Social Media The Good the Bad and the Ugly

I have written before about the effect that the Global Market has on our environment, and our democracy, and I have cited Social Media as one of the key facilitators of the harm that is being done. Having just watched The Social Dilemma produced by the Centre for Humane Technology I feel that the properly qualified scientists can, and have evidenced my hitherto speculative philosophy.

There are ugly moments of doom in this documentary which, for me at least, provides shocking confirmation of my worst fears for humanity in the decades to come. So there is good and bad news.

The bad news, is that it seems pretty much a certainty that we are becoming more and more divided, as we tumble towards the chaos of our extinction and that our finite time before it is all too late for the majority of our species will not be spent drastically attempting to survive and repair, but doing the complete opposite, tearing each other apart. Our democratic processes will be unable to address this. Our understanding of even the most substantial facts will be unreliable and disputed and we will be without a reliable touchstone as arbiter. They accurately describe how the “users” are in fact the product of of the industry of personal data and behaviour prediction/manipulation, add this together with other human behavioural factors such as our vulnerability to addictive behaviours to produce a compelling well reasoned and evidence based proof of their concept. I am not writing a film review, or a critique of the documentary, but I would strongly recommend that you see it for yourself before reading on.

The documentary suggests some mitigating actions that we can take as individuals, and as communities, and they offer various tool kits on their site, but admit frankly that they have little optimism for there being substantial change (necessary for our survival) without considerable social upheaval ie local and global conflicts. However, I feel that they have overlooked an element of our human psyche and an element of the Global Markets that add up to a slither of hope and suggest to me at least a possible alternative.

The good news is that the Global Markets, and the decisions made, along with the mechanisms that Social Media provide to maximise the Market’s utility and function is not human, non-sentient, artificially intelligent. It literally does not care. – WE DO.

I’m thinking about a game of monopoly. A game that is strangely addictive, that many families will bring out at holiday times as the family board game. It is a game of pure (ish) capitalistic ideals. If we play it to the rules, six players will become five, then four, then three, and eventually two, who may be stuck in a stalemate, or sometimes will become one. We nearly all know the dynamics, two of the less successful players who reluctantly join in but really just want to have fun will cheat. One player will develop a form of mutual support bond with another – but it will not be an equal partnership and one will eventually buy the other out with good grace, but essentially the same effect as the other two players who have taken the whole thing terribly seriously and are at each other’s throats duelling to the death and crying fowl reading and re-interpreting the rules and so on for hours of attrition till the end. The end, is an end in which one person gets only the satisfaction of owning everything – on their own – and the game stops. No one benefits, no one gains anything the economy of the board implodes, and as we stack the notes, and sort out the cards for the next time, no one knows why we thought it was worth doing anyway, but they will do it again next year.

The rules, are the fundamental principles of the game and in following them we are absolved from our unkind and ultimately unsustainable behaviour to our friends and family. This is distressing for many of us – but its only a game others will say. Many families will seek to adapt the rules to even things out – but all that achieves is a pointless un-ending game that agrees to simply stop. There is no point doing it of you don’t follow the rules. The rules – don’t care, they don’t know me, they don’t know any of the players, they don’t think, but they have a constructed internal and inevitable logic, they do not have the interests of the players in mind, in fact the humanity of the players is irrelevant, all that is needed is for the humans to participate. – within the rules – and they do because it is pointless playing if you don’t follow the rules.

So, here is what I’m thinking. The algorithm is a complicated non-sentient self learning set of rules which, unfortunately and to some extent unforeseen by the creators of the rules, we are hard wired to subjugate ourselves to. There is little prospect of success with trying to put the clock back, or the genie back in the bottle. The lack of trust in facts means that there is not prospect of an independent arbitration for what is true and what is fake news. If you want to shut it down, you would need to over throw the Global Markets, but first, because of their role with economic management you would also need to over throw the State – all of them.

Ironically, the cumulative effect – or side effect of the psychological trauma and decimation of our social structures is beginning to threaten social disorder, particularly with the effect of the Lockdowns and other economic and social impacts of Covid 19, and that is before we really start dealing with the escalating disasters arising from the Environmental crisis that we have contributed to. But, that is not an answer that anyone who loves us would find desirable – even though I have to say that I recognise it as a possible future.

I think that we need a story.

I think that we need faith in something new.

I believe that in order to assert our human needs and interests we need to engage in a way that is uniquely human.

I am not a bot. I click on this to assert the truth of it, but I know it to be true because I do uniquely human things, guided by rules – sometimes, driven by desires and needs sometimes but neither of these things prove my “non-botness” – The fact that I die, poop, respire, sleep and lots of other facts are not relevant to my engagement with the Market, except in terms of the demands that they create for the market to supply, so these qualities are on the wrong side of the equation- and therefore not helpful. But, I love.

Since the beginning of our species, the very first thing that we did with language, was to engage our imagination and tell stories. The reason that cave paintings are frankly crap representations of things is that they were stories, not pictures. These stories were training, in the hope that you don’t actually have to go through the trauma of fighting off a predator in order to learn how it could be done. We told stories about how a friend of a friend survived, and we engaged our imaginations. So, as time went by we used stories to explain things, and this developed into systems of belief. Belief in these explanations is not necessarily evidence based, so……. we had faith.

The greatest stories that we still tell codify our social organisation and culture. All of our great religious texts are in parable form, and I do not believe that this is coincidence. The stories of the New Testament, or the Koran (other religions are available) illustrate the principles of the faith, and engage our imaginations towards finding novel applications in the novel situations of our everyday lives. Societies that seek to turn the commandments in to rigid law such as we see in the fundamentalist religious groups don’t work out so well, in fact, as we all know they feed extremism and exclusion, in complete contradiction to the meanings found in the parables.

