Noema: Your new book makes the case for how we should produce global public goods without relying on what you call “globalism” — that is, the belief in the possibility of supranational government. While it is obviously the case that the sovereign nation-state remains the bedrock of national politics and international relations, it is equally hard to deny that the idea and practice of state sovereignty impedes global cooperation and thereby threatens the conditions of global habitability. We live within a complex of planetary-scale physical, geochemical and biological systems that operate according to the laws of nature, regardless of the laws of nations. What should we do about this collision?

Roberto Unger: The dominant tenor of writing on global governance is animated by what I call a “soft globalism.” By that, I mean that many people who write about this topic are often antagonistic to national sovereignty and prefer the attenuation of it. Yet these thinkers’ soft globalism puts them at odds with the overwhelming preferences of contemporary humanity, which massively rejects any suggestion of a move toward a world state.

Whereas the soft globalists seem to think there exist a huge range of possible alternatives for governing the world worth considering, experience suggests there’s only one option that works: voluntary cooperation among sovereign states to help solve problems that they cannot adequately solve alone.

Now, I don’t believe in national sovereignty simply because it’s the majority view. I agree with it substantively. The division of humanity into sovereign states is more than a brute fact. My position is that humanity develops its powers and its potential only by doing so in different directions, and can be unified only by being allowed to diverge. Visions of convergence — that we will all converge on the same set of best available practices and institutions — are a disaster. They subvert and impede the experiments by which humanity develops its potential.

All human beings are born nailed to two crosses. We are crucified, first, in a position within the internal social order of a nation-state. We are born into a particular class, caste or community and are required to spend our lives struggling to emancipate ourselves from the consequences of that crucifixion.

But we are crucified the second time by finding ourselves accidentally born into one of these national communities into which humanity is divided. I don’t diminish the significance of this double nightmare. But the alternatives to it are even worse. The idea of evolution toward a world state, a world empire, would be a prison from which we could not escape and in which we would have much less prospect of continuing the ascent of mankind.

Now, of course, we face problems that are global problems. How can we hope to avert the worst harms and achieve the most important common goods, when the world is divided into clashing, greedy, forceful and violent national states? The division of the world into sovereign nation-states is by far the lesser evil, compared to the union of mankind into a single state or into a collection of hegemonic states that would achieve an agreement among themselves and impose it on the rest of mankind in the name of what is allegedly necessary for all.

Our way of approaching the organization of the world should be in the service of the ability to create alternative structures, to create the possibility to resist the imposition of dogmatic blueprints by the powerful. That’s why we need pluralism.

Now, pluralism comes with dangers, including the danger of environmental destruction. Some of these national experiments will take us backward. But the fact that the future is open means it is inherently open to danger. It cannot be open without being dangerous.

Noema: Let me give a concrete example and ask which of the types of voluntary cooperation among plural political structures you think might be most productive to deal with it. Your home country, Brazil, happens to claim sovereignty over most of the Amazon rainforest. But many people — including climate scientists and ecologists — view the preservation of the Amazon as a global public good. Do you agree?

Unger: Yes, it is a subject in which all humanity has an interest. That’s true.

Noema: Okay, so given that all humanity has an interest in this, let’s imagine that Brazil were to elect a president who believed that the best thing to do with the Amazon was to chop the whole thing down and turn it into grazing land. What should be the response, given the voluntary cooperation model you propose?

Unger: One can always imagine examples that push anything to the limit, and, of course, we’ve had a case like this in former president Jair Bolsonaro, who I think you are referencing. Yet despite his lack of commitment to the preservation cause, he was very, very distant from the extreme case than you present. As Brazilians sometimes say, “We have preserved much of the Amazon, unlike, for example, the French or the Germans, who have chopped almost everything down and planted some trees in the garden. So why are you going after us?” Then it becomes a discussion about the details. And we come back to the world of reality, in which there aren’t these simple contrasts.

Noema: One retort might be that the planetary sapience of the importance of preserving biodiversity hotspots did not exist at the time that the French, Germans and Americans razed their forests.

Unger: Let’s forget about the past and focus on the question of contemporary environmentalism. The main temper of the environmental cause in the rich North Atlantic world is a kind of post-structural, post-ideological politics. Northern environmentalists would like the Amazon to be kept, in essence, as a park for the benefit of humanity, when in fact there are more thirty million people living and working there.

Let me give you a concrete example with respect to the Amazon. What does sustainable development in the Amazon mean? It could mean two things. On the one hand, it could mean a primitive, artisanal extractivism, in which you have, for example, indigenous rubber tappers taking latex out of the trees. I think that, implicitly, that’s what a lot of these Amazon-preoccupied people in the rich countries have in mind. It’s a form of “sustainable” development that has no science, no technology, no scale and, therefore, no future. It’s a joke. It’s the same thing as having “primitive peoples” roaming around in a kind of zoo.

On the other hand, the alternative to that is having an advanced form of sustainable development based on technology and science and new institutional models. In other words, it would be a variant of the knowledge economy. It’s either primitive, craft production, or it’s highly advanced. And where is this high advancement to take place? Then we come back to the question of division of experiments. The reason to have divisions is so that we can go from a period in which we had a crazed president who is hostile to environmentalism of any kind to another period in which we can retake the idea of preservation as a variant of the knowledge economy. And instead of having what the Americans have, for example, which is an insular knowledge economy, that excludes the vast majority of workers and firms and therefore produces both stagnation and inequality, we can aspire to have a knowledge economy for the many. We can take the problem of preservation in the Amazon as one of the hooks or provocations for this project of building strong, inclusive economies.

Noema: The issue, however, is that past experiments have closed the possibility of certain present and future experiments. Once the Europeans and North Americans chopped down forests and killed off so many species in the name of our national experiments, it foreclosed what might have been reasonable experiments about cutting down remaining intact forests — assuming we want to keep a habitable Earth, that is.

Unger: I understand that. What you’re saying is that there are terrible things that can happen as a result of this division of humanity into sovereign states. The fundamental answer to that was enunciated by British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead when he said, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” Yes, it is dangerous. And there is no antidote to that, because the alternative danger is having a set of princes or an emperor imposing an order on humanity — which is much, much worse.

Noema: Let us pose an alternative governance model, one that we proposed in an earlier essay. We imagine a set of narrowly tailored planetary institutions dedicated to broad-strokes standard-setting on specific planetary problems. In this arrangement, a planetary climate change institution, for example, would set non-voluntary limits on atmospheric carbon emissions for the planet as a whole, handing out mandates to national governments. Each nation-state would then get to decide how to reach those targets, but the targets would be set at the supranational level, though by problem-oriented institutions, not a general-purpose world government.   

Unger: Here’s my question: How will this regime that you described come about? If it arises as a form of voluntary cooperation, then it would be an example of what I call a “special purpose coalition,” like the International Agency for Solar Policy and Application or the efforts to prohibit human trafficking or to safeguard biodiversity. But if someone imposes this regime on states by force, then I have a problem. Because if they can impose this apparently progressive maneuver by force, there are lots of other things that they can impose by force. And then we have the beginning of the world state, and the doors of the prison are locked forever.

Noema: Is your problem with transnational institutions capable of setting binding targets that they represent a slippery slope toward a (potentially tyrannical) world government?

Unger: No, it’s not a slippery slope argument. I’m focused on the question of whether the beginning of this process arises from an imposition, in which there is a background threat of force. Or is there going to be a regime of inducement and of cooperation? And I think that if we can impose this by force of arms, there’s anything that we can impose by force of arms. Why stop there?

Noema: Is this simply a question of scale? After all, many if not all nation-states were formed by force against various unwilling populations. And, of course, many of these governments continue to be repressive. Is your fear that what is already happening at many national scales would be imposed on the global scale?

