Category Archives: Science

Life in the Algorithm

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By Douglas Haddow

Source: Adbusters

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market. The surveillance society. The police state, and the drones. All guided by a force we never see and few understand.

A series of calculation procedures that come together to constitute capitalism’s secret ingredient — the all holy algorithm, that which binds and optimizes. Those strange numerical gods who decide whether or not you’re a terrorist and what kids’ toy is going to set the market on fire this Christmas. But what are they, where did they come from and how did they get so powerful?

Algorithms are not new. You can trace their origin all the way back to a 9th century Persian mathematician by the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al–Khwarizmi (Algoritmi in Latin) from whom the word derives its name. Then there was Abu Yusaf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al–Kindi, a contemporary of al–Khwarizmi’s at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. He discovered and developed the science of frequency analysis, or code–breaking, providing a basis for code breaker Alan Turing to develop his Turing Machine, the theoretical prototype for the 9 billion devices currently sending and receiving signals through the Internet.

When we talk about algorithms, when they come up in conversation, often tied to latent and emerging fears, we’re not talking about the mathematical models behind them, we’re talking about the models that the models were modeled on. Most people have never heard of a polytope, Boolean Logic or the Hirsch Conjecture. But everyone has a credit score, whether they like it or not.

If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard behind the ghost in the machine, we need to look no further than Adam Smith, that dour Scot who lived with his mum and accidentally created the modern world.

Smith was neither a modernist nor a cosmopolitan. He was an absent’minded hermit who never married, had few friends, suffered from alternating fits of depression and hypochondria, travelled outside Britain on just one occasion and demanded that all his personal writing be burned upon his death. He was the supreme king of unintended consequences, a humble and misunderstood moral philosopher who became the patron saint of greed.

Most famously, and most tragically, Smith was an ambitious writer who got a bit flowery with his language on occasion, and, as a result, his entire legacy was reduced to two words: invisible and hand. As in, the Invisible Hand — that mysterious market force that secretly and surreptitiously guides all our actions and decisions. Or so we’ve been told.

In The Wealth of Nations, the blueprint for what became known as capitalism, Smith drops the phrase but once. It’s situated in a rather dry discussion on trade policy and is used as a metaphor in a straightforward critique of mercantilism’s excessive restrictions.

And that’s it. Just a cursory metaphor used for poetic flourish in an otherwise obscure and forgettable passage. And for the 150 years that followed the book’s publication, that’s exactly what it was — obscure and forgotten. Smith didn’t mention it, his contemporaries didn’t mention it, nor did his critics. Nary a soul on Earth repeated those two words or paid them any heed.

That is, until 1948, when everything changes.

If you look at a Google NGRAM chart of “invisible hand,” you’ll see that there was little to no interest in the phrase up until the 1930s and ’40s, at which point it begins to bubble up a bit, gaining traction in a few peripheral spheres here and there. Then in ’48, Chicago School economist Paul Samuelson writes a book called Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which would go on to become the best–selling economics book of all time.

In his book, Samuelson grabs hold of Smith’s wordplay and freebases meaning from it until a mere metaphor mutates into the economic doctrine that would define the shape and form of global finance for the remainder of the century, and beyond.

“Every individual, in pursuing only his own selfish good, was led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all, so that any interference with free competition by government was almost certain to be injurious,” writes Samuelson. And with that, not only is it justifiable to be callous in the pursuit of wealth, your callousness will somehow, vis–à–vis the invisible hand, uplift those you trample on your way to the top.

Picture Gordon Gekko, hair trickling with high–end product, walking with the gait of limitless sprezzatura, saying, “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Samuelson would later go on to regret the liberties he took with Smith’s words, but the meme had already been injected into the passive hive mind of economics. What followed was a long and tangled game of economic telephone wherein Smith’s fatalistic conceit gradually took on mythical qualities. From turn of phrase to doctrine, from doctrine to dogma, from dogma to metaphysical law. The invisible hand became the celestial justification of the free market and the economic rationalist’s negation of anything that stood in its way.

Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek even went so far as to develop an entire theory of human interaction based on the myth. It was called Catallactics, and proposed that we did not live within an economy, but rather, a Catallaxy — a complex and self–organizing system in which every individual sent out a constant stream of complex signals that mixed to create overall market behavior.

Knowledge, Hayek argued, was distributed on an individual level, each person containing their own fraction of the whole.

The vast repository of human knowledge was inherently decentralized. Because of this, no central body or government agency could ever hope to contain enough of it to know what was really going on. But if allowed to move freely without meddling, these messages would come together to create order and equilibrium in the market.

This, he argued, is why the government should never meddle in the market. And why order could never be “planned,” and was instead “brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.” As long as the signals, our private info–snowflakes, could float freely, the market would reach equilibrium.

Through Hayek, dogma became revelation — the invisible hand was not merely a magical presence promising equilibrium, it was also pointing us toward a not–too–distant utopia. And if we didn’t follow the hand? Oppression and despair would follow mankind into a dark hole of tyranny.

Hayek’s ideas spread swiftly through a series of think tanks connected to his economic clique, The Mont Pelerin Society, which counted Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises and, of course, who else but Milton Friedman among its members. Together they successfully launched what we now call “neoliberalism” into the political consciousness.

Neoliberalism found its champions in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher regularly corresponded with Hayek and used the slogan There Is No Alternative (TINA) to explain her affection for its concepts. Reagan hired Friedman to be his economic advisor. And together they carried out an economic revolution that smashed trade unions and deregulated and privatized anything and everything that could be guillotined. From this axis of Anglos, it spread to other parts of the Commonwealth, then to Europe, Asia, South America and beyond.

But no matter how much they stripped away government meddling, somehow the “abstract signals” still weren’t getting through. The hand remained clenched and crises endemic. Asia, Argentina, the Eurozone, the 2008 meltdown, the flash crash. The market continually failing to magically self–correct and achieve equilibrium.

The faithful kept their faith and stuck to the program. The crisis, both economic and existential, were met with a recommitment to the faith in the form of austerity and technology and the dream persisted.

The problem was obvious to anyone outside the neoliberal thought–bubble: the invisible hand wasn’t real and it didn’t exist. It never had existed. It wasn’t just invisible, but immaterial, made from the twisted fantasies of economists obsessed with achieving an impossible “equilibrium.” You couldn’t touch it, and it couldn’t touch you.
Until now.

In 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial dropped 1000 points in under a minute, the biggest one–day point decline in history, it received far less attention then it deserved, because everything returned to normal a few seconds later. Now, miniature flash crashes occur constantly throughout the day. But this crash was a turning point, demonstrating that something had changed. That something was that the neoliberals had achieved what communists, socialists and Christians never could: they made their god real, and in doing so, achieved their utopia. They just didn’t let the rest of us in on it.

