Cancel Culture is an agent provocateur who has infiltrated the Left.
I first made this statement in a classroom setting, only to watch the instructor immediately turn pale and give an awkward preamble that, “We are here to critique each other’s arguments, not each other’s positions. And if anyone disagrees with, or becomes offended by Alexandria’s presentation, they should try to express their offense at the argument, not at her”. It was a valiant and well-stated preparation for my brash opening of Pandora’s Box. My heart went out to her palpable moment of panic, for I do not envy any teacher their nerve wracking position of vulnerability atop the classroom hierarchy.
Don’t worry – no humans were cancelled during the making of this article.
It’s time to escape the circular firing squads and clean up our house. It’s time to perceive and admit that the oppressions we aim to fight in the world are actually systemic within our movements, embedded in the structures of even some of the most progressive organizations. Isn’t it also time to recognize and understand that it is a grave mistake when we are ruthless to individuals, and blind to systems?
Loretta Ross is absolutely correct in her assertion that we should call in, as opposed to call out. This means we can still address what is viewed as a transgression, but do so in a constructive way that places the issue or oppressive behavior in the cross hairs, not necessarily the individual. We can try to engage with the issues, change the system that produced the oppressive behavior, and maybe even liberate both the transgressor and the transgressed via communication, turning a potential cancellation into solidarity, into mutual aid. Lemons into lemonade.
Which will it be? Calling in or calling out? That depends greatly on a usually ignored, but highly invasive structural feature within progressive movements – hierarchy. Not only does calling in take more effort, guts, and community support, but add that to occupying a lower rung on a hierarchical system, and the scales tend to tip steeply towards calling out. Obviously, it would be better if the objective was not simply to denounce a perceived oppression, but to elevate the positive value being defended. Engage with the issue, as opposed to turning it into a zero sum game where one wins a cheap shot, the other loses potentially everything, and we all collectively lose sight of where we want to go as a movement, as well as losing numbers, confidence, solidarity, and heart. But hierarchical relations are not conducive to the type of work required to call in. In fact, they make it near impossible.
Cancel Culture has infiltrated the left as an extension of our hierarchical society, where in order to rise, we must trample. Cancel Culture is a function of hierarchy, of systems of power and domination. Within our movements, as in society, it is structurally possible, accepted, and even celebrated to grab influence, to take power. Cancelling someone is a way to do this simply by calling them out and casting them down.
It is true, Cancel Culture is a complex issue with multi-faceted entanglements and sources, and there are people whose behavior is so egregious that it does warrant being called out and they, in some way, canceled. But the culture of cancelling is, at its core, yet another destructive function of hierarchy. It decimates solidarity while breeding short-sighted, fear based, winner take all behavior.
What is to be done? How can we stop Cancel Culture infiltrating our movements? It turns out that the same strategy that is effective against traditional infiltration, is also an effective antidote to Cancel Culture. The logic is simple: if an organization has no structural mechanisms for grabbing influence and dominating, if there is no centralization of information and power, and no homogenous, cookie cutter activist persona to imitate, then the organization is not vulnerable to infiltration by any person or antithetical phenomenon. There are no means of dominating, no secrets to expose, and no unthinking mold to fill.
This strategy has recently been championed by an activist network called Real Utopia: Foundation for a Participatory Society. Rooted in liberating values, the “Parsoc” vision also encourages a strategic focus on praxis, building organizations and movements that reflect the vision’s stated values internally. For example, think of a familiar scenario – you join a movement that espouses liberation, yet you encounter the same old systemic oppressions inside the movement. If I go to a meeting of a group who calls for feminism, yet I see men overwhelmingly chairing meetings, making speeches, and women overwhelmingly organizing the chairs and taking notes, I am either not likely to return, or I will need to speak up and try to change things. In the context of hierarchical structures, the challenge to overcome is automatically framed: “How can I rise from my low position?”. If we’re honest, the clearest and most well trodden path is to take down someone above me – the higher the better.