Unger: As I said in my metaphor about the crucifixion, nation-states are not beds of roses. I am not imagining some way to extirpate the element of oppression from human life. There is no neutral definition of a free society: Every institutional order tilts the scales, encouraging some forms of life while discouraging others. My fundamental argument is in favor of experimental pluralism. There will be a struggle in these different states, and some of them will be much more democratic than others, and some will allow for the enhancement of human agency more than others. But with humanity divided into different political communities, there mustn’t be just one conductor.

Noema: Let’s turn to one important instance of institutional innovation arising out of a peaceful coming together of nation-states: the European Union. In your book, you describe the EU as a regional coalition of the willing that provides a possible “model for global order.”

Unger: Let’s accept the European Union as a model for globalization. If you take that idea seriously, then you’d quickly reach a question: Why is it that in Europe, so many who are young or old, or adventurous or romantic, or very left or very right, are against the European Union? The answer is that the EU lies under the dead hand of technocratic centrism. That’s why everyone who has life in them is against the Union.

Europe is a museum, the least interesting part of the world. Most signs of life there come from the right. Otherwise, a Frenchman just wants to sit in his cafe and be served by a Polish waiter. The idea that there should be ideological and political clashes and experiments has vanished.

How did that come to be? It came to be because the dominant architectural principle in the evolution of the EU is legal and institutional convergence. European economic and social policies are increasingly centralized in the EU government, de jure in Brussels though de facto in Berlin. Conversely, the power to develop the social and educational endowments of the citizens is delegated to the national and sub-national authorities.

What could be the alternative? The alternative should be just the opposite. The main vocation of the EU should be to ensure the capabilities of all its citizens and to develop their educational and economic endowments. Then the widest latitude of institutional experimentation should be devolved to the member states. This would be a model of globalization worth pursuing.

Such a change couldn’t come about as be a gift from the European technocracy to the peoples of Europe — it could only come about if the southern and eastern member states allied with opposition forces within Germany, and within France, to force a change. It’s highly unlikely to happen in the present circumstance, but that’s what would be necessary. And then the European Union would be a model for the kind of globalization that would be better for the world, rather than a kind that’s worse.

Noema: We are sympathetic to this view that we should encourage plural and dynamic experimentation. At the same time, if global temperatures increase by four or five degrees centigrade, none of the experiments we’re going to be having are going to be very pleasant. And the fact remains: all the attempts at voluntary cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed. So what do we do?

Unger: First of all, I don’t agree with the idea that climate change is somehow the supreme global harm. The major global danger is the same as its always been: war among the great powers. Everything else is less important, including climate change. And it’s a problem that we cannot escape because it is rooted in the division of the world, which we need, because the alternative to it is worse.

Noema: Your certainty that any alternative to the sovereign state will be worse seems to dismiss a range of possible futures. Yet back in 1987, you wrote, “History really is surprising; it does not just seem that way.” Do you still believe that?

Unger: We now know that there was a time in the history of the universe when the present structural entities did not exist. The basic subatomic structure described by particle physics did not exist, and the laws and constants and symmetries of nature as we now describe them did not apply. The universe has a history. So, history is prior to structure, already cosmologically.

Then we have in the evolution of the universe a series of events that increased this power (that always existed) for the production of the new. Already prior to life in the geological record, we find the creation of novelties, like the formation of crystals. Then comes the mind, consciousness and more. The evolution and ascent of humanity and the development of our powers of agency is related to this enhancement of our ability to create the new. And each of these is a prophecy of more creation of the new. The fundamental reason why reality is surprising is that the new is possible.

This brings me back to our question of governing the world without world government. Whatever we do with respect to the arrangements for the organization of the world, its consequence must not be to suppress or even to diminish our ability to create the new. Because our ability to create the new is our fundamental power.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It has not been revised by the interviewee.

The post How To Govern The World Without World Government appeared first on NOEMA.

A transformation is underway that promises — or threatens — to disrupt virtually all of our long-standing conceptions of our place on the planet and our planet’s place in the cosmos.

The Earth is in the process of growing a planetary-scale technostructure of computation — an almost inconceivably vast and complex interlocking system (or system of systems) of sensors, satellites, cables, communications protocols and software. The development of this structure reveals and deepens our fundamental condition of planetarity — the techno-mediated self-awareness of the inescapability of our embeddedness in an Earth-spanning biogeochemical system that is undergoing severe disruptions from the relative stability of the previous ten millennia. This system is both an evolving physical and empirical fact and, perhaps even more importantly, a radical philosophical event — one that is at once forcing us to face up to how differently we will have to live, and enabling us, in practice, to live differently.

To help us understand the implications of this event, the Berggruen Institute is launching a new research program area, in partnership with the One Project foundation: Antikythera, a project to explore the speculative philosophy of computation, incubated under the direction of philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton.

The purpose of Antikythera is to use the emergence of planetary-scale computation as an opportunity to rethink the fundamental categories that have long been used to make sense of the world: economics, politics, society, intelligence and even the very idea of the human as distinct from both machines and nature. Questioning these concepts has of course long been at the heart of the Berggruen Institute’s research agenda, from the Future of Capitalism and the Future of Democracy, to Planetary Governance, the Transformations of the Human, and Future Humans. The Antikythera program described here exists on its own, but also in dialogue with each of these other areas.

For Bratton and the Antikythera team, planetary-scale computation demands that we reconsider: geopolitics, which will increasingly be organized around parallel and often competing “hemispherical stacks” of computational infrastructure; the process of production, distribution and consumption, which will now take the form of “synthetic catallaxy;” the nature of computational cognition and sense-making, which is no longer attempting merely to artificially mimic human intelligence, but is instead producing radically new forms of “synthetic intelligence;” the collective capacity of such intelligences, which is not located only in individual sentient minds, but rather forms an organic and integrated whole we can better think of as an emergent form of “planetary sapience;” and finally, the use of modeling to make sense of the world, which is increasingly done through the computational “recursive simulation” of many possible futures.

Applications are now open to join the program’s fully funded five-month interdisciplinary research studio, based from February-June 2023 in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Seoul. This studio will be joined by a cohort of over 70 leading philosophers, research scientists and designers. 

To mark Antikythera’s launch, Noema Deputy Editor Nils Gilman spoke with Bratton about the key concepts motivating the program. 

Nils Gilman: The Antikythera mechanism was discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island. Dated to roughly 200 BC, the mechanism was an astronomical device that not only calculated things, but was likely used to orient navigation across the surface of the globe in relation to the movements of planets and stars. Tell me why this object is an inspiration for the program. 

Benjamin Bratton: For us, the Antikythera mechanism represents both the origin of computation, and an inspiration for the potential future of computation. Antikythera locates the origin of computation in navigation, orientation and, indeed, in cosmology — in both the astronomic and anthropological senses of the term. Antikythera configures computation as a technology of the “planetary,” and the planetary as a figure of technological thought. It demonstrates, contrary to much of continental philosophical orthodoxy, that thinking through the computational mechanism allows not only “mere calculation,” but for intelligence to orient itself in relation to its planetary condition. By thinking with the abstractions so afforded, intelligence has some inkling of its own possibility and agency.

The model of computation that we seek to develop isn’t limited to this particular mechanism, which happened to emerge in roughly the same time and place as the birth of Western philosophy. Connecting a philosophical trajectory to this mechanism suggests a genealogy of computation that includes, for example, the Event Horizon Telescope, which stretched across one side of the globe to produce an image of a black hole. Closer at hand, it also includes the emergence of planetary-scale computation in the middle of the 20th century, from which we have deduced other essential facts about the planetary effects of human agency, including climate change itself.

Gilman: How exactly is this concept of climate change a result of planetary scale computation?

Bratton: The models that we have of climate change are ones that emerge from supercomputing simulations of Earth’s past, present and future. This is a self-disclosure of Earth’s intelligence and agency, accomplished by thinking through and with a computational model. The planetary condition is demystified and comes into view. The social, political, economic and cultural — and, of course, philosophical — implications of that demystification are not calculated or computed directly. They are qualitative as much as quantitative. But the condition itself, and thus the ground upon which philosophy can generate concepts, is only possible through what is abstracted in relation to such mechanisms.

