So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:

And a more in-depth, though equally passionate call for the decentralization of currency from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, given at the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2/4/09:

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions—then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Poet, activist and Dreamflesh Journal contributor Claire Fauset has prepared an excellent report for Corporate Watch titled What’s Wrong With Corporate Social Responsibility?. The stall I was doing at the recent London Anarchist Bookfair was next to Corporate Watch, and I overheard someone perusing their stuff, talking to Claire. He said he worked in CSR until recently. He read this report and it was the last straw; he quit.

George Monbiot has observed that those who actively deny the reality of human-caused climate change are now in a tiny, shrinking minority. However, the danger now comes in the form of those who acknowledge the problem, but are only prepared to make cosmetic changes to their lives in response to it. Similarly, the damaging effects of the modern corporation are now seldom brushed aside casually. But the danger remains in the form of CSR, a complex system of measures that corporations have evolved in recent decades as a response to increasing activist attacks.

CSR is (naturally) preferred to exterior regulation. This way, companies can police themselves—or, as is inevitably the case when you are legally obliged to maximize profit for shareholders, weave a disabling web of spin and half-measures that aims to sideline coherent attacks on corporate power and perpetuate the bottom line.

As climate change and resource depletion start making plain the fundamental flaws of business with profit as its prime motivation, and economies predicated on perpetual growth, there’s a rush to save our illusions. There’s much to learn from sites like WorldChanging.com, but the basic premise found there, that profit and growth on the one hand, and the environment and social justice on the other, don’t have to be in opposition… well, it’s one of the few “both/and” arguments that I just don’t buy.

I’m far too muddled and cerebral for committed activism, so I’m not on a soap box here. But activist or not, all of us act, and at least some of these actions are informed by the information we have at our disposal (zombies excluded). And this report is essential information for anyone who even pretends to be a citizen of a democracy today. It’s a radical critique, aiming for the heart of what’s wrong with corporations, but you won’t find any of the wild rhetoric or naive posturing that “neo-greens“—in tandem with corporations themselves—often like to see as characterizing environmental radicalism. It’s clear, succinct, and meticulously referenced.

If you’re suspicious about CSR, but haven’t managed to articulate it, check this out for ammo. If you’re not suspicious about CSR, you have to ask yourself: does a world like ours really need a new definition of “naive”?

Oxford’s tireless chroniclers of the hypocrisies and hidden realities of big business, Corporate Watch, have recently released a first-of-its-kind report on the extent of the role of UK companies in Iraq since 2003: Corporate Carve-Up.

Naturally, UK involvement is dwarfed next to American involvement. As David Whyte says in his foreword, “If US business is the dominant predator here, then British business is the scavenger.” This report presents up-to-date details of UK companies contracted to reap the benefits of reconstructing Iraq in the wake of the British army helping to deconstruct it. A brief analysis of the economic context to this process is given, together with listings of conferences and events that show how the occupying governments and the transitionary authorities they installed in Iraq have opened all the doors to the victors’ business interests.

Particularly revealing is the look at the private security business; even though US giants like Halliburton and Bechtel dominate the general reconstruction market, UK private security and military operations “are easily neck and neck with their US counterparts”. Chief among these is Aegis, a company who won the “three-year $430m Pentagon contract to coordinate the top military/security companies in Iraq”. As for Halliburton and many others, the Iraq war has been a boom time for Aegis, whose turnover “has gone from £554,000 in 2003 to £62m in 2005; three quarters of this is from work in Iraq.” The implicit “revolving door relationship between regular and private military” belies the Foreign Office’s guidelines for dealing with private security companies, providing a specific example of the general complex web of interwoven interests between state actions and private wealth.

In a complex world, we all have images, stories or myths that underpin our rational thinking, helping to give manageable shape to the welter of information about the world around us. More and more contemporary cognitive research is confirming and explaining this fact, giving a more grounded basis for the brilliant but inevitably imperfect initial psychological forays of Carl Jung. But Jung’s advice holds; while it’s impossible to rid ourselves of these background images, we can become more conscious of them, and allow that consciousness to help us guard against possession by them. Bringing them to consciousness isn’t just a prelude to rubbishing them and thus being “free” and rational—such is the naive way that leads to their replacement by other, now wholly unconscious, and thus more perilous images.

