Indoxicate: Recent Episodes
Maarten Steenhagen
How do you make a decision with a group of people? In some activist circles a sociocratic method of consent* decision making has become popular.
But there continues to be confusion about the core idea behind this method. This core idea is the somewhat misleading concept of consent. I will explain later why I think it is misleading, and dangerously misleading. But for now, it’s enough to highlight that the notion of consent has taken on a close to mythical status. I’ve heard almost as many different explications as people explicating it.
Let’s get rid of this. Because the core idea is very simple. The rest is fluff. Once you understand the logic of group decision making, the method of consent* is straightforward.
(Note: I’m using * behind the term ‘consent’ when it’s used in the technical, sociocratic way, to flag that his use of the word is problematic.)
Consent, majority vote, and consensusHere is the definition. A decision made by reaching consent* is a matter of absence of disagreement with the proposal. If and only if no one in a group objects to the proposal, the proposal is accepted by the group through consent.
This way of arriving at a group decision differs from two more familiar methods: majority vote and reaching consensus. Let’s define those in turn:
A decision made by majority vote is a matter of counting: if and only if the most people in a group express agreement with a proposal, the proposal is accepted by the group through majority vote. A decision made by reaching consensus is a matter of unanimous agreement: if and only if everyone in a group expresses agreement with a proposal, the proposal is accepted by the group through consensus.
From logic to practiceThese logical differences have practical implications. A mere majority is much easier to attain in a discussion than unanimous acceptance. If you’re with twenty people, you only need eleven people agreeing to have a majority, but you need the agreement of all twenty to reach consensus.
But on the other hand, the ease of reaching a decision by majority is offset by its potential unfairness. Requiring no more than a majority brings a risk that the views of a potentially sizable minority are brushed aside.
This is a trade-off: ease of reaching a decision versus fairness of decision making.
Here lies the main attraction of the consent method. It steers a middle way: it is easier to reach consent than it is to reach consensus (as I’ll explain in a minute). But consent is still far less tyrannical than majority vote. The method of consent respects the minority—at least in principle.
Why is consent easier than consensus?So why is consent easier than consensus? Well, for consent it is not necessary to get everyone to expresses agreement with the proposal to accept it. All you need is an absence of expressions of disagreement. The following is crucial to understand the method of consent: it is possible for someone neither to express agreement nor to express disagreement. They can simply stay on the fence, as they say, and stay silent.
This point again is a purely logical one. If asked what your view is on a proposal to act, you logically have three possible reactions. You can reply it is a good idea to carry out the action. But you can also not reply that it is a good idea to carry out the action. And if you do not reply that it is a good idea to carry out the action, you can do this in two different ways. On the one hand, you can reply instead that it is not a good idea to carry out the action, but you can also simply not reply at all.
It is typically easier to convince someone not to disagree than it is to convince them to express their agreement. And this is why it is typically easier to reach consent* than it is to reach consensus.
Let me give an example. Together with two friends you are planning a trip to Amsterdam. Your one friend suggests to depart on Friday. But your other friend doesn’t think this is a good idea. They propose to depart a day earlier, on Thursday. As it happens, you are fine with either. But the three of you need to decide, of course. Your other friend now gives a reason why the three of you shouldn’t go on Friday: it would make it very difficult still to go clubbing in the city Friday night. But for you this doesn’t matter at all. You’re going just for a gig on Saturday anyway. When it comes to the question, ‘shall we go on Thursday then?’ you don’t have any objection to make. Your friend hasn’t convinced you that you should go on Thursday, but you don’t see any reason not to either. You just shrug. Assuming that your other friend also doesn’t have an objection, Thursday it is. Consent* has been reached.
I think lots of groups have already been making decisions using this method without knowing anything about consent*. The key thing is just that you let the decision making process be guided by objections (or the absence of any) instead of the attempt to convince everyone that a proposal is really everyone’s best choice.
CriticismWell, there you have it. That is the method of consent*. But two critical observations are important to make in closing. First, people seem to cram a lot of nonsense on top of this simple logical point.
Even quite good resources on the topic will say things like, “You can think of consent as a version of consensus”. But that of course gets it exactly the wrong way round. Consensus is a situation where everyone agrees, and therefore no one disagrees. Consensus therefore is a version of consent. Not the other way around, because in a group where no one expresses disagreement it may still be the case that very few people express agreement, so that consent has been reached while consensus has not.
The same (quite good) source claims that “consent decision making is more clearly defined”. And also this is baffling, at least given the definitions I’ve given of the three contending decision methods. Majority vote, consensus, consent*—each of them is as clearly defined as the others.
I also see often that people take the broader process of presenting a proposal to the group, followed by a round of clarifying questions, followed by the possibility of amendments,… and so on, that that’s all part of the method of consent. But this is confused. Because the very same process of presentation, discussion and amendment can be used to reach decisions by majority voting or by trying to reach consensus. Sure, it might be good practice to begin by clarifying the proposal before a group makes a decision, but it has nothing to do specifically with consent, and also without such good practices consent* can be reached, be it with a significant risk of miscommunication.
The term consent*A second and even more serious objection has to do with terminology. I find it almost inexcusable to use the term ‘consent’ for a decision making method guided by the absence of expressions of disagreement.
The English word ‘consent’ has a common use. Consent is permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. In most cases people need to consent to be operated upon in a hospital, for example. This means they need explicitly to agree to undergoing the treatment. The same holds for having sex. All people involved explicitly need to want to engage in sexual intercourse. Merely not expressing an objection is not enough. Consent, as it is ordinarily understood, is the difference between consensual sex and sexual abuse.
To co-opt this existing term for a practice that is very different runs the risk of confusing people. In the worst case, it may make it seem that a group or an individual consented to doing something whereas in fact they merely (for whatever reason) didn’t voice an objection. This is potentially harmful and abusive. It runs directly against the self-stated aim of sociocracy, to create psychologically safe environments and productive organizations.
I think that a decision making method guided by the absence of objections has its advantages. But I strongly suggest that we avoid co-opting the term ‘consent’ to label it. Don’t try to make a proposal seem someone’s free choice when this free choice has never been expressed.
The Dutch submission for Eurovision is a song called ‘Europapa’ by Joost Klein. It’s a cunningly catchy tune accompanied by a spell-binding and garish videoclip. The entire thing seems tuned to give uncomplicated pleasure and satisfaction, like candyfloss you give to a child. But it adds to that a sense of nostalgia and, ultimately, I think, nationalist angst. And that’s why it should put us on high alert.
Musically the song reminds me of the happy hardcore revivalism celebrated and perfected in the work of Danny L. Harle. But it’s important to look behind the music. There is an undeniably political message communicated through the song: “Europe is in danger, and it is worth fighting for!”
Still from the videoclip of ‘Europapa’A triumph of the will?Every introduction to political propaganda will cover Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a film shot to document the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The reason this film is always discussed is that it shows how the immediate appeal of art can be exploited to shape people’s political consciousness. What is significant about Riefenstahl’s film is that at the time it was a visually stunning piece of cinema that served as shiny wrapping for a toxic political reality.
I don’t want to go so far as to say that the Dutch submission for Eurovision 2024 is a new Triumph of the Will. But the principle is the same. Produce something that immediately appeals to masses of people because of its form, so that a political reality will be cast in a favourable light. A sugar-coated pill, so to speak.
Especially if you take the video clip to be an integral part of the song, it’s hard to deny ‘Europapa’ is a cavalier celebration of Europe. The flag of the Union, a circle of yellow stars against a blue backdrop, crops up in every other frame. Europe is represented by a large house cobbled together out of different buildings and styles. Symbols of national identity, such as different European languages or references to local dishes, have a prominent place. In particular there’s a celebration of Dutch national symbols: the windmill, the lifeless grass deserts of Holland, and the happy hardcore and Gabber scenes—musical subcultures that will awaken childhood or adolecent memories in the song’s intended audience in The Netherlands.
Toxic EuropeanismThe message of ‘Europapa’ is toxically pro-European. Toxic because there’s little to celebrate. Europe is killing thousands of people at its borders, denying access to refugees from war zones or climate chaos it helped create. Europe everywhere is showing signs of fascism, with fascist and far-right politicians either in government or knocking at its doors. Europe is actively supporting Israël’s genocide in Gaza. There’s nothing to be proud of here.
Yet as is usual for nationalistic propaganda, ‘Europapa’ completely ignores the violence carried out in name of Europe. Instead, it portrays Europe as having to race against other ‘super-powers’ of the world.
The portrayal is quite literal. In the video there’s a central scene in which Klein is in a mobility scooter being chased by two other people in similar vehicles. Klein is draped in the European flag wearing a cowboy hat. The other two are dressed in an Elvis costume (the United States ), and a superhero costume in the colours of the white-blue-red flag of the Russian federation. It’s a racing game like Mario Cart. But a game console menu early on in the video makes clear that it’s ‘real life’. Winning, apparently, requires the EU to stay ahead of others, the US and Russia in particular.
Still from the videoclip of ‘Europapa’I would have thought that ‘winning’ required ensuring a dignified treatment of refugees in all member states, the formation of a strong anti-fascist coalition, climate justice, and an end to the support of Israël’s genocide in Gaza. I would have thought that winning required victories of diplomacy, collaboration and solidarity. Instead, Klein’s song portrays Europe’s predicament as a race. If we may believe the video, Europe has a chance of becoming ‘first’.
Supra-nationalismIt is not a surprise to find politics in Eurovision, given that the entire festival each year ends up being a circus-like reflection of current affairs. It’s not even surprising to find an overt celebration of Europe at Eurovision. But at this moment in history, I think the propaganda is especially pernicious.
Reading the available commentary, so far it has mainly been far right nationalists that have spoken about the propagandistic character of Klein’s song. Nationalists everywhere in Europe see the European Union as a threat to their own national identity. The project of the European Union appears to them as a kind of anti-nationalism, a kind of globalism.
But I think these far-right nationalist critics misunderstand what the song and the accompanying video actually achieve. As the song’s narrow celebration of Europeanism shows, ‘Europapa’ is not at all anti-nationalistic or globalistic. Quite the contrary. It promotes a kind of supra-nationalism, a kind of European exceptionalism.
My own attitude towards the European Union is ambivalent. I think that European unity and solidarity is crucial to counteract nationalistic and imperialist movements in its member states. That’s good. But as soon as Europe itself becomes a vehicle for nationalism and imperialism, as it has become, I see dark clouds on the horizon. And those clouds have been gathering for a while now.
A misplaced sense of angstThe initially joyful song seems to end on a note of darkness and angst. The final scenes show the large cobbled together house on fire. The decoded warning: “Europe is on fire”. Never mind the rest of the world. This is where the feelings of nostalgia and childish happiness evoked by the video, at least in a Dutch audience, are moulded into a felt need to preserve and protect. Egoïsm and political selfishness. Parochialism.
And even the far-right critics of ‘Europapa’ I’ve read end up exactly there: a call to clench onto something what allegedly once was. Either way, then, this song reinforces a regressive and nostalgic nationalism at a time where both Europe and The Netherlands are clearly on the wrong side of history.
‘No climate justice on occupied land!’ It was Greta Thunberg who chanted this, together with hundreds of climate activists in a large gathering in Amsterdam on 12 November 2023. Around 80,000 people had gathered between the Museums of Modern Art and Van Gogh to listen to Thunberg’s speech. She used most of her time on stage to express support for the Palestinian people, even handing the microphone to Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian activist, to let her talk about the atrocities committed by Israel: the olive trees burnt, the houses destroyed. That Palestine took centre stage during one of the biggest Dutch climate marches ever is a fact that continues to bother many.
To my mind, it is no more than natural that the climate movement stands with Palestine. The project and ambitions of Israel, as it is currently configured, form an obstacle to a climate neutral and climate just global community. Many climate activists already know this. But around me I see they are predominantly trying to find ways of protesting the destruction and violence in Gaza without criticising the project of Israel as such. And this seems to me potentially disingenuous and a disservice to the cause.
Sahar Shirzad and Greta Thunberg on stage. Photo: ANPProtesting genocide is almost always appropriateFirst of all, a genocide is being committed in Palestine. The recent ruling of the International Court of Justice must serve as a wake-up call. As former diplomat Craig Murray writes: “When you take the detail of what the Court has found to be the actual facts of the case, in death and destruction and in intent, I have no doubt that this is a court which is currently minded to find Israel guilty of genocide”.
When genocide is taking place, we should use any occasion to raise our voice and demand an end to it. You and I are morally required to do so. No one needs an excuse for protesting against genocide.
But many climate activists demand a free Palestine in name of ecological protection, and in name of climate justice. And it is this link that large numbers of people still fail to see. What has the violent occupation of Palestine got to do with the climate crisis?
Carbon neutral bombsAt least in recent months, climate activists have largely fallen short of explicating why as climate activists they stand with the Palestinian people. Many remain stuck pointing out various symptoms of the problem. This easily comes across as insincere.
For example, activists keep emphasising that bombs are bad for the environment. The emissions of carbon dioxide that come with Israel’s current bombing campaign in densely populated civilian areas are sky-high. True enough, but it seems to get the priorities wrong—as if the problem would be solved with ‘carbon neutral’ missiles. It gives the impression that climate activists here are just spinning a story that allows them to use the climate movement for an independent pro-Palestinian cause.
Another reason I’ve seen offered is that Palestinians, because of Israeli interference with their existence and lives, cannot adequately transition to sustainable agriculture and energy use, and cannot adequately prepare for the developing climate disaster. I believe this gets closer to what is really the problem, but it still seems to stay at the level of symptom, instead of identifying the malady.
Here’s what I think is going on. In many Western countries, criticism of the state of Israel—of its ethno-nationalism, or of its colonial foundation—is deemed unacceptable. The seeming untouchability of Israel has been a product of zionist propaganda, which not infrequently spreads even through Western government channels and major news media. At the heart of this propaganda is the false assertion that criticism of Israel equates to criticism of Judaism; that questioning the legitimacy of an Israeli presence on Palestinian land is somehow beyond the pale. Indeed, right after the International Court of Justice published its ruling Israeli officials accused even the International Court of anti-semitism.
Caught up in this irrational nightmare of false propaganda, many climate activists are frantically looking for politically neutral ways of convincing those sympathetic to the climate struggle, that fighting the injustice in Palestine is part of that struggle. It seems a safer strategy perhaps; one that only has to take into account the ‘climate impact’ of what is happening and can stay away from politics. But I think this is not honest about the problem the Palestinian people are faced with. And it is also not honest about what the climate movement is trying to achieve.
Eventually the bubble has to be popped. People need to be steered towards an uncomfortable political awakening: that the project of Israel itself, at least as it is currently configured, forms an obstacle to a climate neutral and climate just world. Climate justice demands of activists that they are frank about this.
Persistent Western imperialismSo, the uncomfortable discussion. What is the project of Israel, and why does it matter for the climate movement?
The state of Israel exists by virtue of zionism—a pernicious nationalism based on ethnicity, which integrates racism into politics. There is no place for racist nationalism in a climate just world. Nationalism always seeks to protect against hardship, chaos, and disaster one group of people, leaving another group to deal with a disproportionately larger problem as a result. This is an injustice, and it has burdened the Palestinians ever since zionist settlers arrived on their lands in the late nineteenth century.
Geopolitically, Israel’s role still is to keep in its saddle a system of global capitalism and imperialism that is largely responsible for climate breakdown. Yes, this is an economic story. A story about white power and cash. The state of Israel was erected by Western forces—Britain and the US, predominantly—to protect Western interests in West-Asia, in particular to secure access to shipping routes through the Suez canal in Egypt (a fact obvious to commentators already in the 1920s), and to secure long-term access to fossil resources.
Shrouded in a zionist myth about Biblical origins and destiny, the state of Israel continues to be one of the most important and persistent vectors of Western imperialism. And it does so through colonial oppression and land grab, in the way that colonial oppression and occupation have served European and North-American interests for centuries.
The occupation as a colonial projectWe must continue to emphasise Israel’s imperialist and colonial origins, because they form the root of the problem. Basav Sen, a Climate Policy Project director for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, says that “the Israeli occupation that we’re seeing today, is a manifestation of the same process of colonialism that has also brought us the climate crisis.” The occupation of Palestinian land is a colonial project.
This makes the project of Israel a completely natural target for the climate movement. For two reasons.
First of all, because colonialism is an obstacle to climate justice. Colonisers oppress indigenous populations, and typically dehumanise them, treating them as natural resources to exploit or a nuisance to get rid of. This process was clear in the international system of slavery and settler-colonialism in the early-modern period. It is clear today in the way the Palestinian people are treated by the occupying forces and colonial settlers. On top of that, being the perpetual underdog, the indigenous populations of colonised areas are typically not offered a chance to prepare for the developing climate disaster. And the people of Palestine are no exception.
Second, colonialism is a process that damages the planet, and plainly so. It is premised on a ’take it all and don’t look back’ principle: you extract and exhaust for your own benefit, leaving a depleted and scorched earth for others to worry about. Colonialism has spread across the globe like a pest, depleting and ravaging continents only to prop up the wealth and power of a selected group of mostly white people.
This is history, but a history that hasn’t been put to rest. There is no place for the colonial process to continue in a climate neutral, climate just world. If as a climate activist you are opposed to colonialism—as you’d better be—you should oppose the zionist occupation of Palestine as such. The colonial process needs to stop.
Palestinian people playing in snow near al-Quds in 1921Climate change is not apoliticalPeople continue to find it incongruous to see anti-colonialism, anti-nationalism and anti-imperialism flourish within the climate movement. ‘What does these have to do with the climate?’, they ask.
For a large part their confusion is due to the concept of ‘climate’ itself. It is an unfortunate abstraction, one that conjures associations with weather patterns, average temperatures, sea levels, and air pollution; natural phenomena, not cultural ones. The ‘climate’ is, almost by definition, an apolitical concept. But the climate crisis is of course political and economic through and through.
The climate movement has during the last decades made great progress in educating its sympathisers. The fight to protect human life in a rapidly deteriorating global ecosystem doesn’t stop at the ‘climate’ narrowly understood. More and more people begin to see that the main obstacles humanity is faced with are political and economic structures, structures responsible for the destruction of ecosystems as well as the cause of wars, of famines, and of racist oppression.