Gilman: Does this imply that computation is as much about discovery of how the world works as it is about how it functions as a tool? 

Bratton: Yes, but the two poles are necessarily combined. One might consider this in relation to what the great Polish science-fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, called “existential technologies.” I draw a related distinction between instrumental and epistemological technologies: those, on the one hand, whose primary social impact is how they mechanically transform the world as tools, and those, on the other, that impact society more fundamentally, by revealing something otherwise inconceivable about how the universe works. The latter are rare and precious. 

At the same time, planetary-scale computation is also instrumentally transforming the world, physically terraforming the planet in its image through fiber-optic cables linking continents and data centers bored into mountains, satellites encrusting the atmosphere, all linked to the glowing glass rectangles we hold in our hands. But computation is also an epistemological technology. As it drives astronomy, climate science, genomics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, medicine, geology and so on, computation has revealed and demystified the world and ourselves and the interrelations between them. 

Gilman: This agenda seems rather different than how philosophy and the humanities deal with the question concerning computation.

Bratton: The present orthodoxy is that what is most essential — philosophically, ethically, politically — is the uncomputable. It is the uncontrollable, the indescribable, the unmeasurable, the unrepresentable. It is that which exceeds signification or representation — the ineffable. For much of the Continental tradition, calculation has been understood as a degraded, tertiary, alienated, violently stupid form of thought. Can we count the number of times that Jacques Derrida, for example, uses the term “mere calculation” to differentiate it from the really deep, significant philosophical work? 

The Antikythera program clearly takes a different approach. We know that thinking with the mechanism is a precondition for grasping what formal conceptualization and speculative thought must grapple with. What is at stake is not simply a better philosophical orientation, but the futures before us that must be conceived and built. Besides the noble projects I have described, many of the other purposes to which planetary-scale computation is applied are deeply destructive. We turned it into a giant slot machine that gives people what their lizard brain asks for. Computation is perhaps based on too much “human centered design” in the conventional sense. This isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of the misorientation of the technology and a disorientation of our concepts for it.

The agenda of the program isn’t just to map computation but rather to redefine the question of what planetary scale computation is for. How must computation be enrolled in the organization of a viable planetary condition? It’s a condition from which humans emerge, but for the foreseeable future, it will be composed in relation to the concepts that humans conceive. 

Gilman: What makes the current emergent forms “planetary”? In other words, what do you mean by “planetary scale” computation?

Bratton: First, it must be affirmed that computation was discovered as much as it was invented. The artificial computational appliances that we have developed to date pale in comparison to the computational efficiencies of matter itself. In this sense, computation is always planetary in scale;  it’s something that biology does and arguably biospheres as a whole. However, what we’re really referring to is the emergence, in the middle of the 20th century, of planetary computational systems operating at continental and atmospheric scale. Railroads linked continents, as did telephone cables, but now we have infrastructures that are computational at their core. 

There is continuity with this history and there are qualitative breaks. These infrastructures not only transmit information, but also structure, and they rationalize information along the way. We have constructed, in essence, not a single giant computer, but a massively distributed accidental megastructure. This accidental megastructure is something that we all inhabit, that is above us and in front of us, in the sky and in the ground. It’s at once a technical and an institutional system; it both reflects our societies and comes to constitute them. It’s a figure of totality, both physically and symbolically. 

Gilman: Computation is itself an enormous topic. How do you break it down into more specific areas for focused research? 

Bratton: The Antikythera program has five areas of focused research: Synthetic Intelligence, the longer-term implications of machine intelligence, particularly through the lens of natural-language processing; Hemispherical Stacks, the multipolar geopolitics of planetary computation; Recursive Simulations, the emergence of simulation as an epistemological technology, from scientific simulation to VR/AR; Synthetic Catallaxy, the ongoing organization of artificial computational economics, pricing and planning; and Planetary Sapience, the evolutionary emergence of natural/artificial intelligence and how it must now conceive and compose a viable planetarity.

Let me quickly expand on each of them, though each could fill out our discussion all on its own. “Synthetic intelligence” refers to what is now often called “AI,” but takes a different approach to what is and isn’t “artificial.” We are working on the potential and problems of implementing Large Language Models at platform scale, a topic I have written on recently. The “recursive simulations” area looks at the role of computational simulations as epistemological technologies. By this I mean that while scientific simulations — of Earth’s climate, for example — provide abstractions that access some ground truth, virtual and augmented reality provide artificial phenomenological experiences that allow us to take leave of ground truth. In between is where we live and where a politics of simulations is to be developed. 

Gilman: Both of these speak to how computation functions as a technology that reveals how things work and challenges us to understand our own thinking differently. What about the politics of this? What about computation as infrastructure? 

Bratton: Two other research areas focus on this. “Hemispherical stacks” looks at the increasingly multipolar geopolitics of planetary-scale computation and the segmentation into enclosed quasi-sovereign domains. “The Stack” is the multilayered architecture of planetary computation, comprised of earth, cloud, city, address, interface and user layers. Each of these layers is a new battlefield. The strategic mobilization around chip manufacturing is one aspect of this, but it extends all the way to blocked apps, proposals for new IP addressing systems, cloud platforms taking on roles once controlled by states and vice versa. For this, we are working with a number of science-fiction writers to develop scenarios that will help navigate these uncharted waters. 

The area we call “synthetic catallaxy” deals with computational economics. It considers the macroeconomic effects of automation and the prospects of universal basic services, new forms of pricing and price signaling that include negative externalities and the return of planning as a form of economic intelligence cognizant of its own future. 

Gilman: How does all this relate to the big-picture claims you make about computation and the evolution of intelligence? In other words, is there a framing of how everything from artificial intelligence to new economic platforms adds up to something? 

Bratton: What we call “planetary sapience” is the fifth research area. It considers the role of computation in the revealing of the planetary as a condition, and the emergence of planetary intelligence in various forms (and, unfortunately, prevention of planetary intelligence). We are asking: machine intelligence, for what? There is, without question, intrinsic value in learning to make rocks process information in ways once reserved only for primates. But in the conjunction of humans and machine intelligence, for example, what are the paths that would enable, not destroy, the prospect of a viable planetarity, a future worth the name? As I asked in a Noema essay last year, what forms of intelligence are preconditions to that accomplishment?

Gilman: Antikythera is a philosophical research program focused on computation, but also has a design studio aspect to it. How does that work? 

Bratton: The studio component of Antikythera is based on the architectural studio model but focuses on software and systems, not buildings and cities. Society now asks of software things that it used to ask of architecture, namely the organization of people in space and time. Architecture as a discourse and discipline has for hundreds of years built a studio culture in which the speculative and experimental modes of research have a degree of autonomy from the professional application. This has allowed it to explore the city, habitation, the diagrammatic representation of nested perspectives and scales and so on, in ways that have produced a priceless legacy and archive of thinking with models. Software needs the same kind of experimental studio culture, one that focuses on foundational questions of what computational systems are and can be, what is necessary and what is not, and mapping lines of flight accordingly.  

Gilman: Who are you involving in the Antikythera Studio?

Bratton: We are enrolling some of the most interesting and important thinkers working today not only in the philosophy of computation proper but also planetary science, computer science, economics, international relations, science-fiction literature and more. We are accepting applications to join our fully-funded research studio next Spring.

The same interdisciplinary vision will inform how we admit resident researchers who apply to the program. The researchers we plan to bring into the program will include not only philosophers but designers, scientists, economists, computer scientists — many of whom are already involved in building the apparatuses that we are describing. They will work collaboratively with political scientists, artists, architects and filmmakers, all of whom have something important to contribute. To say that the program is highly interdisciplinary is an understatement.  