When I studied martial arts, I learnt to use the power of the opponent and this is what I feel that we should do with this mighty foe.

Remember, the bots and the markets actually don’t care. They will not be hurt by campaigns or protests, and they will be protected by the state that shields them. So we work with it. The motivation is to trade and make profit, so OK, that’s what our social structures rely on too (currency/trade, work, status all basic human drives). Social media is organising and shaping our demand, but for the sake of our continued existence we need to change our demands because the systems and processes that we are using to sully that demand are driving us towards an Environmental disaster, as well as exposing us to novel treatment resistant diseases. But, we can not use fact (because these are disputable) and we ought not to use dogma or violence because neither are they very sustainable or efficient. So, what is there that is essentially human? Stories, and specifically parables.

It is pointless to refute or deny a story – it is purely fiction, with meaning.

So, that’s it? A Story? That’s the big idea?

We don’t need to agree on what is true, we need to do what is uniquely human, and agree on what we believe, and our long history shows us that this is best conveyed through a story.

The stories that underpin our existing religions have not protected us from where we are now. I would say that they are still relevant but that they have been corrupted over time and by our human failings. I’m aware that this is disputable, and that is not my point, perhaps its ok to say that they were written to address other issues, and we need to add a sequel. I am not bothered if this is seen by some as a new religion (another uniquely human thing) but the story needs to illustrate how we can escape from this new apex predator, or we will die discovering its power directly.

A Few thoughts about an Independent Wales

I want to see things from a slightly different perspective. Not a party Political one, not in terms of the present set of parameters, but in terms of the future. I have written in earlier blogs that I know that no one reads about what I see as the impending extinction of our species, the fallacy of Democracy, and the imperative of sustainable ways of organising and living. Global issues of Pandemics, and Global Warming, extinction of pollinator species, and Global Markets superseding National democracies, give me pause for dreaming of a sovereign homeland, self governed and fit for the future.

To do this, we have to have a new vision of the future, one that is based on fact and probability, not on political power and ideology.

I am not qualified to give an historical rebellious account of how the Principality of Wales conceals an enslaved nation, hidden and exploited by the British Empire, but you can certainly find well argued and researched historical evidence for this. I will leap to a version of that which I am sure can be debated. In fact, I am sure that petty debates about this will be a major part of a Nationalist agenda in at least part of the argument for independence. My problem with this is that I do not believe that winning or loosing such an argument will inform the future that I wish for my homeland. In fact, I believe that all of the understandable posturing and recriminations that will go back and forth with concepts of fairness, justice, etc, will simply distract from the real point. I would say though that the Imperialist English used Wales as their battery providing the coal, steel and then water to fuel their early Industrialisation giving their Empire the momentum that gave rise to their deluded conceit as a world power in the first place. I feel the shame of our Imperialist Past and I feel that we should step aside from it; be, and behave, differently. We can not simply say…. oh that was them…… it isn’t true,, and its even a bigger lie if we chose not to step aside when we could.

I want to think again about the type of nation that we will need to survive the next 500 years, not simply argue for a local alternative to Westminster, and Her Majesty the Queen.

Being tethered to England, is not so smart. The Empire is gone, the assets are stripped, the Commonwealth is self governed, England has left the European Markets, its utilities are owned by foreign companies and states, and it is deluding itself that it remains a world power by hanging on to its self written history and its nuclear weapons. England is not going to be Europe’s Banker as it has proven itself Internationally Untrustworthy, its water supply is limited, its manufacturing is diminished and will diminish still further. It is a nation of shop keepers that has closed its doors to passing trade. England can not produce the food it needs, and it cannot produce the energy it needs sustainably. England has several areas of extremely dense population, massive disparity between rich and poor, and is plummeting towards a set of circumstances that look pretty scary for the next few generations. England is fast embedding itself in the USA’s cancerous colon, and I don’t want to be there with it.

Wales on the other hand has a small population, excellent farm land, access to abundant fresh water, and can boast the second highest tidal range in the world along with proportionately a top ten ratio of coast. In fact we could still be a battery for trading partners, but this time around a sustainable one.

For our future generations to survive we humans, as a species will need to make a shift towards sustainability as being the key factor around which we organise. So, where would you rather be, New Zealand, or Texas?

This will not be a future world of exploration. We will not be flying all over the place just to see what is there and buy an over-priced souvenir. We will need to live far more within our environmental means, and local borders.

Wales, can, or could, feed its population (which is no bigger than the West Midlands). We currently export 300 million cubic meters of water each year to England, that would need to be renegotiated as a trade deal post independence. We have vast areas of windy hillsides, and the tested blueprints for tidal lagoons, both of which could be exploited to provide all the clean and sustainable energy that we would need, and more. We also have the honour to manage areas of awesome natural beauty and huge tourism potential.

The other thing that I feel that we have as a nation is a culture and set of priorities that lends itself far more towards cooperation and support than competition. We are ok about being champions of Hwyl rather than captains of industry, and it is with that Hwyl, along with our Kiwi friends that we can still compete fairly on a world stage in sport, literature, and music.

Dear Independence future, can I just say, clearly that….

I don’t want to be a poor slave to a mini state of the American union. I want to be move sustainably towards a new, homely order of things, content within our own sustainable and renewable resources.

Tomorrow’s world

Dear Harri

I thought I would try and write about some of the abbreviated discussion that we had yesterday, because I am concerned that you might have thought I was a little mad, and I wanted you to be sure that I am completely mad, so all is well.

What if…….

Covid 19 busts things up a bit?

What if, The Dollar crashes, and the USA goes into a state of revolutionary transformation?

What if we understand that Black lives matter because of the lives bit not the black bit, and that brings us to an understanding about us as a species?

