Luddism and Economic Ideology

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Smithsonian Magazine has a very good feature on the Luddites, well worth a read. There are many elements you just don’t read in many economic histories; for example, the 40-hour work week was not brought down from the mountaintop by Moses and inscribed in stone tablets, despite what you may have heard elsewhere:

At the turn of 1800, the textile industry in the United Kingdom was an economic juggernaut that employed the vast majority of workers in the North. Working from home, weavers produced stockings using frames, while cotton-spinners created yarn. “Croppers” would take large sheets of woven wool fabric and trim the rough surface off, making it smooth to the touch.

These workers had great control over when and how they worked—and plenty of leisure. “The year was chequered with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labor,” as the stocking-maker William Gardiner noted gaily at the time. Indeed, some “seldom worked more than three days a week.” Not only was the weekend a holiday, but they took Monday off too, celebrating it as a drunken “St. Monday.”

Croppers in particular were a force to be reckoned with. They were well-off—their pay was three times that of stocking-makers—and their work required them to pass heavy cropping tools across the wool, making them muscular, brawny men who were fiercely independent. In the textile world, the croppers were, as one observer noted at the time, “notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed.”

The introduction of machinery in cloth manufacture did not make these people’s lives better. In fact, it made them a lot worse:

“They [the merchant class] were obsessed with keeping their factories going, so they were introducing machines wherever they might help,” says Jenny Uglow, a historian and author of In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815.

The workers were livid. Factory work was miserable, with brutal 14-hour days that left workers—as one doctor noted—“stunted, enfeebled, and depraved.” Stocking-weavers were particularly incensed at the move toward cut-ups. It produced stockings of such low quality that they were “pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction,” as one hosier put it: Pretty soon people wouldn’t buy any stockings if they were this shoddy. Poverty rose as wages plummeted.

Yes, you read that right- the introduction of “labor-saving” technology made the amount these people worked increase dramatically. It also made their work much, much more unpleasant. It transferred control to a smaller circle of wealthy people and took it away from the workers themselves. It made the rich richer, increased poverty, and tore society apart.

But more technology is always good, right?

And since history is written by the victors, “Luddite” is a term now inextricably wound up with the knee-jerk rejection of new technology. But the Luddites weren’t opposed to new technology at all! What they were fighting against was the economic conditions that took away their autonomy and turned them into mendicants in their own country:

The workers tried bargaining. They weren’t opposed to machinery, they said, if the profits from increased productivity were shared. The croppers suggested taxing cloth to make a fund for those unemployed by machines. Others argued that industrialists should introduce machinery more gradually, to allow workers more time to adapt to new trades.

The plight of the unemployed workers even attracted the attention of Charlotte Brontë, who wrote them into her novel Shirley. “The throes of a sort of moral earthquake,” she noted, “were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties.”

[…]

At heart, the fight was not really about technology. The Luddites were happy to use machinery—indeed, weavers had used smaller frames for decades. What galled them was the new logic of industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from new technology enriched only the machines’ owners and weren’t shared with the workers.

In fact, the Luddites actually spared the machines that were used by employers who treated workers fairly. Funny how you never hear that in most popular descriptions of the Luddite revolt:

The Luddites were often careful to spare employers who they felt dealt fairly. During one attack, Luddites broke into a house and destroyed four frames—but left two intact after determining that their owner hadn’t lowered wages for his weavers. (Some masters began posting signs on their machines, hoping to avoid destruction: “This Frame Is Making Full Fashioned Work, at the Full Price.”)

Unlike today, labor actually fought back against these attempts to destroy their way of life:

As a form of economic protest, machine-breaking wasn’t new. There were probably 35 examples of it in the previous 100 years, as the author Kirkpatrick Sale found in his seminal history Rebels Against the Future. But the Luddites, well-organized and tactical, brought a ruthless efficiency to the technique: Barely a few days went by without another attack, and they were soon breaking at least 175 machines per month. Within months they had destroyed probably 800, worth £25,000—the equivalent of $1.97 million, today.

Rather than the “natural course” of free-market economics, once again it was government intervention, including brutal state violence, that made modern capitalism possible:

Parliament was now fully awakened, and began a ferocious crackdown. In March 1812, politicians passed a law that handed out the death penalty for anyone “destroying or injuring any Stocking or Lace Frames, or other Machines or Engines used in the Framework knitted Manufactory.” Meanwhile, London flooded the Luddite counties with 14,000 soldiers.

By winter of 1812, the government was winning. Informants and sleuthing finally tracked down the identities of a few dozen Luddites. Over a span of 15 months, 24 Luddites were hanged publicly, often after hasty trials, including a 16-year-old who cried out to his mother on the gallows, “thinking that she had the power to save him.” Another two dozen were sent to prison and 51 were sentenced to be shipped off to Australia.

But wait, isn’t capitalism all about “freedom and liberty?” Freedom and liberty for some, I guess.

The problem, then as now, was not technology itself, but the economic relations that it unfolded against. What I found most interesting is that even back then, the emerging pseudoscience of economics was used to justify the harsh treatment of the workers and the bottomless greed of capitalists, in particular the “sacred text” of modern Neoclassical economics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:

For the Luddites, “there was the concept of a ‘fair profit,’” says Adrian Randall, the author of Before the Luddites. In the past, the master would take a fair profit, but now he adds, “the industrial capitalist is someone who is seeking more and more of their share of the profit that they’re making.” Workers thought wages should be protected with minimum-wage laws. Industrialists didn’t: They’d been reading up on laissez-faire economic theory in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published a few decades earlier.

“The writings of Dr. Adam Smith have altered the opinion, of the polished part of society,” as the author of a minimum wage proposal at the time noted. Now, the wealthy believed that attempting to regulate wages “would be as absurd as an attempt to regulate the winds.”

It seems as though nothing’s really changed. Using economic “science” to justify social inequality and private ownership goes back to the very beginnings of the Market.

When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites (Smithsonian Magazine). Smithsonian wrote about this before, see also: What the Luddites Really Fought Against

As the above history shows, there is nothing “natural” or normal about extreme busyness and brutally long working hours. It is entirely an artificial creation:

A nice post at the HBR blog…describes how being busy is now celebrated as a symbol of high status. This is not natural. Marshall Sahlins has shown that in hunter-gather societies (which were the human condition for nine-tenths of our existence) people typically worked for only around 20 hours a week. In pre-industrial societies, work was task-oriented; people did as much as necessary and then stopped. Max Weber wrote:

“Man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour. (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p24”

The backward-bending supply curve of labour was normal.

E.P. Thompson has described how pre-industrial working hours were irregular, with Mondays usually taken as holidays. He, and writers such as Sidney Pollard and Stephen Marglin, have shown how the working day as we know it was imposed by ruthless discipline, reinforced by Christian moralists. (There’s a clue in the title of Weber’s book). Marglin quotes Andrew Ure, author of The Philosophy of Manufacturers in 1835:

“The main difficulty [faced by Richard Arkwright] did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in…training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation. To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright…It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence.”

Today, though, such external discipline is no longer so necessary because many of us – more so in the UK and US than elsewhere – have internalized the capitalist imperative that we work long hours, …Which just vindicates a point made by Bertrand Russell back in 1932:

“The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.”

Against busyness (Stumbling and Mumbling)

Honestly, the five-day workweek is outmoded and ridiculous. It’s more of a babysitting operation for adults than anything else. It’s a silly as arguing that we need over two decades of formal education in order to do our jobs.

I was reminded of this over the holidays. In the U.S. we get virtually no time off from our jobs, unlike most other countries (East Asia might be an exception). But Christmas/New Year’s is a rare exception, and we have several four-day weeks in a row (without pay for some of us, of course). Those weeks are so much more pleasant, and I would even say productive, than the rest of the year. Every year at this time I think to myself, “Why isn’t every week a four-day workweek?” Some places do have such an arrangement, but they justify it by four long, ten-hour days. I don’t know about you, but towards the end of ten hours in a row of “work” I doubt anyone’s accomplishing much of anything. Is 32 hours a week really not enough to keep society functioning in the twenty-first century?

Not only that, but many people use whatever little vacation they do have in order to take the whole time period at the end of the year off. This is typical in Europe, but rarer here. In any case, while going to work I noticed that there was hardly any traffic. The roads were empty. There were plenty of seats on the bus. The streets and sidewalks were empty. There was no waiting in the restaurants and cafes. There was plenty of room for everything. There was a laid-back feeling everywhere. It was so pleasant. I couldn’t help but think to myself, “why isn’t every week like this?” If more people could stay home and work less, it very well could be. Instead we’re trapped on a treadmill. Working less would actually pay dividends in terms of reduced traffic, less crowding, less pollution, and better health outcomes due to less stress and more time to exercise.

There’s also a simple logic problem at work here. If we say the 40-hour week is inviolable and set-in-stone for the rest of time, and we do not wish to increase the problem of unemployment, then literally no labor-saving technology will ever save labor! We might as well dispense with the creation of any labor-saving technology, since by the above logic, it cannot save labor. You could equivocate and say that it frees us from doing “lower” level work and allows us to do “higher” level work, as when ditch diggers become factory workers, or something. That may have been a valid argument a hundred years ago, but in an age when most of us are low-paid service workers or useless paper-pushers, it’s pretty hard to make that case with any seriousness anymore.

***

I often refer to economics as a religion, with its practitioners as priests. So it’s interesting to read that in other contexts. This is from Chris Dillow’s blog, where the above passage about work was taken:

The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force”, wrote Marx, appears to people “not as their own united power but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and end of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control.”

I was reminded of this by a fine passage in The Econocracy in which the authors show that “the economy” in the sense we now know it is a relatively recent invention and that economists claim to be experts capable of understanding this alien force:

“As increasing areas of political and social life are colonized by economic language and logic, the vast majority of citizens face the struggle of making informed democratic choices in a language they have never been taught. (p19)”

This leads to the sort of alienation which Marx described. This is summed up by respondents to a You Gov survey cited by Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins, who said; “Economics is out of my hands so there is no point discussing it.”

In one important sense such an attitude is absurd. Every time you decide what to buy, or how much to save, or what job to do or how long to work, economics is in your hands and you are making an economic decision.

This suggests to me two different conceptions of what economics is. In one conception – that of Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins – economists claim to be a priestly elite who understand “the economy”. As Alasdair MacIntyre said, such a claim functions as a demand for power and wealth:

“Civil servants and managers alike [he might have added economists-CD] justify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers (After Virtue, p 86).”

