Long live participatory socialism! ⊗ Science fiction is a Luddite literature ⊗ The Earth after humans

This week →{.caps} Long live participatory socialism! ⊗ Science fiction is a Luddite literature ⊗ The Earth after humans ⊗ Speculation, invention and making new worlds ⊗ Fungi ⊗ Eno

A year ago →{.caps} The most clicked link in issue No.152 was 6 Sci-Fi Writers Imagine the Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work.

Long live participatory socialism!

Thomas Piketty has had it with hypercapitalism, in this excerpt from his book Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021, he lays out his vision for a form of socialism. It’s a fascinating set of ideas centered on a stronger social state (education, health, retirement and disability pensions, and social insurance), co-management systems (à la Germany and Sweden), minimum inheritance for all (paid out at the age of 25), property and inheritance tax, and more international collaboration with a different organization of globalization. Overall, he’s aiming for much less inequality and a much greater circulation of wealth and power.

He’s not tackling participation in government, that would be a huge issue to address, as well as a general regression of democracy across the world. The last part on “a feminist, multiracial and universalist socialism,” as well as reparations, is a bit short in contrast to the rest but we’ll see in the book.

History shows that inequality is essentially ideological and political, not economic or technological.  […]

Educational equality and the welfare state are not enough. To achieve real equality, the whole range of relationships of power and domination must be rethought. This requires, in particular, a better sharing of power in companies.{.highlight} […]

It would in particular articulate all social expenditure (education, health, pensions, social transfers, basic income, etc.) and environment-related measures (transport infrastructure, energy transition, thermal renovation, etc.). […]

[N]o valid environmental policy can be carried out if it is not part of a global socialist project based on the reduction of inequalities, the permanent circulation of power and property and the redefinition of economic indicators. I insist on this last point: there is no point in circulating power if we keep the same economic objectives.{.highlight} […]

the just society as I see it here is based above all on universal access to a set of fundamental goods — education, health, retirement, housing, environment, etc. — that enable people to participate fully in social and economic life and cannot be reduced to monetary capital endowment. […]

The participatory socialism I am calling for is based on several pillars: educational equality and the social state, the permanent circulation of power and property, social federalism and sustainable and fair globalization.{.highlight}

Science fiction is a Luddite literature

This one is Doctorow on Luddism as science fiction, which could hardly be more in my ballpark. Yet I wasn’t sure about including it since he rethreads ideas I’ve covered before{.internal}. However he does a great job of showing how “in truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use,” which lines up very very well with co-management systems in Piketty’s piece above.

What were they fighting about? The social relations governing the use of the new machines. These new machines could have allowed the existing workforce to produce far more cloth, in far fewer hours, at a much lower price, while still paying these workers well (the lower per-unit cost of finished cloth would be offset by the higher sales volume, and that volume could be produced in fewer hours). […]

We’re living in quite a Luddite moment, as it happens. Many of us are contesting the social relations surrounding our technologies: should we continue to subsidize big agriculture? Should our cities continue to be organized around cars? Should tech giants be permitted to continue to gobble up each other and their small competitors, reducing the internet to “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four?”{.highlight} (to quote Tom Eastman). […]

Democratizing access to the means of production isn’t intrinsically anti-labor — it’s only bad for workers when the bounty of automation is disproportionally allocated to a small number of capital owners, and not workers.

The Earth after humans

Second piece at Noema, this one by Rob Dunn. He shows us that nature or ‘life on Earth’ isn’t in peril, our living conditions are and even if we disappear, other species will thrive under the new conditions we are creating. Good perspective but I’m including it more for the part on microbes, which aligns with the fungi pieces lower down, and the last part on forms of intelligence.

But there is also another kind of intelligence: distributed intelligence, the sort found in honey bees, termites and, especially, ants. Ants are not inventively intelligent, at least not individually. Instead, their intelligence stems from their ability to apply rules about how to deal with new circumstances. Those fixed rules allow creativity to emerge in the form of collective behaviors. Looked at this way, ants and other societies of insects were computers before computers. Their intelligence is different from our own. They are not self-aware. They don’t anticipate the future. They don’t mourn the loss of other species, or even their own dead. Yet they can build structures that last. The oldest termite mound may well have been inhabited for longer than the oldest human city.{.highlight}

Speculation, invention and making new worlds

In this issue of the newsletter where he explores the themes and questions of the upcoming MSc in Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy, Richard Sandford presents an excellent overview of the multiple speculative practices and approaches around design, sci-fi and philosophy.

Speculative design, speculative fiction, speculative philosophy and research are not all trying to do the same thing, but they all have a common interest in trying out new ways of being in the world. They suggest that speculation about the future is less about simply moving our present further along the timeline, and more about finding new ways to imagine relating to the world and each other.{.highlight} […]

[T]he kind of conceptual accounting that Donna Haraway dissolves majestically within her methodological approach of ‘SF’, invoking “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far”{.highlight} (Staying with the Trouble, p. 2) as she weaves a path into understanding a more-than-human present. […]

But when the present circumstances are too different from those in which our dispositions were developed—when the game changes—our expectations and anticipations fail. The world demands new thinking of us. It requires that we come up with different ways of thinking, that we experiment with new ways of relating to the world—that we speculate.