This is why climate justice is becoming so central to the climate movement. Extinction Rebellion Netherlands has even adopted ‘Climate Justice for All’ as its bedrock demand. ‘Demand Zero’, they call it. It shows an awareness that the climate movement needs to aim first and foremost at bringing about political and economic revolution.
But the mere plea for ‘climate justice’ can easily become an element in a rhetoric cut loose from reality. In the end who doesn’t want justice? Who would disagree with the ideal of a just world?
This is why it is important that activists make an effort, stick their necks out, and be very explicit about the justice they are seeking. This will cause friction, but it is the right thing to do. Identify honestly and openly the wrongs that need to be set right. That is why the climate movement now needs to demand the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation, from the polluted river to the rising sea.
To celebrate the end of the year, I’ve again gone through the songs and albums that I’ve played most during the last twelve months.
Looking back, I can detect some themes and fascinations that were distinctive of 2023. I hope the overview is varied enough to be interesting as well to a listener whose musical tastes don’t coincide with mine.
JanuaryJosquin des Prez, Petite camusetteThe vocal works of the European middle ages and Renaissance are traces of a highly disciplined and alien culture. This piece by Josquin des Prez from 1545 renders into polyphonic choral song a vignette from the old English tale of Robin Hood. The highly constrained cultural register of the time allows for a gemlike compaction of musical ideas, and it’s what I like most about this old music.
There’s an exercise to the mind here, to imagine the social constellations that could have brought forth works like this.
FebruaryHélène Vogelsinger, ReminiscencePolyphonic in a different way, the music by Vogelsinger marks a revival of the modular synthesiser that has been on its way for a while but that continues to spread. Contemporary electronic music generated with genuine synthesisers, instead of the now more common virtual instruments that run on your laptop. It involves dialling in countless physical knobs and connecting a jungle of wires to create a specific ‘patch’: an electronic circuit that produces a unique tapestry of tones and rhythms.
This is spiritual minimalism, I think, but then with a distinctively 21st-century bass.
I found out about Vogelsinger’s music by watching the videos she makes for her compositions. Invariably filmed in abandoned buildings and clearings out in nature, these slow, revolving videos add an extra layer to the meditative quality of her stretched-out landscapes of sound.
MarchPatric Catani, Tic Tic TacOver two decades ago I first listened to Patric Catani’s The Horrible Plans of Flex Busterman, one of the era-defining albums from 1997, if you consider musical niche culture. It is computer game music for an imaginary game with Flex Busterman as the alleged protagonist. There’s even a video clip you can find online, figuring Catani and what seem to be some of his friends in the Digital Hardcore scene of 1990s Berlin.
Catani has since continued a consistent trajectory of experimental chiptune music. In 2020, he released The Brain of Flex Busterman, on which the current track figures. It is a sequel to the early album and, though more mature, I think, the tracks still centre around powerful melodic themes and thumping clipped 8-bit drum rhythms.
In the meantime Catani has also started making music for actual computer games, most recently for Alien Hominid Invasion. I don’t know the game, I don’t really play games. So I can’t really tell you how this works out in practice. But musically it’s still brilliant.
AprilCoil, Are You Shivering?My fascination for the English band Coil started after I received a strange and probably negative comment on social media. My friends told me it was probably negative. A user named our_daily_pain quoted a lyric to me which I found was from a Coil song. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to retrieve what the phrase was, as I have since deleted much of my existence on the capitalist platforms. But it sent me down a rabbit hole.
Coil was formed in 1982 in London by John Balance—a pseudonym—and Peter Christopherson, and they produced a shadowy body of work. Touching on occult, absurdist and erotic themes, their many albums cobble together sermon-like spoken word pieces and compilations of raw and noisy ambient music.
The hermetic underworld of Coil was frozen in time in 2004, when, in a strike of tragic irony, Balance accidentally fell from a balcony to his death. Christopherson dissolved the band not much later.
MayTredici Bacci, Vendetta Del Toro (feat. Charlie Looker)I remember that I was writing at my desk when my attention was grabbed by this song performed by Charlie Looker. It was played on Late Junction broadcast on BBC Radio 3. And that’s every Friday night. The comedian James Acaster had included it as part of his mix-tape for the programme.
The song is part of ‘Amore Per Tutti’, an album by New York-based ensemble Tredici Bacci. It’s a soundtrack for an imaginary piece of Italian cinema. There is no film that belongs to it, but different scenes and dramatic twists are represented in eleven tracks.
I was immediately charmed by this song because of the unadorned and theatrical voice, and over-dramatic lyrics that brought to mind scenes you’d expect to find in an opera by Puccini.
JuneMeridian Brothers, Cumbia totalitariaFor a music set I had to prepare I was around this time of the year looking to gather the finest contemporary Cumbia I could find. Cumbia is a musical rhythm and traditional folk dance from Colombia, but it has spread through other regions of South-America and the rest of the world, mixing in with different influences and instrumentation.
This track by the Meridian Brothers, a Columbian experimental folk band, is like a fever dream. I found it so delirious that I decided to pair it with the most feverish piece of cinema I knew: the part in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, where against the backdrop of the Amazon riviera a large steamer is painstakingly dragged across a mountain by an army of hundreds of forced labourers.
The musical and visual pieces fit well together.
JuliDaughter, DandelionEarlier in the year the British band Daughter released their fourth album. I only discovered it now, and I’ve played on repeat this collection of songs, full of singer Elena Tonra’s wistful reminiscences.
To me it seems that what Daughter achieves here is the pop-musical parallel of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People—itself a pop novel. The angst of growing up and settling into a role that wokrs for you, parties with cheap red wine, and sleepless nights over text messages that should have but haven’t yet arrived.
Just as Rooney, in her lyrics and song Tonra elevates the mundane and stereotypical into something utterly real and precious to those involved.
AugustCesária Evora, Petit paysIn August I saw a 2022 documentary about the life of Cesária Évora, directed by Ana Sofia Fonseca. Évora is probably the most famous singer from Cabo Verde, and her music is closely tied with the West-African island country.
In Dutch we’ve got the tradition of the ’life song’, and I think Évora’s work may be the Cabo Verdean parallel to this: mundane and sentimental, with a strong embeddedness in the experience of a particular community she herself was part of.
The documentary was screened outdoors in a local square, during a summer night, with people sitting on steps and on folding chairs. It was my first introduction to Évora’s music.
SeptemberBaxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy, Delilah Holliday, Tais ToiThis one is a sleazy cockney electro-pop song. I think Dury, De Crécy, and Holliday got together for the occasion to produce one album, to explore the intersection of styles. It’s plain and appregiated, as electro-pop should be.
I like this song mainly because of the crude, voiceover-like vocals by Dury. It reminds me of the early Tarantino films, or, if you’ve seen it, the English film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
OctoberEla Minus, They told us it was hard, but they were wrongWhile exploring the modular synthesiser scene I came across live-sets and tracks by Ela Minus. Born in Columbia, Gabriela Jimeno Caldas uses the name Ela Minus to produce a rebellious blend of after-hours techno and new-wave synth-pop. She has a background designing synthesisers, and most of her work is done on analog machines. Computers only come in at the recording stage.
The lyrics of Ela Minus are sung both in English and Spanish, and often have a revolutionary edge to them. She sets a great example of DIY creativity by writing, recording and producing everything herself.
NovemberDe Ambassade, De ElitetheorieBare-bones compositions, gloomy vocals, scaffolded by quirky, archival samples. That’s how I would characterise the most recent album of De Ambassade. I found out about the group because this specific track was played, again, on Late Junction in late 2022. But since then I’ve got the vinyl album which I regularly put on repeat when I’m writing. (Well, with vinyl you can only put one side of the album on repeat, of course.)
I’m curious where the sample in this particular track is taken from. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me it’s an anti-Leninist voice, perhaps coming from the Dutch anarchist movement in the 1950s or 1960s? In any case, if you recognise this sample, do let me know.
DecemberKOFIA, Leve PalestinaI heard this song at a protest for Palestine. I couldn’t at first place the language—because I just didn’t expect it. But it’s Swedish, a language I actually do understand.
The song is from the 1970s, but it’s still entirely actual. How disgustingly long the oppression of the Palestinians has been. And again, we’re out on the street demanding their liberation.
As Benjamin Zephaniah said, it is just unbelievable that we need to do this after all these years. Zephaniah points to something Nelson Mandela said: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete, without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Zephaniah died on the 7th of December. I’ve been playing his music and recordings of his poetry ever since. There are extremely few people who understand the difference between right and wrong as well as he did.
I will close this overview of my year in music with his song ‘In this world’, which is all as distressing and all as depressing as a song about this world should be.
How people seem suddenly worried about ‘Artificial Intelligence’! It’s as if massive threats to human flourishing suddenly become acceptable if they’re cushioned by a soothing cloud of sci-fi speculation. Well, let me tell you, there’s a much bigger problem, and the current path of AI largely owes its existence to it. It’s capitalism that is the overarching threat we should be discussing.
So, what happened? A large number of people working in ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) have begun to see that AI might actually turn out very dangerous. If left unchecked, it could spread uncontrollably to wipe out humanity, or at least make our lives extremely miserable. Former Google engineer Geoffrey Hinton resigned in part because of this realisation, and he thinks that curtailing the development and use of dangerous AI may require international agreements like the bans on chemical weapons. A few days ago a list of people—including some philosopher colleagues of mine—published an open letter in which they argue that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
It all sounds terribly urgent all of a sudden, doesn’t it?
Whether these fears about AI are overblown is a moot point. It’s not even clear how ‘I’ AI is. Is it really intelligence we’re dealing with or just a clever trick that these programs play with our minds?
As I’ve seen it described, the GPT-style AI people are currently raving about is a sophisticated form of autocomplete. It predicts what answers people expect to be given. Yes, GPT and its friends seem rather good at passing the Turing test, which means that GPT’s responses to prompts can be indistinguishable from a human response. But we should keep in mind that the development of AI over the last decades seems to have got caught by Goodhart’s law. This law says that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. And the Turing test has for a long time been used as a measure of machine intelligence. Arguably, AI research since the 1980s has done exactly what Goodhart warned against: turning a measure into a target. The race for AI has aimed to make machines that pass the Turing test. This suggests that, according to Goodhart’s law, the Turing test, as a measure of intelligence of these AI systems, may well be junk. If that is right, then based on its responses we really can’t tell whether GPT is intelligent or not.
But I don’t actually want to get into this discussion about intelligence. I want to talk about the sudden concern about societal risk. Even if the concerns about AI are justified, it strikes me as decidedly odd—and somewhat suspicious—that people suddenly care about it.
Why should the risk of extinction from AI suddenly feel urgent, and be given priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war? Because we don’t really care much about these other societal-scale risks either, do we?
For one thing, we’re in the middle of a pandemic that has killed tens of millions of people and has disabled at least ten times as many. We’ve just officially ceased to give that risk any priority. The only broadly publicised open letter on the ‘risk of the pandemic’ I can remember is the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued precisely the opposite of mitigating societal risk: it argued that mitigating the risk of pandemics harms society, and that we should allow those at risk of pandemic viruses simply to die. And that ended up being the prevailing pandemic policy! So why do people suddenly care about the prospects of loads of people being killed?
I’m being cynical, of course. But I do think it’s striking that public consciousness is suddenly gripped by a concern for a mass die-off if it’s a group of millionaires that is spearheading these worries.
My view is that, if you are truly concerned about existential risks, and genuinely want to mitigate such risks, then a focus on AI seems to me an odd thing to have right now. This is because capitalism, the supreme existential risk that lies behind all of the aforementioned risks, is not even a speculative risk or a matter of probability. There’s not a 10% or a 40% chance that capitalism would destroy us if left unchecked, no, the capitalist economic system, which aims at maximising profit through economic expansion, is right now and at a global scale destroying the conditions of human life. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s actually happening.
You can quibble about how long it would take for humanity to be wiped out by our own economic success, of course, but it’s a matter of logic that uncurtailed capitalist economy will destroy humanity. Perpetual depletion of a finite world necessarily bottoms out. And if you look at what’s happening to climate and agricultural land around the world, and if you consider that the development of AI itself has a capitalist, for-profit earmark, it’s clear that the risk capitalism poses right now is real and actual, and patently more urgent than the current risk of any future AI system.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t curtail the development and use of AI, as Hinton suggests. But it would be absolutely useless to do so if we don’t also curtail the development and existence of capitalist economies. So it’s time for our heartfelt expression of concern to mention the unmentionable and prioritise the risk posed by capitalism.
Activists, journalists, policymakers, and the public are increasingly discussing a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from capitalist economies. Even so, it can be difficult to voice concerns about some of capitalism’s most severe risks. The succinct statement below aims to overcome this obstacle and open up discussion. It is also meant to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of capitalism’s most severe risks seriously.
Mitigating the risk of extinction from capitalism should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Shout it from the roofs.
On the 5th of May 2023 the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the enduring COVID-19 pandemic is now merely an established and ongoing health issue, and no longer a public health emergency of international concern. This change of position came about after the responsible committee (which even boasts Anders Tegnell as an advisor) had satisfied itself with a steep decrease in the number of reported COVID-19 deaths and hospitalisations (i.e. countries have stopped counting), and reports of high levels of population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. ‘immune’ now means ‘has been infected’).
The announcement should come as no surprise. The WHO is simply doing what it always does: stepping in line with the way especially western governments and pharmaceutical industries want to approach public health—or what’s left of it. Even though the pandemic shows no clear sign of subsiding, as the WHO readily admits, the organisation can’t afford to stray too far from the powers that underpin its existence.
The decision that there’s no longer an emergency is a diplomatic farce. Through various channels I’ve seen people quite upset about it. But as it happens, I think this official end of the emergency may actually be good news. This is because this whole state of emergency has from the outset stifled political actions that would have been entirely appropriate. They still are entirely appropriate.
Never waste a good crisisThe sociologist and philosopher Willem Schinkel, who is at the university of Rotterdam, explains this well in his 2021 book Pandemocratie (‘pandemocracy’). The pandemic, as a social event, has from the beginning been thoroughly depoliticised. Stripped from politics. Back in 2020, when the WHO declared we were in a state of emergency all western governments had already begun construing the virus outbreak as a crisis. Here we had an exceptional circumstance, a situation that made exceptional and often authoritarian measures necessary, and that made it legitimate to expect political disagreement and opposition to be put on the back-burner. “No time for politics, now we need to think about each other,” by which they meant of course: think about our money.
Governing from a state of emergency is nothing special, Schinkel reminds us. He agrees with Giorgio Agamben that liberal democracies have a tendency to rule by finding the exceptions to the law. The emergency or crisis allows government to overrule what people are normally entitled to. That is why many neo-liberal societies are always in one sort of crisis or another, a condition sometimes called the omnicrisis. Who was it again that said that one should never let a good crisis go to waste? It’s a convenient way of keeping politics at bay. The pandemic is no exception.
The same theatrical plot unfolded in many of the world’s capitalist societies. With each successive wave, policy makers refused to follow the precautionary principle because they did not dare interfere with the economy. Because that would have been politics. “But no, not in a time like this.” Instead, they waited until the situation had escalated further, so that the emergency flared up to a blaze. With such a situation at hand, we were simply beyond politics, and decisions would have to be delegated to experts, who were asked for carefully circumscribed advice on how to avert the worst. In The Netherlands, most of these ’expert deliberations’ could be kept secret precisely because they were no part of the regular political process. Decisions became necessities. In particular, they became necessities with a neo-liberal flavour—unavoidable measures that would spare ’the economy’.
Rigged from the startAlthough many within the Zero COVID movement were well aware of the political farce that was unfolding, still the movement failed to escape this logic of emergency. Schinkel’s work lays bare that, during the pandemic, even those who vilified the eugenics and fascism shining through government policies kept playing their part in this ’emergency of the virus’.
A clear sign is the forensic commitment to advocating an alternative government strategy. Those objecting to health supremacism and eugenicist ‘herd immunity’ policies have spent much of the first years of the pandemic trying to convince authorities that, regardless of what their experts said, eradication was in fact the best strategy for them to take. This may well have been true. But this ‘debate’ was already rigged from the start. It was always about a strategy to get out of the crisis and go back to normal. But under neo-liberal capitalism, eugenics and health supremacy are normal.
Moreover, those arguing against policies that sacrifice people for the well-being of the economy frequently invoked this very economy to defend their alternatives. Each wave, fingers were pointed at countries like New Zealand or China, where due to a Zero COVID policy the economy was doing fine. Limiting the spread of the virus and preventing people from falling ill was in fact better for the economy than letting things rip. The economy would like a world with no COVID! Perhaps. But that same economy exploits workers across the globe, perpetuates racism and sexism, and utterly disfigures the way we lead our lives. Why on earth would you volunteer ways of saving it?
In other words, the Zero COVID movement has during these first three years of the pandemic largely adopted a tactic of arguing for various flavours of society-wide and often authoritarian government interventions by governments which they knew were prone to violence.
Nobody should be left behindSo despite all the unmasking of health supremacy and completely valid criticism of eugenic policies, we haven’t actually advocated an alternative. Those that continue to call for intervention and preventative policies tend to stay almost entirely within the plot of the public health emergency, just as those that oppose communal public health policy. As Schinkel writes, both of these factions are trapped in a sphere of exceptional circumstances, without problematising the long build-up that gave rise to those circumstances to begin with. This is why both these sides are to blame for the normalisation of authoritarian control. Because during the pandemic authoritarian control has normalised even more.
As Schinkel observes,
it is absurd to pretend that authoritarian measures become less authoritarian because there’s a a public health crisis. And although limiting the spread of the virus is evidently the to be preferred option, it has an extremely limited political force without fighting for a socialist economy […]. If anything has become clear during the COVID pandemic, then it is that such an economy is possible. Exactly when governments took care of large portions of worker salaries it became clear that something that had always been regarded an impossibility, could be implemented without any trouble: a collective guarantee on income as befits a socialist mode of production, for example. (p. 16, my translation)
We should have stuck to the principle that interventions in people’s lives and preventative policies concerning their health can only be justified if they come about collectively, in a spirit of solidarity and in an arrangement where nobody needs to worry about their livelihood—where nobody is left behind. This should have been our line in the sand. But it would have required pleading not only for narrow forms of public health, but a demand for an end to the economic exploitation of people and the earth. And I think that this never really was part of the demand of zero covid.