Regarding the operations of large-scale power in the world, my own image is one that sees formerly obvious, overt impositions of power by the few over the many becoming ever-more complexified and inscrutable. Feudalism and monarchic dictatorship is challenged by libertarian revolutions and ideologies, but there is never a clear-cut overturning of the structures of power. More often than not, entrenched power moves defensively to become more amorphous, less susceptible to direct investigation and attack. My image, then, is a kind of “hyper Hydra”: worldly power as a beast that at first responds to decapitation by growing more heads than it had before, but eventually responds by sinking back into its lake home, leaving the swords of attack to slash vainly through the waves. An unexpectedly Taoist aspect to power—behind the hard, hollow puppets presented for us to rail against.

The idea that greed and need for oil is the ultimate motive behind the invasion of Iraq is popular, but rarely taken seriously in mainstream media. It’s an important truth, laying bare some of the basic aspects of the current global crisis. But there are other factors, and they’ve nothing to do with benevolence or WMDs. As we have come to equate justice and freedom with democracy, and democracy with free-market capitalism, we’ve lost sight of the rapaciousness of the hydra beneath the watery feel-good visions of humanitarian rhetoric. Our culture’s economic doctrines and dogmas work to wrap old-fashioned plundering in slippery notions of “progress” and “development”.

While the world remains inherently complex, navigating it frequently involves moves to drag its more basic underlying aspects into view, to spark revelations that can help guide us through. Corporate Carve-Up is a small but revealing contribution to the project of pulling the Hydra to the surface.

Here I’ll just note an interesting quote she takes from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, from a letter from the devil Screwtape to his subordinate Wormwood. He gives advice on the use of fashion in exaggerating endemic vices:

The use of Fashions is thought to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already near gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere ‘understanding’. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

It had struck me as devilish that at the most critical moment in our collective debate about and response to climate change and peak oil, there should emerge a chorus of voices calling for greater acceptance of consumerism, corporations and infinite-growth economics…

I’ve not read Wired for a while. When I read it relatively regularly at the turn of the millennium—before the dot-com crash hit, before the gloomy wake of 9/11, and before I started learning more about the nuts-and-bolts of our energy insecurity situation—I was highly forgiving of its unashamed cheer-leading for high-tech capitalism. These days my anti-shiny-bullshit radar is a little more sensitized.

Failed U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore looks out at you from the cover of the May 2006 issue, his irises digitally enhanced (presumably in Photoshop rather than in the flesh) to crown his confident facial expression with an iridescent resolve. The article follows his recent comeback as a non-partisan environmental campaigner trying to get some 11th hour attention for our burgeoning climate crisis. It speaks of “his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming”, referring specifically to his “eco-friendly investment firm”.

We’re entering, it seems, a new phase of “eco-capitalism”. The ethic is best, if rather simplistically, expressed by DJ Zane Lowe in an interview in the recent Independent edited by Bono:

The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations. We’re not going to abolish big business, people aren’t going to stop drinking Starbucks and buying Nike, but you can say to them, ‘There’s a big difference you can make and if we find a way to make it easier for you, would you contribute?’

The Wired cover trumpets the “pro-growth, pro-tech fight to stop global warming”. Alex Steffen’s piece, leading the brace of articles on this theme, is subtitled “How technology is leading environmentalism out of the anti-business, anti-consumer wilderness”.

You can sense my critique coming, can’t you? Rumbling over the horizon like a ten-ton rhinoceros. Well, let me be clear before a stampede clouds the air… I don’t think business per se is a bad thing (I just think the economy it’s structured with is at least partially psychotic). I think technology’s probably worth sticking with and improving (I just don’t think the course of its projected development should be an article of faith). And I like consuming things—especially pasta (I just think some people consume too much—in general, that is, not just pasta).