The earth’s secret miracle weapon is not a plant or an animal. It’s fungi

Fungi are everywhere, fungi do all the things, fungi are essential to our way of life, fungi are not researched enough, and fungi could save the day. And also, “for too long macroscopic diversity and species on earth have been referred to using the now obsolete term flora & fauna, or just plants and animals instead of fauna, flora &  funga, or animals, fungi and plants.”

Fungi are responsible for almost all our food production, and most of our processed materials. They are also to be thanked for many of the important medical breakthroughs in human history that treat both physical and mental ailments, for naturally sequestering and slowly releasing carbon, for optimizing industrial processes, and so much more.{.highlight} […]

We have also discovered the cholesterol-lowering statins in fungi, life-saving antibiotics like penicillin, the medicines that allow for organ transplants to be successful, and we are now finally accepting and legalizing medicinal compounds made by fungi to treat urgent and life-threatening mental health ailments such as PTSD and depression.

It’s time to fear the fungi

More speculative and ‘what if’ then the above but they pair very well (we need more search on fungi), as well as with ‘The Earth after humans,’ since both address the changing planetary conditions and which species will thrive. In this case, the hypothesis is that higher temperatures will result in the evolution of more fungal infections that can affect humans.

About a third of people infected with Candida auris die from the infection within 30 days, and there have now been thousands of cases in 47 countries. Some scientists think this sudden boom in global cases is a harbinger of things to come.{.highlight} […]

Casadevall estimates that for every 1 degree increase in global temperature, the thermal gradient barrier between our guts and fungi could decrease by 5 percent.

Another Green World

This issue is already overlong so I’ll just say Jeff VanderMeer interviews Brian Eno.

Science has quite understandably sidelined feelings as a source of data because they’re too subjective, too fluffy. But aren’t feelings your mind’s first means of navigating through new and unknown terrain? You work from what you call your gut or hunch, your intuition. Feelings are of course fragile and often unreliable, but they are the beginnings of cognition. […]

The English politician Tony Benn said there are two flames burning in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope that you can build a better world. Both hope and anger are useless on their own. You have to believe that something is possible, but you have to be angry enough to make it happen.{.highlight}

Asides

• 🤓 New website, not a new project but great on both counts. Reconstrained Design “is an approach originally developed at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute in Portugal. With a focus on sustainability, the group develops approaches that facilitate the removal of oblique constraints.”
• 🤖 (Tracking is not endorsing.) Everyday Robots. “Where solving many of life’s smallest problems will also help us address some of the world’s most profound ones. From the personal, like the support we might each need as we grow older, to the global, as an ever-aging population changes the future of work for everyone.”
• 🤯 😍 🌏 🗺 Eyes on the Earth. “Fly along with NASA’s Earth science missions in real-time, monitor Earth’s vital signs like Carbon Dioxide, Ozone and Sea Level, and see satellite imagery of the latest major weather events, all in an immersive, 3D environment.”
• 🇯🇵 🎉 🎊 🥳 Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell. “[H]e’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all.”
• 🌎 💩 🍩 🤬 + 🇨🇷 👍🏼 🇨🇦 💩 No country has met welfare goals in past 30 years ‘without putting planet at risk’. “Looking at a sample of 148 nations, research by the University of Leeds found wealthy countries were putting the future of the planet at risk to make minimal gains in human welfare, while poor countries were living within ecological boundaries but underachieving in areas such as life expectancy and access to energy.”
• 😍 🏡 Recognition Grows of Modernist Women Designers. “Renaming the Edith Farnsworth House is a high point in the efforts to diversify the sites that we preserve and the stories we tell about them — often by discarding the narrative of the solo male genius.”
• 🇺🇸 🤩 🏔 🎥 Stunning, Ultra-HD Short Films of National Parks. “Each ultra-HD video is only 3-4 minutes long, extended trailers for the beauty and grandeur of parks like Zion, Grand Teton, and the Badlands and forests like Black Hills, Green Mountains, and Bridger Teton.”
• 🤔 Why Do We Interface? “In this micro-book I take a historical look at interfaces to build an understanding of how they allow us to utilize information in such powerful ways that they can fundamentally change what it means to be human. ”
• 🌱 🤔 🤖 AI-controlled vertical farm produces 400 times more food per acre than a flat farm. “The company says their farm produces about 400 times more food per acre than a traditional farm. It uses robots and AI to monitor water consumption, light, and the ambient temperature of the environment where plants grow. Over time, the AI learns how to grow crops faster with better quality.”
• 🤯 Ziva Dynamics Announces A New ML-Trained Facial Rigging Service. “The Ziva team states they trained the new cloud-based automated facial rigging platform to recreate a range of expressions of human actors using a 15TB library of 4D scan data. The system is said to convert uploaded character head meshes into a “real-time puppet” that can express over 72,000 facial shapes within an hour.”

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