What if we own our history so that we can properly learn the lessons from it? What if we recognise that history isn’t a black and white matter either?

What if, the imperative of a dollar and carbon based global economy is not such an imperative anymore?

What if people don’t attempt to unite around a set of political ideals but around the core truth of our need to exist and persist as a species in harmony with our nature and place? It has only been the propaganda that we bought from Capital that led us to see this fact as another set of ideals. The imperative of the amoeba, or the squirrel or a blade of grass is the same imperative that we have, but we must chose to respect it consciously. We need to see that it was “Hobson’s choice” all along. If we do not respect sustainability, we will fail as a species, fact, not ideology at all, just a simple fact of Life.

What if we discover that the smart thing is to do what other resilient species have done for millennia and chose to work with Nature rather than to try unsuccessfully to conquer it?

What if success is measured by sustainability rather than power?

What if we awake from our delusions and see that even in the socially constructed world of economics and capitol the most successful way to survive is to be Global, locally?

What if after 12 weeks without Coffee shops we realise that we didn’t need the overconsumption that is contributing to our extinction? What if we grew crops as an alternative to the 30 unused herds of cattle that were needed for the overconsumption of the milk we no longer need for the coffee shops?……. and folks are fitter …… and we produce less waste…. and all those other things that a small shift in our behaviour can set off in a chain reaction?

What if we realised that the real need of a Nation for security is actually security of food, health, welfare and power production and not protection from one flawed ideology by another flawed ideology? What am I saying realised? The nation already knows! Who amongst us questioned the obvious assumptions about which were essential workers, and which were non-essential? Oh…. and as an aside, how many of the essential workers are also amongst the lowest paid in our flawed ideological current set up?.

Wait, I know I risk going off at a tangent, but I have to say that when we thought as a natural species to save our lives, did we not recognise that food, shelter, health, education and waste disposal were the things that we would risk death to support?…… Miss-understand that if it suits, but I mean no offence to the millions of folks whose livelihood will be threatened as we move towards tomorrow. Their livelihoods were sustaining the economy, not life, and when we need to know that, we seem to. But transforming towards tomorrow will be full time occupation for the species, we will act, and sing, and brew coffee, we might not produce nuclear waste, or plastics or burn carbon for short term gains. We might exchange , but it might not be stocks or futures. We must not need to change our slogans to “non-essentials lives matter” having learnt from our past.

What if we recognise that all our Governments can do is orientate their economies towards the most beneficial relationship with the Global Markets that they only have the smallest margin of influence over?

What if we realise that the one fundamental control that we have over the same Global markets is the personal choices of the world’s citizens? The power is really with the people, every click of the mouse, every coffee purchased, every delivery requested, every bill paid, every hour worked, every drug administered, sniffed or injected, every product preferred or rejected, every loan requested. What if the people rather than the market knew and understood that?

What if we realised that our personal preferences and choices were the beast that we are campaigning to impotent governments to vanquish? The data that we own, our information, our thoughts, behaviours and preferences are traded within the Global economic machinery driving it forward. What if we recognised that the truth of this means that we are the drivers of the global system and also therefore the solution, personally, no Government required.

What if we recognised that at the point of a Global Pandemic, only those who operate globally and act locally thrive, in business and in Nature? The box being carried down my drive is being carried by a company that exists globally.

Tomorrow, we will know that we are a species among many other species that must collaborate to protect our home. We will not burn it down or cloud its skies…. we live here. We will not fill it full of waste for our Grandchildren to play amongst as they starve and fight, we will accept the same responsibility that other blessed species obtained as a hard wired reason to live, which we unfortunately had to discover and monitor for ourselves.

Tomorrow we will photosynthesise, we will harness the wind, we will use our waste to fertilise our future, we will contribute, and repay. We will do this out of self interests at last, no doctrine to follow, just an instinct reconnected with no longer repressed.

We are a smart species, playful and ingenious, but we have been wasteful, wrekless and arrogant, like an adolescent species, and we will grow up.

Tomorrow, we will climb down from our self deceit and acknowledge our place amongst the other species in our home. We shall apply all the same smartness that we applied to profit the few, towards sustaining our place on Earth, and our part in its future.

Viral Liberty

We need to do some thinking about exit reality from the Covid 19 lockdown.

• We are restricting the spread of a virus that we have no vaccine for by reducing the risk of contamination, and we are doing this by simply avoiding contact with others, nothing more sophisticated than that. I have not got it, and I know you have not got it, so I’m OK with you, but I don’t know if they have got it, so I need to avoid them.

 

• The reason that the number of people infected by a single case has dropped to 1 is purely because of reducing the amount of social contact that we have with each other. In other words there is no change in the nature of the virus, we are limiting its impact by changing our behaviour.

 

• Social distancing is a restriction of movement, and yes it limits our freedom, but it is not a restriction of liberty, because Liberty is freedom to act within a legal framework, and we have consented (?) to a law that justifies the restriction of our freedom.

 

• We will only be able to take this strategy out of our homes when either the opportunity for the virus is extinguished, or the opportunity for us to encounter it is; or, of course, if we are prepared to risk infection. 

 

• To reduce the opportunity for the virus, we need to either completely kill it (unlikely) or we need to develop an immunity to it, either through Herd immunity (and the sacrifice of many deaths) or through the development of antibodies by artificial means (a vaccine).

 

• To increase the opportunity for us to avoid the risk, we need to be able to identify who has the virus and where they are which means mass tracking, contact tracing of everyone so new infections can be traced and quarantined.  What will be the real social cost of such a loss of privacy?