There is, though, a second conception of what economists should do. Rather than exploit alienation for their own advantage, we should help people mitigate it…

Economists in an alienated society (Stumbling and Mumbling)

This makes a point I often refer to – this depiction of “The Economy” as some of “natural” force that we have no control over, subject to its own inexorable logic. We saw above how the writings of Adam Smith provided the ideological justification for the wealthy merchants to screw over the workers. It cemented the perception that the economy was just a natural force with its own internal logic that could no more be regulated than could the wind or the tides. And over the course of several hundred years, we have intentionally designed our politcal institutions such that government cannot “interfere” in the “natural workings” of the economy. Doing so would only make all of us worse off, or so goes the argument.

There is a telling passage in this column by Noah Smith:

…Even now, when economic models have become far more complex than anything in [Milton] Friedman’s time, economists still go back to Friedman’s theory as a mental touchstone — a fundamental intuition that guides the way they make their models. My first macroeconomics professor believed in it deeply and instinctively, and would even bring it up in department seminars.

Unfortunately, intuition based on incorrect theories can lead us astray. Economists have known for a while that this theory doesn’t fit the facts. When people get a windfall, they tend to spend some of it immediately. So economists have tried to patch up Friedman’s theory, using a couple of plausible fixes….

Milton Friedman’s Cherished Theory Is Laid to Rest (Bloomberg)

Yes, you read that right, economists knew for a long time that a particular theory did not accord with the observed facts, but they didn’t discard it because it was necessary for the complex mathematical models that they use to supposedly describe reality. Rather, instead of discarding it, they tried to “patch it up,” because it told them what they wanted to hear. Note how his economics professor “believed deeply” in the theory, much as how people believe in the Good Book.

Nice “science” you got there.

That methodology ought to tell you everything you need to know about economic “science.” One wonders how many other approaches economists take that such thinking applies to.

Friedman was, of course, the author of “Capitalism and Freedom,” which as we saw above, is quite an ironic title. Friedman’s skill was coming up with ideas that the rich wanted hear, and then coming up with the requisite economic “logic” to justify them, from deregulation, to privatization, to globalization, to the elimination of minimum wages and suppression of unions. His most famous idea was that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders, and all other responsibilities were ‘unethical.’ The resulting “libertarian” economics was promoted tirelessly, including a series on PBS, by wealthy organizations and right-wing think-tanks with bottomless funding, as it still is today (along with its even more extreme cousin, “Austrian” economics). One thing the Luddites did not have to contend with was the power of the media to shape society, one reason why such revolts would be unthinkable today (along with the panopticon police states constructed by capitalist regimes beginning with Great Britain— “freedom” indeed!).

Smith himself has written about what he calls 101-ism:

We all know basically what 101ism says. Markets are efficient. Firms are competitive. Partial-equilibrium supply and demand describes most things. Demand curves slope down and supply curves slope up. Only one curve shifts at a time. No curve is particularly inelastic or elastic; all are somewhere in the middle (straight lines with slopes of 1 and -1 on a blackboard). Etc.

Note that 101 classes don’t necessarily teach that these things are true! I would guess that most do not. Almost all 101 classes teach about elasticity, and give examples with perfectly elastic and perfectly inelastic supply and demand curves. Most teach about market failures and monopolies. Most at least mention general equilibrium.

But for some reason, people seem to come away from 101 classes thinking that the cases that are the easiest to draw on the board are – God only knows why – the benchmark cases.

101ism (Noahpinion)

But the best criticism I’ve read lately is from James Kwak who has written an entire book on the subject: Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality. He’s written several posts on the topic, but this post is a good introduction to the concept. Basically, he argues that modern economics allows policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of society to masquerade as objective “scientific” truths thanks to the misapplication of economic ideology. As we saw above ,that goes back to very beginnings of “free market” economics in the nineteenth century:

In policy debates and public relations campaigns…what you are … likely to hear is that a minimum wage must increase unemployment—because that’s what the model says. This conviction that the world must behave the way it does on the blackboard is what I call economism. This style of thinking is influential because it is clear and logical, reducing complex issues to simple, pseudo-mathematical axioms. But it is not simply an innocent mistake made by inattentive undergraduates. Economism is Economics 101 transformed into an ideology—an ideology that is particularly persuasive because it poses as a neutral means of understanding the world.

In the case of low-skilled labor, it’s clear who benefits from a low minimum wage: the restaurant and hotel industries. In their PR campaigns, however, these corporations can hardly come out and say they like their labor as cheap as possible. Instead, armed with the logic of supply and demand, they argue that raising the minimum wage will only increase unemployment and poverty. Similarly, megabanks argue that regulating derivatives will starve the real economy of capital; multinational manufacturing companies argue that new trade agreements will benefit everyone; and the wealthy argue that lower taxes will increase savings and investment, unleashing economic growth.

In each case, economism allows a private interest to pretend that its preferred policies will really benefit society as a whole.The usual result is to increase inequality or to legitimize the widening gulf between rich and poor in contemporary society.

Economics 101, Economism, and Our New Gilded Age (The Baseline Scenario)

All of the above reinforces a couple of points I often like to make:

1.) Capitalism was a creation of government from day one. There is nothing “natural” or “free” about markets.

2.) It is sustained by a particular ideology which poses as a science but is anything but.

These is no fundamental reason we need to work 40 hours a week. There is no reason we have to go into debt just to get a job. There is no benefit to the extreme wealth inequality; it’s not due to any sort of “merit.” And on and on. Economic “logic” is destroying society along with the natural world and preventing any adaptive response to these crises. But its power over the hearts and minds of society seems to be unassailable, at least until it all falls apart.

Saturday Matinee: Obsolete

Posted on June 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: Truthstream Media

The Future Doesn’t Need Us… Or So We’ve Been Told. With the rise of technology and the real-time pressures of an online, global economy, humans will have to be very clever – and very careful – not to be left behind by the future. From the perspective of those in charge, human labor is losing its value, and people are becoming a liability. This documentary reveals the real motivation behind the secretive effort to reduce the population and bring resource use into strict, centralized control. Could it be that the biggest threat we face isn’t just automation and robots destroying jobs, but the larger sense that humans could become obsolete altogether? *Please watch and share!* Link to film: http://amzn.to/2f69Ocr

Algorithmic Control and the Revolution of Desire

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Alfie Brown

Source: ROAR Magazine

Last year, Stanford University published a study confirming what many of us may long have suspected: that your computer can predict what you want with more accuracy than your spouse or your friends. Your digital footprint betrays the truth not only about what you “like” but about what you really like — or so the argument goes. But what if our digital footprints, besides revealing our desires, are also responsible for the very construction of these desires? If that were the case, we would need to display a far deeper level of suspicion towards the complex patterns of corporate and state control found in contemporary cyberspace.

There is little doubt that innovations in mobile technologies are part of emerging methodologies of social control. In particular, games and applications that make use of the Google Maps back-end system — including Uber, Grindr, Pokémon Go and hundreds of others — which should be seen as one of the most important technological developments of the last decade or so, are particularly complicit in these new regulatory practices. Putting the well-publicized data collection issue aside, such applications have two powerful ideological functions. First, they construct the new “geographical contours” of the city, regulating the paths we take and mapping the city in the service of both corporate interest and the prevention of uprisings. Second, and more unconsciously, they enact what Jean-Francois Lyotard once called the “desirevolution” — an evolution and revolution of desire, in which that what we want is itself now determined by the digital paths we tread.

The Psycho-Geographical Contours of the City

In 1981, the French theorist Guy Debord famously wrote of the “psycho-geographical contours” of the city that govern the routes we take, even when we may feel we are wandering freely around the physical space. At that time, it was Debord’s topic — architecture — that was the dominant force in re-organizing our routes through the city. Today, however, that role is increasingly taken up by the mobile phone. It is Uber that dictates the path of your taxi, Maps that dictates the route of your walks and drives, and Pokémon Go that (for a summer at least) determined where the next crowd would gather.

Other similar map-based application programing interfaces, or APIs, dictate our jogging routes (MapMyRun), our recreational hikes (LiveTrekker) and our tourist activities (TripAdvisor Guides). Pokémon Go attracted some publicity because it accidentally and humorously gathered crowds in weird places, but this should only alert us to its potential ability to gather crowds in the right places (to serve corporate interest) or to prevent the gathering of crowds in the wrong ones (to prevent organized uprisings, for instance). Such applications should be seen as a testing phase in the project of Google and its affiliated corporations as they work out how best to regulate the movements of large populations via their phones. Pokémon Go players were the early cyborgs, complete with hiccups and malfunctions — a beta version of Google’s future human. These future humans will go where instructed.

On a smaller scale, this point can be seen in concrete terms with a case study of London. A recent Transport for London talk discussed the possibility of “gamifying” commuting. In order to facilitate this possibility, Transport for London have made the internet API and data streams used to monitor all London Transport vehicles open source and open access, in the hope that developers will build London-focused apps based around the public transport system, thus maximizing profit. One idea is that if a particular tube station is at risk of becoming clogged up due to other delays, TfL could give “in-game rewards” for people willing to use alternative routes and thus smooth out the jam.

While traffic jam prevention may not seem like evidence that we have arrived in the dystopia of total corporate and state control, it does actually reveal the dangerous potentiality in such technologies. It shows that the UK is not as far away from the “social credit” game system recently implemented in Beijing to rate each citizen’s trustworthiness and give them rewards for their dedication to the Chinese state. While the UK media reacted with shock to these innovations in Chinese app development, a closer look at the electronic structures of mapping and controlling our own movements shows that a similar framework is already in its development phase in London too. In the “smart city” of the future, it won’t just be traffic jams that are smoothed out. Any inefficient misuse or any occupation of public space deemed dangerous by the authorities can be specifically targeted.

The Corporate Surveillance State

When it comes to these developments in technology, state and corporate forces work more closely with each other than ever before — and much more closely than they are willing to admit. Srećko Horvat has pointed out the short distance between the creators of Pokémon Go and Hillary Clinton, despite her odd and unsolicited recent public claim that she didn’t know who made the game. Likewise, Julian Assange’s strangely under-discussed 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks showed the shocking proximity of Google chief Eric Schmidt and the Washington state apparatus. In terms of surveillance and the use of big data, it has become impossible to sustain the distinction between state control and the production of wealth, since the two have become so irrevocably intertwined. As such, old arguments that “it’s all just about money” need to be treated with greater suspicion, since major firms today are so closely tied to the state. Various aspects of state organization should likewise be considered equally suspect because of their corporate underpinnings.