The critical flaw in Hayek’s vision of the hand was that a “central body” could never gather enough information. We know this to be untrue, and with big data and the analysis and manipulation of that data through algorithmic equation, the missing link between money and the machine was discovered.

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market … All informed by this marriage between mathematics and capital, all working together in perfect harmony to achieve a singular goal — equilibrium. But it’s a curious sort of equilibrium. Less to do with the relationship between supply and demand, and more about the man and the market.

All these algorithms we encounter throughout the day, they’re working toward a greater goal: solving problems and learning how to think. Like the advent and rise of high–frequency trading, they’re part of an optimization trend that leads to a strange brand of perfection: automated profit.

And their current day use, no matter how impressive the specs, is still rooted in 7th century code–breaking. Only now it’s about breaking our individual codes. Throughout the day we send out thousands of our own individual abstract signals and the algorithms figure out how best to streamline our existence into the market’s needs. We’re all just cyphers waiting to get cracked.

This is not the stuff of Orwell and Huxley, but Amazon and the NSA.

There is an overwhelming feeling of inevitability surrounding all of this. With computational capacity still threatening to double every two years, the algorithmic estate will continue to expand and become more sophisticated. All of this development, testing and research is leading to a predictable outcome. Given that they are leading investment and research in the sector, Wall Street financiers will develop the world’s first fully functioning Artificial Intelligence.

If any of this feels inevitable, it’s because it was designed to make us feel that way. If the algorithms that organize the world of money were turned on their head and used to analyze the defects in their guiding philosophy, they would shred it all on one razor sharp fact: the world beyond the market is still a real one. And no matter how sophisticated the math, how brilliant the AI, we will always be living in it.

Outside of The Wealth of Nations, Smith employed the Invisible Hand concept on only two other occasions. Once in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he slags off the rich, and the other in the History of Astronomy, where he says:

For it may be observed, that in all Polytheistic religions, among savages, as well as in the early ages of Heathen antiquity, it is the irregular events of nature only that are ascribed to the agency and power of their gods. Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; the invisible hand of Jupiter was never apprehended to be employed in those matters.

These days, the “savages” kick back, polish their yachts and let the machines do their thinking for them. Their god is a primitive and cruel one. Worse yet, it lacks imagination. The future it sees is just an optimized version of the present. Everything that falls within its gaze is predictable, because mathematical sequences are predictable. What remains to be seen is whether or not human beings are as predictable as the machines think we are.

State Department Discusses Banning Alternative Media Outlet

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By Justin King

Source: AntiMedia.org

The US State Department has openly discussed shutting down RT, the Russian news network. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was asked about the idea of shutting the company down at a meeting at the Brookings Institute. She said no, paying lip service to the Freedom of Speech, but citing RT’s limited reach as the real reason.

The incident goes to demonstrate exactly how much censorship exists in the United States. RT broadcasts a narrative that is undoubtedly pro-Russian. Now that the pro-Russian narrative is at odds with the Pro-US narrative, the government is willing to openly discuss simply shutting off American access to the network.

This isn’t the first time that RT was targeted by government officials. The Chair of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors equated RT to terrorist groups when he said:

“We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

Why would such a question be asked of a State Department official to begin with? Because the US State Department is responsible for large portions of America’s propaganda efforts.

This is the United States of America. We are supposed to have a free press, but if you push a point of view contrary to the government’s, you’re likely to lose your broadcasting license. Regimes in the past held book burnings to remove unfavorable opinions from circulation. The US government doesn’t need to be so boorish. They simply remove the book from libraries or revoke the broadcasting license of the outlet that won’t read the government’s script.

How to Reclaim your Mind and Life from the Cultural Engineers

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By Paul Fassa

Source: RealFarmacy.com

“We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was a philosopher, social critic, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, lecturer, writer who authored several books. He examined, deconstructed and expounded on a variety of subjects, including: plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, psychedelic drugs, epistemology, alchemy, language, culture, technology and theories about the origins of human consciousness. He created a mathematical theory of time (novelty theory) based on patterns found in the I Ching. [1]

In this short video Terence McKenna explains the necessity reclaiming your mind and creativity from a dying, materialistic consumer oriented society.

“We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture.” –Terrance McKenna [1]

It’s easy to get lost in the noise and hub of the daily grind – dead end jobs, UN-fulfilling careers, relentless consumerism and the constant drone like buzz of the big brother mind control media matrix.

The mass media’s [2] primary purpose and expertise is shaping and programming the “herd” mind with a steady stream of mostly dubious, fear based information overload combined with a cynical parade of buy this NOW advertising.

To say human consciousness has been commercialized is an enormous understatement. Just as day follows night, mass commodification of nature results in the commodification  of human consciousness.

The cultural engineers are obsessed with turning everything into things including people. The predominant value or worth of a person  is based primarily on how many things they can produce directly or indirectly and how many things they own and consume. The sacred intrinsic, non-temporal value of one’s soul is disregarded in favor of the culture’s contrived materialistic value system, which is centered on perishable commodities.

Under these conditions the soul is reified. To reify is to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing. The sacred, inner life of the individual is systemically marginalized and crushed, ensuring  the majority will unblinkingly sell their soul to the externalized value system, which is by design seamlessly interlocked with survival and success on all levels.

“Within this totally jaded society the “individual” had little chance. In fact, his only hope was to escape in some fashion, perhaps into the woods where a person could rediscover the fundamental truths that nature revealed, or into hallucinogenic drugs that pushed the mind past the limitations drilled into it by education and upbringing, or into a completely different lifestyle grounded on more humane and authentic values.” [3]

For those who desire an authentic life created from the inside out and not the other way around, here are some steps that can help you reclaim your mind and life from the cultural engineers.

The burning question is do you really want to reclaim your mind from the gaudy over-commercialized, technological barbarism euphemistically referred to as a consumer oriented society. Are you finally bored with exploitative greed and debt slave materialism? You should be. Why?

“You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

Assuming you’re ready to leap over the rotting corpse called modern culture and its Kafkaesque matrix society, unfasten your seat-belt and take a deep breath as we take a spin down the road rarely traveled. It’s an esoteric path that takes you back to the source of your creative spirit, intuitive wisdom and your unique connection to all that is or ever will be.

Obviously, a critical first step on this journey into the unknown is to resolutely refuse to be a compliant consumer of ideas, things, and dis-empowering belief systems. Be ready to break the chains of your conceptual prison and be willing to view life from the cracks that exist between ideas. The objective is to have a clear view of reality without the distorting lens of preconceived notions of our “borrowed” reality.