 

We are currently compliant, for the most part with the Rule of Law in respect of lockdown, but will our consent remain such an overwhelming consensus? Will all who are told that they must re-engage with work activity outside of the home be ready to expose themselves to potential risk when the Government calls for it? Will we all agree to remain in isolation for months? How resilient is our compliance, is it based on obedience or informed consensus and group interests? Do we have confidence in the information that we have? What are the limits of our decision making? How do we scrutinise the collective, and are we satisfied with the scrutiny? 

Before we go waving flags and lighting up buildings to celebrate the easing of social restrictions in China, we should take a look at what that really means. In the Middle of April 2020, the people of Wuan are able to leave home to shop, and to work. But – only those people that have a green status. The testing used is largely just a temperature reading. This of course has the advantage of an instant result, but has the disadvantage of false positive – as there are any number of reasons why a person might have an increased temperature. Any citizen with an increased temperature (and their household) are required to be in quarantine. All Citizens who are outside will be temperature tested at several points in the day, entering or leaving public places and by law at work several times during a shift. All citizens are required to carry proof of their green status, and this is achieved by the use of a smart phone app.

So, how does that feel in a Western context?

How does that look in a world-wide context?

What in terms of natural human engagement does this form of liberty bring to us?

Before we blindly stumble into consenting to any of the logical potential outcomes from lockdown, we need to consider our priorities as a species, because if we don’t, then the priorities that we will tacitly support will be the priorities of the establishment. Here too is a big problem for the average world citizen, because we are not really that well informed about who the establishment actually is. We are deluded by national and cultural division into colluding with a firmly held beliefs that our various governments and/or our social values and cultural beliefs are the establishment. However, this writer at least believes that with the globalisation of Capital, it is in fact Global Capital that is the true establishment, and that our local government and cultures merely express the idiosyncratic cultural choices that nations make in how they relate to the world economy.

This is important because we believe that democracy is important, and yet, democracy has nothing to really contribute to the global economic super-powers that determine our local priorities. We vote for our elected members of our governments, we are not all share holders or influencers of Microsoft, Google, General Motors, Shell Oil, Amazon, Serco, etc.

So, when we are “free” to leave our homes, what is the priority going to be? Are we now going to prioritise managing the issues that define us as a species, or prioritise the needs of the establishment? Let’s get the economy working! Will be the cry. And of course most of us will desperately need that to happen because our entire community life is centred on the economic exchange of our labour for money to pay for goods and services that we can not independently produce ourselves.

Well, there are a couple of things about that which we ought to reflect on. Firstly, we have discovered in lockdown that our needs for things, and our demand for things are not perfectly correlated. Why did I put that so obliquely? We learnt that we don’t actually need three huge cups of expensive coffee from a shop each day, and that these shops in turn don’t actually need the amount of milk that we produce to service them, so we don’t need so many cows, and we can therefore do without the methane and the land waste that is involved in this one small examples section of the global economy that is in fact (remember before the virus) leading our species to the brink of extinction.

We do not in fact need to fly all over the world just because we can – in fact it was certainly this habit that led to the global spread of the disease. But what we do need is better control over local sustainability – grow more food, produce more goods locally and so on…… and guess what that will help with? 

Maybe, post lockdown we should transform our global community into re-aligning our natural needs with our economic ones. Perhaps reinvesting in producing things locally, and in a sustainable way should take priority over the over consumption that threatens an environmental disaster far greater than Covid -19.

I am aware that there are a lot of question marks and maybe’s in this posting, but that is because our future is so uncertain. I would not like to blunder into it, but the risk of us literally becoming wage slaves only allowed out for the benefit of the economy is staring us in the face, and if we do consent to that, it would be as well for that to be purposeful and informed consent.

We are not worse off if we can not afford a new car lease, or a foreign holiday on credit, in fact in the longer term localising both our industry and our leisure might be of great benefit. We are worse off if our lives are simply measured against the benefits of our labour to capital at the cost of our freedom to socialise, relate and recreate. 

It can not be right, or sustainable for the State to pay our unskilled labour from the leisure industry 80% of their wages to stay at home, whilst we fly in a foreign workforce to pick their/our food. 

The division of labour between those who produce wealth and those who service the workforce and community has never been clearer, and the sacrifices made by those who serve the public needs to be honored and dignified by societal changes that enhance the sustainability of our lives, not simply our economy.

Covid -19 Lessons Learnt?

There is so much innovation going on in the Healthcare sector where I work I sincerely hope that many of the systems that we have needed to adopt will be continued well into the future. Telephone and video appointments with the GP are a great example, as is the realisation that staff can work from home.

But what I most passionately hope for is much bigger than that.

I have written before about the impact of global markets on a State’s ability to substantially impact on Global Climate change, along with a calling for us all to work with what we know about markets to influence this dynamic through demand for the sake of us all as a species. A Manifesto for sustainable life Revolutionary perspective.

What Covid-19 is achieving, far better than any of the climate change activists have managed, is to get us all seeing ourselves as part of a vulnerable species. What we are experiencing is gentle in the scale of the Natural environmental disasters that our scientists have warned us about for a generation. A Pandemic has the global relevance to make our commonality clear. We need to respond as a species. We are forced to consider what is essential for our safety and survival, as individuals and as a community, and this pandemic must be a dress rehearsal for our response to the environment or we will have learnt nothing.

If we do not heed this critical lesson we will mourn the sickness of the very systems that have oppressed us; like hostages tending the wounds of their captors. We will work hard to restore the position of those who were so un-essential to our well-being that we begged them simply to stay home while the servants of humanity do their thing.

Surely we can learn what is really important; family, and sustainability, local production of the things that sustain us, good quality communication and cooperation within our species for the benefit of all? This is not socialism, or communism or any of the isms – it is a natural life, and without it all the gadgets and celebrities, the marketing strategies and the latest hair cut are meaningless, and worthless. Yes, we need to organise, but organise around what we know to be important for the sustainability of us as a species, not simply the sustainability of privileged or commercial power.