What if I did not need to take someone down, or even to rise, to be heard? This is what Real Utopia and other participatory organizations aim to facilitate, not by avoiding honest debate and open communication, but by eliminating the hierarchical setting. Participatory systems and institutions structurally encourage and reward the behavior of calling in, as opposed to calling out. Calling in becomes the automatic response, instead of the most difficult route. These structures both protect internally against the oppression we seek to eliminate from society, while also eliminating the possibility to expropriate the fight against oppression itself, in order to grab influence or power. If you are not content being oppressed while fighting oppression, I recommend it.
The same participatory principles can be applied beyond the organization to the level of wider movements. For what is a movement anyways? Are we the grand sum of all our progressive components, including a diversity of thought and practice, yet sharing solidaric, liberating values, and behaving as a strategic bloc? Or, as is too often the case, are we an ever more fragmented and shrinking coalition, a lowest common denominator movement, that can only get behind the remaining crumb that we all still agree on? When we fail to eliminate, or even notice, hierarchies from our internal organizing, crumbs are inevitably all that survive the clashes and cancellations. This difference may seem nuanced, but it is the difference between revolution and a revolving door.
We must answer the question of what is to be done, in actionable terms, about Cancel Culture and the Left’s overall susceptibility to infiltration by forces that cause us to tear ourselves apart. Simply put, movements need to operate in ways that reflect values that establish vision. We need to clean up our house, practice what we preach. Through participatory, non-hierarchical organizing, where all participants are agents of revolution, empowered to continuously engage with and develop ideas and practices in non-dogmatic ways, the Left as a movement will escape from the clutches of Cancel Culture and other agents provocateurs.
We will again inspire, grow, and get back to the business of liberation.
RevolutionZ | Life After Capitalism Podcast dedicated its 155th episode to mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, in a discussion between Michael Albert and mέta’s Sotiris Mitralexis.
RevolutionZ: Life After Capitalism is a Podcast hosted by Michael Albert. It addresses vision and strategy for a better future. It is all about what we want and how we get it.
The world at a crossroads. A world abound in interrelated crises. Distrust in society’s institutions at an all time high – with no institutions excluded. Misdirected fear and anger resulting among populations.
One way to see the story of our times is that of systems out of control. Interlocked systems – economic, governmental, civic, private – spawning interrelated crises.
The question then might become, “what do these systems have in common?”
With the major gains in consciousness made over the last century – thanks to the birthing of popular movements barely inconceivable prior to the 1960s – where should the focus of the general working population be in order to make lasting change? How can we begin reversing course on these crises? Going beyond them?
Despite these crucial gains, any form of a united resistance among the many popular movements to the institutions largely responsible for the crises is scarcely to be found. Rather it’s been, after all is said and done, a scattering.
Even less to be found than resistance with a common glue is shared vision for not just what we don’t want but what we do want, and the will to organize and strategize in an attempt to propose and implement said visions.
Why might this be the case, both for global crises as well as the lack of popular organization and resistance?
Well, Michael Albert has much to say on this you may find worth your time. “No Bosses – A New Economy for a Better World”, out now from Zero Books in autumn 2021, offers a “scaffold” of a vision for an economy which present and future populations will hopefully add to or detract from as they see fit. As he says, a “planting of the seeds of the future in the present,” which is our responsibility.
Is Albert just another intellectual, disattached and disaffected by the everyday struggles and concerns of ordinary working people, and coming up alone with solutions to their problems he doesn’t understand? Well, read the book and you’ll quickly discover how Albert’s work separates itself from the conventional pack. There is indeed an interminable list of self-important intellectuals both in the mainstream – academia and otherwise – as well as those purporting to be of popular movements, who have supposedly taken up the task of finding so-called solutions and failed. Our so-called “best and brightest” in governments, corporations, think-tanks, universities and media.
In the case of those inside private and state power systems, they seem to pretend not to be a cog in those very systems and inevitably carry out the imperatives of those systems, to the detriment of the general population.
In the case of academics, despite the unique freedoms afforded them, the arena is largely characterized by a conformity to existing power structures, in the end becoming an appendage to the current milieu. Thus, the fear, bitterness and rage of our age, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t distinguish among elites in governments, academia, media and other policy institutions.