Wow, sounds kind of obvious when you say it out loud, doesn’t it? Indeed. Rather than put their messianic faith out there to stand on its own two feet, Wired felt the need to fall back on the ol’ straw man. The target audience need a shiny sense of newness to animate them, and nothing bolsters the feeling of novelty like trashing something.

I’m not writing this to stand in the way of green technology, or to scupper efforts to genuinely bring corporations’ activities in line with sustainability. I rate WorldChanging.com, a prime force in Neo-Green thinking (or “Bright Green” as they term it), as one of the most essential blogs around. Certainly the writing there is much more sophisticated than that in Wired. (Presumably because of the reduction in commercial pressures—who’d've thunk it?) I’m just (1) amazed at the wrongheadedness of much of this new wave of ecological thinking, (2) suspicious of its often sweeping embrace of consumer capitalism and the dogma of perpetual growth, and (3) just dying to vent my spleen.

Tucked in one of the info-bubbles accompanying the Al Gore piece are Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the controversial essay ‘The Death of Environmentalism’ (October 2004). They’ve refused accusations of provocation, despite the title. They are, it seems, committed environmentalists trying to constructively criticize their own movement. The title (although obviously provocative) isn’t gratuitous: their key argument is that environmentalism has to dissolve itself into the wider world, to stop shoring itself up as a separate “issue”, so that people in general start realizing this “environment” stuff is actually about their whole lives.

I found myself surprised to be in strong agreement with many of their premises. It has to be said, the “environmentalism” they build a coffin for is pretty specific: U.S. mainstream NGOs that base their activities on lobbying for more restrictive policies. My main experience is with English grassroots activism, so I missed some of their logic until I realised “environmentalism” was a different thing for them.

To their credit, they begin with the kind of basic politeness that Wired is far too smug for:

Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us.

They do proceed to crap on the heads of many who came before them, but that’s natural.

They quickly trash any simplistic faith in technology:

In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to [...] overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C.

Immediately I saw the curious situation. The approach described above—basically, tweaking the system with practically cosmetic technical fixes—has long been ridiculed by what would commonly be described as “radical” environmentalism. That is, people who think there need to be large-scale structural changes in the global economy in order to balance our relationship to the environment. The above quote could be taken from an Earth First! pamphlet. Why is it here in a document lauded by those who now want to get into bed with big business?

The argument is that both mainstream and radical environmentalism have failed. The former are too lightweight, blinded to current difficulties by the significant policy reforms they won in the sixties. The latter are too impractical, still railing against corporate juggernauts that—as that intellectual heavyweight, Zane Lowe pointed out—are here to stay.

Actually, Shellenberger and Nordhaus don’t really discuss radical environmentalists—maybe they see this approach as too discredited to mention. And many Bright Green advocates do envision the end of business-as-usual—through the type of business-embracing evolutionary approach that many radicals will find far too compromising.

To my eye, it seems that mainstream environmentalism is indeed dead; or at least, should be killed. And any debate about whether the “Neo-Greens” or “old radicals” should now lead the way is probably worthless. Make no mistake, there’s plenty for people who fall into these simplistic categories to disagree on. But without avoiding these differences, I want to look at how Wired’s features exemplify the kind of shallow, misleading attitudes that both categories could do without.

If anyone uses the “hair shirt” metaphor to describe people who love nature and think we should consume less again… I’ll either go on a shooting spree in a rage or fall asleep from boredom.

It’s strange. The accusation that people who like living in forests and rail against consumerism are actually psychologically compelled to mortify themselves, that their political position derives from some deep, twisted need for denying themselves pleasure, usually comes from—where? From people in the mainstream of society. That’s right; people who drag themselves out of bed at 7am every day, sit in traffic jams in order to slave away behind a desk while the sun shines outside, and slump home too tired and distracted to play with the kids or screw their spouse.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe. But really, who’s wearing the hair shirt? The most sense-literate, pleasure-positive people I know are all dedicated environmental activists. Their capacity for sensual indulgence is matched by their refusal to allow this to be exploited by a consumer society predicated on perpetual growth. Many times they suffer greatly “in the line of duty”, weathering tree-top vigils or flurries of intense organizational stress. But I’ve been to far too many wonderful parties with them, spent far too many lazy days in the countryside with them, too begin to think there was anything motivating their sacrifices other than their belief that the things they do do good.

