic inflammation, linked to common medications as well as unhealthy intestinal flora, which in turn stems from practices that are foundational to the American way of birth and life. From hospital births and C-sections, to antibiotics, statins, and birth control pills, to practically everything in the standard Western diet, much of what is normal, advanced, or modern is actually making people miserable. To make the changes the book prescribes therefore requires a repudiation of norms, and consequently of the worldview that embeds them. That includes the ideology of progress, the veneration of science and technology, and the conception of the self as separate from, and in fundamental conflict with, the external world. Gone, then, is the War on Germs; gone is the regime of pharmaceutical control over body processes.

In contrast, the holistic therapies Kelly Brogan outlines are grounded in a sponsoring worldview of interconnectedness and wholeness, that seeks to cooperate with rather than conquer nature. Part of that worldview is trust in the body’s wisdom and innate healing capacity. No longer is depression an enemy to fight. It is a symptom of imbalance, and the response then is to restore wholeness on every level, including that of work, relationship, and life purpose. Therefore, depression is also a gateway to an expanded normal, that brings the qualities of interconnectedness and wholeness to all aspects of life.

I’m not asserting here that every case of depression or any other malady can be traced directly to something one can change with appropriate will and awareness. Life is more mysterious than that. Despite a profusion of psychosomatic maps of the kind Louise Hay made famous in You Can Heal Your Life, simplistic formulas like “Lung problems are about grief” or “Throat problems are about not speaking your truth” are not always helpful. Any serious disease (by which I mean a condition that makes it impossible to live normally) is an invitation into the unknown.

The difference between an allopathic therapy and a holistic therapy is that the former rejects that invitation and seeks to return the patient back to normal, back to the previously-known, while the latter accepts the invitation and opens the door to examining the whole of his or her life. That means that any therapy, whether pharmaceutical, herbal, or dietary, or even the application of colored lights and crystals, can conform to the allopathic mindset if it is reduced to a formula that effaces the unique individuality of the recipient.

The “whole of one’s life” extends to include that person’s relationships to others and to society. If we are to take Krishnamurti at his word, then this epidemic calls for therapies that are social, economic, and political, and not just physical or even mental. In other words, there is a political dimension to the epidemic of psychiatric illnesses. They alert us to a society that is indeed “profoundly sick.”

I believe that we can take Krishnamurti’s aphorism a step further. To be well in a profoundly sick society, one must contribute to the healing of that society. A Mind of Your Own would not be complete if it sought only to give advice to individuals seeking help and ignored the system that is harming them. Just as there is a political dimension to the depression epidemic, so also must any truly holistic book on the subject carry political implications.

On a sociopolitical level we face a choice that echoes the allopathic/holistic distinction: Do we attempt to “fix the patient” – our ailing body politic – or do we accept the invitation into the unknown? So far, the choice has mostly been the former. For example, after the 2008 financial crisis, we bolstered ailing financial institutions with “injections” of liquidity to keep the system going, rather than transitioning to a post-growth ecological economy. After the November terror attacks in Paris, France and the EU strengthened the security state, rather than moving into a post-imperial geopolitics that no longer seeks to maintain dominance. In the fashion of an addict, we address failure by doing even more of the same, hoping that more competent management of the situation will buy time for some miracle to happen.

Addressing psychiatry, A Mind of Your Own welcomes the invitation into new territory that the failure of pharmacological psychiatry offers. Will the profession accept that invitation? Will we accept it, when it comes, as individuals? Will we accept it as a civilization? As one of the defining diseases of our time, depression afflicts us on a collective level as well as a personal. Jimmy Carter identified it as “malaise.” It is hard to deny the signs: the going-through-the-motions, the lack of vision and direction, the feeling of being trapped in an intolerable but inescapable situation, a premonition of doom that swings from anxiety to panic to numbness, the feelings of powerlessness, the loss of agency, the deflation of former goals and ambitions. It was a telling moment when George W. Bush, hoping no doubt to rekindle that adventurous can-do spirit of the previous generation’s moon missions, announced the goal of a manned landing on Mars. Hooray, a new goal to incite our passion! It didn’t work, did it? Most of you probably don’t even remember the announcement. Inflated versions of old aspirations aren’t going to help. The old story that generated those aspirations is dying. It is time to stop fighting the invitation into the unknown that depression offers on a personal and collective level.