As for movements, sadly but not surprisingly, the work of their internal “higher-ups” also too often tends to, first of all, not even attempt to offer up solutions grounded in the day to day realities of the populations they purport to be fighting for. When some do offer up solutions, even good ones, they tend to be in name only, and not collectively worked out with those same populations on a participatory level – or even with the working structures of the movements themselves. Consequently, movements too often are seen by the public simply as posturing when protesting in the streets and squares.
Most of the time, however, movements are simply engaging in analysis – often crucial analysis – but just analysis. Movements then wonder why more don’t join them after telling the working populations about our horrid state of affairs, leaving an impression that we are all just powerless victims of a far-off power play, and not engaging with them – towards objectives – on a regular basis in a participatory manner. Or even making an attempt to. No agency, no movement, no change.
All this does not contradict the fact that, thanks to movements of the last half century, consciousness has been dramatically raised. The very real and profound deficits of these movements, however, form much of the basis out of which visions like Parecon – Participatory Economics – laid out by Albert in “No Bosses” come forth.
I don’t see the vision as academic at all. Indeed, I even, in part, have reservations with it being labelled a vision. It seems to me more like someone with integrity holding up a mirror to those concerned and those involved. A non-patronizing reminder to “play nice.” Or reminders that deep down we all truly know that none of us is superior to any other. Or that, if any of us have visible talents, they can’t be allowed to be lorded over others, because if they are – amongst much else – out goes the efficiency, the objectives of the organization or the workplace and the dignity of the participants. Or that, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we understand that human organization, on the smallest or the vastest of scales, simply cannot endure if existing heirarchies are allowed to persist. Irregardless of organization, whether anti-war groups of 10, workplaces of 50, labor unions of thousands or corporations of hundreds of thousands of workers. Not if there is to be any real semblance of “democracy” and effectiveness. Or dignity. Or fulfilment. Or…
….even survival of the species.
In No Bosses, Parecon, or a sensible economy working for all, clear-sightedly lays out a set of values as its basis upon which the scaffold will be built. These values recall the phrase, “everything we need to know we learned by kindergarten,” but all too often remove as adults, which has more to do with existing incentive structures in current society….and a prodigious lack of popular organization. It would be pretty hard to argue against these values. Equity, self-managment, solidarity, efficiency, diversity and sustainability.
Any arguments against these? In this day and age, for a variety of reasons, diversity and sustainability won’t be touched, except by the most vicious hardliners and deniers of objective reality. Let’s hear you tell your kids, your students or your co-workers that there shouldn’t be equity, self-management or efficiency in society. Or that there CAN’T BE – we’re not capable of doing better than this. (More on that in a minute).
Herein lies much of the essence – and exceptional value – of Albert’s Parecon layout in No Bosses. Modern and classical “liberal” and “conservative” orthodoxy aren’t at a loss for platitudes and pronouncements of liberty, equality, fraternity, justice and democracy. Take a look around. Are our societies overflowing with these principles today? Are they even detectable? Were they in the past? If not, then why not?
In No Bosses, much of the essence of the vision of Parecon, in my view, is simply mapping out what these platitudes actually mean and what they would look like in modern society. Or, should we say, actually taking these values seriously. And that means applying these values not abstractly to society but to the day to day productive areas of peoples’ lives – the economy. It also means that to actually attain these values, if we agree on them – to get to some degree of a participatory economy and hence society – these values will have to be deliberated on en masse and a set of institutions will need to be put in place in a participatory manner in order to fulfill these values.
What could these institutions be, asks Albert. Consumers and Workers Councils, Remuneration based on effort, Balanced Job Complexes and Participatory Planning and Participatory Allocation. These few simple institutions, if deliberated on and carried out in a participatory manner, can realize the values set forth and create a better world.
Don’t like your workplace? (if you’re “lucky” enough to have one at all) Have a problem with a few owning all the wealth and property, thanks, by the way, to your work? A small class of individuals making all the decisions in tandem with the owners? That same class doing all of the interesting, creative and decisive work – in short, the empowering work? You’ve got no say in the conditions and decisions of your work? Your salary remains the same despite your effort? Etc, etc.