Everyone I know who could even remotely be described as “wearing a hair shirt” channels that negativity through the most handy thing around for the purpose: a regular job. But I shouldn’t mention that truth: it’s “anti-business”.

Another Wired feature on eco-friendly fashion emphasizes that these new “green aesthetes” aren’t just rebelling against the polluting habits of the fashion industry:

They’re also taking aim at what Brown [of Stewart + Brown] calls “hippie conservatism,” the hand-wringing gloom and doom that equates virtue with a conspicuous lack of style. Brown and his peers are willing to utter the unspeakable truth: Hemp ponchos and vegan sandals are butt-ugly, and most people who wear them look ridiculous. [...] “The hippies have been the backbone of the alt-environmental movement,” [Graham] Hill says. “But aesthetics matter. We’re trying to show that you can be cool and hip and still give a fuck about the environment.” The green aesthetes take their ideology bright, not dark. “We try to be super-optimistic,” Hill says. “We’re pro-business, pro-solution. The space we’re trying to fill is motivation by hope, not fear.”

Such vacuous rhetoric masks the fact that it isn’t literal hemp ponchos that are being objected to; it’s the belief they symbolize in the Neo-Green imagination—that perpetual growth isn’t possible—that is the real enemy. It doesn’t matter if you propose positive ideas for embracing a shrinking economy; anything but growth is “dark”, “pessimistic”.

This is our economic psychosis at work.

Of course aesthetics are important. But we all have different tastes. I could remark that the “Neo-Greens” in evidence in Wired look like painfully smug patients of an IKEA asylum for the terminally optimistic, all their interesting edges polished into nothingness. But I won’t, because it’s entirely possible that they’re cool people doing good. They just have bad taste.

In my experience, the activists I know and love who would commonly get called “hippies” are more aesthetically enthused than most people I’ve met. But it also happens that they’re not concerned with images in glossy magazines, and more interested in being personally, practically involved in their aesthetics than having it all done for them and handed down from on high.

Maybe the people quoted above would qualify their slapdash opinions if pressed on the matter. But while I applaud their efforts to bring more ethical, sustainably-manufactured clothes to the market, I’m suspicious of the rhetoric, the Manichean picture that’s being painted. This form of Neo-Green aesthetics separates light, smoothness, novelty, wholeness and sanguinity from dark, roughness, age, fragmentation and melancholy—ignoring entirely the complexity of reality, best expressed in Taoism, or Leonard Cohen’s line, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.

Surface aesthetics trumps good taste in supermarkets the world over. The desire for aesthetically pleasing fresh fruit and vegetables—pleasing, that is, to the shallow eye of the gloss-obsessed consumer—wastes technical resources and leads to less flavoursome food, as discussed in an Observer article:

‘I do think this quest for perfection has gone too far,’ says David Johnson, a fruit specialist who works for Horticulture Research International. Though his job is to develop storage technology for apples—largely in a bid to satisfy the supermarkets—he recognises the pressure put on growers by the obsession with appearance. ‘It drives some of our producers mad,’ he concedes, ‘and when you look at carrots, which have to be tapered with no cracks, and cucumbers that must be a certain shape and perfectly straight, you have to ask, “Do these things really matter?” If the product is wholesome and physically sound, how important is it? I think flavour is making a comeback and perhaps, in the fullness of time, people will accept a slightly different quality to get that flavour. But right now, appearance has a higher priority than it should.’

The Neo-Green ethic believes this cosmetic obsession can be hijacked in the cause of sustainability; that we can have our symmetrical, spotless cake, and eat it, too.