Gilman: Given that the Studio will integrate such an interdisciplinary group, what methodologies are you planning on using to bring these researchers together? Are there specific mechanisms of anticipation, speculation and futurity that you intend to promote?

Bratton: One of the ways in which philosophy can get in trouble is when it becomes entirely “philosophy about philosophy” and bounded by this interiority. I don’t mean to disqualify this tradition whatsoever, but I would contrast it with the approach of the Antikythera program. 

Arguably, reality has surpassed the concepts we have available at hand to map and model it, to make and steer it. If so, then the project isn’t simply to apply philosophy to questions concerning computation technology: What would Hegel think about Google? What would Plato say about virtual reality? Why do the concepts we’ve inherited from these traditions so often fail us today? These are surely interesting questions, but Antikythera is starting with a more direct encounter with the complexity of socio-technical forms and trying to generate new conceptual tools accordingly in relation to these, directly. The project is to invent “small p” philosophical concepts that might give shape to ideas and cohere positions of agency and interventions that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible. 

Gilman: How does that level of interdisciplinarity work? How can people from these different backgrounds collaborate on projects if their approaches and skill sets are so different?

Bratton: All those disciplines have an analytical aspect and a projective or productive aspect. Some lean in one direction more than others, but they all both analyze and produce. Collaboration is based on the rotation between analytic and critical modes of thought, on the one hand, and propositional and speculative processes, on the other. The boundary between seminar space and studio space is porous and fluid. Seminar, charette, scenario and project all inform one another. Design thus becomes a way of doing philosophy, just as philosophy becomes a way of doing design.

Gilman: What kinds of studio projects do you foresee? By that I mean not just forms and formats, but what approach will you take this sort of analytical + speculative design? Is it utopian? Dystopian? Something else?

Bratton: Speculative philosophy and speculative design inform one another. We recognize that some genres of speculative design are superficial, anodyne or saccharine, but they’re meant to be positive proclamations about ideal situations, which are, ultimately, performative utopian wishes. They may be therapeutic, but I think we don’t learn that much from that. 

At the same time, there is a complementary genre of speculative design that is symmetrically dystopian, based on critical posturing about collapse. It demonstrates its bonafides as a critical stance, but we also don’t really learn much from it: it mostly ends up repeating things that we already know, aspects of the status quo that are already clear, and ironically ends up reinforcing them almost as dogma. It codifies an “official dystopia.”  For some, this can be simultaneously demoralizing and comforting, but for us that’s not particularly interesting. 

What we’d like to do is develop projects about which we are, ourselves, critically ambivalent. The ideal project for us is one which leaves us unsure, in advance, whether its speculations coming true would be the best thing in the world or the worst. We like projects where the more we think through the project, the less sure we are.  As some might say, it is kind of pharmakon, a technology that is both remedy and poison, and we hope to suspend any resolution of that ambiguity for as long as we can. We believe that projects that we aren’t quite sure how to judge as good or evil are far more likely to end up generating durable and influential ideas.

Gilman: You’ve often argued that philosophy and technology evolve in relation to one another. Is that idea an important part of the method? 

Bratton: Inevitably, yes. One generates machines which inspire thought experiments, which give rise to new machines, and so on, in a double-helix of conceptualization and engineering.  The interplay between Alan Turing’s speculative and real designs most clearly exemplifies this, but the process extends beyond any one person or project. Real technologies can and should not only magnetize philosophical debates but alter their premises. For Antikythera, that is our sincere hope. 

Gilman: Lastly, let me ask the question “why philosophy?” Why would something so abstract be important at a time when so much is at stake? 

Bratton: In the past half century, but really since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a rush to build planetary-scale computation as fast as possible and to monetize and capitalize this construction by whatever means are most expedient and optimizable (such as advertising and attention). As such, the planetary scale computation we have isn’t the technological and infrastructural stack we really want or need. It’s not the one with which complex planetary civilizations can thrive.

The societies, economies and ecologies we require can’t emerge by simply extrapolating the present into the future. So what is the stack-to-come? The answers come down to navigation, orientation and how intelligence is reflected and extended by computation, and how, through the mechanism, it grasps its own predicament and planetary condition. This is why the Antikythera device is our guiding figure.

The post A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation appeared first on NOEMA.

The constitution proposed by that convention was put to a referendum on Sept. 4 and was soundly rejected. 

Lagos is a member of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council. He spoke with Noema editor-in-chief Nathan Gardels.

Nathan Gardels: Chileans clearly wanted a new constitution to replace the one written in Augusto Pinochet’s time. But on Sept. 4, they rejected the draft put forward by what has been called the most inclusive constitutional convention ever assembled — 50% women, ordinary citizens instead of political professionals, independent voters without partisan affiliation and a designated role for Indigenous voices. 

Why then did an overwhelming 62% of the population reject the new document in a mandatory vote? How do you explain this paradox?

Ricardo Lagos: First, what is important to understand is that the “constitution from Pinochet’s time” was amended in 2005 when I was president. The signature on that constitution is mine. Those amendments removed the most egregious elements of military rule: We cut the presidential term from six to four years, eliminated the positions of appointed senators that were mainly from the military and restored the president’s power to remove senior commanders of the armed forces. Fifteen years after the return to democracy, we had mostly made that transition complete.

Because I did not have a majority in the Senate at the time, in part due to the very composition of that body that our amendments were changing, I could not eliminate the clause that placed the state in a subsidiary role to the private sector, hobbling its ability intervene in the economy unless expressly permitted by law and the constitution. This is the so-called “subsidiary state” imposed on Chile in Pinochet’s time by free-market ideologues. 

Well, that affects everything. It was the seed of the social explosion in 2019 that led to demands to write a new constitution.

That explosion took place — despite so many advances in other areas including steady economic growth and reducing the Gini coefficient of inequality under the center-left governments of myself and Michelle Bachelet — because the ratio of tax revenue to GDP remained at around 20%, thus crippling efforts to expand the social safety net and public goods. 

So it is not so surprising that one of the chief aims of the proposed constitution drawn up by the popularly elected delegates, most of whom felt left behind, was to enshrine social rights in the new document.

Constitutions need general acceptance so we can turn to their rules to manage our differences. A constitution cannot be partisan. Only in this way — arguing within the limits of the constitution and not about it — can countries make changes within the framework of reasonable stability. In the end, what was proposed was a partisan document, which is why it failed.

To make a long story short, in the run-up to the election of the convention delegates, the right-wing parties, which get 35-40% of the vote in most elections, insisted that a two-thirds majority of convention representatives was needed in order to propose a new constitution to the public. But when the election for delegates took place, they got only about 20%, making them irrelevant to the process with no veto power.

The more moderate elements among the 155 delegates, like the socialists and President Gabriel Boric’s party, Frente Amplio, along with the Indigenous representatives and the independents, aligned with the agenda of the far-left to reach a two-thirds mandate. Here we saw the digital revolution really enter into Chilean politics for the first time. Though independents are not allowed to join coalitions in normal electoral contests, in this case they joined together in WhatsApp groups under the rubric La Lista del Pueblo. Though the more centrist members of the social democrats in the convention tried to change some of the more extreme clauses, they were unable to do enough.

Gardels: One proposal that stood out was the idea of making Chile “plurinational” in which Indigenous constituencies would operate under their own rules. What did you think of that idea?

Lagos: I would say that Chile was a plurinational state at the beginning. But once the Republic of Chile was established in 1818, it became very different: Everyone was equal under the law. Today, though many people identify as Mapuche, in a republic, they are Chileans.

Gardels: Another idea that stood out was the abolition of the Senate. In the constitutional theory of republics, it is the “negative” that makes the constitution and the “positive” that makes the government. The latter is the power to act, the former is the power of amending or arresting action.

Wouldn’t this have undone a key check and balance of a bicameral legislature?