Well, try putting in place a set of balanced job complexes and remuneration based on “how hard you work, how long you work and the onerousness of the conditions under which you work.” After all, wasn’t this what our better grade school teachers – not radicals – espoused to us as kids? They rewarded and recognized who gave the most effort, especially on collectively worthy endeavors, not who was most talented or who consistently got an “A.”
Solidarity, diversity, equity and sustainability speak for themselves. Check out what No Bosses has to say on these for more.
But what does Albert mean by “self-management?” Each individual ordering himself around? Everyone out for themselves? The perfect right-libertarian fantasy? Well no. Self-management means collective self-management. It means a democratically owned and run workplace and set of workplaces where class is extinguished by way of eliminating not only owners but the coordinator class within workplaces and throughout industries who have monopolized the empowering work. Getting right down to it, it means that everyone has a say in proportion to the degree in which they’re affected.
But, asks Albert, even if a workplace features self-management, do we automatically get better decisions? In principle yes, I’d say, but what about the 80% of the workforce who have been doing disempowering work, as opposed to the 20% of coordinators who enjoy empowering work? (This division generalizes to society as a whole too.) Mentally and physically draining, rote, repetitive work which atomizes workplaces and individuals, limits their potential and abilities, reduces their knowledge, reduces their confidence and gets them to feel that they don’t or even that they shouldn’t have a say in decision-making.
The antidote to this is your balanced job complex, where all members of the workplace – all members – share in the tasks which are required to keep the workplace functioning. Ever ask yourself what your boss actually does, if he does anything at all? Why those managers enjoy confidence and access and make so much more than you but you’re pretty sure that anyone else could be doing their job – or actually doing it much better? Ever wonder what all this talk of so-called “qualifications” and “expertise” actually means? What those degrees actually did to make your workplace – let alone broader society – more equitable and efficient?
Albert asks another excellent question. Even if we have a workplace based on self-management and balanced job complexes, thereby radically altering the division of labor and decision-making with its far-reaching positive ramifications, in a vacuum we’d still be in a market system. What’s the problem with that, one might say?
The short answer, according to Albert – and he’s not alone, by a longshot, and neither is his view limited to so-called radicals – is that markets, by their very nature play a central role in delivering a society based on tension. The tension of competition for goods, jobs and much else. The tension of short-termism. Externalities. The very word in itself is a defining notion of markets – whatever decision I make, my company makes, my industry makes, the hell with the (inevitable) consequences to society. Exploitation, pandemics, apathy, fear, depression, atomization, poverty, inequality, starvation, wars of aggression, pollution, climate change all become externalities. Markets are instrumental in producing anti-social behavior, the seed out of which so much of this is born.
In short, the survival of the species, in our current reality, becomes an externality in a market-driven economic system.
The antidote – participatory allocation – where a series of proposals between workers’ councils and consumers’ councils produce an annual plan for allocation of good and services. These rounds of proposals for consumption and production, from an individual level to a neighborhood, to a city, to a region and so on – foster cooperative relations instead of unending antagonism.
Participatory allocation is the most detailed of parecon’s defining institutions. Can it be done? Pie in the sky?
It doesn’t take much to wonder, at this point, that if strong elements of these institutions are not pursued seriously, then what will become of human society in the coming years? The alternative is the real existing economy we’re living in, whose destructive and exponential tendencies are felt by all.
When we say that Albert’s work on Parecon outlined in No Bosses is not academic, it is a compliment. It is to say that it’s a hell of a lot easier to come up with academic models for career, self-gratification and to impress your colleagues than it is to have to the moral fortitude to work out something, based on real experience, that not only holds up a mirror to self and society but presents a vision to which we can all relate on both the deepest and most immediate levels, and which says we all have a vital stake in what occurs in this workplace, this company, this neighborhood, this union, this movement. That means we must all have a substantial say and play a substantial role to have any hope of realizing the values laid out.
For this Albert is actually doing the job of an educator, unlike so many so-called “educators” and so-called “leaders” and “coordinators” in workplaces and movements. Which may be more of a critique of the pre-determined roles and heirarchical structures than the individuals themselves. Albert is attempting to not only lay out an economy and a society in which all are actively empowered, but that we’re capable of realizing this in the first place. That all can and should have a vital say in their collective conditions. That each of us are worth way more than real conditions – or establishment orthodoxy – get us to believe we are. That we are collectively capable of way better. That common concerns – and objectives – far outweigh individual or sectarian priorities. And that all this has a lot to do with reversing and going beyond current reality.