Of course, when it comes to the mapping applications that promise to help us access the best quality objects of our desire with the greatest efficiency and the least cost, these tempting forces of joint corporate and state control are entered into willingly by participants. As such, they require something else in order to function in the all-consuming way that they do. Far from simply channeling and transforming our movements, they also need to channel and even transform our desires.

We are now firmly within the world of the electronic object, where the mediation of everything from lovers and friends to meals and activities via our mobile phones and computers makes it virtually impossible to separate physical from electronic objectivity. Whilst the electronic Pokémon or the “in-game rewards” offered by many applications may not yet have the physicality of a lover who can be accessed via Tinder, or a burger that can be located via JustEat, the burger and the lover certainly have the electronic objectivity of the Pokémon. We can therefore see a transformation in the objects of desire taking place by and through our devices, so that we are confronted not only with a change in how we get what we want, but with a change in what we want in the first place.

Italo Calvino once wrote of the “amorous relationship” that “erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas.” While in such a moment food and lover become one in a kind of orgy of physical consumption, in the same novel Calvino warned of a time “when the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten,” and in which “perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.”

It is this world that we find ourselves desiring in, where an orgy of electronic objects with no olfactory physicality blurs the distinction between lovers, meals and “in-game” rewards. The purpose of this shift, of course, is to increase the power of technological corporations by giving them a new sort of control over the way we relate to our objects of desire. If the boundaries between the way we search, desire and acquire our burgers, lovers and Pikachus are dissolving, it is not so much the old point that everything has become a commodity, but a new point that this kind of substitutional electronic objectivity endows corporate and state technologists with unprecedented power to distribute and redistribute the objects of the desire around the “smart city.”

Data Centralization in China and the West

There is, moreover, a significant centralization of power underpinning these developments. Like the social credit idea, the Chinese phenomenon of WeChat — developed in 2011 by Tencent, one of the largest internet and mobile media companies in the world — has received concerned media coverage in the West. WeChat is the first truly successful “SuperApp,” the basic premise of which is that all applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, OpenRice, Tinder, TripAdvisor and many more, are rolled into one cohesive application. All for our convenience, of course.

As a result, however, there is now a new level of cohesion between the data-collection and movement monitoring going on in the mobile phone as a whole, where all data is now directly collected in a single place. More than half of the 1.1 billion WeChat users access the app over 10 times per day, and many users simply leave it on continuously, using it to map, shop, date and play. This means that the app sets a new precedent for continually monitoring the movements of a whole nation of citizens. WeChat’s incredibly strange “heat map” feature actually lets users — and authorities — see where crowds are forming. The claim is that this has nothing to do with crowd control: the objective is simply to help us access the least crowded shopping malls, doing nothing more than helping us get what we want.

WeChat is already the most popular social media application in China, but it will soon have huge significance worldwide, with an international version now available and many replica “SuperApps” in production. What the Western media finds to be so concerning about WeChat is once again something that already exists here in the West, at least in beta form, without us knowing it. WeChat actually offers us a glimpse into an Orwellian future in which companies and governments can track every movement we make. While in China the blocking of Google means that WeChat uses Baidu Maps as its API, the international version of WeChat simply taps into Google Maps, showing just how deeply integrated these corporate technologies already are.

What emerges from Western media coverage of these developments is the continued insistence on an apparent division between the public and the private sphere in the United States and Europe. When it comes to digital surveillance and the monitoring of movement, the situation is almost certainly better in the West than it is in China at this moment. Yet from an analysis of recent developments in China we learn not only that we need to be attentive to similar dangers here in the West, but also that there are powerful ideological mechanisms at play to obscure these developments by presenting China and the US as fundamentally opposed to one another. Whilst in China the links between the new SuperApps and the state are commonly accepted, in the US the illusion of privacy remains paramount. Although data is often shared between different corporations and between the public and the private sectors, this fact is generally obscured. The continued expressions of shock at the more openly centralized state control visible in China serve only to further consolidate the impression that these things are not happening in the US and Europe.

Furthermore, WeChat reveals more than the dangers of mass data collection and new levels of technological surveillance. It also embodies the power of the phone over the objects of desire. Since one single app can successfully market us food, lovers, holidays, events, blogs and even charities, the connections between such “objects” become more important than the differences. While the structural similarities between Grindr, Pokémon Go and OpenRice become apparent via analysis of both their surfaces and back systems, WeChat makes the connections plain to see. The various forms and objects of each individual’s desire no longer represent discreet and separable elements of a subject’s life. Instead we enter a fully cohesive libidinal economy in which we are increasingly regulated and mapped via the organization of what and how we desire.

The Desirevolution

So what do we do when faced with this revolution — a technological revolution that is not overthrowing any existing power structures but rather transforming the world in the service of private corporations and the state? Often, the response of those concerned by such developments is to express hostility or distrust towards technology itself. Yet to break this corporate organization of desire, we need not nostalgically yearn for a desire that is free of politics and technology, for no such desire is possible. On the contrary, what we need is to recognize that desire is necessarily and always controlled by both politics and technology.

This awareness would be the first step towards ensuring that the centralized corporate and state organization of desire malfunctions — and, ultimately, it would be the first step towards its potential reprogramming. The corporate desirevolution depends on our blindness to the politics of its technologies, asking us to experience our desires as spontaneous yearning and our mobile phone and its powerful apps as just tools for our convenience, helping us get what we want in the easiest way possible. We need to recognize that this is far from the case. The principal concern of those who own the apps — perhaps even more powerful than data collection — is to transform desire itself. At the very least, we can make visible the complicity of such technologies in producing the perfect conformist modern citizen.

The United States of Work

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Employers exercise vast control over our lives, even when we’re not on the job. How did our bosses gain power that the government itself doesn’t hold?

By Miya Tokumitsu

Source: New Republic

Work no longer works. “You need to acquire more skills,” we tell young job seekers whose résumés at 22 are already longer than their parents’ were at 32. “Work will give you meaning,” we encourage people to tell themselves, so that they put in 60 hours or more per week on the job, removing them from other sources of meaning, such as daydreaming or social life. “Work will give you satisfaction,” we insist, even though it requires abiding by employers’ rules, and the unwritten rules of the market, for most of our waking hours. At the very least, work is supposed to be a means to earning an income. But if it’s possible to work full time and still live in poverty, what’s the point?

Even before the global financial crisis of 2008, it had become clear that if waged work is supposed to provide a measure of well-being and social structure, it has failed on its own terms. Real household wages in the United States have remained stagnant since the 1970s, even as the costs of university degrees and other credentials rise. Young people find an employment landscape defined by unpaid internships, temporary work, and low pay. The glut of degree-holding young workers has pushed many of them into the semi- or unskilled labor force, making prospects even narrower for non–degree holders. Entry-level wages for high school graduates have in fact fallen. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, these lost earnings will depress this generation’s wages for their entire working lives. Meanwhile, those at the very top—many of whom derive their wealth not from work, but from returns on capital—vacuum up an ever-greater share of prosperity.

Against this bleak landscape, a growing body of scholarship aims to overturn our culture’s deepest assumptions about how work confers wealth, meaning, and care throughout society. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, explores how the discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, documenting the expansive power that firms now wield over their employees in everything from how they dress to what they tweet. James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers, goes one step further in No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. Instead of insisting on jobs for all or proposing that we hold employers to higher standards, Livingston argues, we should just scrap work altogether.

Livingston’s vision is the more radical of the two; his book is a wide-ranging polemic that frequently delivers the refrain “Fuck work.” But in original ways, both books make a powerful claim: that our lives today are ruled, above all, by work. We can try to convince ourselves that we are free, but as long as we must submit to the increasing authority of our employers and the labor market, we are not. We therefore fancy that we want to work, that work grounds our character, that markets encompass the possible. We are unable to imagine what a full life could be, much less to live one. Even more radically, both books highlight the dramatic and alarming changes that work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens the fundamental ideals of democracy: equality and freedom.

Anderson’s most provocative argument is that large companies, the institutions that employ most workers, amount to a de facto form of government, exerting massive and intrusive power in our daily lives. Unlike the state, these private governments are able to wield power with little oversight, because the executives and boards of directors that rule them are accountable to no one but themselves. Although they exercise their power to varying degrees and through both direct and “soft” means, employers can dictate how we dress and style our hair, when we eat, when (and if) we may use the toilet, with whom we may partner and under what arrangements. Employers may subject our bodies to drug tests; monitor our speech both on and off the job; require us to answer questionnaires about our exercise habits, off-hours alcohol consumption, and childbearing intentions; and rifle through our belongings. If the state held such sweeping powers, Anderson argues, we would probably not consider ourselves free men and women.

Employees, meanwhile, have few ways to fight back. Yes, they may leave the company, but doing so usually necessitates being unemployed or migrating to another company and working under similar rules. Workers may organize, but unions have been so decimated in recent years that their clout is greatly diminished. What’s more, employers are swift to fire anyone they suspect of speaking to their colleagues about organizing, and most workers lack the time and resources to mount a legal challenge to wrongful termination.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As corporations have worked methodically to amass sweeping powers over their employees, they have held aloft the beguiling principle of individual freedom, claiming that only unregulated markets can guarantee personal liberty. Instead, operating under relatively few regulations themselves, these companies have succeeded at imposing all manner of regulation on their employees. That is to say, they use the language of individual liberty to claim that corporations require freedom to treat workers as they like.

Anderson sets out to discredit such arguments by tracing them back to their historical origins. The notion that personal freedom is rooted in free markets, for instance, originated with the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, when working conditions differed substantially from today’s. The Levellers believed that a market society was essential to liberate individuals from the remnants of feudal hierarchies; their vision of utopia was a world in which men could meet and interact on terms of equality and dignity. Their ideas echoed through the writing and politics of later figures like John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom believed that open markets could provide the essential infrastructure for individuals to shape their own destiny.

An anti-statist streak runs through several of these thinkers, particularly the Levellers and Paine, who viewed markets as the bulwark against state oppression. Paine and Smith, however, would hardly qualify as hard-line contemporary libertarians. Smith believed that public education was essential to a fair market society, and Paine proposed a system of social insurance that included old-age pensions as well as survivor and disability benefits. Their hope was not for a world of win-or-die competition, but one in which open markets would allow individuals to make the fullest use of their talents, free from state monopolies and meddlesome bosses.

For Anderson, the latter point is essential; the notion of lifelong employment under a boss was anathema to these earlier visions of personal freedom. Writing in the 1770s, Smith assumes that independent actors in his market society will be self-employed, and uses butchers and bakers as his exemplars; his “pin factory,” meant to illustrate division of labor, employs only ten people. These thinkers could not envision a world in which most workers spend most of their lives performing wage labor under a single employer. In an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln stated, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” In other words, even well into the nineteenth century, defenders of an unregulated market society viewed wage labor as a temporary stage on the way to becoming a proprietor.