The age of the separate self is coming to an end. We can no longer stand to live in its boxes. I look forward to the day when psychiatric medication goes the way of lobotomy, electroshock therapy, straitjackets, and padded cells, to be followed by the demise of their kin in every realm: prisons, state surveillance, pesticides, genetic engineering, forced schooling, military occupation, confinement feedlots, the War on Drugs, economic austerity… the whole apparatus of domination and control. That is why, although it focuses on a small part of the bandwidth of suffering on this planet, A Mind of Your Own is a revolutionary book. I hope it reaches the many revolutionaries-in-the-making among the depressed, the anxious, the addicted – everyone who rebels against the story that rules our world.

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Science as Public Good and Commons as a Science

Antonio Lafuente — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 01:43:55 +0000

A discussion on the interweavings of science with commons, public and private and the ways we understand, produce and socialize it. By Antonio Lafuente and Adolfo Estalella, from the Instituto de Historia (CSIC) and the University of Manchester.

Proclaiming the public nature of science has become something as commonplace as it is controversial. At times, the consensus is overwhelming: more science and more research funding are universally in demand, taking it as given that science is not only economically necessary but also morally irreplaceable. However, the agreement was never absolute. There have always been those who are willing to blame a democratic deficit for so little discussion on the type of science we want, or for the fact that we still treat the environmental and health damages produced by the deployment of techno-science as externalities. The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky.

Science isn’t only semi-public: it couldn’t survive without the publics [a]. There is an extensive body of work that insists upon the social, urban, and collective nature of science. Within it we are shown how science has always maintained a complex, vibrant and dynamic relationship with the people: amateurs and artisans, witnesses and spectators, activists and consumers. Yes, it’s true that, for better or worse, the citizenry owes a lot to science; equally correct is the thesis that science owes much to the citizenry. A lot of what contributes to the knowledge we find so hard to accept is anonymous, invisible and tacit; our narratives insist upon scorning that knowledge. Consequently, it seems as if the entire world is complicit in creating this absurd and biased image of science.

To build our argument, we’ve divided this text into three parts. In the first we’ll explore the historical origins of science’s capacity as a public good. In the second we will highlight the problems derived from treating Commons science and open science as analogous, which is to say that the exigencies of the open access or open data movements, while necessary, are not sufficient. The third section argues that the condition of being a common good comes not from its being provided for all, but rather stems from being created among all. This opens the capacity of being a common good by virtue of belonging to a third sector, alongside the public and the private.

The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge.

Science understood as a commons would not then be simply a public science seeking an outlet via open access, nor would it be an extramural non-commercialized science, or a formal science (as always) including the citizenry in the design and evaluation of projects and results. Science understood as a commons wouldn’t be the same old science in a democratic or post-modernist guise. Science doesn’t become a commons by being more functional, open or militant; instead it results from the application of contrasted, collective and recursive epistemic practices. The Commons would then be another approach, historically distinguished for producing knowledge, community, and commitment. Thus, in the third part, rather than discussing science as a commons, we will discuss the Commons as a science.

Science Commons as a Public Good

The notion of science being a public good is relatively recent. Philip Mirowski (2011) has devoted much effort to explaining this idea. In order to understand it, we must unavoidably admit that the pressures imposed upon scientists by the Church, Empires, and States bear a striking resemblance to those which today’s industrial corporations seek to impose. We know that by the 19th-century, university laboratories were being scrupulously combed by industrialists probing between test tubes and coils for some discovery upon which new monopolies could be built. It all seems to point to the communitarian nature of science earning credit by somehow finding ways to legitimize corporate-financed industrial laboratories claiming discoveries as their own. In this way, if the discovery was assumed to be collective, no one except the owner of the space where the knowledge was produced could claim the patent.

The Second World War drastically changed this panorama. During the second third of the 20th century, the state gave itself the right to manage science and create the necessary conditions for advancing innovation. The war economy brought about a techno-military complex where the public sector invested in basic sciences, in order to guarantee the free circulation of knowledge among entrepreneurs playing a game whose rules, fixed by the Army, served the national interest. Its condition as public goods meant the militarization and nationalization of so-called Big Science. Everything changed in a hurry from the 1980s on, creating conditions which were favorable for launching an accelerated process of knowledge privatization. Not just inventions but discoveries could be subjected to intellectual property rights and, consequently, be treated as assets circulating in the stock exchange to attract venture capital. In this new regime of academic capitalism the boundaries between the public and the private dissolve.