No Bosses – and Parecon – provides invaluable insight for anyone who cares to engage collectively on any level and in any way in the pursuit of a better world.
What I finally get out of No Bosses and Parecon overall is that, if one has any hope at all to effectively build consciousness, better movements, a better economy and a better world which will last, any and all engagement should in essence be taken as an educational opportunity – for all parties. As opposed to opportunity for self, or name. One aimed at mutual empowerment with a wide scope in order to further gains in the pursuit of objectives. With the understanding that if this isn’t the pursuit to some substantial extent, and decisions and power are left to this upper 20% echelon of any and all organizations, escaping our current existential crises is utopian-like, fantastical thinking.
Unlike Parecon.
In terms of ideas and practical vision, No Bosses walks the walk, not just talks the talk. An indispensable contribution.
What do you think?
It’s up to all of us desiring a better world on the ground to walk the walk as well.
After the Oligarchy has prepared a 40-minute video summary of the model of postcapitalist society proposed in Another Now (2020) by Yanis Varoufakis video summary of Yanis Varoufakis’ postcapitalist sci-fi ‘Another Now’:
The three-day hands-on workshop ‘Gruapa di katrani’ on the traditional technology of pine tar production took place between the 16-18 July 2021 in Vovousa, eastern Zagori and was co-organised by Boulouki and Vovousa Festival.
Given how certain traditional modes of construction may be seen, or re-imagined, as an aspect of the ‘commons’, this documentary is of interest to our endeavour:
Life in 2021. Rampant debilitating denial for the many next to vile enrichment of the few. Material deprivation, denial, and denigration. Dignity defiled. Our planet raped. Climate cooking us all. To succumb to this 2021 normality is not a survivable option. Humanity must attain better. But, if we do not resign in defeat, then what do we do?
*No Bosses* says we conceive and then organize to win a new economy. It says we conceive and then win new institutions for how we work, for how we consume, and for how allocation occurs. It says we eliminate class rule. It says we ensure that economics respects and advances ecological, social, and personal well being. Nothing less.
The vision offered by *No Bosses*, is called participatory economics. It elevates self management, equity, solidarity, diversity, and sustainability. It eliminates elitist, arrogant, dismissive, authoritarian, exploitation, competition, and homogenization.
The *No Bosses* vision eliminates private ownership of productive assets, top down control of workplaces, income for bargaining power and property, jobs that elevate some to empowerment at the expense of relegating many to obedience, and a market rate race in which dishonorable and even hateful behavior is the currency of competitive success.
In place of all that, *No Bosses* proposes a built and natural productive commons, self management by all who work, income for how long, how hard, and the onerousness of conditions of socially valued work, jobs that give all economic actors comparable means and inclination to participate in decisions that affect them, and a process called participatory planning in which caring behavior and solidarity are the currency of collective and individual success.
And why does arriving at a shared vision for a new economy for a better world matter? It matters to provide hope, to provide direction, to sustain commitment on the path to winning change. *No Bosses* is about winning a new world. Nothing less.
Business schools are a part of a system that produces inequality, lack of democratic control, and is unable to deal with climate change. Martin Parker, a Professor at the University of Bristol, UK, and author of the book Shut Down the Business School, argues that business schools encourage students to think that they should approach the future with the same tools that have created our problems. He thinks we need new schools, what Martin calls “schools for organizing”.
Find out more at: http://www.plutobooks.com/9781786802408/shut-down-the-business-school/
Credits and artwork available at: https://theotherschool.art/why-do-we-need-different-business-schools/
by Chiranjit Basu
Digitization. The Holy Grail of our times.
So it would appear, seeing as how companies and governments crave it, consultants hawk it and “wise” people from think tanks foresee doom and disaster and severely lowered sex appeal for anyone who does not have it.
Billions are being thrown at it in the hope that some day it will magically appear and life will be fulfilled or in the worst (best?) case it will just go away and stop bothering us.