We wasted it, but it’s never too lateI’ve been thinking about Schinkel’s argument ever since I read it. He makes clear that the pandemic gave us yet another reason to distance ourselves from ’normal life’. It is precisely these ’normal’ ways of living, with their rampant consumerism, irresponsible travel habits, and colonial exploitation that have formed a catalyst of the pandemic we are in. Their greedy violence towards nature is the cause of habitat disruption, the loss of biodiversity, and the dissolution of the ecological barriers that would have slowed down viral spread and evolution of variants. We were never in an ’emergency of the virus’ because throughout the pandemic it was ‘business as usual’, the world of capitalist extraction never came to a halt. That’s why so many people died unnecessarily. Business as usual was the real problem all along.
So think back to early 2020. When the pandemic hit, it presented an excellent opportunity to ask the question: How can we stop this? How can we live differently? I’m sure many of us also did ask those questions to ourselves, and many did see a glimmer of possibility. But we wasted it. Instead, we fell in a trap and either did nothing or focused on narrowly technocratic disagreements about strategy and the economy. With some notable exceptions, most of what we did reflected the idea that now is not the time for broader political struggle. Perhaps we didn’t know how to launch that bigger fight. Perhaps we were trying to be diplomatic. But the ’emergency’ of a pandemic like this one is precisely not a moment to be diplomatic. As Schinkel writes, it is precisely not a moment to suspend those political struggles, because the preservation of the status quo is the real emergency.
The COVID pandemic is a symptom of capitalism, and so the fight for public health should always have been explicitly anti-capitalist. It should always have been radically political. But as the pandemic became officially ’elevated’ to a public health emergency of international concern, SARS-CoV-2 and its unchecked spread got isolated and depoliticised. It was excised from its historical reality and turned into something natural and inevitable—an external threat to humans and their economy.
Now that we are officially on the other end of the emergency phase of the pandemic, I hope that it will be possible for us to untangle ourselves from this vicious snare. We don’t need an emergency to demand an end to ’normal’ capitalism. It is never too late to ask those questions: How can we stop this? How can we live differently?
Photo by Asad Photo Maldives
As you may have heard, the government of the United Kingdom is trying to pass an Online Safety Bill. This piece of legislation would have far-reaching and negative consequences for online security and privacy. In an open letter well-known communication channels such as WhatsApp and Signal object. They believe that the Bill could “break end-to-end encryption” and would “open the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages.”
It can be hard to find your bearings in the discussion about online privacy. Government rhetoric construes the issue as if it was about whether or not you think criminals should be held accountable. There’s little room for discussion about that. But this rhetorical focus on crime is a red herring. Law enforcement agencies already have a wide range of powers to track down or spy on criminals. What is really at stake is our right to privacy, and whether it is worth anything still. I think it is worth a lot. As I see it, it has never been more important to stand up for online privacy and argue that we have a right to encrypt.
Life in a prisonSo what is the Online Safety Bill trying to achieve? Many things, but a significant goal is to encourage proactive and arbitrary invasion of privacy. The UK government wants to see to it that online communication is screened by default. Messages and photographs you share with friends or colleagues should be disclosed to some third party to be scanned for illegal content, much like how messages sent to family and friends by prisoners in high-security prisons are currently checked by prison staff.
But unlike the prison, which requires the intervention of a judge, the UK government is trying to promote arbitrary screening. Regardless of what you’ve done or said, and free from the need of any court order or warrant, your messages and photographs will be treated as suspicious.
The Bill does not make law enforcement agencies themselves responsible for the screening. Instead, it requires websites and apps like WhatsApp and Signal to do the work for them. Outsourcing surveillance. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes,
Clause 110 [of the Online Safety Bill] mandates that websites and apps must proactively prevent harmful content from appearing on messaging services. That’s going to lead to universal scanning of all user content, all the time.
I think this is an Orwellian prospect. It is on a par with requiring of telephone operators that they eavesdrop on all conversations on phone lines, or expecting the postal services to open all the letters you send to make sure you’ve not written something that violates the law. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights determines that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence. And yet that seems exactly what the Online Safety Bill is demanding of the internet.
Why everyone needs encryptionBut it gets worse. This is not just about screening messages that are sent in plain text. It is about screening encrypted messages, which currently means the bulk of online communication. Indeed, it seems that law enforcement agencies are particularly unhappy with the fact that more or less everyone these days can communicate in a way that successfully prevents prying eyes or eavesdropping. To most this added security would seem an advance, but not to those who want to spy on people.
High safety standards define the internet as we now know it, and rightly so. Internet communication by itself allows messages to be intercepted easily. Much of it travels through airwaves, which require no more than an antenna to receive. Without encryption, being online would be an unacceptable security risk. Paying one the web would become a gamble; your chat messages would be readable to anyone who can intercept network traffic (which is easy to do); and your smart speaker would end up under the control of more or less anyone who manages to sniff your network.
Encryption can mitigate these risks by making it impossible for third parties to read your communication. And note, these third parties include the websites or apps you use to communicate. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone apart from the intended receiver from accessing the contents of your messages, because current encryption standards are virtually unbreakable. Only the party you are communicating with can decipher what you send them.
This is why messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal say that the Online Safety Bill could break end-to-end encryption. If platforms a required to screen messages, they will need access to their contents. And this means abandoning encryption altogether or building in some kind of ‘backdoor’ mechanism, which in practice amounts to abandoning encryption as well. Also the Electronic Frontier Foundation observes that what the Bill requires is neither compatible with our right to privacy, nor with encryption.
Photo by Rachel Claire An worldwide pushCurrently the Online Safety Bill is in the House of Lords and is likely to become law this summer. If from then on the government requires third-party screening, and if third-party screening is impossible when messages are encrypted end-to-end, then the UK government will already this summer effectively abolish end-to-end encryption on much of the internet in the United Kingdom. For citizens of the UK this would be bad news. They already have to face the fact that their offline lives are a mess because of their government’s incompetence, and now this Bill threatens to impose chaos on their online lives as well. John Thornhill in the Financial Times, says that this might make the UK “a strange kind of cyber pariah”.
But it is much worse than that. The real issue seems to extend well beyond the witless politics of the UK. The Online Safety Bill is merely an embodiment of a broader and worldwide push to undermine encryption.
Earlier in April the Global Encryption Coalition reported that senior officials from the United States and European Union want to join forces to shape public opinion against encryption. The aim is to legitimise access to encrypted communications by law enforcement agencies. It is not the first time this is happening, and the measure they are seeking is a mandatory ‘backdoor’, a change in communication software that allows encryption to be bypassed. Or, as the officials record the idea euphemistically in the minutes of their meeting about this, “to mirror privacy by design with lawful access by design”.
A ‘backdoor’ to bypass encryption would mean that a service like WhatsApp can continue to use what seems to be end-to-end encryption, but where law enforcement can directly or indirectly access the unencrypted messages without having to decrypt them. It is exactly such a backdoor that those drafting the UK’s Online Safety Bill seem to have in mind when they expect websites and apps to screen communications, including ones that were encrypted. So instead of a cyber pariah, it would be better to see the UK as the Orwellian front-runner. They seem currently closest to realising the unfettered access to communication the United States and the European Union are eyeballing as well.
But let’s be clear about it, requiring a backdoor to encryption software is unacceptable. This is the consensus among everyone except those that want to use the backdoor to spy on people. It is unacceptable first because it would break end-to-end encryption, as it would no longer be true that only someone in possession of the decryption key can access a message’s contents. This would break the internet as we know it. Specifically, backdoors introduce a costly security risk. These loopholes will inevitably be discovered, and before you know it it’s a free-for-all where your boss or your stalker can pay some dodgy website to snoop on you.
Moreover, a backdoor in encryption software would make arbitrary screening of private online communication possible—indeed, the point of the Online Safety Bill—and arbitrary screening is a plain violation of the human right to privacy as encoded by the UN. Human rights violations are unacceptable.
Splitting keysIn a recent letter to the Financial Times Andersen Cheng claims to have found a solution. “What law enforcement agencies, the government and platforms all miss”, Cheng writes, is “encryption key splitting.” The basic idea of this is obvious. Just give law enforcement agencies the decryption keys whenever you encrypt something. This removes the need for any backdoor. It is not a new idea at all and it is known as the ‘key escrow’ system, an idea floated under the Clinton administration in the United States. It means that law enforcement bodies can always come in via the front door, simply by using the key to decrypt communication in the same way sender and receiver are using such a key.
But for reasons I hope you can imagine already, handing your encryption keys to a third party is extremely unattractive from a security perspective. You would have to trust this party not to abuse the considerable power it gives them, a trust that many people would be unwilling to give to governments cracking down on climate protest or businesses keen to monetise personal data. And even more important, having some authority sit on a massive stash of encryption keys would immediately make them a prime target for cyber crime and cyber warfare.
To avoid this, Cheng proposes to split each key into parts, so that several different authorities will each only have a part of your key. Those parts individually are useless, but if these various authorities jointly agree that decryption of someone’s communication is justified, they can work together and open your messages. You can compare this to the rule used in the military that makes it that nuclear missiles can only be shot into orbit if several people use their individual keys or launch codes.
Encryption key splitting as proposed by Cheng would require both sides to make concessions. On the one hand, it would seem a good way to avoid arbitrary screening of encrypted communication. If multiple authorities would have to agree that something may be decrypted, it will be easier to follow existing practices of requiring court orders or warrants before someone’s right to privacy may be overruled. This would certainly be a better safeguard on privacy. On the other hand, it would mean that, although encryption would not strictly be broken, a third party would have a way of reading encrypted communication. This would be a better way to enforce lawful access, but weaken the privacy of encryption.
A legal solutionI think Cheng’s proposal is a distraction from the real issue. Yes, encryption key splitting is a cryptographically provable technology, as Cheng emphasises. But something cryptographically sound may still be a practical nightmare. If you are online, the websites and apps you use will generate and renew large numbers of keys, each of which would have to be copied, broken up, and transmitted across various networks to authorities. The additional infrastructure for this would make the internet even more complicated and more vulnerable to interception and leaks. And who would control the key spitting and distribution? Issues of trust and security would inevitably rear their heads. For example, it would remain a realistic scenario that malicious actors would pay or blackmail people working for those various authorities to leak the parts of keys.
Cheng’s solution is the classic ’technical fix’ to a problem that is primarily a legal one. As Steven W. Schlesinger and Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid make clear in a 2022 paper, a much more elegant solution is to legislate a circumscribed right to encrypt data. Instead of focusing on removing encryption, they argue that the way forward is to define more precisely a right people have to encrypt, and define the limits to that right.
A right to data encryption would mean that everyone must be allowed to encrypt their data, unless certain exceptional circumstances apply. This default entitlement to encrypt fits well within Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which determines a right to privacy. A right to data encryption is a way to ensure that the right to privacy is respected also in digital and online spheres of life.
Schlesinger and Yanisky-Ravid make clear that it should only be a negative right, and not a positive or claim right. This means that the state would not be responsible for facilitating encryption, in the way many states are now responsible for facilitating education or health care. A negative right to encrypt means just that the state ought not interfere when people choose to encrypt their data.
As with more or less every right, the right to data encryption would come with certain limitations. These are conditions that allow the right to be overruled in light of other factors. The authors make clear that a right to data encryption
can include a modified warrant system like that of the criminal justice system, pursuant to which a designated court can determine whether there is probable cause and reasonable circumstances necessitating governmental access to encrypted data. (2022:592)
In other words, if a court rules that someone’s right to encrypt may be overruled because there is a reasonable suspicion of a criminal offence, authorities may require them to undo the encryption and disclose the original message. This requirement could be backed up by fines or, in serious cases, a prison sentence.
The result would be a situation that closely parallels Cheng’s solution, but without the need for uprooting the infrastructure of the internet, and without introducing problems with trust and security vulnerabilities. It would avoid arbitrary screening of encrypted communication, as any requirement to undo encryption would have to be warranted by judge. It would allow government or law enforcement to seek access to messages in cases where a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity can be shown.
In addition, the circumscribed right to encrypt data as proposed by Schlesinger and Yanisky-Ravid would leave end-to-end encryption and with it the relative security of online communication completely intact.
So understood, instating a right to encrypt would add additional artillery to the already wide range of powers law enforcement authorities have to track down or spy on criminals, while at the same time it would reinforce people’s right to privacy. A win-win situation.
A craving for more surveillanceUnfortunately, I don’t think it will satisfy the international cabal of law enforcement agencies. Simply having a way of forcing criminals to decrypt their messages is not enough, as also Thornhill remarks in his Financial Times opinion piece. He writes that those agencies “want broader powers to force tech companies to filter illegal content pre-emptively”. It’s not about making sure traditional investigative powers also work online. It’s about exploiting the opportunities offered by vast online networks to expand those traditional powers enormously. It’s a craving for more surveillance.
This is why it has never been more important to defend a right to encrypt. Only by establishing such a right will online privacy remain possible. It may well be one of the few protections still available against an ever more Orwellian society.
I sent my first tweet on the 17th of June 2009. It contained a six-word description of that afternoon—I was travelling somewhere. Back then Twitter was for me a way of finding out what my friends were up to. Now, twelve-and-a-half thousand tweets and fourteen years later, the experience of being on Twitter resembles that of standing in the lurid departure hall of a noisy international airport—an activity I would undertake only because I wanted to get somewhere, not because I particularly like it.
So, where do I want to go to? Why am I still on Twitter?
A bizarre and amorphous soupI now use Twitter really only for two purposes. The first is information gathering. I keep hearing the same from many people. This bizarre and amorphous soup of searchable tweets is an almost unparalleled source of raw data. Its consumers include journalists who want to follow events, scientists who follow research that their colleagues are doing, and me. As Jessica Wildfire writes in a recent essay, “if you’re like me, you’re not on social media to watch cat videos. You’re not there for dopamine hits, one way or the other. You’re there for information.”
If you know what you’re doing—a big if, admittedly—then by sifting through piles of unfiltered junk you are often able to form a picture of what is happening that is more accurate and ahead of the curve. Annoying as may be, Twitter, pinnacle of tech venture capitalism, remains a central window on the world.
It’s hard to overstate its value in this regard. The need for raw information is urgent now society has settled on wilful ignorance as a solution to several massive problems. Those invested in a malignantly growing economy firmly control the popular narrative. Thereby they shape the values and expectations of most people. It leads to a situation where the seriousness of many threats is downplayed or ignored, simply because they don’t immediately jeopardise the economy. The messaging about COVID is a good example of this—an incoherent mixture of denial and downplaying, designed to repress that large numbers of people are dying or becoming disabled due to a preventable disease. Much the same goes for the climate disaster, which already ravages your society or will soon enough do so, but still gets illustrated with pictures of people lying on a beach. More generally, talking about the damage capitalism does to health, communities, ecosystems, and the human psyche is more or less taboo.
Warding off hordes of trollsThere’s another reason I’m still on Twitter, and it ties in with the wilful ignorance I see around me. It is ‘activism’. Or at least this is how I keep calling it to myself. This is the attempt of offering counternarratives that are more truthful and honest about the state of the world. The Twitter activism I have in mind tries speak to people who recognise the need for better and more social ways of living. It is the thankless task of reminding everyone that there is power in community; that sticking together and helping each other is the path to resistance. Increasingly this means warding off hordes of disingenuous trolls and the grunt forces of bot armies.
How that is going? Rubbish, to be honest. Plenty of commotion, but little progress.
Activism on social media platforms quickly hits a brick wall. At least this is my experience on Twitter. Yes, because so many people use Twitter for information gathering it is a good medium for raising awareness of problems and injustice. In some circumstances, social platforms like Twitter may even be your only way to communicate freely. And you could argue that such platforms are good for combatting the induced forgetfulness that we see everywhere.
But awareness does not equal action. It is one thing to understand the world, it is another thing to change it. You could even make this into a philosophical point, about what understanding the world amounts to. If you don’t know how to make the world better, then how can you still profess to understand it?
Discourse as an end in itselfIt is due to this gap between awareness and action that a platform like Twitter may well have a stifling effect. In her work on communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean has drawn attention to the fact that in the current internet economy, politics is more and more reduced to a universe of communicative acts, to speaking and saying and exposing, and explaining. The result is that we’re prone to overestimate the political significance of communication, especially if it is part of an endless cacophony of messages.
I have noticed this in myself. Here’s a typical example. I see you’ve tweeted, and I realise that it contains a key political observation. Perhaps you manage to put your finger on a important problem, or perhaps you draw attention to some overlooked form of injustice. Important problems need solutions, and injustice needs to be fought. For this reason, sharing your message among my followers by retweeting it tends to give me the satisfaction of having done a good deed. As if by spreading the word I have already moved closer towards solving the problem, have made a start with combatting injustice.
But have I, really? If recent experience is any guide, it is plain that people are all too capable of sitting on their awareness or knowledge, not doing anything with it besides, perhaps, spreading the word. The same holds for many of the bits I myself write and post. As an author it is easy to overestimate your contribution. In the end, it’s just more words, right?
Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that there is a need for words. Words are crucial in offering new ways of thinking, and improving the world requires new ways of thinking. Words also have their part to play in raising awareness of problems, and such awareness is essential for people to be motivated to act. That’s why I write. But I worry that on platforms like Twitter the words and messages have become increasingly detached from the actions. That is Dean’s point about the current internet economy: it reduces politics to discourse. Discourse in and of itself is politically impotent.
What we direly need is resistance, organised movements, and social struggle. Discourse may be essential to get there, but it should never become an end in itself. Networks like Twitter promote the idea of discourse as an end in itself.
Post or vanish!But that’s not all. Social media platforms like Twitter have a stifling effect on political activism also because they expend valuable energy.
A disproportionate amount of energy is required merely to keep the communication channel open. This is much worse now than it was even five years ago. A friend of mine recently illustrated this well. ‘In order to stay afloat in social media you have to post so much content,’ he wrote. ‘It’s too much. It’s overwhelming.’ My friend is a synthpop musician working in Berlin. As so many artists, he relies on social media to share his work. Merely to break through the noise on those platforms, you need to nurture your feeds incessantly. For him that means posting on TikTok three times a day, six times on Instagram, and either a short or a long video on YouTube. Otherwise you’ll vanish. And he’s not even trying to cultivate a podium on Twitter, where maintaining a sizeable reach for many requires posting ten or twenty times a day.