Lincoln’s scenario does not reflect the way most people work today. Yet the “small business owner” endures as an American stock character, conjured by politicians to push through deregulatory measures that benefit large corporations. In reality, thanks to a lack of guaranteed, nationalized health care and threadbare welfare benefits, setting up a small business is simply too risky a venture for many Americans, who must rely on their employers for health insurance and income. These conditions render long-term employment more palatable than a precarious existence of freelance gigs, which further gives companies license to oppress their employees.

The modern relationship between employer and employee began with the rise of large-scale companies in the nineteenth century. Although employment contracts date back to the Middle Ages, preindustrial arrangements bore little resemblance to the documents we know today. Like modern employees, journeymen and apprentices often served their employers for years, but masters performed the same or similar work in proximity to their subordinates. As a result, Anderson points out, working conditions—the speed required of workers and the hazards to which they might be exposed—were kept in check by what the masters were willing to tolerate for themselves.

The Industrial Revolution brought radical changes, as companies grew ever larger and management structures more complex. “Employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all,” Anderson observes. “Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled.” Companies multiplied rapidly in size. Labor contracts now bonded workers to massive organizations in which discipline, briefs, and decrees flowed downward, but whose leaders were unreachable by ordinary workers. Today, fast food workers or bank tellers would be hard-pressed to petition their CEOs at McDonald’s or Wells Fargo in person.

Despite this, we often speak of employment contracts as agreements between equals, as if we are living in Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century dream world. In a still-influential paper from 1937 titled “The Nature of the Firm,” the economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase established himself as an early observer and theorist of corporate concerns. He described the employment contract not as a document that handed the employer unaccountable powers, but as one that circumscribed those powers. In signing a contract, the employee “agrees to obey the directions of an entrepreneur within certain limits,” he emphasized. But such characterizations, as Anderson notes, do not reflect reality; most workers agree to employment without any negotiation or even communication about their employer’s power or its limits. The exceptions to this rule are few and notable: top professional athletes, celebrity entertainers, superstar academics, and the (increasingly small) groups of workers who are able to bargain collectively.

Yet because employment contracts create the illusion that workers and companies have arrived at a mutually satisfying agreement, the increasingly onerous restrictions placed on modern employees are often presented as “best practices” and “industry standards,” framing all sorts of behaviors and outcomes as things that ought to be intrinsically desired by workers themselves. Who, after all, would not want to work on something in the “best” way? Beyond employment contracts, companies also rely on social pressure to foster obedience: If everyone in the office regularly stays until seven o’clock every night, who would risk departing at five, even if it’s technically allowed? Such social prods exist alongside more rigid behavioral codes that dictate everything from how visible an employee’s tattoo can be to when and how long workers can break for lunch.

Many workers, in fact, have little sense of the legal scope of their employer’s power. Most would be shocked to discover that they could be fired for being too attractive, declining to attend a political rally favored by their employer, or finding out that their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss—all real-life examples cited by Anderson. Indeed, it is only after dismissal for such reasons that many workers learn of the sweeping breadth of at-will employment, the contractual norm that allows American employers to fire workers without warning and without cause, except for reasons explicitly deemed illegal.

In reality, the employment landscape is even more dire than Anderson outlines. The rise of staffing or “temp” agencies, for example, undercuts the very idea of a direct relationship between worker and employer. In The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America, sociologist Erin Hatton notes that millions of workers now labor under subcontracting arrangements, which give employers even greater latitude to abuse employees. For years, Walmart—America’s largest retailer—used a subcontracting firm to hire hundreds of cleaners, many from Eastern Europe, who worked for months on end without overtime pay or a single day off. After federal agents raided dozens of Walmarts and arrested the cleaners as illegal immigrants, company executives used the subcontracting agreement to shirk responsibility for their exploitation of the cleaners, claiming they had no knowledge of their immigration status or conditions.

By any reasonable standard, much “temp” work is not even temporary. Employees sometimes work for years in a single workplace, even through promotions, without ever being granted official status as an employee. Similarly, “gig economy” platforms like Uber designate their workers as contractors rather than employees, a distinction that exempts the company from paying them minimum wage and overtime. Many “permatemps” and contractors perform the same work as employees, yet lack even the paltry protections and benefits awarded to full-time workers.

A weak job market, paired with the increasing precarity of work, means that more and more workers are forced to make their living by stringing together freelance assignments or winning fixed-term contracts, subjecting those workers to even more rules and restrictions. On top of their actual jobs, contractors and temp workers must do the additional work of appearing affable and employable not just on the job, but during their ongoing efforts to secure their next gig. Constantly pitching, writing up applications, and personal branding on social media requires a level of self-censorship, lest a controversial tweet or compromising Facebook photo sink their job prospects. Forced to anticipate the wishes not of a specific employer, but of all potential future employers, many opt out of participating in social media or practicing politics in any visible capacity. Their public personas are shaped not by their own beliefs and desires, but by the demands of the labor market.

For Livingston, it’s not just employers but work itself that is the problem. We toil because we must, but also because our culture has trained us to see work as the greatest enactment of our dignity and personal character. Livingston challenges us to turn away from such outmoded ideas, rooted in Protestant ideals. Like Anderson, he sweeps through centuries of labor theory with impressive efficiency, from Marx and Hegel to Freud and Lincoln, whose 1859 speech he also quotes. Livingston centers on these thinkers because they all found the connection between work and virtue troubling. Hegel believed that work causes individuals to defer their desires, nurturing a “slave morality.” Marx proposed that “real freedom came after work.” And Freud understood the Protestant work ethic as “the symptom of repression, perhaps even regression.”

Nor is it practical, Livingston argues, to exalt work: There are simply not enough jobs to keep most adults employed at a living wage, given the rise of automation and increases in productivity. Besides, the relation between income and work is arbitrary. Cooking dinner for your family is unpaid work, while cooking dinner for strangers usually comes with a paycheck. There’s nothing inherently different in the labor involved—only in the compensation. Anderson argues that work impedes individual freedom; Livingston points out that it rarely pays enough. As technological advances continue to weaken the demand for human labor, wages will inevitably be driven down even further. Instead of idealizing work and making it the linchpin of social organization, Livingston suggests, why not just get rid of it?

Livingston belongs to a cadre of thinkers, including Kathi Weeks, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, who believe that we should strive for a “postwork” society in one form or another. Strands of this idea go back at least as far as Keynes’s 1930 essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Not only would work be eliminated or vastly reduced by technology, Keynes predicted, but we would also be unburdened spiritually. Devotion to work was, he deemed, one of many “pseudo-moral principles” that “exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”

Since people in this new world would no longer have to earn a salary, they would, Livingston envisions, receive some kind of universal basic income. UBI is a slippery concept, adaptable to both the socialist left and libertarian right, but it essentially entails distributing a living wage to every member of society. In most conceptualizations, the income is indeed basic—no cases of Dom Pérignon—and would cover the essentials like rent and groceries. Individuals would then be free to choose whether and how much they want to work to supplement the UBI. Leftist proponents tend to advocate pairing UBI with a strong welfare state to provide nationalized health care, tuition-free education, and other services. Some libertarians view UBI as a way to pare down the welfare state, arguing that it’s better simply to give people money to buy food and health care directly, rather than forcing them to engage with food stamp and Medicaid bureaucracies.

According to Livingston, we are finally on the verge of this postwork society because of automation. Robots are now advanced enough to take over complex jobs in areas like agriculture and mining, eliminating the need for humans to perform dangerous or tedious tasks. In practice, however, automation is a double-edged sword, with the capacity to oppress as well as unburden. Machines often accelerate the rate at which humans can work, taxing rather than liberating them. Conveyor belts eliminated the need for workers to pass unfinished products along to their colleagues—but as Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball so hilariously demonstrated, the belts also increased the pace at which those same workers needed to turn wrenches and wrap chocolates. In retail and customer service, a main function of automation has been not to eliminate work, but to eliminate waged work, transferring much of the labor onto consumers, who must now weigh and code their own vegetables at the supermarket, check out their own library books, and tag their own luggage at the airport.

At the same time, it may be harder to automate some jobs that require a human touch, such as floristry or hairstyling. The same goes for the delicate work of caring for the young, sick, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable. In today’s economy, the demand for such labor is rising rapidly: “Nine of the twelve fastest-growing fields,” The New York Times reported earlier this year, “are different ways of saying ‘nurse.’” These jobs also happen to be low-paying, emotionally and physically grueling, dirty, hazardous, and shouldered largely by women and immigrants. Regardless of whether employment is virtuous or not, our immediate goal should perhaps be to distribute the burdens of caregiving, since such work is essential to the functioning of society and benefits us all.

A truly work-free world is one that would entail a revolution from our present social organizations. We could no longer conceive of welfare as a last resort—as the “safety net” metaphor implies—but would be forced to treat it as an unremarkable and universal fact of life. This alone would require us to support a massive redistribution of wealth, and to reclaim our political institutions from the big-money interests that are allergic to such changes. Tall orders indeed—but as Srnicek and Williams remind us in their book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, neoliberals pulled off just such a revolution in the postwar years. Thanks to their efforts, free-market liberalism replaced Keynesianism as the political and economic common sense all around the world.

Another possible solution to the current miseries of unemployment and worker exploitation is the one Livingston rejects in his title: full employment. For anti-work partisans, full employment takes us in the wrong direction, and UBI corrects the course. But the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, rather than creating new jobs, full employment could require us to reduce our work hours drastically and spread them throughout the workforce—a scheme that could radically de-center waged work in our lives. A dual strategy of pursuing full employment while also demanding universal benefits—including health care, childcare, and affordable housing—would maximize workers’ bargaining power to ensure that they, and not just owners of capital, actually get to enjoy the bounty of labor-saving technology.

Nevertheless, Livingston’s critiques of full employment are worth heeding. As with automation, it can all go wrong if we use the banner of full employment to create pointless roles—what David Graeber has termed “bullshit jobs,” in which workers sit in some soul-sucking basement office for eight hours a day—or harmful jobs, like building nuclear weapons. If we do not have a deliberate politics rooted in universal social justice, then full employment, a basic income, and automation will not liberate us from the degradations of work.