Also, you’ll begin to critically reexamine all the deeply held values that were inserted into your impressionable mind and soul at a very young age before you had the option to critically examine each value in the light and depth of your own consciousness. Unfortunately, at any age the saturation effect of the mass media can instill false values and a substitute reality.

“Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

 

The primary tool of the cultural engineers use to control the masses is the media. In fact, for most the media is reality. The media actually creates reality; it does not merely reflect it.

How the media creates our reality:

“… television cultivates a perception of reality among its viewers. . . . “television … has acquired such a central place in daily life that it dominates our symbolic environment, substituting its message about reality for personal experience and other means of knowing about the world.” [2]

2 Simple Methods to Help You Reclaim Your Mind and Your Life:

“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

 

One very practical method for discovering and occupying the unconditioned space between thoughts is by using an ancient Buddhist practice called mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is a scientist, writer, professor, lecturer and meditation teacher who brought mindfulness into the realm of mainstream medicine and society at large.

Zinn’s definition of mindfulness: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; On purpose, in the present moment, and non- judgmentally.”[3] You cultivate detachment and equanimity of mind regardless of what life throws at you. It really gets interesting when you are finally able to move into the present moment and respond directly to life situations as they occur opposed to reacting to them based on past conditioning.”

With practice, mindfulness enables you to take control of your attention via your intention so you can willfully move your awareness into that clear space of the present moment without interference from the conditioned mind.

Normally our attention automatically drifts and gets stuck in the same ruts and grooves that have already created strong, magnetic like impressions in your mind. This tendency creates a mind lock where the attention is effectively caged in the past and rarely has the opportunity to freshly explore the actual moment that is life that is occurring now. In other words, our attention and thus our life is stuck in the past because where we focus our attention is what our life becomes.

Essentially to break the chains of the past you need to practice anchoring your attention in the present moment. This is when you consciously move beyond your current life “story” perception template into reality directly- moment by moment.

From that operating viewpoint you are free to create your desired reality without dragging the burden of the past or anxiety about the future into the equation. If you ignore the mental noise and turn your attention inward you will eventually discover the expansive space that exists between thoughts.

That space is where the raw, unconditioned power and unfettered freedom to create is found. It’s a timeless reservoir of unlimited possibilities. It’s a no-mind that’s empty with potential. Some refer to it as the quantum mind.

This is where artists go when they want to create something fresh and free from cultural or personal clichés. Sages and shamans are familiar with this space as well. They go there to listen not to think. If they are really good listeners they share what they heard or saw for the benefit of others.

“Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

Of course, Terence McKenna primarily relied on various psychedelics and marijuana to help him enter that sacred space beyond the conceptual realm; he was a dedicated psychonaut, but that’s not the only way.

Discover your Imagination

“If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”
– Terence McKenna [1]

The best plan is to first get in touch with reality via direct experience – ditching the ingrained conceptual template your culture indoctrinated into you from birth. That’s when you can really start to harness the true power of your imagination and use it to intentionally create the personal reality you desire to walk into beyond prevailing ideologies. From the perspective of raw imagination there is no past or future, just now. And that is where your essential power lies, in the present moment.

Forget about slavishly following the yellow brick road – create your own experiential road show starting with your imagination. Venture beyond the  current ideological and spiritual constraints and institutionally sanctioned belief systems that tell you what reality is and decide to boldly experience reality directly and journey into terra incognita.

To create a new reality requires skillfully engaging your intention and imagination utilizing all the senses including: visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), kinesthetic (touch), olfactory (smelling) or even gustatory (tasting). Now with your imagination fully engaged, create a subtle imaginary version that exactly reflects your desired intention.  This is basically how one creates a new reality beyond past conditioning.

From a CNN article titled:

The power of perceptions: Imagining the reality you want

“What we are fighting for, Benjamin (Ruha Benjamin, sociology professor) says, is our imagination — the right to imagine a life and relationships and a social world that are happier, less anxious, more harmonious and more just. We are not being diligent enough or deliberate enough about cultivating our imagination. We have to fight, for the ability to imagine the world we want. Because one form of oppression is telling people that they’re not allowed [or can’t] to imagine something better and happier.”

“Either there are no illusions or everything is an illusion,” (…) “And given that we are pretty much all delusional, you might as well choose your delusion.” –  Beau Lotto, neuroscientist and artist[6]

Paul Fassa is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. His pet peeves are the Medical Mafia’s control over health and the food industry and government regulatory agencies’ corruption. Paul’s valiant contributions to the health movement and global paradigm shift are world renowned. Visit his blog by following this link and follow him on Twitter here.

Sources:
[1] http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/
[2] http://people.missouristate.edu/MichaelCarlie/what_I_learned_about/media.htm NOTE: The term “mass media” refers to the Internet, radio, television, commercial motion pictures, videos, CDs, and the press (newspapers, journals, and magazines) – what are referred to collectively as broadcast and print media.
[3] http://www.shmoop.com/1960s/culture.html
[4] http://www.webmd.com/jon-kabat-zinn (bio)
[5] http://www.wildmind.org/applied/daily-life/what-is-mindfulness
[6] http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/11/health/enayati-power-perceptions-imagination/

Decentralization and the Future World Order – Part I: The Revolution Is On

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Source: Thought Infection

A technological revolution is underway. An array of technologies are being developed that aim to do nothing less than disrupt the deepest fabric of the current world order. In a world where trust is power, decentralization steals the power from the hands of centralized institutions like corporations, banks, and even governments and puts it into the hands of the network. The revolution is beginning with a race to build the next generation of decentralized technologies that may soon replace internet giants like Dropbox or Facebook, but this is only the beginning of a transition to a future world order of decentralized power.

Lets start with a simple question: What is decentralization?

Many people equate decentralization with cryptographic networks like Bitcoin, which combine cryptography with decentralization, but decentralized applications do not inherently require encryption. The prototypical example of a modern decentralized technology would be Bittorrent, a technology with no inherent requirement for encryption. At its base, decentralization is the simple process of taking information and distributing copies among some sort of network so as to enhance data accessibility, security, redundancy, and congruence (consistency between parties).

The idea of decentralization is actually as old as communication itself. Cavemen would share their knowledge of hunting techniques and weapon technology among their tribe in order to be sure that the loss of no single individual would mean the loss of vital information. As humans created increasingly elaborate systems of exchange, organizations learned that keeping two or more copies of important documents was essential to ensuring their security.

The central problem of decentralization is that it also greatly increases the likelihood that information could fall into the hands of untrusted individuals. Thus, balancing the need for privacy and security meant finding a balance between centralized and decentralized structures for information sharing. To solve the age-old problem of privacy in shared information, cryptographic encoding or information was developed. Since at least Medieval times, people have been using simple ciphers to encode messages which they wished to share with only specific individuals.