Lagos: The idea of abolishing the Senate was a surprise to everyone. Clearly, most of the convention delegates considered the body too conservative given the history from the Pinochet years. But its institutional role is to provide some ballast and long-term perspective when there are large electoral majorities to prevent the system tipping too far in one direction and precipitating instability. 

The political history of Chile is two parties in the right wing, two parties in the left wing, and one or sometimes two parties fighting for the center. The Senate has always played a key role in this balance.

Gardels: So what are the next steps now?

Lagos: The constitutional process did not end on the day we learned the result of the plebiscite. The two alternatives at stake — a new constitution or a return to the present one — are far from summoning support from the great majority of citizens.

The current constitution fails to arouse this support since the veto power of private-sector supporters of the subsidiary state has been used to derail social and economic reform every time it was sought.

Chile needs and deserves a constitution that arouses consensus and that, sooner rather than later, allows us to stop debating it and start living it. The challenge remains to find a text capable of achieving a high degree of citizen acceptance. 

We need to incorporate the responsible ideas that emerged from this process. The quorum for constitutional reforms has to be lowered. We need to put an end to the vestiges of a subsidiary state that remain and consecrate social rights instead, substantially following the proposal of the convention. That means ensuring equality between men and women; recognizing the native peoples, respecting and valuing their traditions, language and worldview and according them a scope of reasonable autonomy. 

It will also be necessary to include the protection of nature and the environment. And as the convention did, we should recognize the rights of sexual minorities; of older adults; of people with disabilities and children and adolescents.

The challenge to come will consist of building a good constitution that unites us. While the president of the Republic has the leadership duty to sponsor this continuous effort to redraw a new constitution, it is not his task. He was elected to solve problems in these times, not to establish the rules of governance. 

Practically speaking, we need at least a year and a half for sufficient deliberation over what should be salvaged from the rejected text, what should be saved and what was not considered. It would make the most sense for the president and Congress to set up a commission for this task that seeks broad public input for a fresh document that would be put to a new plebiscite in the coming years. 

Gardels: In Ireland in 2016, Parliament set up a citizens’ assembly to consider whether the anti-abortion clause in the constitution should be removed. The chairperson, a just-retired supreme court justice, was appointed by the government. Thirty-three representatives were chosen by political parties and 66 were randomly selected as indicative of the public as a whole. They met over 15 months, advised by experts from all sides. Their consensus recommendation to remove the clause from the constitution was affirmed in a plebiscite.

Might this kind of citizens’ assembly be a good fit for the constitutional revision process going forward in Chile?

Lagos: That might be a good way to go, yes. In 1925, there was an effort to write a new constitution. Then-President Arturo Alessandri called together a group of 20 or so experts to provide the draft for a constitutional assembly that was going to be elected. As time ran short, he instead brought together the emerging trade unions and housing associations and appointed 90 citizens representing the social spectrum, including those in the lower-income ranks. 

The constitution they came up with was taken to a plebiscite. The Communist Party said, “No, I don’t like that constitution,” and the extreme right-wing parties, the conservative parties, also said no. While both extremes said, “no thank you,” the constitution was approved by a huge majority of the people. The communists and the extreme conservatives got less than 6% of the total vote.

That lesson from Chilean history is obviously relevant today.

The post The Next Steps For Chile appeared first on NOEMA.

July 1 has traditionally been a day of protest in Hong Kong — in past years, the anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to China has drawn hundreds of thousands onto the streets. In 2003, half a million people came out to protest proposed anti-subversion legislation. In 2012, protesters succeeded in staving off proposed “national education” in Hong Kong schools. Protesters occupied the Legislative Council floor for several hours on July 1, 2019, in demonstrations against an extradition bill that were cut short by COVID-19. Then, amid the lockdowns, the PRC passed the National Security Law on June 30, 2020, with immediate repercussions for political organizations, the media, activists and protesters. Now for many, simply deciding whether to stay in the city they call home has become a day-by-day proposition.

Still, the creative life of the city goes on, even as it is diminished by the political climate. Raids and arrests have shut down the independent media outlets Apple Daily and Stand News, but writers are still publishing their work any way they can, in Hong Kong or overseas. Indie musicians keep playing shows, shaking off unwelcome visits from city officials. Miniature replicas of the Goddess of Democracy popped up at Chinese University, in remembrance of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the larger version of the statue that was removed from campus last year.

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the handover to China, two longtime members of Hong Kong’s cultural scene spoke to me about how life in the city has changed.

Karen Cheung is a journalist formerly with Hong Kong Free Press, and the author of “The Impossible City,” a new memoir that grapples with her identity as a Hong Konger and what that means as Beijing subsumes the city under its authoritarian rule.

Hon Lai Chu, a 2010 resident of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is best known for her award-winning, hyperreal fiction, including the short story collection “The Kite Family,” translated into English by Andrea Lingenfelter; she also writes essays and newspaper columns about everyday life in the city.

Anne Henochowicz: What do you want someone who knows nothing about Hong Kong to know about it?

Hon Lai Chu: I think Hong Kong culture has really changed since [the Umbrella Movement of] 2014, or even earlier, before the handover in 1997. When I was in elementary school, there were so many newspapers in Hong Kong.

Every paper, just like the Oriental Daily nowadays, would have a supplement, and that of course would have more popular fiction, but also literary work, like [work by] Xi Xi. The editors knew how to balance their cultural offerings.

So I think Hong Kong culture was more diverse before 1997. After that, it really changed. Of course, this was also in part because people’s reading habits changed as they gravitated away from physical papers and books and toward the internet. 

Karen Cheung: When I was growing up, I was too busy studying to know anything else. The grown-ups would say, “Hong Kong is a cultural desert,” because they remembered how big Hong Kong’s pop culture was in the ’80s. That gradually petered out over the following two decades.

I had a professor at Hong Kong University who invited all these writers and musicians [to class] to show you just how much there is here. One year they invited Jacky Cheung [one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Cantopop music] to speak, and for some reason they asked me to host. I think my parents were proudest of me then!

An entire chapter of my book is about the underground music scene. People are like, I don’t understand why you put in all these interviews with bands. Actually, there’s no reason, I just really wanted to do it. They’ve been a very big part of my life for the past ten years.

Henochowicz: I love that you put that in there. When I finished reading your book I went and listened to David Boring, and now I’m obsessed. I followed them on Instagram, and I saw that one of their shows was raided by the police last year. It’s not clear why. Maybe there’s no reason why.

Cheung: So I was a journalist, but I also started an independent arts and music magazine with friends that lasted for about two and a half years. Then in June 2019 [when protests began against a bill that would permit extradition to mainland China] no one had the motivation to do it anymore. But we interviewed a lot of independent artists, and some were involved in both art and activism.

Henochowicz: You could say that art is a form of activism.

Cheung: A lot of the musicians I interviewed are politically aligned with the movements in 2014 or 2019, but some of them started from the 2011 Occupy Movement under the HSBC building, so their roots are more anarchist. And other people are younger and they’re more what the state would like to call “radical” in terms of their ideology.

It’s not that they wear their politics on their sleeve or anything. It’s just that the authorities have always hated and targeted these underground music shows. There was really no need to send a bunch of undercover food and hygiene officers to raid their shows. We see that more often now, the authorities cracking down on anything they want.

Henochowicz: Hon, do you see this sort of alignment with protest movements in the literary scene as well?

Hon: When the National Security Law went into effect in 2020, it had a clear impact on literature. Some book projects can’t even find publishers anymore. And there’s censorship — not from some bureaucratic office, but an internal censor in your mind. 

One good thing is that there are a lot of young writers who are creating because of this [political] pressure. A lot of novels have come out in the past few years. There are even books about the protests that have been published in Taiwan. Those authors may not be able to return to Hong Kong.

I think Karen is very brave to speak out. For me, even now, I’m not sure that I’m speaking freely, even in this conversation. I sense the fear in the bottom of my heart.