What holds for art holds for online activism just as much. On Twitter, a lot of your time goes towards making sure the platform retains its status as a bizarre and amorphous soup of searchable tweets. Doing that is not activism. It is capitalist production work. It is free labour we’re doing for one of the richest people in the world. My point here is not that this business model is inherently wrong (though I think it is). My point is that, from an activist perspective, this is time wasted. Heaps and heaps of time if you add it all up. Time we could have spent consolidating all those snippets of awareness and understanding into a politically lasting alternative.
The double bind of social mediaOf course, now you want to hear what I think the solution is. It may seem that the easy way out is just to ditch social media. But is it? Should people fighting for justice and equality just abandon social media?
I don’t think this is a good strategy. This is because social media are no longer frivolous, but they have become integral to the infrastructure of communication. It is a fact that many traditional forms of communicating have been replaced wholesale by online messaging. Many people read books online, or listen to their audio versions on Audible or some other platform. They read social analysis on Substack, Twitter, or Facebook. Reading a physical newspaper has become a quaint luxury. Whether we like it or not, social media may well be one of the best channels activists have for getting their messages out.
Dean acknowledges that social media have taken on this central role in communication. “Practically speaking then,” she writes, “we have to be dialectical and recognize that it is going to have a good side and a bad side.” The good side is that they allow us to communicate. The bad side is that they prevent us from actually doing something. As she continues, “the more people focus on the internet and network communication as the important thing, the less they focus on building a revolutionary party capable of forwarding a revolutionary movement and having some kind of plan for what happens afterward.”
Controlling networks and communicationAcknowledging this fundamental ambivalence of social media is important. But I think Dean’s work risks a false opposition. She regards a focus on the internet and network communication as being in tension with building a revolutionary party. But I do not think the two are necessarily opposed.
I think that building a revolutionary party—a party capable of launching a revolutionary movement, a political current that has formed a joint vision for what should happen afterwards—that building such an organisation may well require a firm control over parts of the internet and network communication. This is because the internet and its networks have become a default communication channel in most societies. With the exception of face-to-face conversation, it is what people use. Trying to build a social movement bypassing the internet may work in very localised settings, but I’m afraid it won’t get you very far.
Instead, we should see the ambivalence of social media as part of social struggle. We need to learn to use the internet in our favour. A big part of the problem is that activists on social media platforms like Twitter do not control their own networks. They do not control the communication channels they rely on for building a solidary movement. This is extremely risky, as it leads to a situation in which the movements we build will be tethered to the capitalist forces they’re trying to get rid of. Communication will have to play by the rules of Twitter and the likes, which means it is likely to remain stuck at the level of sharing fragmentary snippets of awareness and understanding.
If part of the problem is a lack of control of networks and communication channels, then part of the solution is to gain that control. Instead of spending an hour reinforcing the power of some of the richest people in the world, everyone who wants to help further socialism would do well to invest that hour in building communication channels that actually will help socialism grow stronger. Just as socialist movements in different historical and material circumstances had to learn to form networks, we today have to learn. We have to learn to form networks that encourage genuine learning and discussion of what world we want to build, instead of encouraging the proliferation of like-bait and spectacle.
A failure of imaginationHow all of this will look concretely? It’s too early to tell. My experience on the Fediverse using Mastodon so far has been good, but I notice I need to unlearn habits of passive interaction and try to team up with friends and comrades much more. Perhaps we have to try to slow down our speech, and move to asynchronous discussion in magazines and newspapers set up to help us to achieve what we want. The part for commercial platforms like Twitter in all this should at best be peripheral, for the simple fact that they’re a huge liability and waste of time.
In Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher wrote that currently it seems impossible to imagine alternatives to capitalism. I think this holds true for the capitalist internet economy just as much. It is hard to imagine an internet and online networks that actively promote and cultivate resistance, organised movements, and social struggle. But the impossibility Fisher describes is not logical, it is historical. And as such it is subject to change. It is a failure of imagination, not a limit. And where you fail, you must try harder.
Somewhere in Plato’s work you’ll find an argument against writing. That’s right; writing, as such. Given how important writing is to me, it always gives me an unsettled feeling to consider whether Plato is anywhere near worth taking seriously on this point.
In the Phaedrus, Plato makes Socrates say that the written word will degrade human memory and remove the dialogic character of thinking—a text may speak to you, but it never listens. This moved humanity away from a rich oral culture of conversation, story-telling, and discussion towards a solitary culture of rigidity and bookishness. Socrates makes it seem that the invention of writing was not human progress at all, but a form of destruction.
I don’t think Plato—who was a writer—means this to be his final verdict, given the many benefits writing brings to people. But in a series of recent books the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has revived this type of reactionary argument. This time the new invention is that of digital communication and digital media. According to Han, they undermine community, stamp out attention and ritual, and lead to a culture of narcissism.
Also this argument leaves me feeling unsettled. Let me be clear from the outset, I disagree with Han. But I would not talk about it if there wasn’t was something to learn from his work.
Reprogrammed by a new mediumDigital technologies, like writing and the printing press before them, are changing dramatically the ways humans live. That seems incontestable. But Han does not like what he sees. As he opens his book In the Swarm:
In view of the meteoric rise of electrical media, Marshall McLuhan observed in 1964: ‘The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology.’ Matters stand much the same today with regard to digital media. This new medium is reprogramming us, yet we fail to grasp the radical paradigm shift that is underway. (In the Swarm, p. ix)
What is wrong with humanity’s adoption of digital technology? Han’s brief answer is that it reduces human society and life to a faint shadow. Digital media ruin community and isolate human beings. If people communicate digitally, then this does not establish relationships, it will be disembodied, and leaves no room for shared feelings. Digital communication is predominantly affect based (which Han links to narcissism) and it develops into a form of communication without community.1
This suggests that instead of being just an ambivalent cultural phenomenon, the move to digital tech marks our downfall as human beings. A significant current within Han’s work of the last seven years or so propels this diatribe against digital technology.
A bland mix of truth and nonsenseThese are bold claims and, frankly, I don’t think Han explains why anyone should believe them. His writings are rather sparse on argumentation and the most striking assertions are made without giving a reason. This is no accident or oversight. His books engage readers at a more holistic level. They offer something like a compelling picture of how things really are—a strategy Wittgenstein at some point preferred as well. It means sketching a portrait of forms of life that a reader will immediately recognise but nonetheless casts in a new light: ‘Yes, that’s it! That’s my predicament!’
This sort of picture-writing runs the risk of allowing valuable truths to combine almost imperceptibly with exaggeration and nonsense. The resulting mixture may appear plausible, but would be dangerous to embrace uncritically. The following passage from one of Han’s books may serve as an illustrative example:
Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception. At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections. (The disappearance of rituals, p. 7)
Now this feels somehow explanatory, doesn’t it? But on a closer look it reveals itself to be no more than a succession of more or less recognisable ideas. True, it is a documented fact that attention span has fallen below historical norms. And this may be associated with what Han calls ‘serial perception’, a form of experience that rushes from one piece of information to the next. But why would an attention deficit lead to binge watching? Wouldn’t someone with shallow attention precisely hop from one activity to another, instead of staying focused on episode after episode on Netflix? We don’t get the reason. The next stop is the assertion that serial perception is ’extensive’. We are not told what this means, but let’s assume this is so. Then does it then follow that digital communication is extensive as well? That it does not establish relationships? The logical connections are missing and no reasons are given. All we get is a provocative idea to take home: digital communication does not establish relationships.
Life in a digital panopticonYou may think I’m being pedantic. As I said, Han’s books don’t seem intended to be read in this analytic way. In fact, they resemble very much the hasty and affective form of communication that Han is criticising. His staccato chapters try through repetitive proclamations to stir up a sense of recognition in the easily distracted reader of the twenty-first century: “Yes, this is what I see around me!” And then, after having embraced them, Han’s words might summon a certain degree of outrage: “No, he’s right! We cannot continue to let our lives be hollowed out by this digital paradigm!”
To have this reaction to our current predicament would not be misplaced, and to that extent the texts do their work. The image of society that emerges from Han’s work is both recognisable and it is alarming. It shows us as living in a world that is becoming increasingly egocentric and more and more anti-social. Han is one of several authors writing about the way neoliberalist societies cultivate egoism and narcissism.
When he goes online Han sees a ‘digital panopticon’, a virtual world in which large numbers of people are performing the unpaid work of tweeting, vlogging, and linking in a hyper-surveillance economy. It’s a system that tricks them into thinking they are free (they can share what they want, right?). But in fact they are the serfs that secure the platform’s profit. As Han puts it:
In the digital version of the panopticon, we are not simply imprisoned. Rather, we are active participants. We take part in building the digital panopticon. By exposing ourselves, by hooking ourselves up and voluntarily uploading our body-related data to the net, like the millions of devotees of the ‘quantified self’ movement, we actually maintain the digital panopticon. (Capitalism and the Death Drive, p. 25)
This socio-economic system we increasingly inhabit is a ‘digital feudalism’, about which Han says:
The digital feudal lords, like Facebook, give us some land and say: ‘You can have it for free. Cultivate it.’ And we cultivate it exhaustively. At the end of it all, our feudal lords return for the harvest. This is a surveillance and exploitation of all communication. The system is extremely efficient. No one protests against it, because the system exploits freedom itself. (p. 89)
This seems apt, and it puts a finger on the way neoliberal capitalism uses digital technology against people, to exploit people, and, as Jodi Dean recently put it, to protect the rich and powerful from the rest of us.
The click of a button?As so often, it is neoliberalist capitalism that’s ruining the good life. In many places Han does identify this neoliberalist crusade for individuality, increased productivity, and surveillance as the culprit of our disintegrating sociability. Yet there are almost equally many places where Han blames digital technology and digital communication for having caused those things. Han’s critique of neoliberalism seems inseparably fused to the critique of the digital. Neoliberalism and digital technology, they would seem to be two sides of the same medal.
Although this once more seems a provocative idea, I don’t think it is right. I think it is rooted in a distorted image of tech.2 In an interview, published as part of his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, Han says that “the digital as such pushes us towards transparency. When I push a button on the computer I immediately get a result”. Observations of this sort recur in his work, that digital technology makes everything transparent, facile, and impersonal. And such observations are revealing.
They are revealing, because anyone who has tried to get digital technology to do things that bypass or subvert capitalist intentions will know that what Han says is false. Just try to set up a free and open social network for friends or comrades, or try to programme home appliances that do not spy on you. Those things won’t go with a click of a button. Quite the opposite. If computers always gave immediate results, there would be no Stack Overflow, and no sprawling community of hobbyists, FOSS-activists, and hackers.
Han’s misdirected aversion to digital technology is perhaps understandable, and may be a sign of a general problem. The image of digital technology has become warped under the influence of neoliberalism. And this is not by accident. If the only things that come to mind when you think of digital communication are Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok, then it may be hard to discern the true potential of online communication. And that serves some people all too well.
A gap between culturesIn his book Exponential (2021) Azeem Azhar describes an increasing distance between those that primarily know digital technology as it is made available to them as consumers, and those that have knowledge of the hardware, source code, and network protocols. Building on a notorious lecture the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave in 1959, Azhar describes ours as a society of two cultures. It is the programmers, engineers, and hackers that know what digital technology is and can do. Its users often show a fundamental ignorance. “Effective analysis of technology,” Azhar writes, “involves straddling two worlds” (p. 7).
It is precisely this two-worlds perspective that is missing from Han’s work. As a consequence, his approach to digital technology seems closer to a consumer phenomenology. His work aptly describes how tech appears to someone scrolling mindlessly through their Insta feed. There may be some value in such a perspective on digital communication. But as an analysis of our predicament, and of digital technology, it runs the risk of mistaking an effect of societal problems for their cause.
Still from Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (1971)
- If you want to read the passages I have in mind, a quick skim of Han’s In the Swarm (2017, e.g. 1-3, 22-24), The disappearance of rituals (2020, e.g. 11-13), and Capitalism and the Death Drive (2021, e.g. 99-103) will suffice. ↩︎
- It may be that Han thinks that MacLuhan’s work on mediality is enough to support this fusion of technical medium and neoliberal ideology, but I would not see any reason to accept the idea on that basis. That at best is true of specific social media like Facebook or Substack, which indeed seem to be designed to create the kind of digital panopticon Han describes. But to say this of, say, HTTP or the TCP/IP protocol would be as implausible as stretching McLuhan’s thesis to link Christianity with ink. ↩︎
I’ve been thinking recently about what form of political organisation I should put my time and energy in. How can I best contribute to bringing about societal and economic reform? It is glaringly obvious that such reform needs to happen. But so far the vast majority of those who agree that something needs to be done largely sits back, watching the future get bleaker and bleaker. Often it feels as if I’m sitting back.
That people think action is needed while at the same time doing nothing does not mean they don’t care. Many of them do. They simply don’t see what they can do—how they could exercise their political agency in a way that would make a difference. If this sounds at all familiar to you, then looking into forms of organising politics may be the place to start.
RevolutionI talked about societal and economic ‘reform’, didn’t I? Well, that’s a euphemism to soften you up a bit. The actual term I had in mind was revolution. By this I don’t specifically mean overthrowing capitalism. I use the term in its more general and explosive sense. By ‘revolution’ I mean a dramatic and radical shift in conditions, attitudes, and operation of society.
Think about how things are going in the world. It’s pretty much a scientific fact that we’re now heading for disaster. The effects of climate change are going to have wide-ranging impact everywhere. Revolution is inevitable, whether you like it or not. What you can control, however, is in which direction things will develop and how society will adapt to the material circumstances that lie ahead. Crudely put, it’s not a done deal whether humanity will see a new dawn of socialism, or another nightmare of fascism.
The question that keeps me up at night is: How can we help nudge the situation in socialism’s favour? Currently we’re not doing great.
The party as formWith this in mind I’ve been reading some of Jodi Dean’s work on movements and organisation. Dean is a political theorist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the US. She argues that those who want to join the fight for a socialist future should join forces within a party.
By this I don’t think she simply means the parliamentary party, those institutions you vote for in elections and then you’re done. Dean understands a party as not primarily electoral, but (in her words) as “an organisation and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics” (Crowds and Party, 117) and “a solidary political association that cuts across workplace, sector, region, and nation” (157). The party is a group of people who organise themselves to commit to shared goals, shared principles.
A party, in this sense, is an alternative political community, one that defies the status quo. Dean has in mind the communist party, but I think the arguments I want to discuss here apply to whenever a group adopts a shared counter ideology and tries to establish it as a joint political programme.
What about political autonomy?Do we need to join a party like that? In many circles on the Left this is a controversial point. This is because joining forces within a party implies a restriction of political autonomy. Why? Well, as part of a party you will have to expect to make concessions. “The party comes first.” Tasks may be assigned in a way you did not choose. Individuals will have distinct responsibilities, experiences, skills, and—correspondingly—varied forms of authority. Some people will be more active than others, and therefore more dominant and influential. The very point of the party is to impose a course of action. “This is how we will move forward.” Of course, in a well-functioning socialist party such restrictions, divisions, and impositions will have a radically democratic and transparent basis. But they will be restrictions, divisions, and impositions none the less.
Some assume that for these reasons the party form is just another form of domination and another source of antagonism. It will organise things such that a few have a relative authority over the many, a few who have a bigger say and more power than others. That inevitably brings hostility and discord. And surely socialists should try to get rid of domination and discord, not proliferate it.
This is where I find Dean’s work worth reading. Because she doesn’t disagree with the premises of this argument. Simplistically, you can say that in the theory of politics there are two camps: those that think that authority and antagonism are signs of bad politics, and those that think they’re signs of any form of politics. Dean firmly believes the latter, which to me seems at least empirically justified. This is her negative argument for the party form. Yes, in a party you will find yourself in an arrangement in which a few have a relative authority over the many; yes a party will be a site of division and strife. But this is true of any form of lived politics. So, it doesn’t speak against the party at all.
Fantasies of democracyI do think that this is a very important point to think about. It is all too easy for activists to uphold an elaborate fantasy about how egalitarian and level their networks or gatherings are. But even when people come together in a fully level and participatory setting, try to follow principles of direct democratic collaboration, and agree that decisions are only made by all—that everyone will be equally important, and that everyone has an equal say—even there you will see domination and antagonism. It’s more or less a return of the repressed, to use a familiar phrase from psychoanalysis.
Take the most anti-hierarchical assembly you know—I myself am imagining my time in an anarchist squat scene, quite some years ago. Look at it with an anthropologist’s eye. Study what actually happens (instead of what those involved think or say happens). You’ll see that a few will be doing most of the work, only a few will take most of the initiative, and only a few people are getting most of the attention.
This is how Dean defends the party from the criticism that parties are a form of authority and sources of conflict. In practice, the few will always be dominant in an aggregation of people, not the many. This is a well-described phenomenon—in some fields known as the Pareto principle. It has more to do with human and group psychology than with politics. Dean points to Albert-László Barabási’s work on complex networks, which suggests that any growing network based on free choice and containing individual preferences produces de facto hierarchies—even if the participants like to think of themselves as anti-hierarchical.1
So if you don’t like authority and antagonism, it’s no use trying to start an assembly that bans these factors. There is no such thing. The point is not that we should therefore be happy with pecking orders and strife—of course we shouldn’t. But we should see them for what they are: unwelcome aspects of living together. It is naive to think that you can get rid of them in a diverse community of any significant size.
Why the party?What’s the alternative? Dean thinks that if you don’t join forces with others as a political party, your influence will remain individualistic—which happens to be the form of subjectivity cultivated in neoliberalist capitalism. This is her positive argument for the party form.
If you don’t join forces with others and adopt a shared counter ideology, trying to establish it as a joint political programme, then you’ll remain one among the many. The set of principles you promote will be one among a multitude of ideologies on offer. The slogans you use will not have a common meaning, as each of us means something slightly different by what they say, right? “We all have our own truth—and that’s fine.” Any influence on politics you then have will depend on forces that are well known from how capitalism has arranged the ‘market place of ideas’: can you be the first, can you be the loudest, can you get the most likes?