In the 20th century, cryptography advanced greatly particularly during the world wars, when warring nations needed to be able to move around large amounts of information while preventing it from falling into the hands of the enemy. This spurned great innovations in both encryption and decryption, with both sides pouring resources into figuring out what their enemy was planning. It is widely believed, that the breaking of the Enigma code by British code-breakers which included one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Alan Turing, was key to winning the war.

With the help of the universal computers Alan Turing helped invent, increasingly secure encryption algorithms were developed over the last half of the 20th century. Using these modern encryption algorithms, we can hide information well enough to confidently exchange sensitive financial information over a network which is essentially open (the internet). Thus, cryptography means that anyone eavesdropping on your web communications with your bank would have no way to understand the messages.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed, encrypted ledger which stores the holdings of users of the network in individually encrypted data. This way, those using the network can be sure to agree on what amount of Bitcoin each user has, while only allowing those with the keys to be able to unlock their data and send some amount of Bitcoin to another user (see more here). Using the encrypted blockchain, Bitcoin is able to seamlessly transfer a limited supply of units of value between individuals in a way which does not rely on backing from any one central authority to provide value to the currency.

The core advance of the blockchain is that it allows the distribution of highly secure and highly congruent information throughout a network with no need for a centralizing authority.

As a side-thought, I would like to point out that although the software instantiation of the blockchain which underlies Bitcoin is totally dependent on digital computation, I see no reason a similar system based on mechanical encryption could not also be possible. Even if we never had invented computers I think we eventually would have come up with a sort of steam punk Bitcoin through which we could distribute value or congruent information using a cryptographic ledger system. 

Bittorrent was the first application to show that sharing of encrypted information over a decentralized network could be used to transfer value securely and efficiently, but there is no reason that decentralized technology could not be used to share any kind of information in a trustless network.

The MaidSafe and Storj projects have the ambitious goal of allowing anyone to share anything securely and efficiently over a decentralized network, something that could have deep consequences for the way that the internet works. If anyone can use the distributed network to share a website, then this could eliminate the needs for centralized servers which currently serve up websites when you visit them. Under these protocols, the cost of storing and sharing data with other users of the network who donate some part of their bandwidth and hard-drive space in exchange for the right to use the network. While some might worry that such a network would be used primarily for content piracy (as has been the case for Bittorrent), the integration of the Safecoin cryptocurrency with the MaidSafe network may actually make it easier than ever for content producers to monetize their content.

According to the project leader, both Maidsafe and Storj could be used to develop alternative, distributed versions of popular services such as Dropbox, Facebook, or even Google. Distributed versions of these centralized services could offer advantages for security and failure resistance. MaidSafe could also dramatically lower the barriers to entry for new players trying to compete such internet institutions as Facebook. While I have doubts whether the massive data-crunching necessary for Google could be pulled off on a decentralized network, a decentralized social network seems an obvious applications for MaidSafe.

Whereas MaidSafe, Storj and Bitcoin are specific applications of distributed technology, the Ethereum project aims to go much further and create a general distributed computer language on top of which anyone could easily develop an application like MaidSafe or Bitcoin. They are essentially trying to create a sort of decentralization operating system on top of which it would be possible to build any sort of program. By allowing the secure sharing of computer programs, Ethereum could allow the creation of advanced smart contracts with defined limits on how and when their funds could be disperse, or potentially even much more complex entities such a corporations.

2014 was a bit of a down year for Bitcoin, with coins falling from a value as high as $1000 to around $230 today. While this might be taken as a sign that the future of Bitcoin is in some danger, it is absolutely clear that it does not reflect at all on the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem. The ability to distribute trust through a network through the use of a Blockchain is a world changing technology, and the value of one currency does nothing to change its utility as a method of exchange. Saying that a drop in the price of bitcoin makes it irrelevant is like saying that the drop in the price of computer chips makes them irrelevant. Bitcoin is just the first in a series of decentralized applications that are already beginning to compete with centralized services.

Decentralization is becoming the gold standard for when you truly need to trust something, and in a world where trust is power it seems inevitable that decentralized technologies are destined to become the new nexus of power. In my next post I will discuss the past present and future of trust and power, and how that has been reshaped by decentralization.

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I would like to make a recommendation for a subreddit and a podcast that I think that those stimulated by this article might enjoy following, /r/Rad_Decentralization and the Decentralize Podcast. 

What They’re Not Telling You About Monsanto’s Role in Ukraine

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Will This be a Takeover of Ukraine’s Farmland?

By Christina Sarich

Source: Natural Society

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) is helping biotech run the latest war in Ukraine. Make no mistake that what is happening in the Ukraine now is deeply tied to the interests of Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and other big players in the poison food game.

Monsanto has an office in Ukraine. While this does not shout ‘culpability’ from every corner, it is no different than the US military’s habit to place bases in places that they want to gain political control. The opening of this office coincided with land grabs with loans from the IMF and World Bank to one of the world’s most hated corporations – all in support of their biotech takeover.

Previously, there was a ban on private sector land ownership in the country – but it was lifted ‘just in time’ for Monsanto to have its way with the Ukraine.

In fact, a bit of political maneuvering by the IMF gave the Ukraine a $17 billion loan – but only if they would open up to biotech farming and the selling of Monsanto’s poison crops and chemicals – destroying a farmland that is one of the most pristine in all of Europe. Farm equipment dealer, Deere, along with seed producers Dupont and Monsanto, will have a heyday.

In the guise of ‘aid,’ a claim has been made on Ukraine’s vast agricultural riches. It is the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat. Ukraine has deep, rich, black soil that can grow almost anything, and its ability to produce high volumes of GM grain is what made biotech come rushing to take it over.

As reported by The Ecologist, according to the Oakland Institute:

“Whereas Ukraine does not allow the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, Article 404 of the EU agreement, which relates to agriculture, includes a clause that has generally gone unnoticed: it indicates, among other things, that both parties will cooperate to extend the use of biotechnologies.

There is no doubt that this provision meets the expectations of the agribusiness industry. As observed by Michael Cox, research director at the investment bank Piper Jaffray, ‘Ukraine and, to a wider extent, Eastern Europe, are among the most promising growth markets for farm-equipment giant Deere, as well as seed producers Monsanto and DuPont’.”

The nation WAS Europe’s breadbasket – and now in an act of bio-warfare, it will become the wasteland that many US farmlands have become due to copious amounts of herbicide spraying, the depletion of soil, and the overall disruption of a perfect ecosystem.

The aim of US government entities is to support the takeover of Ukraine for biotech interests (among other strategies involving the prop-up of a failing cabalistic banking system that Russia has also refused with its new alignment with BRICS and its own payment system called SWIFT). This is similar to biotech’s desired takeover of Hawaiian islands and land in Africa.