This aesthetic issue with basics like food isn’t discussed in Wired. But in discussing the social values of appearances, they report that Ken Kurani, an engineer at UC Davis, studied the reasons for people buying hybrid gas-electric cars in 2004 and 2005.

“We had a hard time explaining why people bought hybrids,” Kurani says. If consumers calculated the cost of the car and how much gas money a newfangled engine would save, the numbers wouldn’t add up. But few actually did the math—and those who did didn’t care. [...] For most buyers, the goal wasn’t fuel economy. It was to produce fewer emissions, to minimize external harm—and to let everyone else know they’ve made a deliberate choice to do so.

The theory is that the wealthy early adopters will bootstrap eco-industries towards economies of scale that will proliferate green technologies throughout society.

Well, if the practical upshot is good—less destructive industries—then it’s hard to oppose these tactics. There is a nagging sense that the idea that the vanity of the rich will lead us forward to good things might prove a little naive in the long run. But this does seem like a pragmatic solution to the double-bind that prompted Tony Blair to be uncharacteristically straight-speaking last year at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum:

My view is that if we put forward, as a solution to climate change, something which involves drastic cuts in growth or standards of living, it matters not how justified it is, it simply won’t be agreed to. [my emphasis]

In the face of this dispiriting truth, there only seem to be two options.

First is the Neo-Green response: that not only can we solve climate change, we can solve it without cuts in growth or living standards—indeed, we can keep on growing ad infinitum. This is the belief we’ve cherished at least since the Sumerian culture hero and god of light, Marduk, slew the dark primordial dragon, Tiamat: the belief that we humans are special, apart from nature, beyond the blind instincts of animals. Religion thought that we were just plain different—even if natural ecological constraints were perceived, it wouldn’t matter anyway as the kingdom of heaven awaited us. When science stumbled on the idea that we are actually just smart monkeys, our distinct status was maintained in the belief that our superior technological intelligence will forever bail us out from submitting to ecological constraints. We are animals, but we are the animals that will forever change the rules of the game of nature. There is no God; but we are gods.

The other approach is to accept that we are limited, constrained animals, big brains notwithstanding. And while humanity almost certainly has a future, whatever future there is, is on the other side of an extremely narrow evolutionary bottleneck. Our rationalizations for our base instincts—all the froth of justification that actually ends up believing our desire for comfort and convenience can be our saviour from ecological catastrophe—will cushion our descent into the population crash that must inevitably follow our overshooting of sustainable resource use. But crash we will, all the harder for our having buried our heads in our cushions at the beginning of the end.

I haven’t a fucking clue what’s going to happen. None of us have. Even though I don’t own a car, fly relatively infrequently, do my best to shop ethically and sustainably, and recycle where possible, I’m not doing nearly enough to help to “consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization” (as Alex Steffen accurately describes our task in an essay much more balanced and in-depth than his brief Wired piece). None of us are doing enough.

In order to turn things around, I think we need a sharp awareness of the dire possibilities implied in the second approach above. Panic is counter-productive fear, and to be avoided. (Though as William Burroughs noted, subtle tactics are necessary: “That rot about pulling yourself together, and the harder you pull the worse it gets. Let it in and look at it. What shape is it? What color? Let it wash through you.”) Fear itself is with us for a reason. It can act as a powerful catalyst to action. Would the Neo-Greens even be bothering if they hadn’t gone through one or more bouts of fear?

But overdosing on fear or building a high tolerance to it are both counter-productive. The glowing hopes for a bountiful future also need to be treasured. They may seem fragile; but perhaps they are more like diamonds, near-indestructible nuggets of beauty formed amidst the intense pressures deep in the dark earth. Alex Steffen’s ‘Winning the Great Wager‘ presents a vision that seems at once hopelessly outlandish, and—in the terms he presents, in the face of the facts he presents—necessary.

I have doubts. I think the best bet is to combine all approaches; or rather, what will happen is that all approaches will have to be used.