Well, at least this is Dean’s point. Here’s a long quote in which she puts it well:
Is political change just aggregated personal transformation, communism as viral outbreak or meme-effect, #fullcommunism? Do we think that autonomous zones of freedom and equality will emerge like so many mushrooms out of the dregs left behind in capital flight and the shrinking of state social provisioning? Or do we optimistically look to democracy, expecting (all evidence to the contrary) that communism, or even upgraded social democracy, will arise out of electoral politics? All these fantasies imagine that political change can come about without political struggle. Each pushes away the fact of antagonism, division, and class struggle as if late neoliberalism were not already characterized by extreme inequality, violence, and exploitation, as if the ruling class did not already use military force, police force, legal force, and illegal force to maintain its position. Politics is a struggle over power. Capital uses every resource—state, non-state, interstate—to advance its position. A Left that refuses to organize itself in recognition of this fact will never be able to combat it. (Crowds and Party, 153)
So in this situation where activists are effectively trying as political content producers to beat the market, the revolution will be a long way off. Perhaps joining forces with others as a party is indeed the only viable way to turn a mere aggregate of those who want to fight for a better world into a community, and then into a movement.
The right kind of political struggleRight now I will just leave you with these arguments. The reason I wanted to present them is primarily to get them into view. Dean has made these points in various places and in slightly diverging ways. A brief reconstruction brings the matter into sharper focus.
There are many things I’ve left out here. For example, how should a party organise itself? How do we make decisions. How do we assign tasks? How do we settle on our principles? These are things that we do need to talk about should we decide to join a party together.
I also haven’t discussed Dean’s interesting take on the psychological work that a party does. She thinks the party is uniquely suited to work through the problems of living together politically. (And this is a psychoanalytic sense of ‘working through’, involving the discovery of unconscious aggression, desires, and defence mechanisms).2
Regardless of whether you or I agree with Dean all the way, these arguments are worth discussing with those you feel politically close to. What expectations should you have of a movement towards a new politics? With an eye on the future, what is more important, your own political agency or the agency of a group? And what actions can you undertake right now to cultivate the sort of struggle that we need?
Image of a protest by the radical Dutch party BIJ1, advocating the abolishment of capitalism and a society with equal rights and equal opportunity for everyone.
- Barabási’s work is in mathematics and computer science, not in political theory, and his book is worth reading if you’re interested in networks more generally. ↩︎
- In particular, Dean bases her psychological claims on the work of Jacques Lacan, to my mind a corpus of charlatanism that rests on completely misguided assumptions about linguistics and human psychology. Lacan largely ignored psychoanalytic practice and espoused an a priori psychology. Whenever I see someone cite Lacan, I’m reminded of Richard Wollheim’s majestic rebuttal (‘The Cabinet of Dr Lacan’). The things Lacan did get right, other traditions in psychoanalysis have articulated much better. I’d love to see how Dean’s points about the psychological function of the party sound when they are articulated in terms of post-Kleinian and post-Bionian relational theory. ↩︎
Microchips are some of the most extraordinary objects humanity has ever made. This writes John Lanchester in the first March issue of the London Review of Books, which I read during breakfast. Computer chips are extraordinary in part because they seem impossible to put together. This fact about them makes chips dangerously fragile technology, and it is not obvious that we can continue to rely on them when the full effects of climate change will have made themselves felt.
Exceptionally fragileIn 1961, the first chip had only four transistors. But sixty years later high-end chips like those designed by Apple or Huawei cram ten or twenty billion transistors in a piece of silicon not even half the size of a postage stamp. The size of transistors is now measured in double or even single digit nanometres.
To etch the circuitry in between the molecules of silicon wafers, chip manufacturers use photolithography with extra-ultraviolet (EUV) light. Many insiders thought for a long time this process was technologically unfeasible. They were wrong, but only just. EUV photolithography requires such specialisation that there currently is only one company in the world that can assemble the machines to make the high-end chips that power your iPhone or new laptop, and only one company that knows how to use those machines in a production line to make those chips.
Lanchester’s claim that microchips are extraordinary artefacts is based on Chris Miller’s book Chip War (2022). Miller is an historian doing research on key shifts in technology, international politics and economics. This recent book of his offers a history of the development and manufacture of semiconductors and integrated circuits, better known as chips. Not only are the chips themselves exceptional, but so is the chain of dependencies that underlies their manufacture.
The world’s production of advanced computer chips relies crucially on only a handful of companies. The machines to etch the nano-sized circuitry onto those chips are designed and assembled by ASML in The Netherlands. And the facility that actually produces the chips themselves is TSMC in Taiwan. There are a few companies that supply the components necessary for this process, such as lenses, lasers, and ultra-pure silicon, and a few facilities that are capable of producing less sophisticated—but still sophisticated—chips. There are no other producers. No one else can pull off this technological feat. In other words, a dominant engine behind current society rests entirely on an exceptionally thin supply chain.
A EUV photolithography machine produced by ASML. Photo: ASML
When China succeedsMiller has only so much time to marvel at the feat of technology. His main concern is with how microchips have changed almost everything we do and almost every tool we use, and how more and more our lives depend on them. Because this gives whoever produces chips immense power. This is why current geopolitics so often pivots around the semiconductor industry. The ‘chip war’ is a key determinant of what is happening in world politics right now.
In his book Miller frames it as a war between the US and China. Currently, China is largely dependent on importing advanced microchips from suppliers that are in one way or other controlled by the United States. The quite understandable ambition of China is to set up its own production facilities, so as to reduce its economic and political dependency on other countries, the US in particular. If China succeeds—when China succeeds, because in my mind there’s little doubt that they will—it would likely mean economic superiority and the end of the global hegemony of the United States. It would take away from the US one of the key industries its economy and military relies on.
The dynamic Miller describes in his book made a lot of the details of current geopolitics fall into place for me. I now see better why suspicion of the Chinese tech giant Huawei needed to be roused in recent years. Why TikTok suddenly is a problem (and Facebook still isn’t). Or why the US is pushing The Netherlands to make it illegal for ASML to sell its advanced photolithographic machines to China. And it explains for a large part why the US is so keen on defending Taiwan, and why military force would potentially be worth it for them.
What if chip manufacturing grinds to a halt?But there is another thing that’s good to notice about this portrait of the microchip. Chips have become integrated in almost every part of our lives. Computers, telecommunication equipment, cameras, kitchen appliances, research labs, libraries, maps, manuals, encyclopedias… all these things now depend on advanced microprocessing technology. Even further, as I’ve described before, we more and more outsource even our own cognitive processes to the ‘artificial intelligence’ that is currently developed. If there’s no AI without piles and piles of microchips, then soon there may be no significant human thinking without a steady supply of chips either.
What happens if chip manufacturing suddenly grinds to a halt? Given the fragility of the supply chain, this is not a far-fetched possibility. A powerful earthquake near TSMC in Taiwan, for example, would likely shut down global production for months if not longer. Miller estimates the costs of such an event would be measured in the trillions of dollars.
Societal collapse is no longer a ‘doomer’ prospectBut earthquakes are one-of events. There’s a more serious contingency on the horizon. What happens if humanity is forced to transition to forms of society that are unable to sustain such complex and resource-demanding production processes?
In their book Deep Adaptation, Jem Bendell and Rupert Read write that climate change “will probably, or inevitably, lead to the collapse of industrial consumer societies.” They think that, apart from trying to reduce emissions and pollution, people urgently need to plan for a post-collapse world. In such a world, many things that we now take for granted will have to be given up because they can no longer be sustained, either because of lack of resources, lack of power, or lack of people.
Though their view has been portrayed as ‘doomer’ or ‘alarmist’, the idea that society as we know it won’t survive this century is rapidly becoming mainstream. In 2020, a group of hundreds of scientists wrote an open letter to the world, warning that “researchers in many areas now consider societal collapse to be a credible scenario this century”. The most recent IPCC report projects a global warming well over the 3C rise that a recent report by The Economist marks as ‘catastrophic’ and ‘disastrous’ if it happened. But it will happen. Sustainability analyst Gaya Herrington calculated that collapse may happen as soon as 2040. This is reality catching up with half a century of lobby-driven optimism.
Of course, the collapse predicted here won’t be a single event. That’s how a disaster film would portray it no doubt. But in fact it will be an extended chaos of processes, covering a spectrum of deterioration and decay. Many of the things people now take for granted they will lose: unconcerned holidays, exotic fruits and produce, accessible health care, insurance, housing, and who knows what else.
Preparing for post-collapse computingLet’s accept that this is really happening. Then we should see that one thing at risk is computing and digital communication. The supply chains of the chip industry are fragile due to the extreme complexity of the product. Only very few sites are capable of producing sophisticated microchips. Miller mocks Mao Zedong’s future vision in which (in Millers interpretation) all people will make semiconductors—“as if every member of the Chinese proletariat could forge chips at home” (385). Whether it truly was Mao’s or not, as a vision this is unrealistic precisely because the manufacturing of a chip requires an unfathomable range of resources and tools. There is no way the semiconductor industry can become ‘small’ or ’local’.
This is why it should become a key priority to prepare for post-collapse computing. What could post-collapse computing be? Well, I think we better take that question extremely seriously. Climate change is likely to force far-reaching changes upon the way people use and rely on computers. In particular, I think societies should prepare themselves for a situation in which people are no longer able to produce their most extraordinary object. The thin connections that run between key nodes of the semiconductor industry are probably too fragile to withstand an era of natural disaster and war, of rationing of energy and resources, of widespread famine, of international suspicion, and of unprecedented migration away from coastal areas and newly forming deserts. In such a world, chip manufacturing is likely to be reduced to a trickle at best.
How would we manage? Not, I think, by simply letting go of computers. Tragic as it may seem, humanity can no longer do without advanced computing. Societies have become too complex, and people have grown too dependent on a technology that in many ways is an ideal solution to complexity. Just think about it for a minute. In what ways is your daily activity already scaffolded by the network of computers that surrounds you, near or far away? For myself I can easily give dozens of examples.
Chips as relics of the old daysIncreasingly often the scaffolds offered by high-tech computing are essential to keep you going. There are already plenty of things most people can no longer do without a computer: communication over distance, keeping accounts, banking, writing novels or articles, looking up information, navigation… And at least in the coming years this list will continue to grow at increasing speed, because it is the front line of capitalist expansion.
What would happen to all such essential tools if the chip factories are on fire, under water, or when their workers are dead or starving? In a post-collapse world, we may find ourselves reliant on computer technology left over from ’the old days’. Would that be feasible? Is the technology we now design resilient enough to last that long? Easy enough to repair? Would it be enough to sustain a low-tech internet?
It is hard to predict the future, but it is good to be prepared. And preparing for post-collapse computing may require us to alter current designs and manufacturing processes with an eye on making microchips more sustainable and durable. In forty years time, the microchips that are rolling down the assembly belt as we speak may well come to be cherished as precious relics, carefully kept and maintained to power essential aspects of life. Connected to solar panels, wind turbines, or some other improvised energy source, they could then have obtained a status as elusively complex devices, extraordinary objects powering improvised peripherals that are much less technologically sophisticated.
A node in the Scottish Tegola Network, a testbed for research into rural and community-run broadband technology.
The political energy of fascism is colouring the horizons of Europe. The right wing of public life is teeming with activity. With each new electoral gain, its momentum grows, as does the cold-bloodedness of their slogans and the callousness of the policies they imagine. At least in countries like Italy, Sweden, and The Netherlands, a fascistic revolution seems rapidly approaching. It does to me at least.
Just look around you. Refugees, climate activists, people of colour, trans people, Muslims, critical historians, disabled people, people who are medically vulnerable, women who choose to control their own bodies—all of these groups are pushed ever more forcefully into the dehumanising mould of a ‘problem’ or ‘aberration’ that needs to be dealt with. To put it bluntly, large parts of humanity are with increasing enthusiasm portrayed as those that need to be got rid of, instead of fellow souls that deserve respect, support, shelter, and a living.
That this is happening should be obvious.
Yet although the political rhetoric is there for all to witness some people continue to find it incongruous to see the term ‘fascist’ applied to the type of politics that is unfolding. Still, it is exactly what I am intent on doing. I will use ‘fascistic’ to describe the direction in which Europe is currently moving, because this is what I judge it to be.
I’ve been told off for this—online, but still. “Of course, that right-wing politicians have become mainstream is obvious. But it’s well beyond the pale call them fascists.”
But why exactly? Why is labelling the current political movement fascist objectionable? I have seen two different reasons offered. The first is that ‘fascist’ is a label that applies only to specific historic movements—fascism is contained and a thing of the past and what we see now is just… something else. The second is that the word ‘fascist’ should not be used because it’s merely a pejorative phrase: a term of abuse that expresses no more than contempt or disapproval—“Oh, you don’t think what I think? Well, in that case you’re a fascist.”
As it happens, I don’t think either of these reasons is any good. To start with the pejorative use, this is of course nothing new. George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about fascism, wrote in his essay on politics and the English language that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. Keep in mind that he wrote this not even a year after the menace of German fascism had been defused.
So yes, if you describe everyone as a fascist, then you are unlikely to say anything informative. However, we should be careful to distinguish between words and things, between ‘fascism’ (the term) and fascism (the political force). Even if the term ‘fascist’ is frequently misused, that doesn’t mean that fascism doesn’t exist, or that some people nowadays cannot be or become fascists.
Orwell would have been the first to emphasise this. Much of his work as a writer and essayist was devoted to chronicling the twentieth-century struggle against fascism, mainly in its German, Italian, and inchoate British varieties. Continuously he stumbled into a brick wall. It was that many of his contemporaries were unable or (more commonly) unwilling to get to grips with what fascism really is. It was just too inconvenient, too disruptive, to look true fascism in the eye. In ‘Socialism and the English genius’, an essay from 1941, Orwell writes
To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face.
Orwell here is jumping ever so slightly ahead of what I want to say. But his words do get me to address the other reason you supposedly should not call someone a fascist. This is the misguided assumption that ‘fascist’ is a term that applies only to specific historic movements.
The assumption betrays a hopeless ignorance of what fascism (the political force) actually is. “One can gauge the general ignorance,” Orwell wrote, “from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of ‘Fascism’ as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany.”
Even in Orwell’s time many people were reluctant to label anyone but rather specific historical groups or movements as fascistic. The idea that fascism could rear its head in different forms and—heaven forbid—in your own country was just unthinkable. And for many it still is, I think. Because of this wilful ignorance, the forces that could cause fascism to gain a foothold in 21st-century Italy, Sweden, or, say, The Netherlands continue to be downplayed or remain unacknowledged altogether.
Fascism must be understood as a world-view or a vision of society. Orwell speaks about a ‘fascist attitude of mind’ and a ‘fascist feeling’. He defines it as essentially reactionary—as going against something. What does it go against? He is clear about this. The fascist attitude of mind is repulsed by equality, by the ideal of a world-state of free and equal human beings. As it happens, this ideal of a world-state in which everyone is free and equal is the ideal of socialism. That’s why Orwell thought that to understand fascism you would have had to study socialism first. It is even possible to see fascism as a reaction to actual socialism, wherever it crops up—in several places Orwell takes this possibility extremely seriously, and at one point portrays fascism as a mirror-image of socialism.
So understood, it should be clear that the fascistic attitude or sentiment is not geographically or historically contained. Someone who felt and expressed this fascistic feeling, according to Orwell, was the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Writing A Vision in 1925 Yeats described his idea of utopia: “every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few”. This is a vision of a society opposed to freedom, opposed to justice, and opposed to equality. As Orwell writes in his 1943 essay on Yeats,
in a single phrase, ‘great wealth in a few men’s hands’, Yeats lays bare the central reality of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely political Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason.
Orwell’s writings about fascism are of immense value to day. They should serve as a mandatory refresher of how real the political force of fascism is, and how closely fascism lurks under the surface of capitalist society. His works remind you of the fact that although the fascist will always claim to fight for ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’, they invariably suppress the qualification that it concerns only freedom and justice for them.
I think that the term ‘fascist’ can perfectly well be used today, and even used in a purely descriptive way. The political movement I see in frightfully many places in Europe is reactionary, it is viscerally opposed to the idea that everyone deserves free and equal treatment, and it actively promotes great wealth to remain in the hands of a privileged and aggressively protected few.
It is hard to do away with metaphors, and we shouldn’t always want to. But some metaphors are better than others. That’s why it’s always useful to pause when a metaphor becomes entrenched, and look critically at what work it is doing. What is the metaphor making us believe, and what is it hiding from sight?
A metaphor that very much deserves such critical treatment is the idea that our files and software are in ’the cloud'.
What is going on here? “The cloud is made up of servers in data centers all over the world,” you can find on the website of Cloudflare, one of the big players in cloud computing. “Moving to the cloud can save companies money and add convenience for users,” they write.
But they would write that, wouldn’t they? They’re after all a ‘cloud’ company.
Photo by Kaique RochaThe cloud and the manifest imageIt seems to have been back in 1996 when the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined. It was meant to describe a form of distributed computing. The idea behind distributed computing is that the processes behind your application or software, need not be on your own computer, but can be run elsewhere, at least in part. These processes can be bits of computation, or involve file storage and network management. But if not on your computer, where then do these processes take place? They’re in the cloud. Or so we’re supposed to think.
To use ’the cloud’ as this unspecific and somewhat esoteric reference to the location of where these processes take place has proven tremendously powerful. The idea that you can store your data in ’the cloud’ is by now more cliché than fresh metaphor.
‘The cloud’ has become part of the manifest image of twenty-first century culture. The term ‘manifest image’—itself a metaphor—was coined by the philosopher Wilfred Sellars. By using it I mean that ’the cloud’ has become part of how people understand computers in everyday practice. Recently I was on a government website that recommended to make safe backups of your personal data in ’the cloud.’ If an idea has reached government, it must be established indeed, right?
Unpacking a metaphorWhat is the metaphor of ’the cloud’ making us believe? It’s always hard to unpack the imagery of metaphor in words, but I think it’s at least this. That there is a massive virtual world somehow hovering over all of us, just as the meteorological clouds in the sky. ‘The cloud’ is a common resource, a phenomenon, something that transcends human activity or intention. Moreover, the metaphor makes us believe ’the cloud’ is a phenomenon all of us have access to, almost as if it was a recently discovered piece of nature.
I think we can even be more specific. Talking about ’the cloud’ gives the idea that we are dealing here with a technologically advanced version of the commons. The idea of the commons is often used to describe “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth.” Calling something a commons typically implies that it is a collective resource, something that belongs to us all: the fields, the oceans, the clouds.