The Ukraine war has many angles that haven’t been exposed to the general public – and you can bet that biotech has their hands in the proverbial corn pie.

 

The Pro-GMO Lobby: Anti-science and a Politically Motivated Agenda

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: RINF

The pro-GMO lobby claims that there is a scientific consensus on the safety of GM food and therefore the GMO debate is over. It claims that GMOs guarantee higher yields and less pesticide/herbicide use. The claim is also made that GM agriculture has no adverse impact on soil, the nutritional value and health of crops or biodiversity. The industry and its supporters claim that the ‘scientific community’ believes GMOs can only have positive effects and point to research to back this up.

These claims are bogus. Many analyses have highlighted the inadequacies of the research cited by the pro-GMO lobby, not least in terms of methodology, the glossing over of the significance of certain findings and conclusions that do not necessarily fit the evidence provided [1-3]. Moreover, numerous studies demonstrate the often worrying physiological abnormalities derived from ingesting GMOs as well as poor/falling yields, increased pesticide use, lower nutritional values and degraded soil and plant health (etc) associated with GM agriculture [4].

When certain pro-GMO figures proclaim that the debate over GMOs is over, their proclamations are based on propaganda, not science. They say that people who challenge their views are anti-science, politically motivated and are mounting a ‘campaign’ against the industry. Like all good propagandists, this is doublespeak.

Given the existing scientific evidence that challenges the claims of the pro-GMO lobby, a rational and reasonable response would involve applying a precautionary approach to GMOs [5] because there is clearly no scientific consensus. Yet public safety concerns are regarded by the GMO lobby as a barrier to bringing its products to the commercial market and are to be sidelined by all means possible [6-9]. To justify this, it promotes the falsehood that GMOs are ‘substantially equivalent’ to non-GMO products, which is certainly not the case [10].

It is therefore with good reason that concerned people have organised to ensure the precautionary principle is adopted or strengthened and to challenge the industry and officials that are driving the GMO agenda.

It is the GMO sector itself that is politically motivated, anti-science and mounting a campaign in favour of its products. Its faulty science has been challenged, and as a result it is unable to produce the evidence that would convince us that GMOs are safe and provide the benefits claimed. Little wonder the industry hides behind the notion of ‘commercial confidentiality’ to maintain a veil of secrecy over its own research that regulators too often accept at face value [11].

Having failed to win the day with science, it resorts to placing restrictions on independent research into its products, censors findings, intimidates, smears, bribes, uses fakery and has successfully used its wealth and power to hijack regulatory bodies and co-opt bodies and officials who propagate lies on its behalf [12-15]. Yet it is those who highlight and challenge such tactics who are attacked for attempting to derail an industry which likes to portray itself as working for the public interest.

One of the main PR weapons used by the sector is that anti-GMO campaigners are taking food from the mouths of the hungry [16]. Let’s get one thing clear: GMOs are not the answer to feeding the world [17-22] and that type of emotional blackmail will only ever work on the ignorant, misinformed and those who believe the industry’s propaganda.

There is enough scientific evidence to warrant serious concern over GMOs. After all, evidence is mounting that some of these companies may have already been poisoning us for decades with their cocktail of agricultural inputs [23,24].

However, it is easy for the layperson to become confused by an endless parade of studies claiming to back up one or other side of the debate. For that reason, sometimes they have to look beyond science to sharpen their focus. They have to look at motives. They must ask who is controlling the GMO agenda? For what purpose? What is the track record of those involved? Should we ever in a million years trust certain players given their criminal record [25]?

Commercial concerns are driven by profit. Capitalism compels companies to capture and maintain market shares. However, cartels, price rigging, threats, cronyism and having politicians in your back pocket are a much better guarantee to seize and dominate markets than any economic model taught in textbooks and based on the ‘free’ market being determined by supply and demand. Such economic theory is the smokescreen that modern day neoliberalism tries (but fails) to hide behind [26]. As far as the GMO issue is concerned, however, there is much more to it than the need to make a fast buck.

There is a reason why well-known proponents (Rockefeller, Gates) of depopulation and eugenics are involved with the GMO sector; there is a reason why these very people have funded a giant seed bank on an island in the Arctic [27,28]. There is a sinister side to this industry, which points to a heady mix of US geopolitical hegemony based on the global control of agriculture, the hijack of the world’s seeds and food supply and depopulation [29].

If the science around GMOs is confusing to some, then ambiguity is what powerful corporations want: the tobacco industry was happy for the waters to be muddied for decades over the link to lung cancer. But if ambiguity over the efficacy of GMOs does indeed reign, the underlying politics is much clearer to grasp.

colintodhunter.com 

Notes

1] http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2014/15669-why-jon-entine-s-trillion-meal-study-won-t-save-us-from-gmo-dangers

2] http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2014/15618-biology-fortified-misleads-the-public-on-gmo-safety

3] http://rightbiotech.tumblr.com/post/103665842150/correlation-is-not-causation

4] http://gmomythsandtruths.earthopensource.org/

5] http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2013/jul/08/precautionary-principle-science-policy

6] http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2014/07/agribusiness-biggest-lobbyist-eu-us-trade-deal-new-research-reveals

7] http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2013/05/open-door-gmos-take-action-eu-us-free-trade-agreement

8] http://www.gmfreeze.org/actions/42/

9] http://corporateeurope.org/food-and-agriculture/2014/05/biotech-lobbys-fingerprints-over-new-eu-proposal-allow-national-gmo

10] http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Substantial_Non-Equivalence.php

11] http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2014/15519-the-glyphosate-toxicity-studies-you-re-not-allowed-to-see

12]http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Monsanto+’faked’+data+for+approvals+claims+its+ex-chief/1/83093.html

13] http://www.globalresearch.ca/gmo-scandal-the-long-term-effects-of-genetically-modified-food-on-humans/14570

14] http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12715-seralini-vs-fellous-a-gmo-libel-case-over-independent-expertise-and-science

15] http://www.globalresearch.ca/gmo-researchers-attacked-evidence-denied-and-a-population-at-risk/5305324

16] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-gmo-biotech-lobbys-emotional-blackmail-and-bogus-claims-monsantos-genetically-modified-crops-will-not-feed-the-world/5407080

17] http://www.cban.ca/Resources/Topics/Feeding-the-World

18]http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20110308_a-hrc-16-49_agroecology_en.pdf

19] http://vivakermani.blogspot.in/2014/07/gm-food-crops-why-india-must-say-no.html

20] http://www.globalresearch.ca/india-genetically-modified-seeds-agricultural-productivity-and-political-fraud/5328227

21] http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2013_en.pdf

22]http://www.unep.org/dewa/agassessment/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads_Global%20Report%20(English).pdf

23] http://naturalsociety.com/americans-suffering-chronic-disease-due-glyphosate-herbicides-new-study/

24] http://www.tonu.org/2013/12/03/shivchopra_squamish/

25] http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/06/20/complete-history-monsanto-worlds-evil-corporation/

26] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/is-every-market-rigged.html

27] http://www.naturalnews.com/034468_doomsday_seed_vault_secrets.html#

28]http://www.naturalnews.com/035105_bill_gates_monsanto_eugenics.html

29] http://www.globalresearch.ca/menace-on-the-menu-development-and-the-globalization-of-servitude/5416488

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO): Profit, Power and Geopolitics

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not essential for feeding the world [1,2], but if they were to lead to increased productivity, did not harm the environment and did not negatively impact biodiversity and human health, would we be wise to embrace them anyhow?