The transition, however, wasn’t without resistance. What by now is obvious to all was only anticipated by some, and their arguments are still relevant. Paul A. David (2008) explains how, since the dawn of modern science, a perception emerged of scientists as unmanageable people, owing to the sophisticated nature of their knowledge. The truth is that the court, given that nobody could act as a counterweight, elected to open knowledge so that they themselves could preside over the quality of scientific work. This would be the origin of the awards, academia, and the periodic journals. The autonomy of science imbued its organization with the qualities of a meritocratic, open and cosmopolitan enterprise. Distinguishing between sages and charlatans required the concurrence of new spaces, different actors and different mediations that, as a whole, lead us to treat what is known as the Scientific Revolution not as an epistemic revolution but as an open science revolution. Michael Polanyi also wanted to join the club of those who opposed the treatment of knowledge as information to eventually, after disenfranchising it from its places of production, turn it into a profitable resource. The commodification of science is impossible when the only knowledge that can be patented is non-tacit. The aforementioned positions argue that science only prospers when it is kept as a collective enterprise whose products are not reduced to codified information, and whose organization won’t overwhelm the attempts to confine it within a protected environment. The history of ideas, the anthropology of organizations and the economy of innovation coincided in the necessity of demanding an active role from the state in the preservation of science as public goods. And this is the tradition assumed and inherited by Michel Callon (1994) in his provocative vision of science.

Callon’s reasoning begins by obliging his readers to accept that knowledge was always the most mundane of enterprises, never isolated from the surrounding interests. To say otherwise was tantamount to ignoring the ample work previously undertaken in the field of the study of science. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge. What STS has taught us is that verifying any natural law or testing the relevance of a scientific concept necessitates a plethora of machines, technicians and reagents, as well as the time and resources to produce, select, contrast, discuss, standardize and communicate the results. As such, the desire to have science as a commons is a utopian undertaking which obliges us to examine whether we can truly assume the potentially untenable cost of transmission.

We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t; an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

Michel Callon has shown us that a robust science should promote the necessary Freedom of Association to operate different forms of organization; he also calls for a Freedom of Extension to prevent the network from allowing the obstruction or imposition of any type of orthodoxy or canon. Finally, it invites all participants to a Struggle against Irreversibility to prevent monopolies from creating standards that block innovation. The notion of public goods is explicitly related to the notion of diversity and not of open access. The importance lies not in the equitable distribution of knowledge, but rather in creating conditions that prevent interruptions in the process of knowledge production and diversification. The resource in need of protection isn’t knowledge itself, but the plurality of forms of socialization it facilitates. We don’t need the state to protect knowledge itself, but the networks it circulates within. It isn’t about protecting ideas that are published or deserve a Nobel Prize, but the infrastructures supporting them, which are often as inscrutable as they are contrary to the Commons.

Image by Peter Miller

Science Commons as Open Science

Imagining science as a commons requires that we stop thinking of it as something separable from the market. We also have to disentail the aforementioned claim from notions of open access. Elinor Ostrom (1990) argued for this with memorable aplomb: there is nothing more contrary to the Commons that an open access system absent any form of governance. Confusing both concepts is in fact what led Garrett Hardin to proclaim the tragedy of the Commons and to demand, as a survival strategy, the public or private patrimonial appropriation of those resources that really matter. The Commons, Ostrom remarked, are not a thing, but a management process that collapses when the community that sustains and is sustained by them doesn’t incorporate efficient rules to protect itself from, among other threats, free riders.

Over the last decade we’ve witnessed the birth of various movements which demand that science be awarded the condition of open enterprise. Though not all of their proponents use the same arguments, nor emphasize the same concepts, it seems reasonable to mention two central sets of motivations. On the one hand, there are those who question the generalized practice of externalizing the process of communication. They all share the critique of the current system as both profligate and paradoxical, as it assumes huge expenses to produce papers that we are later obliged to buy back from those who’d previously received them from us gratis.

The second motivation for demanding open access to scientific information has to do with the desideratum for well-informed politics, belief in free choice, and the strengthening of democracy. Debates on energy options, consumption of GMOs, air quality, food labeling, and the treatment of chronic diseases prompt processes that should be discussed openly. No less important is the fact that the exaggerated costs of scientific information or pharmaceuticals exclude poor institutions and countries from their use. This adds science to the list of factors contributing to the widening inequalities in the world.

Extravagance, careerism, and opacity are justified criticisms that validate an orientation towards open access. The quality of our democracies and global justice are neither minor, nor likely deferrable, objectives. But it’s an absolutely insufficient debate. While the politics of open science do correct some of the most heinous shortcomings of the current system, it is no less true that open, online and free distribution requires a set of conditions that, ultimately, benefit big corporations foremost – or, in other words, those able to capitalize on the information. Furthermore, it’s not clear that accessibility corrects the role of science in our world in any decisive way. Making the information freely available is not tantamount to being able to use or do something with it, as it will remain invariably tied to the technologies and values through which it was produced.