Someone else’s computerIt sounds dreamlike, ethereal, as Rebecca J. Rosen wrote in the Atlantic. But when we talk about ’the cloud,’ ‘we are not talking about mist-like data hanging out in the ether, but massive computer servers, powered by generators, cooled by air conditioners, and stored in warehouses. More mechanical than magical.’
And I would add, more proprietary than communal. What people keep on calling ’the cloud’ does not belong to us all. It is far from a collective resource.
Whenever you put something in ’the cloud’, just say out loud to yourself that you’re putting it on someone else’s computer. This is a popular trope on Hacker News (a virtual water cooler for people working in tech). A quick search through the archives of Hacker News shows how pernicious the metaphor has become. Even though typically the forum users are critical of the metaphor, the term ’the cloud’ nonetheless gives you over 18000 hits on Hacker News alone. It shows how hard it is to escape the manifest image of a time.
‘The cloud’ is not neutral territory, but exactly the opposite. It is part of the hostile environment of for-profit data-mining. Alongside fossil fuels and health care, cloud-computing is a key site of capitalist economic expansion. It’s where your computer is turned into someone else’s source of revenue. This is what the metaphor of ‘cloud computing’ is hiding from sight. The data-centres you upload your photos to, the server that runs your scripts or software, is not just anyone’s machine. It’s most likely a machine owned by one of the monopoly players Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
To be clear, I’m not opposed in principle to making money by offering computing services. But I am opposed to trying to pass off a privately owned and for-profit infrastructure as a shared and communal resource. It is not. There is no cloud. There’s just a clever way of making a lot of cash doing things that people could have (and should have) arranged publicly and communally amongst themselves.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about market-driven deskilling. I did this after thinking about declining literacy skills on the one hand, and the rise of ever more sophisticated ways to replace human cognitive activity with profitable tools. The examples I had in mind included relying on a search engine’s ‘suggested answers’ to resolve queries, and using ChatGPT for reports and analysis. I called this branch of business ’thinking as a service’, and suggested that it cultivates and promotes a cognitive form of deskilling.
The idea of deskilling seems a good lens through which to get some of the major changes in society into focus. But I had never looked into if and how deskilling in society had already been discussed by other writers. Do people talk about how capitalism promotes deskilling? And if so, what do they say about it?
The degradation of workTo be fair, from the outset I was pretty sure deskilling must have been discussed at length. It is just too prominent to go unnoticed by many. After some searching on Google Scholar I traced the way authors in sociology and economics currently approach deskilling. It led me to the work of economist Harry Braverman.
In his book Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), Braverman argued that in a capitalist economy, there is a drive towards reducing skill in the labour force. Deskilling characterises the fate of the modern labourer. This idea has its root in Marx’s concept of alienation, but Braverman elaborates it specifically for the way skills become a pivotal element in the struggle for power.
Fragment of the cover of Labor and Monopoly CapitalBraverman sees two main reasons for why capitalism should lead to deskilling. First, the capitalist rat race for profit will motivate those who own and profit from the production process to break up complex and skilled tasks into simple and and inexpensive ones.
But more importantly, deskilling is a strategy for those who own and profit from the production process to maintain their power. This is the more crucial reason Braverman identified in 1974. By keeping the conception of products separate from the process of execution of products, the actual knowledge of how to produce goods is kept among a select few, while the production itself can be done by workers who lack this knowledge, and who only perform highly specific tasks.
Those workers, as a consequence, become increasingly dependent on the powerful few who manage production and control the available opportunities to work. Instead of resisting, workers will be forced into a docile and subservient role—anything in order not to be shut out from work.
In other words, Braverman says that by controlling the distribution of skill, capitalist enterprises control who is in power. Sounds familiar? I think so. And, spoiler alert: the power stays with the capitalist.
Criticism of Braverman’s deskilling thesisAlthough Braverman’s work has been influential, his main claims about deskilling have been questioned and watered down.
One criticism voiced soon after Braverman published his thesis is that he portrays workers too much as helpless victims of a capitalist determinism. Where workers have managed to resist the capitalist logic in an organised way, his critics argued, deskilling has not taken place in the way Braverman predicted. Hence, it is not inevitable.
Another critical response looks at the way computers and micro-technologies got introduced into the workplace after Braverman published his thesis. Far from being simple to operate, these technologies required a higher level of skill to operate, and hence an upskilling of the workforce. For example, Paul Attewell has argued that this in part makes it that deskilling does in fact not characterise the fate of the modern labourer, even though it does occur in some professional sectors (1987).
Consumer deskilling in the food sectorHow useful is all this for me and what I was thinking about? The impression I get is that, so far, the bulk of the discussion about deskilling has been about labour and the workforce. The workers are losing their skills. But the more dramatic form of deskilling I see in society right now happens outside the workplace. It’s the strategic replacement of skills with newfangled products that happens in people’s everyday life.
In 2006 JoAnn Jaffe and Michael Gertler wrote an article about ‘consumer deskilling’ and the transformation of food systems. Their main claim is that there is an increasing gap between what consumers know and are able to do, and what those who more and more own the means of producing food and profit from food manufacturing know and can do.
Now, I don’t like the term ‘consumers’ here. I don’t like it because it plays along with an image of society in which the citizen is first and foremost a consumer. But Jaffe and Gertler have an interesting observation to make. They see that fewer people have extensive knowledge of specific foodstuffs and their preparation, and fewer people are able to discern the quality and sustainability of certain foods. (Of course, much of your supermarket is devoted to promoting ‘quality’ and ‘sustainability’, but those choices are made for you by those who profit from them. Think about that.)
Jaffe and Gertler write that the food industry has cultivated and encouraged a change in how people understand what they do in their own kitchens. Instead of being engaged in autonomous production of food from raw materials, you are in your kitchen and at your dinner table consuming products that you have bought from food producers. Gradually, you slide into a rhythm of consume, consume, consume…
Deskilled by the marketI think this idea of ‘consumer deskilling’ is important, although as I said I think you should be weary of being thrown into the dreary role of the consumer. Especially when you consider that in many cases, it is precisely this type of deskilling that forces people into consumerism to begin with. So it’s not deskilling of consumers, but deskilling into consumers.
I like to call what’s going on here market-driven deskilling. That places the emphasis on the market. It is a form of deskilling that is driven by attempts to secure and generate profitable sale of commodities.
What I’ve been able to find tells me that this form of deskilling has mainly been discussed in the context of the capitalist food industry. taking off from Jaffe and Gertler’s paper. However, I think that it has a much wider application. Let me give you one example close to home.
Front page of Google ScholarOn the shoulders of giantsEarlier I said that I used Google Scholar to look for the origin of discussions about deskilling. Google Scholar is owned by, you guessed it, Google. Although the Wikipedia article on Google Scholar describes it as a ‘freely accessible web search engine’ and a ‘bibliographic database’, it is good to keep in mind that Google Scholar is part of Google’s profit-seeking monopoly on the internet. Google sells ads and products that exploit your data.
Consequently, that you can find scientific publications easily through this service is not a friendly gesture, but a way for Google to make researchers and knowledge producers dependent on its services, so as to continue its nefarious business of selling ads and products that exploit your data profitably. You may find this a cynical take on a very useful tool, but only pause and think what Google Scholar is actually doing.
Yes, I have been trained to use libraries and know how to use cataloguing systems. But Google Scholar has made such knowledge largely redundant. It seems to have everything, and it has it in an easily searchable form. The ability to scan through publications using ‘full-text’ search enables you to find uses of a phrase or concept much more quickly, often without having to study and read. Scholar does this work for you.
Indeed, it is a marvellous feeling to have the world of knowledge at your fingertips, without having to go through the frustration of finding that one volume among kilometres of library shelves, only to learn that the paper you wanted to consult does not discuss the topic you were interested in after all. “Stand on the shoulders of giants”, Google Scholar tells you when you visit the site.
But the convenience Google Scholar offers comes at an uncomfortable price. I don’t have figures for this, perhaps I will look into this some time soon. But I worry that increasingly many people will not be able to do bibliographical research without Google. This is something I certainly have seen in several generations of students. And it is something I notice in myself. It’s market-driven deskilling. Market-driven, because Google is able to exploit my and your loss of skill to sustain and increase its power. By gradually replacing our abilities with its service, the company can control people, governments, and society, and make sure they will continue to secure its profits.
Because of these created dependencies, people who should be critical of Google’s business model may be the first in line to celebrate and defend its oh-so-convenient services. Anything in order to not to be barred from climbing the shoulders of giants.
Language can be a stumbling block. How you write and present a text determines not only what you say, but also who is likely to understand you. If a text is too brief or uses too general terms, you may fail to communicate what you mean. But a flip side is that writing that is long or uses specialised words is likely to shut the door on some readers. In navigating this dilemma, the specific problems of accessibility that language poses should usually be at the front of your mind.
These accessibility problems are real. In practice, language often excludes. To put it simply, it divides between those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed within any community that values diversity and equality. Here I will focus on written language and reading needs. My argument is that because there is a plurality of reader experiences, communities should facilitate a plurality of text formats when there is a need for them.
A fallacy of generalisationThe aim of all writing is communication and writing fails if communication fails. Ernest Gowers wrote The Complete Plain Words (1954), one of the best known books on how to communicate well through writing. Gowers said that the golden rule is to pick the words that will convey your meaning, and only those words. Those words should be as plain as possible. No one is served by written documents that are needlessly complex or verbose.
But what is plain to the one, need not be plain to the other. It is all too easy to assume that, because a text is plain to you, it will be plain to everyone else as well. That is a fallacy. We can call it the fallacy of generalising reading experience. Such a generalisation is almost always a mistake, because there is great diversity among readers. An important source of this diversity is a difference in reading level.
A measure of reading levelSomeone’s reading level is often expressed using the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Their literacy scale ranges from A1 and A2 (beginner) to B1 and B2 (intermediate) to C1 and C2 (advanced). The scale was developed for people learning additional languages. However, over time it has come to be used to express first language ability as well. Someone who grew up in the Czech Republic and learnt to read texts in Czech can on this scale be scored as, say, a B1 reader if their ability to read Czech is intermediate, or as a C2 reader if their ability is advanced.
The B1 level is currently taken to be a norm for writing for a general audience. In the Netherlands, for instance, it is a guideline used by governments and public bodies for when they communicate with citizens across society.
Someone who has a B1 reading level in a language is an intermediate reader of that language. According to the CEFR classification, such a reader “can understand texts that consist mainly of high frequency everyday or job-related language”, and they “can understand the description of events, feelings and wishes in personal letters”. What is characteristic of texts intended for B1 readers, then, is that those texts will avoid specialised language, unless it is language that is common in the intended reader’s professional life.
Declining literacy and its consequencesAlthough B1 is a common norm, certainly not everyone is able to read at this level. An OECD survey from 2015 found that 1 in 6 of adults in England, and 1 in 5 in Northern Ireland, has literacy skills at or below the most basic level. According to the 2018 PISA report, in France just over 20% of 15-year-olds shows only the lowest level of reading proficiency, and among Dutch teenagers of that age this figure is closer to 25%. Furthermore, these figures are not stable, but in many countries literacy is declining.
This means that, compared to a few decades ago, increasingly many people struggle to read texts written for a general audience, let alone specialised texts. For this reason, successful communication will sometimes require finding alternatives to the B1-norm for general audience texts. (The Dutch government, for example, provides versions of some of its communication tailored to A2 readers.)
Language as an accessibility problemAll this proves that if you care about accessibility, you should take into account that language works differently for different people. It is all too common for written communication to become an exclusionary device. Just imagine how someone still learning Turkish may become sidelined in a society in which all important documents are sent to them in Turkish. Or think of a management meeting in which the circulated memo presupposes an understanding of the lingo specific to an organisation; this may make a newcomer feel left out and at a loss.
More generally, when members of a community or practice are expected to be able to read at a specific level, then this will put at a disadvantage any member who for whatever reason cannot meet those presumed standards. In these cases, it would be legitimate to wonder, ‘if I am really a member, then why am I not enabled to participate?’
Default reading levelsHow should we respond to the specific accessibility challenges posed by written language? It may be tempting to suggest that to ensure accessibility, all texts must be written for a general audience. Because specialised language is not accessible to all, it must be avoided in documents that concern all—or so the thought goes. I think that this is a mistake. It is a mistake because the accessibility problem occurs regardless of which level of reading is adopted as the norm. No norm will be accessible to all.
True enough, if only specialised texts are offered to a diverse community of readers, it is likely that such documents will not be accessible to the entire community. Not everyone may have the ability to read and understand such texts. But the same holds when written communication in an organisation is aimed at people who read a language at a B1 level (which many governments and public bodies use as a norm for general audience communication). As mentioned earlier, a significant and growing proportion of many communities is not able to read that community’s dominant language at B1 level. Such readers will be left out if there are no forms of communication available that meet their specific needs.
In other words, it won’t do to to single out a specific reading level for which your text needs to be suited, because whatever reading level you pick, there will be people who cannot read at that level. And what should you do if you want to reach those people as well? I think that the answer is that texts should be tailored to meet people’s needs. But tailoring texts to specific needs of one group of people, may well produce results that are inaccessible to others. For example, a translation into Arabic or Finnish can help some, but will again not be accessible to all.
There are no B1 texts, only B1 readersMoreover, the assumption made in all this is that we can meaningfully classify texts in terms of reading levels. That we can say of a specific letter or report that this text is suitable for B1 readers. But the assumption that there are ‘B1 texts’ is problematic, because the group of B1 readers is itself diverse.
Between those who would score as B1 readers there will be differences as to what counts for them as ’everyday or job-related language’. Everyday life is not homogenous. Differences in people’s upbringing, employment, and life experience will make for differences in which vocabulary these readers will experience as ‘plain’. For example, someone who scores ‘B1’ on a reading test may well be able to read the professional manuals or instructions pertaining to their day job, documents that contain terms that would mean little to many other people. This illustrates that even if a document is plain for some B1 readers, it is highly likely that there will be B1 readers for whom it will not be plain.
The upshot is that there are no B1 texts, only B1 readers. There is no form of writing that works for all. Instead, a community is best served by a variety of writing forms and ways of delivering them, tailored to the specific needs of the people you are communicating with. This will always be imperfect, but it is the best you can do.
The use of specialised vocabularyThere are other problems with expecting of organisations and communities that shared texts are all written tailored to a B1 reader, at least if by that is meant that these texts only use language that avoids specialised vocabulary.
For one, in legal contexts specific terminology may be required for a text to function at all. More generally, avoiding all specialised vocabulary will often make texts unhelpfully long and complex. This is because specific language can improve readability just as it can undermine it. The richer a vocabulary, the wider the range of words you have at your disposal, the more efficiently a thought can be expressed. (This is illustrated by how the number eleven can be expressed using different numeric systems with vocabularies of different sizes: eleven in binary, which has a vocabulary of two terms, must be written as ‘1011’; in decimal, a vocabulary of ten, it is shortened to ‘11’; in hexadecimal, a vocabulary of sixteen, it is reduced to ‘B’.)
Removing all specialised vocabulary from a community’s communicative registers would mean that certain things could only be communicated in a form that replaces specific terminology with a general description using only more basic words. This would inevitably lengthen these texts. But length can itself be an obstacle for people. In that case, the accessibility problem would not have been solved, but only displaced. Or the community would simply have to stop writing about that topic.
Once more, the conclusion to draw is that accessibility asks for a diversity of approaches. Different readers may require different formats.
Not one size fits allI hope this makes clear that because there is a plurality of reading needs, communities should facilitate a plurality of text formats when there is a need for them. The irony is not lost on me that my elaboration of this simple point has taken a considerable number of words, and led me to take you through various lines of argument. But I have tried to be as plain as I could without losing sight of the things I meant to say.
When it comes to accessibility, one size fits all is rarely the solution. And also when you consider the specific problems posed by written language, there simply is no form of writing that is accessible to all. This includes my own writing, I am well aware.1 If you want to ensure accessibility of communication, you should expect that whatever form you choose, there will be some people to whom it is not accessible. No text is ideal.
In the end, none of this absolves you of the task of writing as plainly as possible. If you want to say something, there is no excuse to abandon the golden rule.2 Pick the words that will convey your meaning, and only those words.
- In part for that reason, I do not intend this to be the only thing I will write about this issue, and will be looking for different forms. ↩︎
- The golden rule does not hold with equal force for poetry and literary prose, but even a writer of those genres is not entirely off the hook! ↩︎
It is common to interpret an epidemic as a sign of society’s moral failings. Syphilis outbreaks in ancient times were seen as a punishment for a sinning population. The medieval plagues were explained in terms of moral pollution of society, with foreigners or minorities ending up as the usual scapegoat.
As Susan Sontag describes in AIDS and its Metaphors, also the much more recent AIDS pandemic in the 1980s continued this pattern. The spread of HIV/AIDS has been portrayed as a reflection of the misdeeds of society, for instance when the Bishop Falcao of Brasilia declared AIDS to be “the consequence of moral decadence" (Sontag 1989:149).
An individualising turnAs it happens, I think that epidemics typically do disclose moral failings of society, although these failings have nothing to do with ‘sin’ or ‘moral pollution’, and everything with an unfair distribution of resources, care, and infrastructure (e.g. under capitalism).
However, in her work Sontag has pointed out that this narrative of disease as a societal problem is losing its grip. And this trend is only continuing. There has been a gradual shift in how illness gets exploited for projecting moralistic fantasies onto people, a shift towards the individual.
In the past, such grandiloquent fantasies were regularly attached to the epidemic diseases, diseases that were a collective calamity. In the last two centuries, the diseases most often used as metaphors for evil were syphilis, tuberculosis, and cancer—all diseases imagined to be, preeminently, the diseases of individuals. (58-9)
In other words, instead of moralising about society when we find ourselves in a deluge of infection, our moral outlook construes and experiences sickness and health increasingly as individual failures or achievements. This is one of the central theses of Sontag’s classic work on illness and its metaphors: more and more, people interpret your disease as a judgment on you, and not as a judgment on your society.
The society of ErewhonA satirical portrayal of Sontag’s thesis was made already a century before she published Illness as Metaphor in 1978. The satire is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: or, Over the Range.
Published in 1872, the book describes the adventure of an English settler in New Zealand who discovers an unknown society after passing through a dangerous mountain range. The people he finds live in the land of Erewhon (an anagram of ’nowhere’).