I believe we should write the truth. The truth is so important, especially now. But I know that my writing is less truthful than it was before. It’s not that I’m lying, it’s that I don’t know what I should and shouldn’t say. I was so sad when I heard this censoring voice inside me. But I’m dealing with this struggle through writing.

I’m going to stay in Hong Kong. I have no interest in being anywhere else. But I am also mentally prepared. Maybe one day, in the very early morning, the police will come to my home and say, “You wrote this, you’re under arrest.” I have a weekly column [in Ming Pao], and another in a magazine. If I were writing fiction, that would be safer. But I’m not.

Cheung: Every time somebody says that they’re leaving, every time somebody says that they’re staying here, it becomes a headline. It’s like, good for them, it’s probably very difficult for them to have made this decision, and then, oh, I guess that’s one less person whose works I’m going to see around or who is going to be physically in the city with me.

We can’t necessarily know what the impact is on our culture, but I think it will be very palpable in the next decade or so. Because it’s like you said, Hon, it’s not that there’s necessarily a censorship department telling you that there are things that you can and cannot write, it’s that you have this internal calculation happening in your head. 

We grew up in an environment where we could do and could say [what we wanted to], and [whether you did or not was] really a matter of skill. But we’re learning to dial it back. I am worried about the next generation of people who will grow up with those preexisting lines in their head about what they can and can’t say.

I feel safe and not safe at the same time. I feel not safe because my book is with a very big publisher, but I feel safer because I write in English. English is still not as important in Hong Kong in terms of the political discourse. Unless you’re writing a Bloomberg editorial, the government is not going to pay attention to you. But I’m also trying to figure out how to write fiction, because it could give me more plausible deniability.

Henochowicz: This conversation brings to mind the Causeway Bay publishers who were picked up by mainland police [in 2015]. I wonder if this self-censorship in writing started then.

Cheung: We’re constantly guessing the lines, and that definitely made people more scared to visit China. But that case was also kind of specific, because they had published work that was related to internal struggles within the Chinese Communist Party. It definitely did make people more scared, but I think it wasn’t anywhere to the level of 2020 with the National Security Law.

A lot of what I ended up writing [for Hong Kong Free Press and the New York Times] was taking the temperature of the city. I wouldn’t say it’s explicitly about politics, but I felt this huge distance between the way that people around me were feeling and the very clinical, newsy language that the newspapers and the headlines were describing what was happening here.

If I had the privilege to write for these papers, I want it to have a little bit more about how I was feeling and how I was experiencing this moment. And, you know, I have that question all the time, which is just: How useful is is it? If I’m just writing in English for people outside of the city, what is the use of it? Maybe they will be sympathetic toward us, but does it help the people around me? Have the words done anything for them?

Hon: The constant [barrage of] events of the past few years, like with the Causeway Bay booksellers, have been terrifying. On the other hand, we are all learning how to face our fear, so that our fear gradually becomes something we can control.

I’m of two minds: as an ordinary person, I want to be safe, but as a creator I want to move toward danger. I started out writing fiction. Of course [my stories] reflect recent events, but they’re safe, because the enforcers of the National Security Law have no idea what I’m writing about. But then I think, what’s the point? I find myself writing more essays in order to face that danger.

But I also understand where Karen is coming from. No one can read what we write if we’re all in jail.

Cheung: I have said this before and people think I’m joking, but I really don’t think I’m joking, which is that if I left Hong Kong, I’m not going to write about Hong Kong anymore. 

Hon: Why?

Cheung: Because I don’t want to write about a place from afar. Does that make sense? I can always use photographs, I can use memories, but when you’re not physically in a place, there is so much of the sensory elements [that you miss], like what the air feels like on your skin that day. I am constantly aware of how the air feels on my skin.

In Hong Kong it’s humid all the time, and it has such a palpable effect on how you feel when you walk out during the day. I’m not going to know what it feels like on my skin when I’m not here. All I’ll have to go with is a memory of what that air feels like. Maybe some people can do it, but I haven’t figured it out.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Struggling With The Censor Within appeared first on NOEMA.

Nathan Gardels: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.” 

By that definition, ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is antisocial, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation. 

What is the dynamic and what are the mechanisms behind what you call “the crisis of community?” What are the consequences for how we feel and live in our daily lives?

Byung-Chul Han: The inwardly turned, narcissistic ego with purely subjective access to the world is not the cause of social disintegration but the result of a fateful process at the objective level. Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people. 

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true. 

But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the other hand, is centrifugal, with very destructive effects on social cohesion. If we want to comprehend what kind of society we are living in, we need to understand the nature of information. 

Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise, pulling us into a permanent frenzy of fleeting moments. 

We greet information with a fundamental suspicion: Things might be otherwise. Contingency is a trait of information, and for this reason, fake news is a necessary element of the informational order. So fake news is just another piece of information, and before any process of verification can begin, it has already done its work. It rushes past truth, and truth cannot catch up. Fake news is truth-proof.

Information goes along with fundamental suspicion. The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows. Information is Janus-faced — it simultaneously produces certainty and uncertainty. A fundamental structural ambivalence is inherent in an information society. 

Truth, by contrast, reduces contingency. We cannot build a stable community or democracy on a mass of contingencies. Democracy requires binding values and ideals, and shared convictions. Today, democracy gives way to infocracy.

As you suggest in your question, another reason for the crisis of community, which is a crisis of democracy, is digitalization. Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public. 

This has highly deleterious consequences for the democratic process. Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers. Digital communities have the form of commodities; ultimately, they are commodities.

Of course, there was information in the past, too. But it did not determine society to such a degree as today. In antiquity, mythical narratives determined people’s lives and behavior. The Middle Ages were, for many, determined by the Christian narrative. But information was embedded in narration: An outbreak of the plague was not pure, simple information. It was integrated into the Christian narrative of sin. 

Today, by contrast, we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives. Narratives crumble and decay into information. With some exaggeration, we might say that there is nothing but information without any hermeneutic horizon for interpretation, without any method of explanation. Pieces of information do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration. 

The narrative vacuum in an information society makes people feel discontent, especially in times of crisis, such as the pandemic. People invent narratives to explain a tsunami of disorienting figures and data. Often these narratives are called conspiracy theories, but they cannot simply be reduced to collective narcissism. They readily explain the world. On the web, spaces open to make experiences of identity and collectivity possible again. The web, thus, is tribalized — predominantly among right-wing political groups where there is a very strong need for identity. In these circles, conspiracy theories are taken up as offers for assuming an identity.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that our happiness consists of the possession of a non-negotiable truth. Today, we no longer have such non-negotiable truths. Instead, we have an over-abundance of information. I am not sure that the information society is a continuation of the Enlightenment. Maybe we need a new kind of enlightenment. On a new enlightenment, Nietzsche noted: “It does not suffice that you realize the ignorance in which humans and animals live, you also have to have the will to be ignorant and learn more. You need to comprehend that without this kind of ignorance life would become impossible, that only on condition of this ignorance can what lives preserve itself and flourish.”

Gardels: As you wrote in your most recent book, societal rituals once created that objective narrative bond that held societies together. They “stabilized life” as you put it. 

Now such rituals are under assault by the wrecking ball of deconstruction as nothing more than the designs of the privileged who had the power to impose them in the past. In today’s horizontal world, with no legitimate value hierarchy, subjective projection steps in to fill the vacuum. 

Out of these ruins of an objective order, how can stabilizing anchors of ritual ever be reestablished? On what basis? On whose authority? What will life look like if that is not possible?

Han: I would not promote a reactivation of past rituals. This is simply not possible because the rituals of Western culture are very closely associated with the Christian narrative. And everywhere the Christian narrative is losing its power. There is little left of it beyond Christmastime.