The loss of life and disruption of this pandemic will be as nothing to the effect of re-polarisation of our magnetic poles, or the rise in sea level of only inches, or the random bad luck of a major volcanic eruption, let alone the avoidable impact of our fossil fuel and over consumption obsessions. What is required is not really a manifesto or listening to a persuasive leader, we simply need to connect with the sense of threat and potential loss that we feel today in lock down, to begin to accept that the possibility of catastrophic natural global events really do matter to me, and to you – personally. This is not some remote war in a foreign land, this is not some party political fake economy. The threat that I feel is at a natural level, life or death, and the actions that I take make a difference at that natural level.

Well folks, that is exactly what the global environmental scientists have been trying to get through to us for over a generation. Yes, it is unthinkable, or, it was until I hope that the Pandemic has helped us to see our true vulnerability as a species to natural forces that we can not bluff our way out of or negotiate with.

Those who seek to maintain their previous positions of power and influence will characterise our Economy as being the sick saviour of our people. The damage to jobs, the deficit, the years and years of austerity once again or the depths of a global depression both economically and socially. We will be asked to restore the very things that are contributing to the next and much greater threat to our species, and we will do so blindly unless we learn from the one great gift of this pandemic.

A Manifesto for sustainable life

When did elected democratic government really die?

To my mind it has been effectively dead for decades, but preserved like a zombie wasp that we see in nature, with the pupae of the capitalist agenda turning it into a deceptive automaton. It still lives and breathes but its primary function is servicing the needs of another organism that uses it for a tool, a vehicle. It feels no more about it than the carpenter does a hammer – best to keep it serviceable, but alternatives are available. Global sources of information and mis-information determine the outcome of popular votes, and who does this information truly serve? It is so well disguised that it sounds ridiculous to ask if Google serves the Polar ice-cap, or EBay protects the bee, but our environmental situation is such that if we the people don’t attend to the Polar ice cap or protect the humble bee, then we as a species will die, so as with every other species, all that we do actually needs to contribute to the sustainability of our lives, and our future. Not the wellbeing of Global Corporations or the free flow of the markets, but much more basically; the sustainability of our life itself.

When will the people realise that they are the hosts of an oppression; and that government that was once the container of this oppressor , has become its shield?

Same oppressor. Different scale. Global markets determine the issues that require our government and globally our distribution of wealth and the conditions and effects of the resulting deprivation and surpluses. Democratic government contained the mill owners and national corporations but the necessity of international trade to utilise unequal distribution of carbon based energy, fuelled conflicts and turbo charged technical development strengthening international producers of globally essential data services. Phew – perhaps I need to unpack that a little?…..

Democracy in a Capitalist economy was always serving Capital, but it was doing that by preserving the stability and health of the work force. Unchecked, individual capitalist enterprises would exploit the availability of a work force without a care, but a Nation needed a flourishing and stable economy to sustain the availability of workers that in turn create the demand for goods and services, including state run services like health, care, policing, and military protection. The national systems for achieving this could contain national enterprises, but with Global markets, Capital can shift production and finance to more profitable nations whilst still being driven by demand from other nations. Global production, Global demand, and Global information and marketing, beyond the direct control of a Nation’s government and even from International trading blocks such as the European Union. The box of national government neither has control over the means of production, nor the information that the population bases its demand decisions on. For example, UK chooses to leave Europe, so Ford chooses to shift production to Mexico, the only benefit of remaining in the UK was the free trade with Europe, without that assured prospect the cheaper more efficient productivity of a lesser developed labour market tips the balance against production in the UK.

The box is therefore too small to contain the unorganised drive of international corporations to produce a maximum profit in its business without a care for the global population or the global environment- unless or until to do so globally would be counter productive for its commercial aims. Each individual nation continues to do what it does to protect its position, but none are able to unilaterally influence the global picture, despite the scientific inevitability of a mortally damaged global environment. The effect is ironically, is to shield the capitalist drive, rather than to contain it. However, this results in an unregulated global driver for capitalism and therefore a key driver for the inevitable chain of events that is bringing our species to the brink of destruction is Demand.

In Britain, 82% of cars on the road are owned under some sort of credit or lease – so in fact are not owned by individuals at all, and these cars are replaced on average every 27 months! The production of internal combustion engines employs people, allowing them to obtain credit, a debt that has to be services by continued employment and so it goes around and around in a self fulfilling destructive cycle that ultimately serves only to continue to perpetuate a carbon based economy which, in turn, is bringing about the destruction of the world in which we live, but there is no single government responsible for containing or really influencing it. To be fair, there is no real evil Baron sitting in a bunker plotting to deceive us like this either, it is all simply a function of how we choose to engage one with another through trade.

Demand remains a function of choice, which in turn is influenced by information – beyond the direct control of national governments (eg Arab Spring – twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, eBay, amazon etc , the election of non-presidential but popularise Presidents in Global Major Economies). We the people make these choices apparently freely, but unthinkingly about the impact, meaning, and range of alternatives.

But wait, surely the freedom to communicate globally means that we can get an environmental message across? Greta Thurnburg, David Attenborough, and all the leading Environmental Scientists are continuing to attempt this. I’m typing what I believe to be a new, simple and common sense perspective, but I am not social media savvy and my squeak with be read by probably me alone, and acted on, probably by none.

By all means choose a democracy that governs in a way that facilitates your business plan and trade with the world. The effect has been to facilitate other major markets. Exporting industries allow for optimum profit since the most beneficial manufacturing democracy does not have to be the most benign trading democracy you simply ship the product in trade with another globalised company who registers their ships in the most profitable trading country . Government is left to manage the impact and support stability for the work force and its service industries thus supporting the markets that it can no longer contain.