Both Livingston and Anderson reveal how much of our own power we’ve already ceded in making waged work the conduit for our ideals of liberty and morality. The scale and coordination of the institutions we’re up against in the fight for our emancipation is, as Anderson demonstrates, staggering. Employers hold the means to our well-being, and they have the law on their side. Individual efforts to achieve a better “work-life balance” for ourselves and our families miss the wider issue we face as waged employees. Livingston demonstrates the scale at which we should be thinking: Our demands should be revolutionary, our imaginations wide. Standing amid the wreckage of last year’s presidential election, what other choice do we have?

Miya Tokumitsu is a lecturer of art history at the University of Melbourne and a contributing editor at Jacobin. She is the author of Do What You Love. And Other Lies about Success and Happiness.

Reimagining Money

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

What if markets were designed to build trust instead of wealth?

By Douglas Rushkoff

(The Atlantic)

Bitcoin was conceived as a modern solution to an ages-old problem: How can two parties agree on and verify an exchange of value? In this sense, Bitcoin is an effective technology, in that it trains the massive processing power of distributed personal computers on the same situation that paper currency was built to resolve. But in important ways, Bitcoin transposes some of the shortcomings of traditional currency onto the digital realm. It ignores a whole host of questions about the potential to reimagine what money can be designed to emphasize: What sorts of money will encourage admirable human behavior? What sorts of money systems will encourage trust, reenergize local commerce, favor peer-to-peer value exchange, and transcend the growth requirement? In short, how can money be less an extractor of value and more a utility for its exchange?Around the world, people have proposed experimental, tentative answers to these questions. What follows are three ways that people have toyed with rearranging the priorities of transactions—all of which would encourage a radical reimagination of what money is and can do.

The simplest approach to limiting the delocalizing, extractive power of central currency is for communities to adopt their own local currencies, pegged or tied in some way to a central currency. One of the first and most successful contemporary efforts is the Massachusetts BerkShare, which was developed to help keep money from flowing out of the Berkshire region.

One hundred BerkShares cost $95 and are available at local banks throughout the region. Participating local merchants then accept them as if they were dollars—offering their customers what amounts to a 5-percent discount for using the local money. Although it amounts to selling goods at a perpetual discount, merchants can in turn spend their local currency at other local businesses and receive the same discounted rate. Nonlocals and tourists purchase goods with dollars at full price, and those who bother to purchase items with BerkShares presumably leave town with a bit of unspent local money in their pockets.

The 5-percent local discount may seem like a huge disadvantage to take on—but only if businesses think of themselves as competing individuals. In the long term, the discount is more than compensated for by the fact that BerkShares can circulate only locally. They remain in the region and come back to the same stores again and again. Even if nonlocal stores, such as Walmart, agree to accept the local currency, they can’t deliver it up to their shareholders or trap it in static savings. The best Walmart can do is use it to pay their local workers or purchase supplies and services from local merchants.

Many other communities—Detroit, Santa Barbara, and a few places in Europe—are experimenting with variations on the BerkShare model. Most of these local currencies are still more fad than utility. In some cases, it’s because only economically conscious progressives are willing to employ them. In others, it’s because the central monetary system is still strong enough to serve a majority of people—or dominant enough to minimize the apparent viability of alternatives. Moreover, by pegging themselves to central currency, these local discount currencies can isolate themselves only so much from the chronic monetary problems of inflation, deflation, bubbles, and debt.

* * *

Unlike local discount currencies, cooperative community currencies don’t need to be pegged to the dollar at all. They are not purchased into existence but are worked into circulation. They are best thought of less like money than like exchanges.

The simplest form of cooperative currency is a favor bank, such as those founded in Greece and other parts of southern Europe during the Euro crisis. Incapable of finding work or sourcing Euros, people in many places lost the ability to transact. Even though a majority of what they needed could be produced locally, they had no cash with which to trade. So they built simple, secure trading websites—mini-eBays—where people offered their goods and services to others in return for the goods and services they needed. The sites did not record value amounts so much as keep general track of who was providing what to the community and coordinate fair exchanges. This casual, transparent solution works particularly well in a community where people already know one another and freeloaders can be pressured to contribute.

Larger communities have been using “time dollars,” a currency system that keeps track of how many hours people contribute to one another. Again, a simple exchange is set up on a website, where people list what they need and what they can contribute. The bigger and more anonymous a community, the more security and verification is required. Luckily, dozens of startups and nonprofit organizations have been developing apps and website kits via which local or even nonlocal communities can establish and run their own currencies.

Time exchanges tend to work best when everybody values their time the same way or is providing the same service. Time dollars are extremely egalitarian, valuing each person’s time the same as anyone else’s. An “hour” is worth one hour of work, whether it is performed by a plumber or a psychotherapist.

The Japanese recession gave rise to one of the most successful time exchanges yet, called Fureai Kippu, or “Caring Relationship Tickets.” People no longer had enough cash to pay for their parents’ or grandparents’ health-care services—but because they had moved far away from home to find jobs, they couldn’t take care of their relatives themselves either. The Fureai Kippu exchange gave people the ability to bank hours of eldercare by taking care of old people in their communities, which they could then spend to get care for their own relatives far away. So one person might provide an hour of bathing services for an elder in her neighborhood in return for someone preparing meals for her grandfather who lives in another city. As the Caring Relationship Tickets became accepted things of value, people began using them for a variety of services.

Time-dollars systems, and those like them, don’t encourage extractive profiteering because they are really only good for exchanging labor and services with other people. Unlike bank-issued currency, hours are not borrowed into existence, nor do they collect interest over time. They don’t actually accumulate. Instead, everyone’s account starts at zero. When Sylvia babysits for Joe’s kid, her account is credited three hours, and Joe’s is debited three hours. Since they both started at zero, Sylvia now has three hours in her account, while Joe’s account is in the red for three hours’ worth of work. He will remain owing those three hours to the system—to the community—until Mary hires him to fix her refrigerator. The net result of the exchange is even. The net total of the system is still zero. It is not a growth economy but a transactional economy.

Although a person can do a bunch of work in order to bank enough hours to get a whole bunch of services, most time exchanges put a limit on how many hours members can accumulate. They also put a limit on how many hours a person can owe. This way a freeloader can be removed from the system, and the entire community can absorb the cost of the unearned hours pretty easily.

* * *

How might traditional banks participate effectively in the financial rehabilitation of the communities they serve? Here’s just one possibility:

Sam’s Pizzeria is thriving as a local business, and Sam needs $200,000 to expand the dining room and build a second restroom. Normally, the bank would evaluate his business and credit and then either reject his loan request or give him the money at around 8 percent interest. The risk is that he won’t get enough new business to fill the new space, won’t be able to pay back the loan, and will go out of business. Indeed, part of the cost of the loan is that speculative risk.

In another approach, the banker could make Sam a different offer. The bank could agree to put up $100,000 toward the expansion project at 8 percent if Sam is able to raise the other $100,000 from his community in the form of market money: Sam is to sell digital coupons for $120 worth of pizza at the expanded restaurant at a cost of $100 per coupon. The bank can supply the software and administrate the escrow. If Sam can’t raise the money, then it proves the community wasn’t ready, and the bank can return everyone’s money.

If he does raise the money, then the bank has gained the security of a terrific community buy-in. Sam got his money more cheaply than if he borrowed the whole sum from the bank, because he can pay back the interest in retail-priced pizza. The community lenders have earned a fast 20 percent on their money—far more than they could earn in a bank or mutual fund. And it’s an investment that pays all sorts of other dividends: a more thriving downtown, more customers for other local businesses, better real-estate values, a higher tax base, better public schools, and so on. These are benefits one can’t see when buying stocks or abstract derivatives. Meanwhile, all the local “investors” now have a stake in the restaurant’s staying open at least long enough for them to cash in all their coupons. That’s good motivation to publicize it, take friends out to eat there, and contribute to its success.

For its part, the bank has diversified its range of services, bet on the possibility that community currencies will gain traction, and demonstrated a willingness to do something other than extract value from a community. The bank becomes a community partner, helping a local region invest in itself. The approach also provides the bank with a great hedge against continued deflation, hyperinflation, or growing consumer dissatisfaction with Wall Street and centrally issued money. If capital lending continues to contract as a business sector, the bank has already positioned itself to function as more of a service company—providing the authentication and financial expertise small businesses still need to thrive.

The bank transforms itself from an agent of debt to a catalyst for distribution and circulation. Like money in a digital age, it becomes less a thing of value in itself than a way of fostering the value creation and exchange of others.

This article has been adapted from Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk

Source: Reality Sandwich

It’s delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull
They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line
Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”1

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others—human and non-human—as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy.

You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a lefty conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads to hope.

Viruses of the Mind

The New World fell not to a sword but to a meme.
~ Daniel Quinn²

One of the most well-accepted scientific theories that helps explain the power of idea-spreading is memetics.

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . . It is still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.” He goes on, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”³

One of the high priests of rationalism, the scientific method, and atheism, is also the father of the meme of ‘memes.’ However, like all memes or ideas, there can be no ownership in a traditional sense, only the entanglement that quantum physics reminds us characterizes our intra-actions.⁴

Of course, similar notions of how ideas move between us have been around in Western traditions for centuries. Plato was the first to fully articulate this through his Theory of Forms, which argues that non-physical forms—i.e., Ideas—represent the perfect reality from which material reality is derived.

Modern articulations of the Theory of Forms can be seen in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Noosphere (the sphere of human thought) and Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, where structures of the unconscious are shared among beings of the same species. For Jung, the idea of the marauding cannibal would first be an archetype that manifests in the material world through the actions of those who channel or embody it.

For those who prefer their science more empirical, the growing field of epigenetics provides some intellectual concrete. Epigenetics studies changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than any physical alteration of the gene itself. In other words, how traits vary from generation to generation is not solely a question of material biology but is partly determined by environmental and contextual factors that affected our ancestors.⁵

The Wetiko Virus

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the White man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land infested by “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us.
~ Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle⁶

Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Sufism (the mystical branch of Islam), Taoism, Gnosticism, as well as many Indigenous cultures, have long understood the mind-based nature of creation. These worldviews have at their core a recognition of the power of thought-forms to determine the course of physical events.

Various First Nations traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows—indeed commands—the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement. Author Paul Levy, in an attempt to find language accessible for Western audiences, describes it as ‘malignant egophrenia’—the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. We will use the term wetiko as it is the original, and reminds us of the wisdom to be found in Indigenous cultures, for those who have the ears to hear.

Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, can personify the disease: ‘a wetiko.’ This holds true for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they routinely manifest these traits.