The fact is that GMO technology would still be owned and controlled by certain very powerful interests. In their hands, this technology is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power, a tool to ensure profit. Beyond that, it is intended to serve US global geopolitical interests. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy.

“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports, not on industrial exports as people might think. It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.” Professor Michael Hudson [3].

The Project for a New American Century and the Wolfowitz Doctrine show that US foreign policy is about power, control and ensuring global supremacy at any cost [4,5]. Part of the plan for attaining world domination rests on the US controlling agriculture and hijacking food sovereignty and nations’ food security.

In his book ‘Seeds of Destruction’, William Engdahl traces how the oil-rich Rockefeller family translated its massive wealth into political clout and set out to capture agriculture in the US and then globally via the ‘green revolution’ [6]. Along with its big-dam, water-intensive infrastructure requirements, this form of agriculture made farmers dependent on corporate-controlled petroproducts and entrapped them and nations into dollar dependency and debt. GMOs represent more of the same due to the patenting and the increasing monopolization of seeds by a handful of mainly US companies, such as Monsanto, DuPont and Bayer.

In India, Monsanto has sucked millions from agriculture in recent years via royalties, and farmers have been compelled to spend beyond their means to purchase seeds and chemical inputs [7]. A combination of debt, economic liberalization and a shift to (GMO) cash crops (cotton) has caused hundreds of thousands of farmers to experience economic distress, while corporations have extracted huge profits [8]. Over 270,000 farmers in India have committed suicide since the mid to late nineties [9].

In South America, there are similar stories of farmers and indigenous peoples being forced from their lands and experiencing violent repression as GMOs and industrial-scale farming take hold [10]. It is similar in Africa, where Monsanto and The Gates Foundation are seeking to further transform small-scale farming into a corporate controlled model. They call it ‘investing’ in agriculture as if this were an act of benevolence.

Agriculture is the bedrock of many societies, yet it is being recast for the benefit of rich agritech, retail and food processing concerns. Small farms are under immense pressure and food security is being undermined, not least because the small farm produces most of the world’s food [11]. Whether through land grabs and takeovers, the production of (non-food) cash crops for export, greater chemical inputs or seed patenting and the eradication of seed sharing among farmers, profits are guaranteed for agritech corporations and institutional land investors.

The recasting of agriculture in the image of big agribusiness continues across the globe despite researchers saying that this chemical-intensive, high-energy consuming model means Britain only has 100 harvests left because of soil degradation [12]. In Punjab, the ‘green revolution’ model of industrial scale, corporate dominated agriculture has led to a crisis in terms of severe water shortages, increasing human cancers and falling productivity [13]. There is a global agrarian crisis. The increasingly dominant corporate-driven model is unsustainable.

More ecological forms of agriculture are being called for that, through intelligent crop management and decreased use of chemical inputs, would be able to not only feed the world but also work sustainably with the natural environment. Numerous official reports and scientific studies have suggested that such policies would be more appropriate, especially for poorer countries [14-16].

When on occasion the chemical-industrial model indicates that it does deliver better yields than more traditional methods (a generalization and often overstated [17]), even this is a misrepresentation. Better yields but only with massive chemical inputs from corporations and huge damage to health and the environment as well as ever more resource-driven conflicts to grab the oil that fuels this model. Like the erroneous belief that economic ‘growth’ (GDP) is stimulated just because there becomes greater levels of cash flows in an economy (and corporate profits are boosted), the notion of improved agricultural ‘productivity’ also stems from a set of narrowly defined criteria.

The dominant notions that underpin economic ‘growth’, modern agriculture and ‘development’ are based on a series of assumption that betray a mindset steeped in arrogance and contempt: the planet should be cast in an urban-centic, ethnocentric model whereby the rural is to be looked down on, nature must be dominated, farmers are a problem to be removed from the land and traditional ways are backward and in need of remedy.

“People are perceived as ‘poor’ if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.” Vandana Shiva [18]

Western corporations are to implement the remedy by determining policies at the World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank (with help from compliant politicians and officials) in order to  depopulate rural areas and drive folk to live in cities to then strive for a totally unsustainable, undeliverable, environment-destroying, conflict-driving, consumerist version of the American Dream [19,20].

It is interesting (and disturbing) to note that ‘developing’ nations account for more than 80% of world population, but consume only about a third of the world’s energy. US citizens constitute 5% of the world’s population, but consume 24% of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians and 370 Ethiopians [21].

Despite the environmental and social devastation caused, the outcome is regarded as successful just because business interests that benefit from this point to a growth in GDP. Chopping down an entire forest that people had made a living sustainably from for centuries and selling the timber, selling more poisons to spray on soil or selling pharmaceuticals to address the health impacts of the petrochemical food production model would indeed increase GDP, wouldn’t it? It’s all good for business. And what is good for business is good for everyone else, or so the lie goes.

“Corporations as the dominant institution shaped by capitalist patriarchy thrive on eco-apartheid. They thrive on the Cartesian legacy of dualism which puts nature against humans. It defines nature as female and passively subjugated. Corporatocentrism is thus also androcentric – a patriarchal construction. The false universalism of man as conqueror and owner of the Earth has led to the technological hubris of geo-engineering, genetic engineering, and nuclear energy. It has led to the ethical outrage of owning life forms through patents, water through privatization, the air through carbon trading. It is leading to appropriation of the biodiversity that serves the poor.” [22]

The ‘green revolution’ and now GMOs are ultimately not concerned with feeding the world, securing well-rounded nutritious diets or ensuring health and environmental safety. (In fact, India now imports foods that it used to grow but no longer does [23]; in Africa too, local diets are becoming less diverse and less healthy [24].) Such notions are based on propaganda or stem from well-meaning sentiments that have been pressed into the service of corporate interests.