We need a bigger box; or we need to realise that we, the species, are the cause and the cure.

We are holding up the shield and the shield is protecting and hiding the markets in plain view.

We, the species need to understand that our lives and our futures depend on a simple change in our collective behaviour. To feed ourselves not the markets.

Our global environment – where we live and breed and survive- is threatened to extinction because of the things we buy, the way we buy them and who we buy them from. The choices we make and that we don’t make determine the direction of the markets. We hold up the shield.

This is not a call for a revolution. Revolting against the government will simply replace the way the shield is held, but the responsibility of the new regime would remain one of achieving stability for the markets to feed the workforce to the global market. A democracy that fails to hold that in balance risks a dangerous spiral in the well-being of its people and that leads to instability.

We drive demand and demand fuels the market. We feed our children, breed and sustain by not destroying our environment. We have been distracted by the necessity for local stability in power pulses of party political government. We have forgotten that the environment is global too. There is no backyard. It’s all our environment. To sustain our species we must revolutionise our demand. We must behave like a species, in partnerships that sustain where we can live and procreate like any other species. Through consumer choice influenced by the interests of us as a species. We globalise the choice not a culture or a political position. Organise your country as you please, but the members of the species must now choose sustainable consumption.

Ironically but helpfully the richest most damaging consumers also have the most choice about their consumption. We chose what we buy. We choose who we elect. We can choose to select against ways of burning fossil fuels or producing toxic waste. Solar, wind, wave power generation, hydrogen fuel cell technologies, grafine batteries stuff that doesn’t need rare metals, stuff that is needed but sustainably produced and supplied or even generated locally like all other species.

Look around ourselves as a species, take a tip from any of the billions of species that have already outlived humans – They do not consume their environments – simple! We could be smart enough to use the Sun’s energy to great power that in turn could be used to exploit the hydrogen and oxygen of our environment (like trees and all plants do) but no, we choose blindly to burn the earth, on which we stand and turn a deaf ear to the scientists who tell us what the most simple single cell organisms has implicitly “known” about since the dawn of life, but we choose only to fund and support the research of the very industries that achieve the opposite of sustainability. NO – nuclear power from anywhere other than the Sun, is a dumb idea – come on – take our situation seriously.

Our demand is the direction of the global economy and it is the global markets not governments that are truly driving the politics. Get it? Ford makes cars for us because we change our car at the end of the lease period, and if we don’t buy one from them we will buy one from VW, or some other manufacturer – if we don’t buy them, they wont sell them, if we will only buy blue ones, they’ll make blue ones, what if we only bought ones that we hydrogen cells or some other sustainable energy source. What if we didn’t need to travel around so much anyway because our access to sustainable power sources was unlimited, and we could work to sustain our lives and futures in a different way? Each of our global enterprises serves profit, but we need to choose to serve humanity and the future of us as a species – if that’s what we want. The earth will be fine without us, as it was before us. We ought to save ourselves not the Planet.

Be fashionable. Design wonderful things to meet the demand of us as a species to live in a sustainable, stable environment. It is not cool to wear fast fashion if it pollutes our environment. An electric car is crap if it can’t drive 300 Miles and the metal in its battery poisons the environment when it is taken from it. I want to power my car with hydrogen split from sea water using hydroelectric or solar generated power. This is not a change of the State, it is completely within our control to change our opinion, our attitudes and ultimately our choices and behaviours.

I can not buy a palm oil product and ignore that a rainforest that produces the oxygen I need to breathe was destroyed to produce it.

Let the market supply the species not the workforce.

Where will we bank? A bank that invests its money in industries that sustain the species or industries that threaten it?

We will prefer working for sustainable producers so that market forces will favour new supply networks.

Why don’t we the species choose our Governments by the principle of what is best for us as beings and future generations?

We don’t need to overthrow we just need to know.

If Facebook or Google or Twitter thrive by driving our knowledge of what a product means to our environment will environmental stability increase, or self fulfill? If we re-rank sustainability and our species to be the prime influences on our engagement with the markets will we change the earth and have somewhere to live?

Seeing ourselves as the host, and knowing what’s going on is a revolution of our personal perspective, no forms or votes no membership fee or code to follow, no challenge to religion race or creed, just the most natural driver in nature the drive to survive. We have not been resisting this we have not understood it, distracted by local interest. It is in our nature to strive to survive. We do not put our hands into a fire twice, but we need to perceive the damage that the fire brings to us. We truly need to understand that our responsibility to ourselves and our neighbours is simply a matter of a choice that we will be offered if we are determined to not compromise with any lesser choice. Which one of us in any other circumstances would choose to be a little dead?

The man who slipped on the concrete steps of the stadium carrying two beers and a tray of hotdogs watching the game slipped and was killed by nature and gravity, not the game that he prioritised. We must take our attention away from the game at the last minute to prevent an inevitable and natural disaster.

Revolutionary perspective.

 

It occurred to me that one of the fundamental failures of the revolutionary  thinker is that they tacitly use the terms and framework of the oppressor in their argument.

For example; in challenging the ownership of the means of production we also implicitly accept the need for that production –

Does humankind need cars and fridges, McDonalds and mobile phones?

Sure? – yes we desire them but that is within a framework of Capitalism, of survival of the socially/economically  fittest — but that was all fake news socially engineered to serve the needs of Capital. We may think we are the smartest animal on the planet, but our behaviour has threatened our existence – not so smart really.

Within the framework that was established during the arrogance of a self possessed righteous ignorance that saw no end to coal stocks and energy, that had no thought for finite resources, that could not conceive of the environmental disaster that they were vesting onto future generations.