Rituals found a community. Contrary to the suggestion in your question, it is not inevitable that rituals solidify existing power relations. Quite the opposite. During Carnival, power relations are reversed, so that the slaves can criticize and even mock their masters. Often, roles are exchanged: The masters serve their slaves. And the fool ascends the throne as king. This ritualized temporary suspension of the power structure stabilizes the community.

In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs. It is Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which every want is immediately gratified. The people are kept in good spirits with the help of fun, consumption and entertainment. The state distributes a drug called soma in order to increase feelings of happiness in the population. Maybe in our brave new world, people will receive a universal basic income and have unlimited access to video games. That would be the new version of panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”).

I am, however, not completely pessimistic. Perhaps we shall develop new narratives, ones that do not presuppose a hierarchy. We can easily imagine a flat narrative. Every narrative develops its own rituals for the purposes of making it habitual, embedding it in the physical body. Culture founds community. 

After the pandemic, what is most in need of recovery is culture. Cultural events such as theater, dance and even football have a ritual character. The only way in which we can revitalize community is through ritual forms. Today, culture is held together solely by instrumental and economic relations. But that does not found communities — it isolates people. Art, in particular, should play a central role in the revitalization of rituals.

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of time. Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. To combat this terror, we need a very different temporal politics.

In “The Little Prince,” the fox wants to be visited by the little prince always at the same hour, so that his visit becomes a ritual. The little prince asks the fox what a ritual is, and the fox replies: “Those also are actions too often neglected. … They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.” 

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration. 

As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we can enter in celebration do not pass away. Without such temporal structures, time becomes a torrent that tears us apart from each other and away from ourselves. 

Gardels: You have said that you look to art as “the savior” from the conditions you’ve been describing, since philosophy today lacks the transformational quality it once had. What did you mean by that?

Han: Philosophy has the power to change the world: European science began only with Plato and Aristotle; without Rousseau, Voltaire and Kant, the European Enlightenment would be unthinkable. Nietzsche made the world appear in an entirely new light. Marx’s “Capital” founded a new epoch. 

Today, however, philosophy has completely lost this world-changing power. It is no longer capable of producing a novel narrative. Philosophy degenerates into an academic, specialist discipline. It is not turned toward the world and the present. 

How can we reverse this development and make sure that philosophy regains its world-changing power, its magic? My feeling is that art, as opposed to philosophy, is still in a position where it can evoke the glimmer of a new form of life. 

Art has always brought forth a new reality, a new form of perception. All his life, Paul Klee said: “Immanently, I cannot be grasped at all. Because I live with the dead, just as I live with the unborn. A bit nearer to the heart of creation than is usual. And not near enough at all yet.”

It is possible that art is nearer to the heart of creation than philosophy. It is therefore capable of letting something entirely new begin. The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard-of color, an unheard-of sound.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The post All That Is Solid Melts Into Information appeared first on NOEMA.

After the U.S. government fended off a pandemic-induced recession with historic stimulus spending, many asked whether this was the end of American neoliberalism as we knew it. Roosevelt Institute President Felicia Wong argues there has indeed been a sea change in the dominant economic thinking in the U.S. She spoke with Noema Magazine about what that means and how increased public investment can shape a more egalitarian future for all Americans.

Braden Goyette: To start off, since “neoliberalism” is a term that’s been deployed in a lot of different ways, would you tell us what that word means to you?

Felicia Wong: Neoliberalism is often seen as primarily economic, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But historically, it has never been just about economics. Neoliberalism is an entire paradigm, a set of cultural beliefs that celebrate and reify norms like individualism, property ownership and wealth accumulation. This has become profoundly anti-democratic and anti-political.

That is because neoliberalism says we should make decisions according to prices alone, where supply and demand curves cross. Neoliberalism discredits collective action, collective voice. The political theorist Wendy Brown has long argued that neoliberalism has undone the demos and remade human life into human capital. So neoliberalism has market fundamentalist economics as a backbone. But the flesh and blood of neoliberalism is much more a set of beliefs that animate political alliances and institutions that are, in many ways, anti-democratic.

And here’s why this matters: not only because of political theory (as much as I love political theory!) but because our beliefs about what is right or wrong economically and societally constrain, or enable, what we think is possible in our politics. Our paradigms shape our presidential elections, our legislative outcomes. The fate of Build Back Better, our ability to decarbonize our economy fast enough, to build a child care and elder care infrastructure that works for families and for workers — all depend in part on whether and how we move past neoliberalism.

Goyette: How will we know we’re moving past neoliberalism? What are the indicators of that for you?

Wong: To know whether neoliberalism is on the outs or whether it continues in some kind of zombie form, you have to look not just at economic policy, but at politics. At alliance building, institution building and organizing.

There are a lot of signs that we’re moving past the old political elite consensus on neoliberalism. Just look at some of the ideas that we’ve seen embraced by the Biden administration, especially early on in Biden’s presidency. His team has pushed new ideas: public investment in clean energy, for example, or a new approach to thinking about structuring the care economy. Many of those ideas are about public provision and public investment.

There’s been a real embrace of smarter regulation and more taxation on corporations and on the wealthy. The American Rescue Plan put billions of dollars directly into the bank accounts of low-income families through the child tax credit and sent money directly to workers, cities and states. That was very different than the policy response to the Great Recession.

There are a lot of new ideas that are being put into motion. They build on a decade-plus of work done by policy experts and economists in academia and think tanks, outside of politics. But obviously we see that many of those ideas are politically contested, both within the Democratic Party and, of course, across the aisle.

Goyette: You’ve written about “zombie neoliberalism” — how increased spending during the pandemic suggested neoliberal ideas were losing purchase, but with the Build Back Better Act being chipped away, neoliberalism is creeping back in. Why do you think neoliberalism has been so tenacious in the U.S.?

Wong: Let’s start with economics. Even though there’s been an enormous pivot in the economic profession, that pivot is not yet complete. In recent months, a few prominent economists have pushed back against the amount of federal spending in both the CARES Act and the Rescue Plan.

Now, this pushback has been really overplayed by many journalists. Because overall there is significant agreement that the level of spending in the American Rescue Plan ended up benefitting workers, in part by ensuring that there was not only relief money, but also the support of stronger labor markets. Two years ago, we expected mass unemployment — that was the prediction in March and April of 2020 — and instead, we’ve seen the opposite. We’ve seen record low unemployment, which is remarkable, when you think about it.

There’s also pushback from some centrist economists arguing that the amount of spending in the American Rescue Plan is the primary driver of price increases. I think there’s a lot of evidence that’s not true. Today’s inflation has many different causes. And the spending in the Rescue Plan clearly did a lot of good. What many economists agreed on two years ago — that it’s far more dangerous to spend too little in the face of a pandemic-induced recession than to spend too much — still holds.

The second reason that neoliberalism exists in zombie form is that its institutions are very strong, whereas post-neoliberal institutions that would be about pro-democracy and pro-public engagement for its own sake are quite weak. So I would make the argument that, on the progressive side, we have very strong outside advocacy organizations focused on particular issues — women’s reproductive health, gun violence, gun safety laws, etc.

But we don’t actually have strong membership institutions that would argue for a democratic post-neoliberal society. Labor unions, yes, but even with the uptick in labor action recently, unions are historically weak, especially compared to the mid-20th century. So that’s one of the reasons we see neoliberal ideas coming back in the fray. At this time of paradigmatic confusion, where we are past neoliberalism but the new world is still unclear, we don’t have post-neoliberal institutions to argue that a new democratic world is possible, smart and achievable.

Yakov Feygin: Given the Republican Party’s populist turn, do you see areas where progressives can work with the GOP on these issues? And if there are, what are the dangers of that?

Wong: I do think we’re past the high-water mark of neoliberalism on the Republican side, which was the “Reagan Revolution.” And we’re even past the high-water mark of neoliberalism on the Democratic side, which would be some of the ways the Clinton administration chose to solve policy problems. So, in that sense, we are beyond neoliberalism.