Biotechnological innovations have always had a role to play in improving agriculture, but the post-1945 model of agriculture has been driven by powerful corporations like Monsanto, which are firmly linked to Pentagon and Wall Street interests [25]. Motivated by self-interest but wrapped up in trendy PR about ‘feeding the world’ or imposing austerity to ensure prosperity, the publicly stated intentions of the US state-corporate cabal should never be taken at face value [26,27].

In India, Monsanto and Walmart had a major role in drawing up the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture [28]. Monsanto now funds research in public institutions and its presence and influence compromises what should in fact be independent decision and policy making bodies [29,30]. Monsanto is a driving force behind what could eventually lead to the  restructuring and subjugation of India by the US [31]. The IMF and Monsanto are also working to ensure Ukraine’s subservience to US geopolitical aims via the capture of land and agriculture [32]. The capture of agriculture (and societies) by rich interests is a global phenomenon.

Only the completely naive would believe that rich institutional investors in land and big agribusiness and its backers in the US State Department have humanity’s interests at heart. At the very least, their collective aim is profit. Beyond that and to facilitate it, the need to secure US global hegemony is paramount.

The science surrounding GMOs is becoming increasingly politicized and bogged down in detailed arguments about whose methodologies, results, conclusions and science show what and why. The bigger picture however is often in danger of being overlooked. GMO is not just about ‘science’. As an issue, GMO and the chemical-industrial model it is linked to is ultimately a geopolitical one driven by power and profit.

Notes

1] This report indicates the root causes for global food shortages:  http://www.cban.ca/Resources/Topics/Feeding-the-World/Will-GM-Crops-Feed-the-World

2] Citing official reports and data sources, references in this article indicate agricultural productivity in India was better in 1760 and 1890 and that India does not require chemical-industrial agriculture let alone GMOs: http://www.globalresearch.ca/india-genetically-modified-seeds-agricultural-productivity-and-political-fraud/5328227

3] http://michael-hudson.com/2014/10/think-tank-memories/

4] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm

5] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40093.htm

6] Arun Shrivastava reviews and summarizes Engdahl’s book here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/seeds-of-destruction-the-hidden-agenda-of-genetic-manipulation-2/9379

7] http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva180614.htm

8]  Based on the findings of a report by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-evidence-of-suicide-epidemic-among-indias-marginalised-farmers

9] Official figure quoted by the BBC as of 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21077458

10]http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2267255/gm_crops_are_driving_genocide_and_ecocide_keep_them_out_of_the_eu.html

11] Official report released by GRAIN: http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland

12] Farmers Weekly quotes a report by researchers at the University of Sheffield in the UK: http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/only-100-harvests-left-in-uk-farm-soils-scientists-warn.htm

13] Newspaper report quoting official statistics and research findings: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/337124/punjab-india039s-grain-bowl-now.html

14] Official UN report: http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2013_en.pdf

15]http://www.srfood.org/en/official-reports# and http://www.plantpartners.org/agroecology-reports.html

16] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735903.2013.806408#tabModule

17] http://phys.org/news/2014-12-crops-industrial-agriculture.html

18] http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/shiva112305.cfm

19] Food policy analyst Devinder Sharma outlines the motives of Western corporations in India: http://www.bhoomimagazine.org/article/cash-food-will-strike-very-foundation-economy

20] Arundhati Roy discusses the erroneous notion of ‘progress’ being applied in India and the conflict and violence that has followed: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/we-call-this-progress/

21] http://public.wsu.edu/~mreed/380American%20Consumption.htm

22] http://www.spaziofilosofico.it/numero-07/2959/economy-revisited-will-green-be-the-colour-of-money-or-life/

23] Vandana Shiva describes how the ‘green revolution’ and ‘free trade’ have turned India into a net importer of foods it used to be self sufficient in: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/09/201398122228705617.html

24] Article describing the plight of agriculture in Africa: http://www.globalresearch.ca/behind-the-mask-of-altruism-imperialism-monsanto-and-the-gates-foundation-in-africa/5408242

25] http://www.globalresearch.ca/monsantos-gmo-food-and-its-dark-connections-to-the-military-industrial-complex/5389708

26] Article providing factual historical insight into Monsanto and its wrongdoings: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-complete-history-of-monsanto-the-worlds-most-evil-corporation/5387964

27] Analysis of Wall Street’s fraudulent practices in recent times and the complicity of the entire political and economic system: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/pers-m15.html

28]http://www.democracynow.org/2006/12/13/vandana_shiva_on_farmer_suicides_the

29]  http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/monsanto-a-contemporary-east-india-company-and-corporate-knowledge-in-india/

30] http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/nip-this-in-the-bud/article5012989.ece

31] http://www.countercurrents.org/todhunter031114.htm

32] http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/food-security-hostage-wall-street-and-us-global-hegemony

Time and the Technological World

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Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

Check out this fascinating summary of  How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. This particular summary looks at the part of the book that documents how our perception of time has changed, and how that has affected the modern world.

The book talks about something called the “Hummingbird Effect,” which describes the way in which various inventions and technical discoveries change the world in unexpected ways. Some of you may recall James’ Burke’s excellent TV show Connections on BBC/PBS (These used to be available on YouTube, but JamesBurkeWeb appears to have disappeared. Still, some episodes can still be found) which covered the same ground:

Johnson points out that, much like the evolution of bees gave flowers their colors and the evolution of pollen altered the design of the hummingbird’s wings, the most remarkable thing about innovations is the way they precipitate unanticipated changes that reverberate far and wide beyond the field or discipline or problem at the epicenter of the particular innovation. Pointing to the Gutenberg press — itself already an example of the combinatorial nature of creative breakthroughs — Johnson writes:

    “Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens.”

It starts with Galileo’s observation that a pendulum always swings to-and-fro in a regular amount of time.

“But machines that could keep a reliable beat didn’t exist in Galileo’s age; the metronome wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries. So watching the altar lamp sway back and forth with such regularity planted the seed of an idea in Galileo’s young mind. As is so often the case, however, it would take decades before the seed would blossom into something useful.”

The ability to accurately measure time was a departure from before when:

    “Instead of fifteen minutes, time was described as how long it would take to milk the cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes. Instead of being paid by the hour, craftsmen were conventionally paid by the piece produced — what was commonly called “taken-work” — and their daily schedules were almost comically unregulated.”