 

Don’t we know better now?

Now that we have seen the possibility of exhausting finite natural resources, we have poisoned the hitherto boundless oceans with plastic and chemicals, we have extinguished species that have survived sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years before we came on the scene.

The revolution against Capitalism is no longer about the ownership of the means of production and perhaps it never should have been. The masses did not need to win that game, humans were always going to lose. The revolution must be played on an entirely different pitch.  Petitioning for the rights of workers within a system that is ultimately going to kill us all is like jockeying for the best position of deckchair on the Titanic – seemed important at the time……………

The bigger picture is not the economy of a country or even the global economy, the bigger picture is far more basic and straightforward, appreciated and conquered by the most simple of organisms but not mankind.

Will I live tomorrow?

Can I (afford to) reproduce?

We have social and spiritual needs and opportunities because we can communicate imaginative and theoretical concepts, but we have led ourselves to put these first and fool ourselves that they are real. We have suffered real consequences from these theoretical concepts and that has supported the construction of a false reality that we have globally accepted and competed within.  But, on our deathbeds, or in front of a tsunami  the reality of our position and the fragility of our existence is always clear.

The real revolution has nothing to say about international trading tariffs on Harley Davidson motorcycles. The revolution must re-frame the argument. Our ingenuity must not be directed towards making inefficient carbon fuel combustion more efficient. The only fusion reactor we need is the Sun which leaves no toxic waste for us on earth.

What makes us think we are so smart when a tree can tower over us, outlive us, create and recreate itself out of a seed, water and sunlight and do nothing but contribute to an ecology that we seem to be hell-bent on destroying.

We need to be smart with graphene, we need to photosynthesise, if we need power we must take it from the sun and the tides not from the rock on which we must stand. – Stupid!

Much of what we know and have developed has been inspired by a commercial opportunity (war being the greatest stimulus inextricably linked to profit and social power) but commercial opportunity is a socially constructed fake.

We need a new motivation for our curiosity and invention – call it sustainability – or we could have if that word too had not come from a capitalist construct of maintaining profit or power or both.

Call it “tomorrow” but if we leave it till then it will be too late.

Democracy

de⋅moc⋅ra⋅cy /dɪ’mɒkrəsi/

noun

1. the political orientation of those who favor government by the people or by their elected representatives 

2. a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them 

3. the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group

ORIGIN: 1574, from Middle French democratie, from Middle Latin democratia (13c.), fromGreek demokratia, from demos “common people,” originally “district,” + kratos “rule, strength.” Democratic for one of the two major U.S. political parties is 1829, thoughmembers of the Democratic-Republican (formerly Anti-Federal) party had been calledDemocrats since 1798; though colloquial abbrev. Demo dates to 1793.

This is a book, not really a blog, so what follows is an unsubstantiated set of theories, musings and thoughts as a memo for some future time when I have nothing better to do than to set about demonstrating, or probably informing my thoughts. Why blog it? Well maybe it resonates with someone else’s thinking who is better informed about the historical references that will be needed to make any of what follows creditable or even persuasive. 
The first (above) promises nothing along any moral grounds, its a hopeless whim of a collective consciousness that favours government by the people or their elected representatives, but offers no idea about what that might be designed to achieve.
The second describes the fact of the status quo in nations that believe that they are democratic. Supreme power resting with those who have been elected for that reason. 
The last offers a little more in terms of the mechanics of how democracy does things but it remains a doctrine – for which we might as well substitute a belief.
Taken from the Wikipedia entry:–

According to political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: (a) A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; (b) The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; (c) Protection of the human rights of all citizens, and (d) A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.[3]
So, let’s run with that; political system with free and fair elections? ✅

The active participation of the people? ???? ❎

Protection of Human rights ? ✅ oh…. all citizens ❌ oh wait, what if we dont afford citizenship to those who we dont want to give rights to… that’ll be ok ✅

The rule of Law? ✅

I’m with Larry Diamond so far as it goes, but if he is close to getting a definition, then I fear that we are a long way from democracy in his terms. The real obstical seems to be the participation bit. What is that? Are we participating once every four or five years by voting for someone else to participate?

I am writing in the year that Jo Cox (an active and committed representative of the people who devoted her life towards engagement and promoting change before and whilst being elected to Parliament) was murdered almost certainly by some deranged motivation in the heart of a lunatic citizen engaging in his terms with a referendum in the UK. This is the year when the UK voted narrowly to leave Europe (politically – as if that was reality) then realised that they didn’t understand the word they had coined for it. Next thing we saw was that all the key players on both sides of the argument ran for the hills, we got a new Prime Minister (who had voted and campaigned to remain) whose helpful comment was “Brexit” means “Brexit”. This is also the year where a mysogenist billionaire business man and game show host competes against a member of the establishment in the USA who is being investigated by the FBI for matters of dishonesty to become the figurehead of the most powerful, richest and scariest of all “democracies”.  

How are these campaigns run? Publicity, targeted marketing, youtube, TV, the Press, Twitter and Facebook. Our digital footprints incorporated into campaign strategies to ensure that the right message goes in the right way to the right people to get the right result. And that is how a Nation can feel as if they have debated something for months, and not understand what the result means to them, as citizens – because they were never really told, they were asked. They were asked what matters to them, and told that they could achieve that by voting one way or another, and when it came to it, more people saw the final of the Great British Bake off than the opinion forming debates between the candidates.