Those who’ve studied open science invite us to consider cases such as SETI [1] or all the crowd-sourced projects related to the pioneering BOINC [2] platform. Voluntary computation has shown itself to be a powerful mechanism for solving problems that demand enormous calculating capacity. Wikipedia and Fold.it [3] are two very different projects that authoritatively demonstrate the emergent power available to interconnected multitudes. We are speaking of colossal mechanisms connecting millions of humans; we’re also referring to new ways of producing and validating knowledge. Examples that allow us to imagine an empowered citizenry capable of producing facts to counter official data do exist. We could be talking about environmental or food crises, or the production of new cartographies, different patterns, or different institutions. If that were the case, we would witness the birth of different systems of knowledge gestated through pioneering forms of coding, communicating, archiving, and validating the knowledge. Laboratory space, formerly reserved for experts, is turning into disputed territory. The experts have good reason to feel uneasy. It all indicates that their consolidated hegemony could be in danger. It wouldn’t be the first time that the needs of the disgruntled have provoked a broadening of the space where knowledge resides, including new agents and different questions. We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t, an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

If we had to put the term “citizen science” on the scale, we would have to acknowledge that it tips more heavily toward science, despite extending beyond academia. Effectively, citizen science is independent science, knowledge developed by virtuous communities who, radical in their political rhetoric, are more conservative than we imagine in scientific practice. But citizen science isn’t monolithic and we could stand to evoke that diversity in the plural. All the citizen sciences share a resistentialist gesture. Some have also highlighted the existence of alternative means of relating to political, economic, scientific and environmental realities. Having reached this point, it’s imperative to mention hacker culture. The truth is, we owe much to Pekka Himannen and his notion of hacker ethics as the expression of technological non-conformism, negating the idea that things can only be that for which they were designed. But the most radical of hacker gestures, as shown by McKenzie Wark, not only implies a questioning of functionalities but also a confrontation with their properties. Hacking the world, beyond the invention of new possibilities for inhabiting and transforming it, could return to the Commons all that has been abusively relegated to state and market patrimony. The first hackers, from the 60s onwards, invented the squaring of the circle: to be an author doesn’t demand that you be a proprietor. Achieving the condition of author happens the moment the author gives away the thing that was authored. Thus, accreditation functions as an admirable way of opening knowledge.

Commons as a Science

None have been as radical in their approaches as the hacker movement. No one has managed to attain a better set of practical and sustainable protocols for a culture that is open, experimental, inalienable, horizontal and distributed. Moreover, as an abstract culture adept at generating new futures and imbued with a curiosity that generates hope, hacker culture has made its mark on other domains. It is no longer restricted to geeks, nor is it the domain of maladapted computer scientists. Nowadays we talk of hacking museums, academia and the city. We have hundreds of projects daring to examine the arts as ventures to be reformed according to non-mercantile principles, fighting to rescue music, painting or architecture from the clutches of the culture, tourism, or housing speculation industries. The city itself, its squares and abandoned lots, can be inhabited in other ways. From 2011 on, the Occupy movement has been the most visible manifestation of something that has been going on for decades all over the world. The city has been occupied, it must be occupied [b]; we must wrest it away from the entertainment, security and housing corporations (Harvey 2012). This is the origin of the open source urbanism that looks to and is inspired by free software hackers.

There is no city where citizens aren’t gathering in the squares and open lots; where, fed up with bowing to the ideal of individual consumerism, people aren’t stretching themselves a bit and getting reacquainted with the pleasures of group dances, sharing food, holding bazaars, fairs and other kinds of popular festivals. They’d almost convinced us that we’d do well to forget the old ways of socializing, to toss them out as old-fashioned and fossilized. However, now we see these things as our cultural patrimony, bringing out the best in us; that is to say, what we share and create among ourselves. This new urbanism is not new construction, but rather new relationships to one another experienced through material intervention in our own city. Madrid is an example of what we’re talking about right now in the second decade of our new century, but we also see it in Berlin, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Mumbai. A city re-urbanization shooting up from the abandoned lots, urban gardens, collective bike routes, self-guided walking tours, neighbourhood assemblies, local markets, rescued festivals, recovered collective memory, and finally, in the thousand and one ways of redesigning the city and gathering where our common links are weakest, most sporadic, tentative, intermittent – yet still apparent and solid, in place and functional (Corsín Jiménez 2014).