The protagonist immediately feels at home in Erewhon. It feels European. Its people are friendly and cultured, and they receive the exhausted traveller with a certain degree of warmth and friendliness. But first impressions lie. The culture isn’t quite the same, and layer upon layer of bizarre custom reveals itself. One of several dramatic inversion concerns the judicial system of the Erewhonians. Instead of trying and imprisoning thieves, fraudsters, and murderers, the Erewhonians prosecute the ill and the disabled. Sickness is a crime, both in people’s experience and before the law. Erewhonian prisons and labour camps are filled with those who are chronically ill, infected, and injured.
Engraving of The Bench, by William Hogarth, 1758In one scene Butler portrays a typical day in an Erewhonian court, in which a judge delivers the following speech:
Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character.
The trial fills the protagonist with ambivalence. He disapproves of the morality the procedures express, but at the same time sees that even the convicted person comprehends and embraces the verdict. This particular trial is no exception. As the novel makes clear, if you’re sick in Erewhon, you’ll end up in prison. People go through great lengths to hide any sign of physical unease or discomfort so as to avoid moral scrutiny. (And to complete the dramatic reversal, the Erewhonians will respond with great pity and concern for their well-being to anyone who has committed fraud or violence, give them time off and wish them speedy recovery.)
Social DarwinismButler’s portrayal of the moral code of the fictitious Erewhon was intended as a commentary on actual moral practice in modern society. It is, after all, satirical. Professor of Victorian literature Hans-Peter Breuer suggests that Butler used the dramatic inversion of illness and crime to articulate a social-Darwinist ideal, a conception of society that was becoming increasingly fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century.
When writing his novel, Butler was strongly influenced by George Drysdale’s The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1855), which proposed an empirical morality according to which only deviations from natural laws should be counted as moral failings. Conventional laws, like those of etiquette or the church, are no genuine guide to right and wrong. As Breuer sums up the core of this moral code, “the strong, not the virtuous, are rewarded, and the weak, not the wicked, are punished, by suffering and death” (1973: 324).
It is the kind of morality you find articulated in works by Friedrich Nietzsche around the same time, and which inspired pseudo-scientific movements with a eugenicist or social-Darwinist inflection.
Whether Butler himself subscribed to a form of social-Darwinism or whether his satire was meant to demonstrate the abhorrent character of this way of thinking about illness and disability is not a settled matter. It is clear that Butler recognised that the actual English society of his time didn’t differ as much from Erewhon as people might have liked to think. But did Butler see this proximity and overlap with Erewhonian morality as a good beginning? According to Breuer, we must read Erewhon as Butler’s dramatic defence of a broadly social-Darwinist ethics, already implicit in people’s practice, according to which morality is about strength, not virtue. On the other hand, Sontag, who comments on Erewhon in a footnote, interprets Butler as using the dramatic inversion of illness and crime to “point out the absurdity of condemning the sick” (56).
To be clear, I have only read the novel, and not any of Butler’s other writings. But going by the novel’s text, I’m inclined to side with Sontag.
It is perfectly clear that Butler saw the practices of the Erewhonians as symbolic for actual attitudes in society. Yet, it is equally beyond doubt that his inversion was intended as satire, just as the rest of the novel. Presenting a judge who sentences someone for tuberculosis was an exaggeration intended to evoke indignation in a reader, not praise. To me it seems that the satire’s pedagogic purpose is to get a reader to recognise how close the actual world already is to Erewhon.
Read in this way, the novel maintains its relevance as social commentary. In many situations and corners of society, illness and disability are already construed as moral failings. In modern capitalist societies, people with chronic illness are already tried and persecuted, be it only in a de facto way.
David Hume’s problem of induction is one of the central puzzles of modern philosophy. It is the problem of explaining how it is possible rightfully to claim knowledge about things that are not immediately staring you (or your interlocutor) in the face. I think that what’s happening to the natural world at the moment forces us to see Hume’s philosophical puzzle in a different light.
Will the sun rise tomorrow?The classic example is the knowledge that the sun will come up tomorrow. Most people, including myself, do claim to know this. But how can they, given that tomorrow hasn’t yet begun? Sure enough, I’ve seen the sun come up today and the days prior to it. But I can’t look into the future. To put it generally, how do people form beliefs about matters of fact that are, as Hume says, ‘beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses’? (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1740, 89)
Hume’s answer is that our knowledge of the future is based on the assumption that nature is uniform: if one thing and another have been regularly connected in experience, then this connection holds generally in nature. Every time a new day starts, the sun comes up.
That nature is uniform, Hume thought, was so obvious and natural that it needn’t be questioned. If this is so, then the evidence I have about the sun will be enough to allow me to claim authoritatively that the sun will come up again.
Now, think about this for a minute. Perhaps you’ll notice that a reliance on the idea that nature is uniform makes the argument circular. If it’s really so obvious, then how do we know that nature is uniform? It seems we can once more base ourselves only on what we’ve seen so far. Yet the initial problem was precisely one of extrapolating such knowledge into the future. By pointing to the idea that nature is uniform, then, we don’t seem to have solved the problem at all.1
All this is well-trodden ground. Yet because of climate change, we now occupy a perspective on this puzzle Hume couldn’t appreciate. The uniformity of nature seems no longer a given.
A changing climateI was reminded of Hume’s puzzle when I listened to James Meadway on the podcast Politics, Theory, Other. Meadway is Director of the Progressive Economy Forum, and in the podcast he talked about how climate change is rapidly altering the world we live in. The changes are so profound that they affect both the way the world works, and what we can know about the world.
Examples of climate change are no longer a matter of speculation about the future. The unfolding catastrophe is here, right before us. The European heatwaves of the last couple of years make clear that life in Europe is rapidly altering. Suddenly I hear friends in the traditionally cool northern countries complain about a lack of air-conditioning. Insect populations are dwindling. Droughts lead to lower water levels in the European rivers, setting in motion a chain reaction that affects transportation, food production, and power supply. Last summer, the surface water in France was getting so warm that nuclear power plants, which use river water for cooling, had to dial down their production to prevent damage.
In the rest of the world, the changes have been even more obvious for a long time, and their effects have already led to suffering and disaster. The massive flooding of Pakistan in 2022 put one third of the country under water. Desertification on the African continent is making it increasingly difficult to sustain agriculture. In Ethiopia, for example, eighty percent of the land is at risk of desertification.
Economics in an unstable worldBeing an economist, Meadway is alert to the way all this has led to global shortages and price increases. This is a problem for millions of people who see their futures becoming less and less certain. But Meadway also highlights a problem for the way scientists and experts make knowledge claims about the world. His focus is on economics, as a scientific discipline, but I think the point generalises to several other fields of inquiry.
According to Meadway, the field of economics has for centuries, and perhaps since its very inception, been able to rely on the idea that the natural world, including the climate, forms a relatively stable background to human existence. Sure, there are the seasons and regional differences in climate across the planet. But despite those local variations, globally the natural world and the climate have been uniform enough to ignore them as parameters. Economic models by and large focus on explaining what happens in terms of what humans do. Economics is an anthropocentric science, dealing with human well-being. (Meadway makes clear that there are exceptions to this—a kind of ’ecological economics’—but these exist still very much in the margins.)
This anthropocentric way of thinking that dominates economics is no longer sound. Climate change is transforming the natural world in ways humans have not encountered before. Regular patterns get disrupted. Seasonal changes become unpredictable. Weather and ecosystems are caught a downwards spiral. As a result, the background to human life is becoming unstable. And if it becomes unstable, Meadway says, “then all of our economic activities are going to be disrupted in ways that none of our economic models right now really cope with.”
What claims can economists still make when their fundamental assumptions can no longer be relied on? And more urgently, how can we use economics still to guide policy and action, if its models are junk?
Humans and their place in natureMeadway argues that these developments should lead economics to change its game quite dramatically. Nature and the environment should become part of the model, instead of a silent backdrop. We should move economics further away from humans. This means that economists should develop an approach to scarcity and abundance, to logistics, and to economic value that puts the state and well-being of entire ecosystems at its centre.
This call to move away from a human-centred view of life and well-being can be heard in other fields as well. In recent decades epidemiologists have called for a ‘One Health’ approach to medicine and disease control. We can’t understand infectious disease spread by looking only at human behaviour. We need to look at what the animals are up to as well, and also at how the ecosystems are changing. As epidemiologist and anthropologist Freya Jephcott explains, the call to move to an interconnected understanding of health and disease control was inspired, during the last decades of the twentieth century, by a sudden increase in infections doctors hadn’t seen before, outbreaks that were driven by the way modern human activity had disrupted ecosystems.
The biggest challenge in a long timeBoth the human and the natural world are in turmoil. Indeed, this is no coincidence if both worlds are thoroughly interconnected. The challenge we as humans face is bigger than anything we’ve faced in the last couple of centuries, possibly millennia. The challenge is not only of a practical nature, even though ultimately it will have to be a change in practice that helps us find stable ground again. The trial is intellectual as well.
The intellectual challenge is that many of our knowledge claims are based on assumptions about the natural world that can no longer be justified. What to do?
- To claim that this shows we can never have knowledge of things that are not immediately given, amounts to a refusal to take the puzzle seriously. To my mind, the best way of clearing up Hume’s puzzle has been articulated by Nelson Goodman (who attributes the spirit of this resolution to Hume himself). Have a look at my lecture notes on Goodman. ↩︎
I have noticed that when people think about risk, they only think about probability: How likely is it that x will happen?
For example, the UK Government’s Flood Risk service tells you that Trinity College, Cambridge has a “very low risk” of flooding, by which they mean that this area has a chance of flooding of less than 0.1% each year.
Similarly, and closer to the point I want to make later on, in a recent Nature review on long COVID, Hannah E Davis et al. quantify the risk of developing long-term damage after COVID purely in terms of the percentage of people that develops the condition, reporting for instance that “MRI studies revealed cardiac impairment in 78% of 100 individuals who had a prior COVID-19 episode”.
Chances, probabilities, likelihoods. We’ve heard a lot about those during the last few years. However, risk assessment is not only about probability or chance. If you want to determine the risk of something, you should be thinking just as much about the severity of the consequences: How bad would it be if x happened?
Umbrellas and seatbeltsCompare the following two examples. When I step outside to go for a long walk, there often is a chance higher than one in five (>20%) that I’ll be caught in bad weather and get soaked. Yet, even with those odds I normally don’t go through the hassle of carrying an umbrella.
On the other hand, when I get into a car I always wear a seatbelt, even though the chance of getting involved in an accident is less than 1%. Why do I leave the umbrella home, but insist on wearing the seatbelt? For keep in mind, the chance of the negative outcome the umbrella protects against happening is much higher than the chance I’ll be in an accident.
The answer is of course that it doesn’t matter much if I get wet. It’s inconvenient, but when it happens it’s not much more than an uncomfortable but interesting adventure. In stark contrast, the consequences of a road accident are likely to be severe, possibly even very severe. It could easily lead to hospitalisation or death.
Given this, getting caught in a shower is in fact a lower risk than the risk of a car accident. Risks are about consequences as well as chances. For similar considerations I don’t smoke, even though I know that the majority of smokers will reach old age. With smoking, for me it’s not about the chance of being fine, but about what happens when you’re not.
Calculating riskGenerally, we should calculate risk with the following formula:
Risk = Probability x Consequences
When we let our assessments of risks be guided by this formula, we will see that the more severe the consequences of an outcome are, the less the probability of those consequences matters.
When Sir Christopher Wren designed the famous library at Trinity College (1676–84), in his design he factored in flooding. The library is raised on pillars high above the ground. Was there a high chance of flooding? No. But the consequences of damage to the precious library would be so devastating, that even the low probability of the river Cam’s leaving its banks was enough to build in flood defences. The chance was low, but the risk was high.
The Cloisters underneath the Wren library. Source: Cambridge CollegesRisk in an ongoing pandemicAll this matters for risk assessment in the ongoing pandemic. In the Nature review I quoted above the authors observe that “Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections” (this figure includes vaccinated people). Not only do we here get a quantified expression of the chance of developing long COVID (>10%), we also get a qualitative estimation of its consequences. The consequences are described as ‘often debilitating’. To my mind, this puts them somewhere close to car accidents or the kind of damage done by smoking.
Can we now assess the risk of developing long COVID? No, because there’s more. Consequences involve contextual factors as well. Getting wet on a sunny day is less bad than finding yourself soaked when it’s just above freezing. Similarly, the conditions under which we lead our lives have changed significantly since the start of the pandemic.
In part due to the way the pandemic has been mismanaged, in many countries the health care system is under severe strain. This means, for example, that in the UK more patients than ever are on waiting lists for treatment (7+ million people), and that 500 people die every week simply because they cannot get access to urgent care. In The Netherlands, the care watchdog has announced that with the changed situation access to care is no longer a given.
In other words, if you are ill and in need of treatment, it is becoming increasingly less likely you will have access to that treatment. This in turn means that the consequences of accidents and of falling ill are becoming increasingly severe. This increase in severity can happen even if, strictly speaking, the medical facts about accidents or illnesses don’t change, or even become more favourable.
This matters for risk assessment in a COVID-19 pandemic. The higher the disease burden on societies, the more unreliable the health care system becomes for many of us. And that in turn means that the consequences of getting COVID, long COVID or some other COVID sequelae are becoming worse and worse. Falling chronically ill in a society that has a well-functioning social healthcare system is bad, but falling ill in a society where the social healthcare system is at the brink of collapse is much, much worse.
In several wealthy countries basic literacy is declining year on year. Here I want to focus on The Netherlands, a country I understand well. In the most recent PISA report, which looked at data from 2018, The Netherlands performed poorly given its wealth, trailing a large distance behind Estonia, Singapore, and China.
Ranking of countries relative to mean reading score. Source: PISAThe report was no surprise. The Dutch Education Council has tried to raise awareness of this decline for years, yet there is no sign anything significant is happening to counter it. Why aren’t we seeing a more concerted effort to invest in and improve primary and secondary education?
For, surely, it matters a lot. Reading skills involve more than the ability to reproduce a text; they demand comprehension as well. Indeed, the PISA score measured precisely comprehension, “the capacity to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve goals, develop knowledge and potential, and participate in society”.
Someone who struggles with reading is likely to struggle with writing as well. And indeed, also when we look at the ability to write, the majority of Dutch children leaves primary school with writing skills that fall below the desirable threshold. In fact, a quarter of school-leavers does not even possess the most basic level of writerly competency.
Anyone who is familiar with Dutch society should already be able to spot the effects of this steady decline on everyday life in the Low Countries.
Cognitive deskillingNeedless to say, this is not the fault of children. I think it is fairly uncontroversial to see the decline in literacy and comprehension as a systemic failing, a result of how society at large has ceased to value the ability to read, write, and to reflect and understand. (Consider, it’s not only children that read worse—their parents do so too.)
In this light, I think it’s crucial to see these declines against the backdrop of a much bigger picture, one that extends well beyond the specifics of the education system. Where is society heading?
The answer is: towards a de-skilled society. More and more, thinking itself is being turned into a service, a product that is offered by some company or other. When people look for answers or want to understand something, they turn to Google, Bing, or to social media. There, they are likely to find easily digestible, byte-sized snippets that will do for most practical purposes. Consultancy, instead of being a specialist service, has become a mainstream staple.
Examples are everywhere to find. Instead of reading a manual, people will find the solution to a problem with their laptop or dishwasher as a ’top hit’ on a search engine. Instead of reading a news article or analysis piece, people will base their view of what’s happening on the gist distilled for social media. More and more do we rely on auto-completion of emails, and on automatically generated messages and choices. This outsourcing of thinking happens in scientific contexts as well, and with the advent of ‘Artificial Intelligence’, all of this increasingly takes place cheaply and automatically, without meaningful human intervention or control.
What I expect to see more and more is that thinking will become a service. A service to which you’ll have to subscribe, either by paying with money or with your data. This Thinking as a Service model (TaaS) has been set in motion a long time ago, but I think we are only now beginning to see exactly how corrosive it is. It thrives on and promotes a specific kind of cognitive deskilling. As any other form of market-driven deskilling (think of what happened to cooking, exercise, repairing, cycling, networking, organising, etc.), the decline in reading and comprehension skills is a welcome and expanding opportunity for turning created demand into profit.
The true causes of literacy declineWith this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Google is increasingly infiltrating the classroom, or that people are imagining a life in which ChatGPT takes care of your emails and administration. When we worry about declining literacy in societies that should very well be able to afford decent education, we should not look too narrowly when we look for causes. Instead, as always, we do well to follow the money. The less capable people are to read, write, and understand, the easier it will be to exploit their helplessness for profit.
To celebrate the end of the year, I’ve gone through the songs and albums that I’ve played most during 2022.
It’s a catholic collection, but listening back to these songs, soundscapes, and melodies now I can see there are unmistakable sites of overlap. I’ll leave it to you to find them, and I hope you’ll find something of your liking as well.
JanuaryIsao Tomita, Suite bergamasque: No. 4 Passepied.In January I was rather extensively exploring early electronic music, and discovered the work of Isao Tomita. He’s one of the pioneers, so it was a surprise I hadn’t come across his work before. An ecclectic fusion of classical composition and experiments with the Moog synthesiser.
It reminds me of Wendy Carlos’ impressive work—you might know her for her work on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrik’s film A Clockwork Orange (click the link for an interview with Carlos.)
FebruaryLegowelt, Dune is a Great Movie No Matter What People SayIn February I saw that Legowelt had released a new album. This was not too surprising, because the electro guru from the The Hague churns out new music more fequently than he does his groceries. But it’s always a pleasant moment.
I first discovered Legowelt when I played DJ-sets in the large main hall of the art school at which I was studying. Back then, in 2002, his track Chokolectricity was a highlight of every proper party.
MarchSex Pistols and Ronnie Biggs, Einmal War Belsen Wirflich BortrefflichIn March an article appeared in the London Review of Books about the legacy of Malcolm McLaren. McLaren is best know for his creation of the Sex Pistols (alongside the recently deceased Dame Vivienne Westwood). After the band’s decline had set in, McLaren thought it a good idea to feature Ronnie Biggs as singer on the Sex Pistol’s The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle, replacing John Lydon.
Biggs was one of the the Great Train Robbers in 1963, and a fugitive after he had escaped from prison in 1965. Asking him to sing on the album was McLaren’s way of making sure the record would still be punk.