We should learn from the past wherever possible, whether it be from the mistakes or from the things that we got right in the Stone Age but suddenly screwed up in the past few centuries. As Hakim Bey noted, a return to the Palaeolithic is impossible and undesirable; a return of the Palaeolithic is necessary. It’s the mega-Renaissance that Terence McKenna spoke of: as the Italians in the middle of the last millennium looked back to Classical civilization for inspiration to build the modern world, our need for an even greater leap forward entails casting our nets even further back, to find inspiration at this critical juncture in the roots of our species.

We need to shed the infantile idea that the coming transition to a sustainable culture is not only possible, but will be easy. “I guess it is easy being green,” Kermit is forced to say in a Ford hybrid SUV advert in Wired—no doubt with Ford’s CEO pointing a gun at his head.

More will never be enough, and we need to revise our prejudices against “less”. We need to foster a true materialism, a deeper engagement with the sensual world, to replace the jittery false materialism we’re currently mired in. The monotheist detachment, the split from matter, was not healed by scientific materialism; it merely transformed it into Cartesian alienation. The seeds are there in current science for a further transformation: evolutionary theory, the neurosciences, the kinds of cognitive approaches championed by George Lakoff, biomimicry… All point to the quite heathen possibilities of reconnecting consciousness to the material world.

Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), argued that even though it no longer applies, the origins of modern industrial capitalism lay in the intense puritanical restraint of Calvinists and other Protestants, together with their belief in tireless work in your “calling”. It was only through such ascetic industriousness, together with their strict avoidance of the “indulgence” of the peasant’s hand-to-mouth existence, that the basis for modern rationalized industry could be formed. I think the ghosts of the religious postponement of pleasure haunt even our apparently indulgent society. Exorcizing these spooks, and encouraging more genuine enjoyment of simple material pleasures, will help us break the law of diminishing returns that our addiction to more, more, more has lead us to.

Part of this has to involve resisting the current wave of Neo-Green rationalizations for the dogma of growth. In the comments on a recent WorldChanging.com article on the fascinating but debatable proposition that we may evolve lives that have “no net negative ecological impact at all”, discussion of birth control and energy use reduction was met with a violently jerking knee: “It makes me sick when the only solution people come up with is to kill.” And further: “This is a repulsive argument. It’s a classic example of ‘There’s No One So Green As the Dead.’” The hysteria underlying these responses is emphasized by the fact that they’re responses to something that wasn’t there at all. There was no mention of killing; just birth control. Well, I know some other people partial to equating birth control with murder. “Be fruitful and multiply” has been secularized and strengthened in the runaway irrationalism of the modern free market, to the point where it is skewing even the most ostensibly informed debates on reducing population and/or energy use. We shouldn’t let our inherited values distort our view of what is most important.

And yes, at the same time—even tempered with an awareness that “progress” might not be as linear or assured as we hope—we need to develop new technologies, and new techniques, that will ameliorate the problems we face, and eventually build new foundations for sustainable societies.

This post has become much longer than I intended. There are plenty of other issues spinning off from this. Hopefully now I’m regularly on the web again I can start posting my thoughts on them in more digestible portions!

I’ll close by returning to my original point—which certainly seems very petty after that grandiose climax, and should certainly be seen as a footnote rather than the ultimate point of all this. Basically, I’m just alternately angry and bemused at how Neo-Green rhetoric often trashes the tireless efforts of many good eco-activist friends of mine using shallow arguments and shoddy logic. It just shows how skin-deep much of their ecological thinking is.

If you wander out to any tree in a field or park, you’ll see the beautiful bright green leaves shimmering in the wind, speaking of new life and growth, and reaching towards the light. But you’ll be a fool if you think they exist independently. Out of sight, the tree’s roots reach down into the soil, drawing up moisture and nutrients every bit as essential as the light harvested by the leaves. The roots have the dirtier job, but the tree depends on them as much it relies on the leaves.

Having said that, go read WorldChanging.com. It’s doing the best job I’ve so far seen of integrating the less palatable realities into its generally admirable work towards a “bright green future”; reaching for the light without uprooting itself out of distaste for the messy, dank realities below.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: Flamingo, 2000
• ISBN: 0002258471

I must first confess that this is the first Ballard novel I’ve read since 1979′s The Unlimited Dream Company. Perhaps a journey through the books between this and Super-Cannes would have prepared me for his current stance, which I was mildly surprised to find had a much more overt moral component than I’d previously noticed.