People are learning to experience and experiment with their city in new ways, with or without architects, with or without designers, with or without anthropologists. The experiment has been granted new life beyond the confines of the lab, setting in motion a process where the places, parties and infrastructures needed to turn the city into both an object and a place for experimentation are being re-imagined. There’s no scarcity of the credentialed in many of these projects, but theirs is not an expert role, recognizing themselves as part of a collective experiment to problematize established forms of authority. They all feel the importance of these communities of learning. Everyone experiments, everyone investigates, everyone interprets, everyone contrasts, everyone consents, everyone learns and everyone creates new knowledge: a commons science, to create a city of the Commons.

It’s not hard to find references from hacker culture in these projects, as they often invoke the free software community as a source of inspiration. In them, we find some of the characteristics that make free software a singular mode of production, knowledge, and sociability, among them rapid prototyping, recursive in its organization and granular in the distribution of its efforts (Kelty 2008). Rapid prototyping means that designs, objects and proposals are circulated before they are even finished. This is a vulnerable and precarious state of affairs that, nonetheless, compels others to partake in an effort that aspires to be collective. In this way, the widening of the design object is paralleled by the growth of the community surrounding it. But this ongoing beta state also allows for forking at any stage, the possibility of opting for another alternative, and separating from the dominant criteria. Free software, then, is always open to all its potential, always functions as a beta design, a prototype manifested in a non-niche community, a project that is always more than many and less than one.

The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless. It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism.

Projects that learn from their errors are recursive, something that children do systematically and which, at times, also lies within the reach of adults. But in this context, our interest in recursive notions lies in their application to systems rather to persons or simple projects. In such circumstances we detect a recursive nature when not only is the functionality of the mechanism is preserved, but also its moral integrity — in other words, when the protocols and the code are responsible for the preservation of the values that sustain the project, that is to say the community. What makes free software community vibrant isn’t the intention of producing for everyone, but of involving everyone in its construction. Here is the reason why the distribution of its efforts is granular; anyone can contribute with his or her knowledge and available time and effort.

The Commons that hackers are working towards isn’t guaranteed by free access, but by a willingness to not exclude any form of collaboration that improves the result. This is, obviously, not a product, but a way of understanding our relationship with technology and other humans based on the principle that the language used by machines for communication must be open and communities must be peer-based in order to dissolve the artificial, imaginary boundaries society imposes between nationals and aliens, experts and amateurs, communicating and sharing — and between free as in “open”, and free as in “free of charge”. As we’ve mentioned, we are speaking of cosmopolitan, informal communities based in the gift economy.

Just as the city is reinvented, the body is also involved in a process of reconfiguration. The accelerated expansion of chronic ailments — coupled with the growing number of persons with severe conduct, nutritional, mental or addictive disorders, along with numerous collectives of victims assailed by allergies or intolerances — marks incurable ills as a new and disquieting phenomenon within our world. We’ve been educated in the conviction that every ill has a technical, scientific, and therefore, political solution. We weren’t ready to confront the obvious and admit that not all bodies are equal and that all react in different ways to the same therapies. Generalized solutions always produce minorities of sufferers. Many people — it’s hard to know if they’re the most lucid or the most disheartened — seriously doubt whether institutionalized wisdom can offer adequate consolation. And there are answers for everything, from those who’ve fallen into the arms of disciplines as alternative as they are hazy, and from those who’ve opened the floor to talk about what’s going on with them (and us).

Putting the pieces back together is difficult and very costly. But Internet allows it at zero cost, as in the case of the mentally ill who communicate amongst themselves in Brain Talk Communities, or those affected by electro-hypersensitivity who don’t even possess the words to describe their ailment. Dissatisfied with available diagnostics and treatments, they take on the task of identifying traits that might be recognized as symptoms, compelling them to manufacture a shared and contrasted language. These projects constitute a gigantic real-time clinical study, where the affected themselves have decided to take the reins of their own bodies. There are none more interested in finding a good answer than those who are risking their own lives searching for it. They know that they can only aspire to enhancing their quality of life: for them at least, the healing paradigm has been left behind.