AprilAndreas Scholl, I am a poor wayfaring strangerA singer dear to me is Andreas Scholl. His classical work is well known, but perhaps fewer people are aware of his ventures into folk music (as well as electro, but I won’t linger on that here). His renditions of English folk songs are intimate and appropriately plain. To his album Le Voyageur I return quite regularly, and I find its wistful registers quite attractive.
My first encounter with Scholl’s work was when I watched Simon Schama’s TV-series The Power of Art with a group of students, in a class on cultural history I taught. Schama’s episode was on the work of the sculptor Bernini, and in the background Scholl’s sublime rendition of the song ‘Ah ch’infelice sempre’ from Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater was used. The class, including myself, was reduced to tears.
(Interesting fact, the recording of Scholl’s singing this Vivaldi piece, released in 2007 at quite crucial moments clips, possibly the result of an unfortunate microphone setting. For years I believed my headphones were to blame. To release the record anyway was a bold refusal of perfectionism.)
MayMatmos, Fight to Sodom / Lot do SaloAfter an episode of Late Junction on BBC Radio 3, my favourite radio show by quite some distance, I rediscovered the work of Matmos. Their new album Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer once more is proof that Matmos is, well, hard to pin down. Clicks and cuts: samples: instruments clearly invented for the occasion: all with a good dose of British wit.
Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer by MatmosMatmos is another of those names that have been with me for a long time. The first of their albums I played over and over again was The Civil War from 2003. It sounds like an electronic music studio that got timewarped back into the middle ages.
JuneHannah Diamand, Staring at the CeilingThere’s experiment in the main stream as well. I closely follow what the PC Music collective is up to, and this will not be the last track from their universe. (I think ‘collective’ is more appropriate than ’label’—if you look at them more closely you’ll understand why.) Regularly, PC Music releases spectacular mixtapes on YouTube. One of their unfaltering gems is Hannah Diamond.
JulyConnan Mockasin, Jass TwoWhen I walked into a coffee shop in New York City, some time in 2014, I was met for the first time by the curious awkwardness of Connan Mockasin’s music (for the record, this was the exact song that kept me spellbound for days). From New Zealand, Mockasin has carved out a vocal register that is so distinctive and strange I don’t think there’ll be many artist who wish to repeat it. But it’s utterly compelling and brilliant. He’s an awsome musician as well. Connan Mockasin’s most recent album Jassbuster Two is faily traditional by his own standard, and it is very much a sequel to the earlier and somewhat more experimental Jassbusters.
The album cover is fantastic as well. And if you’re into the delightful aesthetic niche Mockasin has carved out, don’t miss the few songs by Soft Hair that are in circulation. Soft Hair is Mockasin’s collaboration with Sam Dust (a.k.a. LA PRIEST and Late of The Pier).
AugustMax Tundra, Lights (A.G. Cook remix)An album I had been eagerly waiting for was Max Tundra’s Remixtape. If you don’t know Max Tundra, think: Steely Dan production quality + Amiga tracker software + a fetish for left-field chord progressions. To listen to his work remixed by related and friendly musicians is a true delight. What I perhaps had been waiting for most was A.G. Cook’s take on Max Tundra, and then finally it was there…
So this is a remix. A.G. Cook is one of the founders of PC Music, which I mentioned above. His remix of the classic Lights (orginal here) adds to Max Tundra some of the distinctive glimmer and glitter Cook is known for. But to be frank, I still think Max Tundra’s remix of A.G Cook’s Soft Landing shows who in the end is the true king and queen of hyperpop.
SeptemberSarah Davachi, Hall of MirrorsI don’t remember how I came across Sarah Davachi’s work, but her eerie ambient soundscapes make for the perfect music to write to. In Hall of Mirrors from her album Two Sisters, the bells bring back memories of the medieval town of Cambridge (UK) I used to live in, with its crumbly churches and quiet graveyards and meadows.
Listening to this, I cannot but conclude that, apart from the pipe organ, the bell tower is the most majestic instrument I know of.
OctoberVincent Gallo, I Wrote This Song for the Girl Paris HiltonThe faltering rhythm of Vincent Gallo’s track feels somehow comforting, as if it proves that even a life lived in jittery bursts can be meaningful. Another reason I like this track is that it reminds me of two other musicians. The start-and-stop character of the song’s beat is reminiscent of Encre’s unsurpassed album Encre. And the way the guitar flirts with the electric organ reminds me of the haunting melody lines in Capitol K’s City.
The biography of Vincent Gallo is worth reading as well, as it makes clear that music is not at all his main business.
NovemberNick Drake, River ManTogether with my friend Nikhil Krishnan I once ran a reading group on quasi-philosophical texts, and he suggested we read the lyrics of Nick Drake. It was a transformative moment to explore and discuss his music in all seriousness. We didn’t find much interesting philosophy, mind. But some of the poetry is like a time-capsule.
I became convinced I understood River Man, one of his most imaginative songs. Drake studied at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge when he wrote it (there’s a recording which I think was made in his room in college). Anyone who’s been in Cambridge will appreciate that life there very much revolves around the river Cam. Drake’s song about a river man, then, cannot but be about Cambridge. I imagined that the river man was some sort of recluse living on a long boat on the river. Perhaps it was some avant-garde hippy who sold marihuana to undergraduates. The conflict between the wisdom of the university and the wisdom of the river man in the song captures the experience of a student who realises the world outside the university contains too much of importance to ignore.
DecemberJohn Maus, The CombineThe mix of synthesisers and gloomy baritone singing you find in John Maus’ Screen Memories is so authentic it’s hard to believe the album came out only in 2017. A kind of Neo New Wave, I suppose. It is retro sentimentality at its finest, and this is another album I love to play when I’m writing.
Happy new year!Well, this list just creams off the glorious surface of what I’ve been listening to in 2022. There’s much more, but for that you’ll just have to ask me if you’re interested. I wish you all the best for the new year.
How bad would human extinction be? To my mind, it seems that it all depends on how it happens. It would be strange to think that we should prevent extinction at all costs—in part because extinction is inevitable.
There’s a useful parallel here with one’s own extinction, one’s future death. One’s death is inevitable, but it need not be something to dread or fear. Yes, death becomes troubling when it is unjust, avoidable, unnecessary, or untimely. But in a life, death is often not the worst thing that could happen. Life can be more horrible than death.
These are perhaps difficult things to get to terms with, but I think that it shows that striving to die well is more important than striving not to die. And much the same holds for human extinction.
In the last couple of weeks, several excellent pieces have been published on an ethical programme that perversely twists utilitarian normative theory to argue that human extinction is the worst thing that could happen. According to this programme, our moral lives should revolve around eliminating existential risk. The human suffering we currently see around us is largely irrelevant, the thought goes, as it is dwarfed by the colossal threat of human extinction. Authors critical of this programme have already queued up. I particularly enjoyed reading Eric Schliesser’s critical reflections, as well as Nafeez Ahmed’s work uncovering the movement’s connections to eugenics.
Here I want to highlight a rather superficial aspect of this perverse programme. Superficial, but in my view nonetheless quite a crucial one: the programme’s name. In What We Owe to the Future, the book that currently is a prime vehicle of the movement, Will MacAskill writes in the introduction:
This book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.
The term ’longtermism’ has already been taken up even by critics to talk about the ethical programme MacAskill and his conspirators defend. But notice how MacAskill in his introductory act of baptising slides from one idea to another. The first idea is that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority. I agree. The second idea, however, is much more controversial and I disagree with it. This is that we should take seriously just how big the future could be.
What does this mean? MacAskill means that because we can influence the size of future populations, we can influence the amount of future happiness. The most efficient way of maximising happiness (the utilitarian maxim) is to make sure that we create as many future people as possible—or so MacAskill seems to think. For this, the ethical programme MacAskill spearheads promotes that we try to colonise space and find ways of uploading our minds to computers to accommodate as many as human lives as possible. That’s the positive ethical programme. But the single biggest threat to this is human extinction. If humans go extinct any time soon, trillions of potentially happy people will never see the light of day. In fact, every other form of current injustice or suffering will simply be outweighed by the many trillions of virtual minds the future could see. Hence, on this view, striving for humans not to go extinct is our most important ethical imperative.
MacAskill wants us to think of both ideas (that we should show heightened concern for the future, and that we should be concerned with promoting trillions of possible future lives) as the same, but they are not.
To be clear, I think the positive programme associated with all this is megalomanic and misguided. For one thing, it’s impossible to upload your mind to a computer (that people think it’s possible is due to the distorted lens through which many remember Descartes’s legacy ). And even if you think that we can scale up humanity in a non-virtual way, the problem of ethics is simply not one of scalability—it is perhaps not a surprise that the ethical programme MacAskill outlines is popular in Silicon Valley, where the default problem is always one of scalability.
But I want to set these points of criticism aside. I think that even before making such observations about the programme’s assumptions, and before we start a discussion about the programme’s merits (or lack thereof), we should object to the name MacAskill and others have appropriated for this view: longtermism.
That name implies that this is the programme that puts the future first, the programme that is willing to take the long view of things.
Names are superficial, but they matter. Even though they’re not in themselves truth-evaluable theses, names often bring covert presuppositions to a discussion. Often it is wise to look cautiously at the dialectical work a name does before we accept its use, and to block use of the name if this dialectical work is illegitimately undermining what we want to say or do, e.g. undermining our own views even before discussion has begun. And I propose that blocking is exactly what we should do in this case. We should refuse the name MacAskill and his sympathisers have appropriated. It’s ill-suited and misleading.
MacAskill’s act of baptism I quoted above implies that anyone who’s not on board with the programme he advances, with the idea that the problem of ethics is one of scalability, is someone who only really has eye for the short term. His appropriation of ’longtermism’ presupposes that anyone who does not think that human extinction is our most important ethical problem takes a short-sighted, myopic view of things. This is misleading and wrong.
I’m reminded of a story about the ceiling beams of the dining hall at New College, Oxford. Contrary to what the name may lead you to think, New College is among the oldest Oxford colleges, founded in the 14th century. The vast dining hall was built around that time. In the 19th century, the roof of the dining hall was reaching the end of its life and the unusually long beams had to be replaced. The carpenters were worried it would be impossible to find trees tall enough to supply the wood required for the renovation. But then, someone discovered a record of how, back in the 14th century, when the hall was built, the College’s governing body had planted some trees for exactly the purpose of replacing the ceiling beams, once they would have come to the end of their life.
These medieval planners took the long view. They knew that planting those trees was the right thing to do. They didn’t just think of their own immediate circumstances of a brand new hall, but took into account events that would only happen centuries after their deaths, and the way their actions could make a difference to future lives. Yet the actions of those 14th century planners had nothing to do with procreation, scalability, or extinction. They were concerned with preserving a form of life they valued, and preserving it well into the future. If you care to stick an -ism on them, they were longtermists. We can and should learn from them. But what they did has little to do with the ethical programme outlined by MacAskill.
One of the biggest problems with present-day society is that it doesn’t take the long view. We don’t plant the trees needed for the future. Capitalism is about short-term profiteering, and this has infected society at every level. Only think of how governments responded to the pandemic, and of how climate policy continues to be inadequate. It shows a short-sightedness that is morally contemptible.
But we should be very careful to distinguish rejecting this endemic short-sightedness from endorsing the megalomanic ethics MacAskill and his sympathisers want us to adopt instead. Longtermism properly understood, taking the long view, may well mean to navigate an entirely different course.
What would happen if humans stopped being able to reproduce? The novelist P.D. James took the counterfactual as a premise for her 1992 book The Children of Men. In the beginning of the story, set in 2021, the reader hears that the sperm count of human males had quite suddenly decreased to zero in the year 1994. No new children were born after that point. After a couple of decades, the memories of having babies and children around had mostly faded. A solution to the fertility problem had not been found, and in the novel we find a society that is mothballing itself in preparation of a seemingly inevitable end.
Today I was reminded of James’ book when I read that COVID-19 has a detrimental effect on sperm count in human males. There’s a string of scientific studies showing that this is yet another bit of damage done by the pandemic. One study describes a significant reduction of sperm count right after an infection with SARS-CoV-2 in 37% of males. Another study confirmed this result, and found that sperm concentration in their control group of COVID-negative males was significantly higher than in the group of COVID-19 patients they tested. With an increasingly large portion of the population being exposed to the virus time and time again, could we be facing the kind of scenario sketched by James?
It is good to read these findings in context. As the authors of these studies note themselves, it is highly likely that the dramatic effects of COVID-19 on sperm count are short-lived. Where the first study I mentioned found a reduction in 37% of males within one month of infection, compared to non-infected controls, after one month this dropped to 29%, and after two months it was only 6%. It is well known that sperm count positively correlates with hormones like testosterone, and that the production of those hormones in turn can be suppressed by fever. A human male who has recently had a prolonged fever is therefore likely to be less fertile. However, this effect is normally only temporary, as hormone levels typically restore after recovery. (That said, testosterone levels do seem to be more severely suppressed after COVID-19 than after other respiratory illnesses.)
Still, this should only be a moderate reassurance to those who want to see the human species survive for much longer. Mean sperm count in human males has been plummeting for a long time, with the decline starting well before the pandemic. A 2017 study found that between 1973 and 2011 sperm count in males living in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand has more than halved. A review published this year found that the decline had in 2018 already reached 62%, and moreover, that the decline seems to be exponential, with the decline per year doubling every year since 2000. What causes this dramatic decline in fertility? The factors of influence are varied and not well-understood. But it is clear that many of them can be traced back to capitalist exploitation of people and nature: high-stress, poor nutrition, polluted environments, and poor air quality.
In James’ novel, the cause of the sudden drop in male fertility remains a mystery. She describes how scientists have conducted study after study, but have eventually given up their inquiry. In the real world, it is likely that the prime causes of the decline are (as so often) too inconvenient to acknowledge. It’s more profitable to pretend everything’s fine.
COVID-19 by itself is unlikely to be a cause of long-term infertility. But it may well speed up the rapid decline of mean sperm count already set in motion. I’ve noticed that societies have a very hard time getting to terms with the fact that unmitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2 continues to aggravate the shortages on the labour market and the pressure on hospitals. It should not come as a surprise if any sudden increase in male infertility due to repeated exposure to variants of SARS were to be brazenly described as ‘mysterious’ until it’s too late.
R.G. Collingwood’s article ‘Fascism and Nazism’ (1940) is relevant to think about today. It’s main aim is to explain how fascism and nazism can get off the ground. How can it be that in countries where a clear majority of people share the values of liberal democracy, fascistic groups, groups that overtly threaten democracy and undermine the ideal of freedom for all people, gain a foothold, grow in force, and, at least in Collingwood’s lifetime, seize power?
Collingwood’s answer to this question continues to trouble me. Part of me just doesn’t want to believe it. It is that the democracies in Europe have become secular societies. We’ve lost religion.
In particular, Collingwood writes, it is because the magical and emotional elements of Christianity have all been dismissed as unscientific superstition, and no longer form a part of the majority of people’s lives. As an atheist, I cannot but raise my hand in recognition. But as Collingwood writes:
The real ground for the ’liberal’ or ‘democratic’ devotion to freedom was religious love of a God who set an absolute value on every individual human being. Free speech and free inquiry concerning political and scientific questions; free consent in issues arising out of economic activity; free enjoyment of the produce won by a man’s labour—the opposite of all tyranny and oppression, exploitation and robbery—these were ideals based on the infinite dignity or worth of the human individual; and on the fact that God loved the human individual and Christ had died for him.
These are the kinds of things that are hard to swallow for me. Due to secularisation, Collingwood suggests, people can no longer feel what’s valuable about protecting the freedom for all people. As Iris Murdoch may have put it, the magnetism of this ideal has been defused.
This gives an interesting spin on the idea of the ‘silent majority’, the hordes that disapprove of the rise of fascism but don’t speak up. They are silent, because they are confused. They have the principles, but are shut off from the religious energy required to understand why exactly they’re worth fighting for. They know what fascists do and say is wrong, but they don’t really feel it. Instead, they feel themselves in the presence of the virile, primitive force of the crude but real emotional energy the fascists have managed to tap into. And stripped naked of their own emotional energies, the majority is slowly drawn in.
This is a psychological explanation of the rise of fascism, rooted in an understanding of the moral function of religious experience in people’s lives. This explanation is different from one Collingwood gave only a year before he wrote his article. In his Autobiography (1939)—a book he wrote in during a time where some people close to him suspected he had become a communist—Collingwood portrayed fascism as the expression of class consciousness among capitalists. The fascist, he suggested, is the political actor doing capital’s dirty work. This is a more traditional Marxist analysis of how fascism arises: because capital is in trouble. This is the analysis I would like to believe.
Nonetheless, in the 1940 article Collingwood dismisses it. His argument is that the Marxist take on fascism and nazism turns them into class movements. But they are not, Collingwood says. “They affect every class alike, and there is no one class whose special interest they advance or whose special point of view they express.”
Now, I’m not immediately convinced by this argument. But I don’t think it matters for me right now, because I’d like to understand what Collingwood says about emotional force. For even if the Marxist is right, and fascism is a sign of class struggle, there still is the question of how fascism can arise in a society that is, by and large, and at least at a cerebral level, opposed to the anti-liberal and undemocratic values the fascists brandish. And perhaps here Collingwood’s explanation of a lack of emotional force or magnetism is still relevant.
As Hilda Oakeley makes clear in a response to Collingwood’s article, Collingwood’s ‘religious energy’ must be understood in a very broad way, close to something like ‘creative force’. It’s not something that should threaten the ambition of a secular society as it is commonly understood. (I’m reminded of the work of Akeel Bilgrami on secular re-enchantment, which I once read with an entirely different set of questions in mind.) Besides, Collingwood’s claims about Christianity can be read as purely historical ones, and as such they seem undeniable. In much of Europe, the value of freedom for all has as a matter of fact been traditionally experienced as a Christian value—and a poisonously Eurocentric one, I hasten to add. (Oakeley points to Thucydides to remind us that the history of valuing freedom precedes Christianity, but I don’t think that undermines Collingwood’s psychological point about its emotional sources for people living in modern societies in Europe.)
So the real question Collingwood presents, even to a secularly minded writer like me, is whether we shouldn’t be urgently looking to find ways of rekindling a broadly shared emotional consciousness of the political values we rationally know to be best. How? I don’t know yet. But if Collingwood is right, then without such a project sooner or later fascism will win.