That’s not to say his earlier work is out-and-out ‘immoral’—perhaps not even ‘amoral’, although this is the most generous that his critics used to get. It’s obvious from the Re/Search book on Ballard (which, if it can be considered one of his works, is my favourite) that he has a very powerful moral sense, only one that is coupled to an unflinching Freudian-surrealist passion for facing the unconscious on its own terms.

Here, though, we’re a step removed from the plunge into creative pathology. This is not a criticism, however. I’m fascinated to see Ballard for aiming his guns directly at a target (unbridled corporate power) rather than firing just to explore the possibilities—it’s just not what I expected.

The novel’s protagonist, Paul Sinclair, is an aviation magazine editor recuperating from a crash (Ballard’s not changed that much then!) who arrives with his young wife at her new job in Eden-Olympia, a utopian business park built near Cannes to house some of the world’s most powerful corporations. The familiar Ballardian roguish psychopomp comes in the form of Wilder Penrose, the park’s resident psychiatrist. Penrose—like nearly everyone else—is reluctant to say much about the recent spree-killing conducted by the former occupant of the Sinclairs’ new house, who was killed in the process…

Paul, bored by the pool with his injured leg, becomes slowly but powerfully obsessed by the spree-killer’s actions and motives. (I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound amateur sleuth in Rear Window, but of course Ballard’s less interested in the injury’s connotations of impotence, as Hitchcock was, than in the character’s fascination with brutal incidents and acts, and the fetish value of surgical restraints.) He gradually uncovers a secret world of proto-fascist violence beneath the hyper-efficient work regime of Eden-Olympia, and, largely through the dominating influence of Wilder Penrose, becomes embroiled. But Paul struggles to maintain a measure of distance, forming a tension that drives the narrative, between fascination with the nearly consequence-free release of repressed urges, and shocked indignation at callous violence and perversity.

The seductive logic behind these covert eruptions of brutality is detailed in a riveting cod-philosophical conversation between Penrose and Sinclair. But the moral dimension to this work is foregrounded from the beginning, where we learn of the idea that Eden-Olympia, seen as an experiment in future living, was constructed with the intention of eliminating the need for moral choice in its inhabitants. Everything is automated, looked after, watched over, designed. The unquestioned and inexorable drive for more and more streamlined economic efficiency leaves in its wake confused people with a waning capacity for making difficult choices about what to do with their mounting wealth and power.

Certainly not one of Ballard’s best, but seeing the poet laureate of suburban alienation peel back the layers of deceit around our unelected techno-lords is fascinating at the very least.

The Government keeps complaining that the unemployed don’t want to work… lets face it; the employed don’t want to work either!

Bruce Morton, SiN

With both the Conservative and Labour parties declaring battle on the "evil" of unemployment, it has been left to those storm-troopers of the revolution, the Liberal Democratic Party, to admit that unemployment will not go away, and in fact full employment is virtually impossible. As the economic and industrial strategies of the world change is it still possible to insist that everyone in the developed world devotes their life to being a good and fruitful "wage slave"? Even with society currently designed to ensure that everyone is streamlined into a "career path" or low paid "McJob"; and all our energies are spent on ensuring that we get to spend the rest of out lives doing things we don’t want to do; does it seem so bizarre to suggest that careers, employment and jobs are 20th century diseases which require to be eradicated? Well, I admit it does look a big step if you are hypnotised into believing in the work ethic, but look beyond what you have been told and see the future.