We believe in democracy, and like other aspects which require faith, there seems to be very little independent effort to prove its existence or for that matter to properly define it, measure it or consider alternatives. 
It is. 
And all the evidence you need is to choose at intervals to vote for your chosen representative. And we, the people, do so (in ever decreasing numbers) joking, or moaning that the manifesto of our chosen organisation is either never to come into play because they will have no hope of a majority, or largely unobtainable and unfundable without a whole raft of unpalatable hidden ulterior motives.
How does it really work, and what is it really for? How did it come about – really?
On the basis that History tends to be recorded by the victors, we might need to be a little circumspect in considering these questions from the perspective of the unelected, the dispossessed. There will inevitably be a flavour of a Marxist approach to my thinking, since this thinking never really prevailed in the language of the victors, and it finds it roots in dissent of the masses allowed simply by revealing and describing their true relationship with the means of production and the accumulation of Capital produced by them and held by others with self defined and legitimised power.
The Great Western Democracies will point to their economic success, and the standard of living of their nations as proof of the success of democracy- of course, and since this is self defining it is correct within its own terms of reference. However this often ignores the less successful countries, and nearly always ignores the ultra successful non-democratic nations such as China, Korea and many of the Arab states. We also here a lot about another self defined truth about Democracy- that is brings peace. We wage, promote and participate in war an revolution in the Middle East so that they can have the liberty and peace that democracy brings and here, with this apparent oxymoron I find some truth. Peace and stability does seem to be the prime benefit of democracy to a nation that believes in it.  
The break up of the Soviet Union and the translation of Government diktat to the language of democracy can go unchallenged so long as the existence of democracy remains a matter of mass belief and consent to be ruled, or even dissent from adopting unscheduled or unsanctioned ways of providing challenge. 
Criminalise any potentially successful means of opposition if you want to keep things the same. Ritualise permitted alternatives with rights of free speech and such like to allow for the futile venting of dissent.
UK parliamentary elections for me, the citizen who lives in a constituency that disagrees with the voting intention of the majority (here, but not numerically as a nation) makes my vote invalid. Tough – that’s democracy buddy. I voted for a campaigning party that had no hope of election of course, but its presence on the ballot paper was the best publicity they could hope for, and the response from the establishment is to increase the deposit that persons must pay to prevent the usurping of the democratic process by organisations that simply wish to use it in this way. What? Hang on! Run that past us again? – oh, never mind. 😏
And now I am stuck, because there are so many strands to this that it is difficult to present it in a coherent whole. 
Where is it from?

When did it start?

What does it achieve?

What does it promote?

What does it resist?

Who is it good for?

What is it bad for?
Chapter headings I suppose, but is this the right order?
The end point in a nutshell is the awareness that superseding Religion, the concept of Democracy is new the opium of the secular masses. It is necessary for the survival of our species for us to consider alternatives, or at the very least to see the processes for what they are in the hope of seizing control of them in accordance with their stated and unachieved goals. If we do not find a way of living sustainably with our planet, we will make it uninhabitable – got it? If we do not work towards living in peace with each other, controlling our self interest for the benefit of the whole, and if that whole does not include the natural world, then our species, like so many others that we have extinguished, will perish.
How did I get here? – Perhaps listing my most recent influences will assist in explaining the trigger for this thinking. What got me typing?
BBC live-in documentary of the Victorian Slum. See in five short weeks how we can take our fat lazy 21 Century selves back to a point in recent history (just 3 generations) where starvation, exploitation and collective mass action were reality and called for change. Citizens engaged with their direct community, they collected together, they acted, and their lives changed. Why?
Never in the history of power have the powerful gently surrendered it. 
Let’s explore the possibility that concessions to the masses benefit those who benefit most from the activity of the masses. 
How did parliament come about anyway? Wasn’t it a Royal Dynasty trying to prevent the powerful lords from seizing power, and those powerful Lords fearful of the type of revolution that would also damage their position? We ended up with the same democracy as the French, who went one step further at the cost of many thousands of lives and who now elect their president puppet instead of letting Nature and Royal proclivity take its course (at a greatly reduced cost to the public purse I might add).
So what about the Victorians, surely the struggles of the workers in the Industrial revolution led to the workers rights that we have today – that was a success – right? Democracy gave us this surely. 

Maybe we can say that the Welfare State, the NHS and the like are good illustrations of how the people are well served by democracy. Or maybe – as I believe – all such achievements are sacrificed pawns by the power of Capital to maintain control and avoid revolutions of other sorts. The UK was close to revolution after the second world war, with disaffected battle hardened workers, hungry, under-employed and aware of their collective power calling for more of the spoils of peace that they had shed their blood to achieve – and they got it – and calmed down. Opium – masses sedated – business as usual, in fact better than ever, well fed, healthy productive workers – and there was plenty for them to do.
What if the purpose of democracy is to maintain control? Not such a bad thing, – right?

But what is the purpose of the State? Control over what and for what purpose? 

It surely isn’t the pooling together of resources, organising our groups so that we can live the best lives we can in a meaningful sustainable way – is it? Measure human enterprise against Global Economy before you jump to answer – what we are capable of as a species, against what we achieve. Do we get to vote for that?

 This is important, not least because we have been warned recently by the worlds most eminent Artificial Intelligence experts, including Hawkins that the possibility of AI is just a small matter of time. With the capacity to reduce production costs, and improve efficiency exponentially the agenda will become more important than the wellbeing of the masses.
What do we, the people, know about the options that are possible as opposed to the options that are presented? What do we even know about the options being presented, woven with lies,hyperbole and sophistry- cheating the electorate and burying the evidence after even if it comes to light. 

 Who gives us the news?

Democracy brings peace by quelling rebellion and nullifying dissent. My fear though is that it also maintains the momentum of Capital and that it is this momentum that is bringing our species to a precipice that democratic processes will never address. The odds of success are too stacked against any movement or organisation that would want to change the direction away from capital growth packaged as prosperity. 
I wonder if my great great grandchildren will vote for survival.