The experiment is proven when they agree that they feel better, even though this recovery, as with drug addicts, is etched in words. It is an effect of a commitment held between all, not an individual solution. If participants get taken seriously by formal scientific institutions, or experience an improvement, there is no other choice but to admit that we’re speaking of knowledge constructed by all. The community that sustains it is recognized — diagnosed, even — in light of the fact that the knowledge it produces is validated by virtue of being functional. The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless (Lafuente e Ibáñez-Martín s/d). It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism. From abandoned lots, from social practices long ignored for belonging to the poor, ignorant or marginal, we are reinventing the city. In the same way, we are creating a common body from all that’s left, that which was discarded as irrelevant by formal scientists.

We now have all we need to reach a conclusion. The Commons science that has determined to achieve a reinvention of the body and the city is a knowledge enacted from the experiential, where, consequently, none can be excluded. Commons science is not an alternative to academic science. Both have a mutual need of each other, although we’ll occasionally see them contending public space, and ever more frequently, the publics.

Image by Praktyczny Przewodnik

References

Callon, M. (1994) “Is Science a Public Good? Fifth Mullins Lecture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 23 March 1993”, Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol.19/n.4: 395-424.
Corsín Jimenez, A. (2014) “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online, Vol.32.
David, P. A. (2008) “The Historical Origins of ‘Open Science’. An Essay on Patronage, Reputation and Common Agency Contracting in the Scientific Revolution”, Capitalism and Society, Vol.3/n.2.
Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London, New York: Verso.
Kelty, C. (2008) Two Bits. The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham: Duke University Press.
Lafuente, A. and Ibáñez-Martín, R. (s/d) “Cuerpo común, y cuerpos colaterales”, manuscript.
Mirowski, P. (2011) Science-Mart. Privatizing American Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

[1] http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[2] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

[3] http://fold.it/portal/

Translator’s notes

[a] We’ve elected to use “the publics” instead of “the public” in reference to Callon’s own nomenclature.

[b] “Okupar” in the original. “Okupar”, an alteration of the Spanish “Ocupar”, makes reference to the squatter movement, as well as the Occupy Movement.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Article translated by Stacco Troncoso and Anne Marie Utratel – Guerrilla Translation

Originally published in Guerrilla Translation

Lead Image by Alison

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Civilians Seize Control of Wandering Space Satellite and Open Source Data

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 09:27:33 +0000

The headline and opening paragraphs of this article stirred up a bittersweet nostalgia at first, pushing the same buttons as an 80s-era Spielberg movie: some kids take control of space junk using castoffs from the family rec room in an abandoned fast-food graveyard. But these aren’t kids, their plan is just ambitious enough without being far-fetched, and the whole thing seems to boil down to “let’s just see what happens” on the part of everyone involved – NASA included. An open-source project upcycling icons of the 20th Century with public access (although mediated by Google). A very down-to-earth space program.

For the first time in history, an independent crew is taking control of a NASA satellite and running a crowdfunded mission. They’re doing it all from a makeshift mission control center in an abandoned McDonald’s in Mountain View, CA, using old radio parts from eBay and a salvaged flat screen TV.

“If I could come up with another absurd detail, I would,” Keith Cowing, the project’s team lead, told Betabeat.

The ISEE-3 is a disco-era satellite that used to measure space weather like solar wind and radiation, but went out of commission decades ago. Now, a small team led by Mr. Cowing have taken control of the satellite with NASA’s silent blessing.

Mr. Cowing is a former NASA employee, and now runs a handful of space news sites, like NASA Watch and SpaceRef. Sitting out in the desert one night after a documentary shoot, Mr. Cowing asked Bob Farquhar, an old NASA researcher who worked with the ISEE-3 in its glory days, what it would take to bring the satellite out of retirement.

The satellite’s battery has been dead for over 20 years, but it had solar panels to power 98 percent of the satellite’s full capabilities. In its heyday, it ran missions around the Moon and Earth, and flew through the tail of a comet. But technology gets old, and everyone happily let the successful satellite go, knowing it would be back in Earth’s orbit someday — namely, 2014.

Since the satellite went offline, the team had retired, the documentation was lost and the equipment was outdated. They could still hear the satellite out there talking, but they’d need to build the equipment to talk back.

But the satellite had been built for longevity with very simple technology. To get it back would simply be like trying to make concrete with the original Roman recipe. In other words, they’d need a few outdated parts, but it could definitely be done.

“What’s so hard about that?” Mr. Cowing remembers asking.

Two weeks later, they began a crowdfunding campaign that would beat its $125,000 goal and go on to raise $160,000. Within another six weeks, a small team was in Puerto Rico, running around Arecibo Observatory running tests, hoisting a transmitter into place with a helicopter, ready to make contact.

Read the rest of the article at betabeat.com

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