But, what is it? The name suggests something to do with digits. Fingers? In a sense, yes. It refers back to numbers – specifically zeroes and ones – the programming language of computers. Why then this frenzy? What is causing it to become the quest and mission of the millennia? Why is it digitize or die?
To try to unravel that we need to take a few steps back…perhaps quite a few steps…to a time before the machines of ones and zeroes quite took over our lives.
We need to step back and talk a bit about what is culture.
Culture, in its simplest description is how a society conducts its life. For some old enough to have experienced it, work was / is the series of steps and people and paper forms we navigated to deal with institutions and each other. It was the conversations, records, reports and correspondence required to file a return, apply for a job, announce a wedding, teach a course, arrange a funeral or any other such mundane acts, the sum total of which described that particular society. It was, quite simply, how a people did things to conduct their lives from birth to death. It was how they wrote music, passed on a recipe, wrote a novel, scripted a play, passed on orders, fought a court case or proposed to someone to marry you.
It was (and in many ways, still is) the series of actions and artifacts that takes one from a beginning to an end and a hopefully successful conclusion.
Bureaucracies, in some sense, epitomized a large part of this culture, this collection of activities that kept societies alive.
This developed over millennia. It changed, adapted, morphed, was discarded, re-invented, made byzantine or just simpler, but at a pace that human conversations could encompass it. People talked, thought about things, talked some more and eventually agreed to make some change. Sometimes they fought over it – on horseback or on foot. Sometimes they signed in solemn blood and shook hands and the culture nudged a little and moved on.
Then came the zero-one machine.
It had / has two qualities. It is exceptionally stupid. It is incapable of asking a single question on its own (as Picasso famously observed). It had / has no curiosity. And it is capable of doing the same thing over and over again exceptionally fast and never getting bored, nor asking for a raise (at least not yet), or questioning what it is doing.
People, being people, taught it to do some things over and over again and in doing so, inadvertently, taught it do work. Work that was / is a facsimile of the work that they themselves would normally do.
Without quite thinking about it they made it an actor and a repository in their culture.
There was / is however one issue with this that no one has quite paid attention to. The fact that it could not ask questions resulted in the fact that the machines could not ask whose errands they were running. Whose interests it was serving.
Humans, because they are able to and are (or at least were) compelled to ask questions, can ask whether the work they were doing was something they agreed with, disagreed with, wanted changed, eliminated, expanded or were simply compelled to do because someone else stood over them with a sword.
One other difference is that humans reproduce themselves. Evolution taught them to attach (in the best of circumstances) a considerable degree of pleasure with the act and so most have not rebelled at the obligation.
The machine however is a different story. Resources are needed to make them and they have therefore not fallen under the pleasure principles referred to in the last paragraph but instead under the golden rule – which states, “he who has the gold makes the rules”.
And that is where the problem with digitization starts. Because the machines are made and funded by certain groups in society, they are assumed to first and foremost do the bidding of their creators. The owners decide the algorithms that the machines process. The algorithms are the rules according to which they want the work done. As a result they end up deciding what out culture should be.
Their creators have funded their creation because they want the work that the machines do to serve their interests. Make them more powerful, richer, self-evidently dominant and a priori superior.
Digitization, under the euphemistic rubric of effectivization and efficiency, is nothing but an instrument of power.
It makes work that is in the interest of the owners seemingly simpler, faster, cheaper and (more dubiously) apparently better.
The work of the disempowered is discarded as being not conducive to the betterment of society. The touchstone of that decision is the concept of profit, which is more often than not concealed under the seeming objectivity of the word – efficiency.
Digitization, in the usurpation of work, has become the usurper of culture. What used to be the large, messy, evolution of how societies did things, has become in the digitized world, a narrow monoculture of how the ever-shrinking top of the pyramid of society wants to be served.
Digitization is the death of culture by asphyxiation. Asphyxiation by a monoculture of efficiency.
This leads us to the last question about digitization – efficient for whom and to what effect? Efficient as per what and who’s criteria? Who creates and controls the algorithm that determines what is efficient and what is not.