Once the regimentation of the clock was introduced, many things followed from that due to the Hummingbird Effect:

Over the century that followed, the pendulum clock, a hundred times more accurate than any preceding technology, became a staple of European life and forever changed our relationship with time. But the hummingbird’s wings continued to flap — accurate timekeeping became the imperceptible heartbeat beneath all technology of the Industrial Revolution, from scheduling the division of labor in factories to keeping steam-powered locomotives running on time. It was the invisible hand of the clock that first moved the market — a move toward unanticipated innovations in other fields. Without clocks, Johnson argues, the Industrial Revolution may have never taken off — or “at the very least, have taken much longer to reach escape velocity.” He explains:

    “Accurate clocks, thanks to their unrivaled ability to determine longitude at sea, greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks, which gave the first industrialists a constant supply of raw materials and access to overseas markets. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the most reliable watches in the world were manufactured in England, which created a pool of expertise with fine-tool manufacture that would prove to be incredibly handy when the demands of industrial innovation arrived, just as the glassmaking expertise producing spectacles opened the door for telescopes and microscopes. The watchmakers were the advance guard of what would become industrial engineering.”

Not mentioned is the introduction of public schools, designed to take farmers used to “cow milking time” and “discipline” them into a workforce able to sit still and obey and punch a clock, a system we are still living with today. Those of us who cannot or will not conform to this ruthless discipline are severely punished:

And yet, as with most innovations, the industrialization of time came with a dark side — one Bertrand Russell so eloquently lamented in the 1920s when he asked: “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” Johnson writes:

    “The natural rhythms of tasks and leisure had to be forcibly replaced with an abstract grid. When you spend your whole life inside that grid, it seems like second nature, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, as the laborers of industrial England did in the second half of the eighteenth century, it arrives as a shock to the system. Timepieces were not just tools to help you coordinate the day’s events, but something more ominous: the “deadly statistical clock,” in Dickens’s Hard Times, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.”

[…]

    “To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life… The time discipline of the pendulum clock took the informal flow of experience and nailed it to a mathematical grid. If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry.“

And as clocks became ever more precise and ubiquitous, things flowed from that – more regimentation, more standardization (village clocks used to be set by the sun’s position, but this introduced inaccuracies in railroad timetables – thus two inventions, one steam-powered and one not, are bound up together), and entirely new scientific discoveries which led to new inventions such as the computers that now rule over our lives:

Johnson goes on to trace the hummingbird flutterings to the emergence of pocket watches, the democratization of time through the implementation of Standard Time, and the invention of the first quartz clock in 1928, which boasted the unprecedented accuracy of losing or gaining only one thousandth of a second per day…But the most groundbreaking effect of the quartz clock — the most unpredictable manifestation of the hummingbird effect in the story of time — was that it gave rise to modern computing and the Information Age. Johnson writes:

    “Computer chips are masters of time discipline… Instead of thousands of operations per minute, the microprocessor is executing billions of calculations per second, while shuffling information in and out of other microchips on the circuit board. Those operations are all coordinated by a master clock, now almost without exception made of quartz… A modern computer is the assemblage of many different technologies and modes of knowledge: the symbolic logic of programming languages, the electrical engineering of the circuit board, the visual language of interface design. But without the microsecond accuracy of a quartz clock, modern computers would be useless.”

And once the computer is invented – note that it becomes the new mega-metaphor taking over from the steam engine – the brain as “neural network” that can be simulated, the economy as a perfect “information processing machine” via the price mechanism and humans as “rational utility maximizers”of Neoliberal economics, and recasting the analog world as binary one of ones and zeros – art, music, literature, etc. that can be simulated through sufficiently complex algorithms. All this flows from our view of the world, which in turn is dictated by our technology.

The Hummingbird Effect: How Galileo Invented Time and Gave Rise to the Modern Tyranny of the Clock (Brain Pickings)

More at the link. It’s worth noting that this entire thesis was laid out by Lewis Mumford as far back in the 1930’s in Technics and Society, and this book looks like it covers much the same ground.

Mumford’s these is that the Industrial Revolution did not spring forth fully-formed from nowhere, but came forth from changes in the human perception of the world and man’s relationship to nature that had been occurring for centuries beforehand. He called this the Eotechnic period, and points out that it needs to be understood to see how the modern world emerged. He classified the subsequent periods as Paleotechnic (centered around the stream engine, iron and coal), and the Neotechnic (centered around electricity and the scientific method). He stressed how much our perception of the natural world and human nature dictate the nature of our science and social organization.

Several intellectual revolutions had to take place in order to get us to the Industrial Revolution. One, as noted above and emphasized by Mumford, was the accurate measurement of time. Another was the increasing control over motive forces exemplified by the windmill and watermill. Another was individual perception, as indicated by the use of perspective in painting. Another was the increasing standardization, political centralization and bureaucracy. Another was the discovery of the New World of which the ancients had no knowledge or precedent. Another was the increasing use of the abstraction of money for trade. But perhaps the biggest one of all was recasting the natural world as a machine that could be analyzed and understood. These changes were all formative to the Industrial Revolution, which could not have come about without them.

Mumford writes extensively about the Medieval period, and how that period increasingly used technology to control the environment but in a genuinely humane way, one designed to enhance human needs and desires rather than control or eliminate them. Think of the medieval clock-making guild as opposed to the deskilled factory worker for example. The decentralized and localized nature of the Medieval period is what allowed technology to be used in this way.

But, beginning in the seventeenth century with the rise of the nation-state and the consolation of Europe’s kingdoms into large, centralized states with standards and bureaucracy (much of it due to the emergence of gunpowder and artillery, against which castles and mounted knights were useless), all that began to to change. Technology became increasingly tyrannical, and man was more and more forced into the “logic of the machine.” Consider the armies that emerged identical uniforms, identical weapons with interchangeable parts and drilled, regimented training designed to turn men into interchangeable parts themselves. Military training was the precursor to the disciplined workforce of the Industrial Revolution, which is why the connection between business and military discipline remains to this day (corporations today are run on the top-down hierarchical military model). Since battles were won by sheer numbers of “citizens” with rifles rather than an aristocratic warrior class who owned horses, the social relations changed, and the common man emerged with more importance. Population growth equaled national strength in the new order. Man’s rationality became celebrated, all other values were discounted. Productivity and technological “progress” became goals in the themselves rather than means to an end. Pursuit of growth and profit became all-consuming, human needs be damned.

In contrast to the Medieval period, today’s technology is dehumanizing, submitting man to centralized control, and seeing him as nothing more than a machine. Mumford envisioned a society where human values could once again take center stage instead of the productivist logic of “the myth of the machine” Thus Mumford was not anti-technology; rather he wanted a world in which technology served profoundly different values than in our present time. The brutal regulation of time, rather than the human time of being in the world – the difference between chronos and kairos, or the subjective and the objective – is one of the best illustrations of this difference. Just because we can measure time down to the nanosecond does not mean we have to be enslaved to it. That is a social choice, as Mumford would quickly remind us.