Eradicating work does not mean regressing to a pre-historic Garden of Eden, (there’s far too many of us to feed from one tree anyway). There are tasks of manufacturing, supply and distribution which are required by society. These tasks could be more efficiently per formed by intelligent machines than by humans. Machines work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, they don’t require holidays, pensions, healthcare, training, maternity leave, sick leave and mornings off cos they’ve got a hangover. They don’t turn up late, get stroppy, skive off, steal the stock and sabotage the operations. They don’t go on strike. With current cybernetic technologies most jobs in the developed world, both in "unskilled" and "management" positions, could be better performed by a machine. In the near future even the supervision and creation of the machines will be automated so that a minimal human involvement will be necessary to supply our every need. The major obstacle in the progress of cybernetics is the limited imaginations of governments, employers and unions. They simply cannot see what good could come of putting all those people out of work.

Alternatively their imaginations run vividly to an army of idle revolutionaries smashing the state because at last they are not chained down by worrying about their income. They also cannot see how we would survive economically. Well is it not obvious, even with high initial costs for instalment and considering maintenance, machines are much more efficient than human workers? The increased productivity would mean increased profits. In the current system increased profits go into the pockets of the managers and the share holders. Why not make us all shareholders, spread the rewards a little? At this time all wages and benefits come from the ‘available pool of resources’. It is the myth that one’s livelihood depends on "earning" a part of this pool that keeps the rich at the top of the pile. An equal distribution of the worlds current wealth would allow everyone to share the standard of living of a well off American family. Let’s be clear at this point that ‘money’ is not ‘wealth’. Money is a token system, a piece of modern voodoo which be stows a mysterious value on otherwise worthless bits of paper. Wealth is the education, means of production, distribution system, homes, and above all, nowadays, information that is controlled by a community, individual or nation.

The distribution of a nations wealth could be achieved by a variety of means, such as some of the examples listed below (these are only a few of the alternate economic systems we could adopt):

The National Dividend

Invented by engineer C.F. Douglas, and developed by Ezra Pound and Buckminster Fuller. Every citizen is declared a shareholder in the Nation and receives dividends on the Gross National Profit for the year. This would not be inflationary as long as the dividends were equal to the GNP and not above it.

The Guaranteed Annual Income

Proposed by economist Robert Theobald. The Government establishes an annual minimum income (above the poverty line), and guarantees that no-one would receive less. They would be responsible for making up the incomes of those not earning or with low earnings. The removal of various layers of red tape would make this a cheaper system to operate, and would spare the recipient the humiliation of welfare queues.

The Negative Income Tax

Devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman. Similar to the above—any citizen whose earnings fell below the agreed minimum would receive from the government a sum to make up the difference. Again this is cheaper than the current system and less degrading for the recipient.

The RICH Economy

Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis. Devised by L. Wayne Benner and Robert Anton Wilson. This works in four stages:

1. Encourage cybernation by rewarding workers who design themselves out of a job.
2. Establish either the Guaranteed Annual Income or the Negative Income Tax to ensure that those unemployed by the cybernation are not forced into the current lunatic welfare system.
3. Gradually raise the Guaranteed Income to the level of the National Dividends, thus raising the living standards of the whole nation.
4. Progress with massive investment in adult education.

Eventually everyone will get bored watching daytime soaps, getting stoned and lying in bed all day. Give people the opportunity to learn to do something more fulfilling than TV, Fast Food and crummy jobs, give people a chance to become part of the challenges of the future, feeding the rest of the planet, Space Migration, Life Extensionism Sciences. It is also recognised that raising the educational level of a nation decreases the birth rate and increases the wealth creating potential, both problems receiving much media coverage just now.

Aristotle is recorded to have said that slavery would only be abolished when machines were built that could operate them selves. We now have that technology, but we do not have the intelligence and the will to use it. The idea of a work ethic (an idea created by the ruling classes who never had to work a day in their lives) has hypnotised us long enough. Let us celebrate unemployment as the crest of the Third Wave and congratulate the wilfully unemployed for leading the way to a new universe.

Further reading

• R.A. Wilson: The Illuminati Papers (The RICH Economy)
• Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave and Previews & Premises
• Henry George: Progress and Poverty
• Silvio Gessell: The Natural Economic Order
• Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
• Benjamin Tucker: Individual Liberty
• Peter Maurin: The Green Revolution