In his now classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American historian Jack D. Forbes describes how there was a commonly-held belief among many Indigenous communities that the European colonialists were so chronically and uniformly infected with wetiko that it must be a defining characteristic of the culture from which they came. Examining the history of these cultures, Forbes laments, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.”⁷

We would presumably all agree that behavior of the European colonialists in North America can be described as cannibalistic. Their drive for conquest and material accumulation was a violent act of consumption. The engine of the invading culture suckedin lives and resources of millions of others and turned them into wealth and power for themselves. The figures are still disputed, but it is safe to place the numbers killed in the tens of millions, certainly one of the most brutal genocides in history. And the impact on non-human life was equally vast. Moreover, it was all done with a moral certainty that all destruction was justified in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization.’

This framing belies the extent of the wetiko infection in the invader culture. So blinded were they by self-referential ambition that they could not see other life as being as important as their own. They could not see past ideological blinders to the intrinsic value of life or the interdependent nature of all things, despite this being the dominant perspective of the Indigenous populations they encountered. Their ability to see and know in ways different from their own was, it seems, amputated.

This is not an anti-European rant. This is the description of a disease whose vector was determined by deep patterns of history, including those that empowered Europeans to drive ‘global exploration’ as certain technologies emerged.

The wetiko meme has almost certainly existed in individuals since the dawn of humanity. It is, after all, a sickness that lives through and is born from the human psyche. But the origin of wetiko cultures is more identifiable.

Memes can spread at the speed of thought but they usually require generations to change the core characteristics of cultures. What we can say is that the fingerprints of wetiko-like beliefs can be traced at least as far back as the Neolithic revolution, when humans in the Fertile Crescent first learned to dominate their environment by what author Daniel Quinn calls ‘totalitarian agriculture’ — i.e., settled agricultural practices that produce more food than is strictly needed for the population, and that see the destruction of any living entity that gets in the way of that (over-)production—be it other humans, ‘pests’ or landscaping—as not only legitimate but moral.

This early form of wetiko-logic received an amplifying power of indescribable magnitude with the arrival of Christianity. “Let us make mankind . . . rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,” said an authority no less than God in Genesis 1:26. After 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture spreading slowly across the region, it is perhaps not surprising that the logic finds voice in the holy texts that emerged there. Regardless, it was driven across Europe at the point of Roman swords in the two hundred years after Christ’s death. It is no coincidence that, in order for Christianity to become dominant, the existing pagan belief-system, with its understanding of humanity’s place within rather than above nature, had to be all but annihilated.⁸

The point is that the epidemiology of wetiko has left clear indicators of its lineage. And although it cannot be pathologized along geographic or racial lines, the cultural strain we know today certainly has many of its deepest roots in Europe. It was, after all, European projects—from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism, imperialism, and slavery—that developed the technology that opened up the channels that facilitated the spread of wetiko culture all around the world. In this way, we are all heirs and inheritors of wetiko colonialism.

We are all host carriers of wetiko now.

Wetiko Capitalism: Removing the Veils of Context

I don’t know who discovered water, but I can tell you it wasn’t a fish.
~ Attributed to Marshall McLuhan

When Western anthropologists first started to study wetiko, they believed it to be only a disease of the individual and a literal form of flesh-eating cannibalism.⁹ On both counts, as discussed, their understanding was, if not wrong, certainly limited. They did, however, accurately isolate two traits that are relevant for thinking about cultures: (1) the initial act, even when driven by necessity, creates a residual, unnatural desire for more; and (2) the host carrier, which they called the ‘victim,’ ended up with an ‘icy heart’— i.e., their ability for empathy and compassion was amputated.

The reader can probably already sense from the two traits mentioned above the wetiko nature of modern capitalism. Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its disregard for the pain of groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as cannibalizing life on this planet. It is not the only truth—capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity—but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.

Of course, capitalism is a human conception and so we can also say that we are phenomenal hosts of the wetiko mind virus. To understand what makes us such, it is useful to consider a couple of the traits that guide the evolution of human cultures.

We have decades of evidence from social science describing just what highly contextual beings we are. Almost all aspects of our behavior, including our moral judgments and limits, are significantly shaped in response to the cultural signifiers that surround us. The Good Samaritan studies, for example, show that even when people are primed with the idea of altruism, they will walk by others in need when they are in a rush or some other contextual variable changes.¹⁰ And the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments show how a large majority of people are capable of shocking another human to a point they know can cause death simply because an authority figure in a white lab coat insists they do so.¹¹

We really are products of our environment, and so it should be taken as inevitable that those who live in a wetiko culture will manifest, to one degree or other, wetiko beliefs and behaviors.

Looking through the broader contextual lens, we must also account for the self-perpetuating nature of complex systems. Any living network that becomes sufficiently complex will become self-organizing, and from that point on will demonstrate an instinct to survive. In practical terms, this means that it will distribute its resources to support behavior that best mimics its own logic and ensures its survival.¹²

In other words, any system that is sufficiently infected by wetiko logic will reward cannibalistic behavior. Or, in Jack Forbes’ evocative language, “Those who squirm upwards [in a wetiko system] are, or become, wetiko, and they only perpetuate the system of corruption or oppression. Thus the communist leaders in the Soviet Union under Stalin were at least as vicious, deceitful and exploitative as their czarist predecessors. They obtained ‘power’ without changing their wetiko culture.”¹³

This ensures that the essential logic of cultures spreads down through generations as well as across them. And it explains why they self-organize resources to maintain a high degree of continuity in distributions of power, when those distributions efficiently serve their survival and growth. When this continuity is interrupted or broken, revolutions occur and the system is put under threat.

However, as the above quote suggests, the disruption must happen at the right level. Merely trading one wetiko for another at the top of an otherwise unchanged wetiko infrastructure (as in the case of Stalin replacing the czars or, more contemporarily, Obama replacing Bush) is largely pointless. At best, it might result in the softening of the cruelest edges of a wetiko machine. At worse, it does nothing except distract us from seeing the true infection.

The question, then, for anyone interested in excising the wetiko infection from a culture is, where is it? In one respect, because it is a psychic phenomenon that lives in potential in all of us, it is non-local. But this, though ultimately important to understand, is not the whole truth. It is also true that there is a conceptual place where the most powerful wetiko logic is held, and that, at least in theory, makes it vulnerable.

In the same way that a colony of bees will instinctively house its queen in the deepest chambers of the hive, so a complex adaptive system buries its most important operating logic furthest from the forces that can challenge them. This means two things: first, it means siting the logic in the deep rules that govern the whole. Not just this national economy or that, this government or that, but the mother system—the global operating system. And second, it means making these rules feel as intractable and inevitable as possible.

So what is this deep logic of the global operating system?

It comes in two parts. First, there is the ultimate purpose, which we might call the Prime Directive, which is to increase capital.

We often dress this up in a narrative that says capital generation is not the end but the means, the engine of progress. This makes the idea of dethroning it feel dangerous and even contrary to common sense. But the truth is, we have created a system that artificially treats money as sacred. At this point in capitalism’s history, life is controlled by, more than it controls, the forces of capital. The clue is really in the name. But if you need further proof, look no further than how we define and measure progress: GDP. More on that below.

Then, there is the logic for how we, the living components of this system, should behave, which we would summarize with the following epithet:

Selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore selfishness is everything.¹⁴

This dictates that if we all prioritize ourselves and maximize our own material wealth, an invisible hand (ah, what a seductive meme!) will create an equilibrium state and life everywhere will be made better. We are pitted against each other in a form of distributed fascism where we cocoon ourselves in the immediate problems of our own circumstances and consume what we can. We then couch this behavior in the benign language of family matters, national interests, job creation, GDP growth, and other upstanding endeavors.

Put these two parts of the puzzle together and it’s easy to see why the banker who generates excess capital receives vast rewards and is labelled ‘productive’ and ‘successful,’ almost regardless of the damage s/he causes. Those who are less ‘successful’ at producing excess capital, meanwhile, are rewarded far less, regardless of the life-affirming good they may be doing. Nurses, mothers, teachers, journalists, activists, scientists—all receive far less reward because they are less efficient at obeying the Prime Directive and may even be countermanding the ‘self-interest’ operating principle. And as for those who are actually poor—well, they are effortlessly labelled not just as practical but also moral failures.

This infection is so far advanced that the system now requires exponential capital growth. The World Bank tells us that we have to grow the global economy by at least 3 percent per year to avoid recession.¹⁵ Let’s think about what this means. Global GDP in 2014 (the last full year of data) was roughly USD $78 trillion.¹⁶ We grew that pie by 2.4% in 2015, which resulted in the commodification and subsequent consumption of roughly another $2 trillion in human labor and natural resources. That’s roughly the size of the entire global economy in 1970. It took us from the dawn of civilization to 1970 to reach $2 trillion in global GDP, and now we need that just in the differential so the entire house of cards doesn’t crumble. In order to achieve this rate of growth year-on-year, we are destroying our planet, ensuring mass species extinction, and displacing millions of our brothers and sisters (who we commonly refer to as ‘poor people’) from around the world.

So when people tell us that the market knows best, or technology will save us, or philanthrocapitalism will redistribute opportunities (pace Bill Gates), we have to understand that all of these seemingly common sense truisms are embedded in a broader operating system, a wetikonomy, with all that that means. And the more they are presented as ‘unchangeable,’ the more often we’re told, ‘there is no alternative,’ the more we should question. There is actually a beautiful irony in the fact that, when we know what we’re up against, such statements are our signposts for where to look.

It is not that we are against markets, technology, or philanthropy — they can all be wonderful, in the right context—but we are against how they are being used as alibis to excuse the insanity of the wetiko paradigm that they are inseparable from. We are reminded of Jack Forbes’ heavy words; “It is not logical to allow the wetikos to carry out their evil acts and then to accept their assessment of the nature of human life. For after all, the wetiko possess a bias created by their own evil lives, by their own amoral or immoral behavior. And too, if I am correct, they were, and are, also insane.”¹⁷

Information Tribalism, starring Terence McKenna, Marshall McLuhan and Alan Watts.

Seeing Wetiko: Antidote Logic

Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game, there is no progress.
~ Terence McKenna, Memes, Drugs and Community¹⁸

You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.
~ Beyoncé, Formation¹⁹

A key lesson of meme theory is that when we are conscious of the memetic viruses we are less likely to adhere to them blindly. Conscious awareness is like sunlight through the cracks of a window.

Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of ‘seeing wetiko’ in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure. And once we see, we can name, which is critical because words and language are a central battleground. To quote McKenna again:

The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language.. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.²⁰

His last line is critical for exploring our own agency in the replication of wetiko. We are all entangled in the unfolding of reality that is happening both to and through us. In place of traditional certainties and linear cause-and-effect logic, we can recast ourselves “as spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings—within a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of unfolding, agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in separation from anything else, a reality within which we are immersed both as participant agencies and to which we also owe significant aspects of our own natures.”²¹

If wetiko exists, it is because it exists within us. It is also entangled with the broader superstructure, relationships, and choice architecture that we are confronted with within a neoliberal system on the brink of collapse.

Forbes reminds us that we cannot ‘fight’ wetiko in any traditional sense: “One of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values.

Thus, when they ‘win,’ they lose.”²² A lot of reform-based initiatives, from the sharing economy to micro-lending have succumbed to the co-optation and retaliation of wetiko capitalism.

However, once we are in the mode of seeing wetiko, we can hack the cultural systems that perpetuate its logic. It is not difficult to figure out where to start. Following the money usually leads us to the core pillars of wetiko machinery. Those of us that are within these structures, from the corporate media to philanthropy to banking to the UN, have access to the heart of the wetiko monster.

For those of us on the outside, we can organize our lives in radically new ways to undermine wetiko structures. The simple act of gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debt–based money system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help decolonize and de-wetikoize the mind. Helping to create alternative communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of consciousness.

By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values.

We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us. Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern capitalism—i.e., holding a constellational worldview that sees all oppression as connected—serves our ability to see the alternatives, and indeed, all of us, as intricately connected.

Plato believed that ideas are the ‘eyes of the soul.’ Now that the veils obscuring wetiko are starting to be lifted, let us give birth to, and become, living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are challenging the monoculture of wetiko capitalism. Let us be pollinators of new memetic hives built on altruism, empathy, inter-connectedness, reverence, communality, and solidarity, defying the subject-object dualities of Cartesian/Newtonian/Enlightenment logic. Let us reclaim our birth right as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded paraphernalia, techno utopianism and even the self-salvation of the New Age. Let us dance with thought-forms through a deeper understanding of ethics, knowing, and being,²³ and the intimate awareness that our individual minds and bodies are a part of the collective battleground for the soul of humanity, and indeed, life on this planet. And let us re-embrace the ancient futures of our Indigenous ancestors that represent the only continuous line of living in symbiosis with Mother Nature. The dissolution of wetiko will be as much about remembering as it will be about creation.

Endnotes

1 These are lyrics from a song entitled “The Priests of the Golden Bull” by the Na-
tive Canadian singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie from her 1992 album entitled Coincidence and Likely Stories. The authors believe this was their first encounter
with the memetic mind virus of wendigo (a version of wetiko). This will all make sense at the end of this article.
2 Quinn, D. Beyond civilization: Humanity’s next great adventure. Broadway Books (2008), p. 50.
3 Dawkins, R. The selfish gene. Oxford University Press (1990).
4 ‘Intra-action’ is a neologism created by Karan Barad and described in her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). Barad writes about intra-action, rather than interaction, to illustrate how entanglement precedes thingness. In other words, there are no things as such, just relationships—and these ongoing relational dynamics are co-responsible for how things emerge.
5 Recent research, for example, has shown how the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have different stress hormone profiles than those from otherwise very similar circumstances but whose grandparents did not suffer through the Holocaust. Rodriguez, T. “Descendants of Holocaust survivors have altered stress hormones,” Scientific American (March 2015), accessed at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/descendants-of-holocaust-survivors-have-altered-stress-hormones/
6 Luther Standing Bear. Land of the spotted eagle. Bison Books (2006).
7 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.46.
8 See Not in His Image (2006) by John Lamb Lash for a comprehensive account of the systematic annihilation of paganism by the new Christian religion.
9 Cooper, J.M. “The Cree Witiko Psychosis” in Primitive Man, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan., 1933), pp. 20-24: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research.
10 Darley, J. M., and Batson, C.D. “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973), Vol. 27, Number 1, pp. 100-108.
11 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.
12 Capra F, Luisi P, A systems view of life: A unifying vision. Cambridge (2014), Chapter 8.
13 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.46.
14 A version of this argument was originally published on Occupy.com by the authors in a two-part essay entitled “Capitalism is Just a Story and Other Dangerous Thoughts.” See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/capitalism-just-story-and-other-dangerous-thoughts-part-i#sthash.INKCFdNs.dpuf.
15 For example, see this forecast report by the World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/GEP/GEP2016a/Global-Economic-Prospects-January-2016-Global-Outlook.pdf
16 See http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf
17 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.37.
18 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO6-1sqQme0
19 These lyrics are from Beyoncé’s song “Formation,” which was originally debuted at the 2015 Super Bowl. For a critical analysis, see Dianca London’s article entitled Beyoncé’s capitalism, masquerading as radical change.
20 McKenna, T. The archaic revival: Speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. Harper Collins (1992).
21 John Shotter, “Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns’’ Theory and Psychology, 2014.
22 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.61.
23 Karan Barad talks about the confluence of ethics, knowing, and being as an ‘onto-ethico-politico-epistemology.’ Ontology refers to what is in the world. Epistemology is about how we know what is in the world. And ethics is how we should engage in the world. These are not separate, but emerge materially in an ongoing dynamic. The nature of reality and the nature of knowledge are entangled—not fixed or final or determinate— and thus cannot be divorced from power and what we find valuable or just.

The Future of Crime

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in G-Spot 14 Winter 1994 and later included in the anthology book Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism [Home, 1997]. Though intended as speculative satire, aspects of it now seem eerily prophetic.)

By Stewart Home

Source: Stewart Home Society

In the nineteen-sixties a group of French radicals called the Situationists suggested that ‘freedom is the crime that contains all other crimes’. Things have changed a lot since then, although those at the top of the social heap still believe that the vast mass of humanity are simply cattle to be fattened and slaughtered. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s now ten years since 1984 and the hardware for our total electronic control not only exists, it is also completely obsolete.

The industrial economy based around railways, electricity and the car is a historical curiosity. Until recently, the technological innovations revolutionising society were centred on the generation, storage, processing and transmission of information. Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new technological revolution, a bioeconomy dependent upon genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurocomputers. Obviously, the level of scientific, technological and cultural development within any given society dictates the types of crime that may be committed within it. Among nomadic tribes, the chief crimes are rape and murder. With the establishment of agriculture and the development of a class system, theft became the major concern of those who controlled the fast expanding, and increasingly bureaucratic, legal system.

A lot of would-be trendy magazines and tv programmes like to pretend they’re covering the cutting edge of crime by running features on computer hacking. Basically, what these people present as the future of crime is hi-tech theft, with cybernauts ripping off money from bank accounts and credit card facilities. When you think about it, this scenario isn’t so different from some farmer of three thousand years ago stealing his neighbour’s cow. A theft, is a theft, is a theft, despite the fact that the methodology of larceny is transformed by technological developments.

What isn’t being reported by the mainstream media is the way in which biotechnology, based on genetic engineering, is being used to boost the profits of multinational corporations as it simultaneously destroys the health of ordinary people. At its most simple, this consists of drugs like Thalidomide being prescribed to pregnant women in Brazil, despite the fact that Thalidomide is banned in Europe because it causes children to be born without limbs. Biotechnology gets even sicker when it’s combined with pre-existing forms of mind control based on psychiatric and electro-shock treatments.

While RoboCop and Terminator were presented to the public as futuristic scenarios, they portray a situation that already exists. The technology required to remake a man or woman, either psychologically or physically, has existed for years. This is where the future of crime really lies, because the police and intelligence services require criminal activity to keep them in a job. While biotechnology is being used to transform the bulk of the population into obedient slaves, the psychological aspect of such mass brainwashing works much more effectively when a minority of individuals are programmed to act as violent psychopaths. The passive majority already accept that the constant surveillance of both public places and cyberspace is fully justified to protect them from those maniacs who threaten the smooth functioning of a well ordered society.

A huge body of publicly available literature exists on CIA experiments such as MK-Ultra, which used LSD as a means of turning ordinary men and women into mind controlled zombies. A number of MK-Ultra test subjects were programmed to slaughter their fellow citizens. Everyone from Luc Jouret and Charles Manson, to Jim Jones and Mark Chapman, the bloke who murdered former Beatle John Lennon, is a victim of coercive psychiatry which transformed them from a regular guy into a murder maniac. During LSD sessions, these future killers were subjected to ‘psychic driving’, a torture technique which consists of revelations extracted under psychoanalysis being played back over and over again, via a helmet the victim can’t remove. In the future, virtually every piece of mayhem to gain widespread publicity will be the involuntary act of some helpless sap whose murderous antics were pre-programmed in a government institution.

Alongside increasingly sophisticated mass murder programmes sponsored by the security services and multinational corporations, there will be resistance from those groups who have already been criminalised for wanting the freedom to party. The Criminal Justice Act, now in force, makes raves illegal and worse is to follow. Fortunately there are still plenty of people about who want to defend themselves from this crackdown. In England, the resistance will be led by the London Psychogeographical Association, who will use games of three-sided football to free people from the shackles of dualistic thinking. Already, the state is preparing to outlaw football played on triangular pitches, with three goals, where a tally of the goals conceded reveals who has won. The shifting allegiances this game brings into play teaches people to break out of the dualistic system of thought that tricks them into becoming victims of the mind control techniques employed by the ruling class.

When three-side football is banned, which will certainly happen in the next two or three years, the London Psychogeographical Association will organise games in abandoned multi-storey car parks and the basements of deserted office blocks. Some games will be played for a full ninety minutes, while others will be broken up by the cops. Anyone arrested will have been told in advance to claim that they are Luther Blissett, a name which has been appearing mysteriously on buildings all over Bologna, Italy, in recent weeks. Some of those who are nicked during games of three-sided football will later reappear among their friends, and with great sadness they will be killed, to free them from the programming that’s destroyed their personality and will compulsively drive them to murder anyone who resists the state. This is the future of crime and it demonstrates that the Situationists were right. FREEDOM IS THE CRIME THAT CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.

Snow, Death, and the Bewildered Herd

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Few people at this hour – and I refer to the time before the breaking out of this most grim war, which is coming to birth so strangely, as if it did not want to be born – few, I say, these days still enjoy that tranquility which permits one to choose the truth, to abstract one in reflection. Almost all the world is in tumult, is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most essential attribute: the possibility of meditating, or withdrawing into himself to come to terms with himself and define what it is he believes and what it is that he does not believe; what he truly esteems and what he truly detests. Being beside himself bemuses him, blinds him, forces him to act mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism.