Well, it is pretty obvious that it is efficient for the powers that be as it enhances their control over the culture and also enables them to gain greater control over the assets of that culture.
But the effect?
Look out of the window (if you are lucky enough to have one). Nature confounds you. It is, by all prevailing definitions of efficiency completely inefficient. It is filled with redundancies and it rests on a rock-bed of communication and collaboration. The exact opposite of the efficient effectiveness that seems to be the wet dream of the digizati.
Millennia of evolution have proven that redundancy is a successful survival strategy. It is a clinical test that has lasted longer and had a sample size way larger than anything we have dreamed up.
As Nassim Taleb describes it so thoroughly in his book Antifragile – nature and evolution invented anti-fragility. We, and all living things, gain from disorder. No, not the toxic disorder/stress caused by fear, domination and anxiety but stress of pushing ourselves over the next horizon. And some of the most important characteristics of that antifragility are, diversity (not monocultures), redundancies (not minimalization), and the embrace of reasonable risk, randomness and unpredictability (not the elimination of.), and the unexpected.
Digitization cannot handle that quite simply because it is based on machines that do not know how to ask a question. And because it cannot ask questions, it is a deathtrap in a globalized world. It is a death trap because it makes culture fragile. Since it cannot ask questions and therefore be skeptic, it makes the culture believe that its assumptions are sacrosanct, unchangeable and unchallengeable. It disguises digitization as a technocratic engineering invention, when it is in fact a cultural artifact being used as a political and ideological weapon. It confounds humanity’s cognitive map into believing that monoculture is culture. And this fragilized monoculture today encompasses the entire globalized world. And as we know from other examples, scale kills. Scale compounds hidden risk like no other parameter. (Think industrialized agriculture, palm oil forests etc,) But monoculture is not culture. The one is dictatorial, the other democratic. Digitization as currently owned is the handmaiden of the dictator.
The struggle for human liberation must therefore now also include the liberation of digitization. Digitization (aka Software) is a cultural seedbed. A monoculture plantation will eventually kill both the seed and the soil. But mixing it in with the rain forest of all other living things will enhance both.
The choice is ours to make.
A message from DiEM25 co-founder Yanis Varoufakis.
We already live in meta, or post, capitalist times. New feudal lords are emerging whose digital platforms, with the help of governments they control, have grown not just into monopolistic markets but, instead, into private digital fiefdoms in which you, we, everybody, are their neo-serfs.
This is why last year DiEM25 set up mέta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. In our mission statement we explained its purpose:
“We live in postcapitalist times. They may turn out dystopic, utopic or anything in between. Through art and research, argument and poetry, mέta works to break with a dystopic present to imagine the world anew – to grasp our present historical moment so as to help radical progressive movements find a path from the emergent dismal postcapitalism to one worth fighting, and living, for.”
The most prominent of the techno-feudal lords, Mark Zuckerberg, has already told us what he is planning: To turn Facebook into a 3D metaverse into which people move their lives. A digital world in which they play, work and laugh. A world that he owns and in which we are his digital serfs.
Make no mistake: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Co. are hell-bent on doing exactly that which DiEM25’s mέta was created to prevent: To build a techno-feudal dystopia. And, as if to drive his point home, Zuckerberg announced the first step toward creating it – yes, he will call it… Meta.
So, here we are, staring at a fork in the road:
We can take DiEM25’s mέta road toward a technologically advanced democratised society, leading one day to a Star Trek-like liberal communism. Or,
We can surrender to Zuckerberg’s Meta, a techno-dystopia that will lead humanity to a Matrix-like nightmare.
This is where you come in.
To help us help you walk DiEM25’s mέta path, rather than be sucked into Zuckerberg’s META, here are some simple steps you can take:
Join DiEM25, along with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Slavoj Zizek, Caroline Lucas and tens of thousands of activists and progressive thinkers.
Contribute to DiEM25, remembering the zillions Zuckerberg is investing in his dystopia. While we do not need zillions to counter his Meta dystopia, we do need your financial contribution. So, please donate!
It’s DiEM25’s mέta or Zuckerberg’s Meta. Let’s seize the day, or Carpe DiEM. For if you, we, don’t, Zuckerberg certainly will!
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