-Ortega Y Gasset “The Self and the Other”

As I write these words, the house is being buried in a snowstorm. Heavy flakes fall slowly and silently as a contemplative peace muffles the frenetic agitation and speed of a world gone mad. A beautiful gift like this has no price, though there are those who would like to set one, as they do on everything. In my mind’s eye I see Boris Pasternak’s Yurii Zhivago, sitting in the penumbra of an oil lamp in the snowy night stillness of Varykino, scratching out his poems in a state of inspired possession. Outside the wolves howl. Inside the bedroom, his doomed lover, Lara, and her daughter sleep peacefully. The wolves are always howling.

Then my mind’s lamp flickers, and Ignacio Silone’s rebel character, Pietro Spina (from the novel Bread and Wine) appears. He is deep into heavy snow as he flees the Italian fascists by hiking into the mountains. There, too, howl the wolves, the omnipresent wolves, as the solitary rebel – the man who said “No” – slowly trudges in a meditative silence, disguised as a priest.

Images like these, apparitions of literary characters who never existed outside the imagination, might at first seem eccentric. But they appear to me because they are, like the silent snow that falls outside, evocative reminders of our need to stop the howling media streams long enough to set our minds on essential truths, to think and meditate on our fates – the fate of the earth and our individual fates. To resist the forces of death we need to concentrate, and that requires slow silence in solitude. That is why the world’s archetypal arch-enemy, Mr. Death himself, aka Satan, aka Screwtape, advises his disciple Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to befuddle people against the aberration of logic by keeping them distracted with contradictory, non-stop news reports. He tells him that “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’ “

It is a commonplace to say that we are being buried in continuous and never-ending information. Yet it is true. We are being snowed by this torrent of indigestible “news,” and it’s not new, just vastly increased in the last twenty-five years or so.

Writing fifty-eight years ago, C. Wright Mills argued:

It is not only information they need – in the Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.

Today, as we speed down the information superhighway, Mills’s words are truer than ever. But how to develop an imagination suffused with reason to arrive at lucid summations? Is it possible now that “the information bomb” (attributed to Einstein) has fallen?

Albert Camus once said that “at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” While that is still true today, I would add that the feeling of an agitated and distracted bewilderment is everywhere to be seen as multitudes scan their idiot boxes for the latest revelations. Beeping and peeping, they momentarily quell their nervous anxieties by being informed and simulating proximity through the ether. Permanently busy in their mediated “reality,” they watch as streaming data are instantly succeeded by streaming data in acts of digital dementia. For Camus the absurd was a starting point for a freer world of rebellion. For Walter Lippman, the influential journalist and adviser to presidents and potentates, “the bewildered herd” – his name for regular people, the 99 % – was a beginning and a wished for end. His elites, the 1 %, would bewilder the herd in order to control them. His wish has come true.

A surfeit of information, fundamental to modern propaganda, prevents people from forming considered judgments. It paralyzes them. Jacques Ellul writes in Propaganda:

Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacity for attention or adaptations. This trait of continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.

Coherence and unity in claims aren’t necessary; contradictions work just as well. And the more the better: more contradictions, more consistency, more complementarity – just make it more. The system demands more. The informed citizen craves more; craves it faster and faster as the data become dada, an absurdist joke on logical thinking.

Wherever you go in the United States these days, you sense a generalized panic and an inability to slow down and focus. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness fill the air. Most people sense that something is seriously wrong, but don’t know exactly what. So they rage and rant and scurry along in a frenzy. It seems so huge, so everything, so indescribable. Minds like pointilliste canvases with thousands of data dots and no connections.

In the mid-1990s, when the electronic world of computers and the internet were being shoved down our throats by a consortium of national security state and computer company operatives (gladly swallowed then by many and now resulting in today’s total surveillance state), I became a member of The Lead Pencil Club foundered by Bill Henderson (The Pushcart Press) in honor of Thoreau’s father’s pencil factory and meant as a whimsical protest: “a pothole on the information superhighway.” There were perhaps 37 1/3 members worldwide, no membership roll, and no dues – just a commitment to use pencils to write and think slowly.

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

So I am writing these words with a pencil, an object, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, which haunts our present electronic world by being a ruin of the past. It is not a question of nostalgia, for we are not returning to our lost homes, despite a repressed urge for simpler times. But the pencil is an object that stands as a warning of the technological hubris that has pushed our home on earth to the brink of nuclear extinction and made mush of people’s minds in grasping the reasons why.

I think of John Berger, the great writer on art and life, as I write, erase, cross out, rewrite – roll the words over and look at them, consider them. Berger who wrote: “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”; that “most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert….dead ‘word-mongering’ [that] wipes out memory and breeds a ruthless complacency.”

The pencil is not a fetish; it is a reminder to make haste slowly, to hear and feel my thinking on the paper, to honor the sacredness of what Berger calls the “confabulation” between words and their meaning. I smell the pencil’s wood, the tree of life, its slow ascent, rooted in the earth, the earth our home, our beginning and our end.

Imagining our ends, while always hard, has become much harder in modern times in western industrialized nations, especially the United States that reigns death down on the rest of the world while pretending it is immortal and immune from the nuclear weapons it brandishes. Yet the need to do so has become more important. When in 1939 Ortega y Gasset warned in the epigraph of a most grim war coming to birth so strangely, as people acted “mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism,” he was writing before nuclear weapons, the ultimate technology. If today we cannot imagine our individual deaths, how can we imagine the death of the earth? In a 1944 newspaper column George Orwell made an astute observation: “I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.” He connected this growing disbelief to the modern cult of power worship. “I do not want the belief in life after death to return,” he added, “and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.”

I think that one reason we have not taken notice of this fact of the presence of a huge absence (not to say whether this disbelief is “true”) is the internet of speed, celebrated and foreseen by the grandmaster of electronic wizardry and obscurantic celebrator of retribalized man, Marshall McLuhan, who called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve and who argued that the extensions of human faculties through media would bring about abstract persons who would wear their brains outside their skulls and who would need an external conscience. Shall we say robots on fast forward?

Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know – or should – that we are in big trouble. John Ralston Saul, a keen observer of the way we live now, mimics George Carlin by saying, “If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”

Saul is also one of the few thinkers to follow-up on Orwell’s point. “Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man’s fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.” Blind reason, amoral and in the service of expertise and power, has replaced a holistic approach to understanding that includes at its heart art, language, “spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” People, he argues, run around today in an inner panic as if they are searching for a lost forgotten truth.

Zygmunt Bauman, the brilliant sociological thinker, is another observer who has noticed the big hole that is staring us in the face. “The devaluation of immortality,” he writes, “cannot but augur a cultural upheaval, arguably the most decisive turning point in human cultural history.” He too connects our refusal in the west to contemplate this fact to the constant busyness and perpetual rushed sense of emergency engendered by the electronic media with its streaming information. To this end he quotes Nicole Aubert:

Permanent busyness, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take action people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.

McLuhan’s abstract persons, who rush through the grey magic of electronic lives where flesh and blood don’t exist, not only drown in excessive data that they can’t understand, but drift through a world of ghostly images where “selves” with nothing at the core flit to and fro. Style, no substance. Perspective, no person. Life, having passed from humans to things and the images of things, reduced and reified. Nothing is clear, the images come and go, fact and fiction blend, myth and history coalesce, time and space collapse in a collage of confusion, surfaces appear as depths, the person becomes a perspective, a perspective becomes a mirror, a mirror reflects an image, and the individual is left dazed and lost, wondering what world he is in and what personality he should don. In McLuhan’s electronic paradise that is ours, people don’t live or die, people just float through the ether and pass away, as do the victims of America’s non-stop wars of aggression simply evaporate as statistics that float down the stream, while the delusional believe the world will bloodlessly evaporate in a nuclear war that they can’t imagine coming and won’t see gone. Who in this flow can hear the words of Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood/A river that goes singing/past the bedrooms…”?

If you shower the public with the thousands of items that occur in the course of a day or a week, the average person, even if he tries hard, will simply retain thousands of items which mean nothing to him. He would need a remarkable memory to tie some event to another that happened three weeks or three months ago….To obtain a rounded picture one would have to do research, but the average person has neither the desire or time for it. As a result, he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly….To the average man who tries to keep informed, a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he cannot understand.

Jaques Ellul wrote that in 1965. Lucid summations are surely needed now.

Here’s one from Roberto Calasso from The Forty-Nine Steps: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”

Anyone who sits silently and does a modicum of research while honestly contemplating the current world situation will have no trouble in noticing that there is one country in the world – the U.S.A. – that has used nuclear weapons, is modernizing its vast obscene arsenal, and has announced that it will use it as a first strike weapon. A quick glance at a map will reveal the positioning of U.S. NATO troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders and the aggressive movement of U.S. forces close to China. Hiroshima and Nagasaki make no difference. The fate of the earth makes no difference. Nothing makes a difference. Obama started this aggressiveness, but will this change under Trump? That’s very unlikely. We are talking about puppets for the potentates. It’s easy to note that the U.S. has 1,000,000 troops stationed in 175 countries because they advertise that during college basketball games, and of course you know of all the countries upon which the U.S. is raining down death and destruction in the name of peace and freedom. That’s all you need to know. Meditate on that and that hole that has opened up in western culture, and perhaps in your heart.

“If you are acquainted with the principle,” wrote Thoreau, “what do you care for myriad instances and applications?” Simplify, simplify, simplify.

But you may prefer complexity, following the stream.

The snow is still falling, night has descended, and the roads are impassable. The beautiful snow has stopped us in our tracks. Tomorrow we can resume our frantic movements, but for now we must simply stay put and wonder.

Eugene Ionesco, known for his absurdist plays, including Rhinoceros, puts it thus:

In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

Ionesco emphasized the literal insanity of everyday life, comparing people to rhinoceroses that think and act with a herd mentality because they are afraid of the solitude and slowness necessary for lucid thought. They rush at everything with their horns. Behind this lies the fear of freedom, whose inner core is the fear of death. Doing nothing means being nothing, so being busy means being someone. And today being busy means being “plugged into the stream” of information meant to confound, which it does.

I return to the artist Pasternak, since the snowy night can’t keep me away. Or has he returned to me? I hear Yurii Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai speaking:

Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it ….What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible to not know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history….Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them he is unthinkable – the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. Mind you, all of this is still extraordinarily new….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work. Ouf! I got quite worked up, didn’t I? But I might as well be talking to a blank wall.

I look outside and see the snow has stopped. It is time to sleep. Early tomorrow the plows will grind up the roads and the rush will ensue. Usefulness will flow.

But for now the night is beautiful and slow. A work of art.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: technology