But we’re at a real fork in the road for post-neoliberalism, where you can either have a democratic — small “d,” this is not about parties — post-neoliberalism that is about public engagement and affirmative racial inclusion or you can have a white nationalist post-neoliberalism that has some elements of populist economics — a kind of welfare state for white people.

There’s plenty of people in the Republican party or on the conservative side who are anti-large corporations or monopolies. The problem is they are not pro-public in a racially inclusive sense. They are not arguing for changes that would benefit working mothers or make sure that women are included in the labor market. In fact, much of the Republican party now is driven by a MAGA faction that is motivated mostly by “animus” (a polite word) toward people who are not white or Christian. Yes, they might be populist, in that they don’t like big business either. But the dangers of racist, populist economics are very real.

Goyette: What could be done to counter those dangers?

Wong: We need to strengthen our institutions so that they’re more inclusive. The Biden team is actually starting to do this, but it will be a very long road. In a race equity executive order on his first day in office, Biden said we need to have a whole-of-government approach to race equity, to make sure that we are gathering all the data we need so that all Americans — Black, brown, indigenous, Asian, immigrant — are actually able to partake in public policy. So it’s about building governmental institutions that actually understand how to serve the public and are getting the information they need to do so.

And I think we have to look at the ways in which we shape markets using two mechanisms. It’s not just about distribution and redistribution to families and workers, although that’s obviously incredibly important. It’s also about using public investment to shape markets so that they really help the American people.

In an earlier version of Build Back Better — and I hope some of this will come back into legislation — there were hundreds of billions of dollars to incentivize corporations to decarbonize. That is an incredibly important use of public power and federal funds. On the flip side, you need to make sure that you’re using environmental regulation to shut down or curb producers that are actually polluters. There’s a way to use federal carrots and sticks to shape markets. Same thing with building a stronger care economy.

Where it’s possible to directly provide goods or supports to the American public, we ought to do it. One pointed example is the way we have handled COVID testing over the last couple of years, especially over the last six months. The governments in many other wealthy nations, in Singapore and throughout Europe , for example, have done far more to use public power to meet their citizens’ needs. They have either purchased tests and sent them directly to their citizens’ homes or they have made sure to invest much more directly in the manufacturing of tests, so that tests are widely available and easily accessible.

They did that rather than relying on market mechanisms alone. The Biden administration could have produced rapid tests very early on, or it could have purchased them at low cost from manufacturers. It could have made sure that they were distributed to every household. Recently, the administration has started doing that, which is a very good move. But it could have made this shift much earlier. It’s smart public health policy, and it’s popular! Seventy-five percent of Americans are in favor of this, and about as many have heard about this — no small feat in today’s fractured media and political environment.

Because instead, at least right now, you have tests in the U.S. that are privately produced, that are governed by a single provider with an oversized market share. So tests are expensive, they’re hard to find, and, at least until very recently, the administration had been relying on private insurance reimbursement. And that is just not good enough. This is an economic problem, this is a public provision problem, and it’s also a public health problem.

I’d contend that the reason we didn’t do more public provision earlier is that the administration’s thinking was held back by neoliberalism, which says that the private system will provide.

Goyette: What lessons do you take from how the Build Back Better Act negotiations have stalled?

Wong: That is a really good question. The framing around the entire package should not be “BBB will combat high prices,” which is what you sometimes hear, but instead, “We can afford to invest in a better future.” Even some recalcitrant economists — the ones who worry about inflation — say that of course we can and should be making Build Back Better’s investments.

We can afford to do big things, because there is so much money available at the top of the economy. That’s why it’s extremely important to focus on corporate and wealth taxation. And to look at all of the new research and data that suggests that higher taxation of ultra-wealthy people would have a positive effect on the economy.

Originally, the idea was close to a $4 trillion package over 10 years, a $400 billion package every year. That was eminently affordable, given Joe Biden’s original tax proposals from the 2020 election — $4 trillion over 10 years. These are investments we can absolutely afford — investments in child care, elder care, decarbonization, in our education system, in roads and bridges via the infrastructure plan.

We have to make sure that argument is shored up as we move forward on legislative investment and spending proposals. Too often, at least in the media, these arguments get disaggregated rather than put together. It’s very hard to make a clear argument for public investment if you haven’t made a clear argument for the virtues of higher taxation.

One thing to remember in all of this is that there is a real nuts-and-bolts business case for making these kinds of investments — and for taking on debt, because it’s really debt in the service of long-term investment. There is also a nuts-and-bolts political case for doing so in a way that makes sure that the American people — and not huge corporations that dominate our politics and lobby for tax breaks just for them — see the benefit of federal spending.

Making the business case for investment in American kids, American workers, a greener economic future — whether it’s battery production, electric vehicle charging stations, wind, solar — that’s the way to bring in not just a lot of progressives, but also a lot of centrists who see the opportunity in growth and inclusion.

Goyette: How do you respond to the narrative that government spending is causing inflation, and what tools beyond rate hikes do you think we should deploy to address the problem?

Wong: Well, first, I think we should start the conversation with a much bigger sense of what a healthy economy is: full employment, a shrinking — or nonexistent — wage- and wealth gap between white people and people of color, public and private investment in the sectors that will drive a greener future.

But, as for inflation itself, we need to do a little more explaining, to get past the model in people’s heads that inflation is driven by too much money in the system, especially by too much money going to workers. Because that neoliberal thinking leads to austerity, which is a bad answer today.

When you look at the drivers of price increases, whether it’s ports running at full capacity or a shortage of semiconductors — that requires not rate hikes and a throttling down of the whole economy, but more investment, both public and private. What you want to be doing in certain sectors is to spend more money, not less.

The same is true in housing. One of the biggest drivers of price increases that hurt everyday people is the price of housing. In the short term, you can talk about rent control and rent relief. In the long term, you can talk about investing in more social housing.

There is also significant evidence that part of what’s behind price increases is markets that are overly monopolized and not competitive. The White House recently focused on the meat packing industry. Meat in the United States is dominated by three or four very large producers, who can then essentially act as a conglomerate to hold prices up. Instead, you need to use anti-trust mechanisms to fight that kind of market sclerosis.

One of the most interesting things the Biden team did recently was to take about a billion dollars to shore up smaller producers, and I think that is a novel way to think about prosecuting competition policy. It’s not just antitrust from a legal and regulatory perspective — it’s also small amounts of public investment to try to make sure the market actually operates as it should.

When you have one or two producers dominating a market sector, they’re also able to hold workers’ wages down. Thus, ensuring competition helps both consumers and workers.

Goyette: How would you want to see the U.S. strengthen and innovate redistributive policy measures in the next 5-10 years or so?

Wong: I said this before, and I’ll say it again: First and foremost, it’s incredibly important not to leave money on the table with respect to taxation. Why would we do that? There’s plenty of evidence that higher taxation on the wealthy will not hurt economic growth. Now, we haven’t gone far enough for a lot of bad political reasons, including corporate lobbying — just look at the lobbying numbers against wealth taxation and different forms of corporate taxation. We have to see taxation in and of itself as a tool to fight inequality and to create markets that distribute better.

Second, the Federal Reserve should keep interest rates as low as possible, because that’s very good for workers. It’s going to be challenging in the next year, as the Fed seeks to figure out what kind of rate increases are going to be needed to bring inflation down to what people think will be the best-case scenario, perhaps 3 or 4% inflation (from 7% last year).

But keeping interest rates low creates a hotter economy. That means more workers are being hired, which means wages rise. And that’s what we’ve seen — record low unemployment and record wage increases, especially at the bottom of the income distribution over the last year. And that has been driven in part because we have seen a Federal Reserve willing for a very long time to keep rates lower in order to drive more employment. This is a big, maybe even radical change in the Federal Reserve’s thinking.

Feygin: Where do public ownership and public options come into it for you, and what is the government’s role in areas traditionally dominated by markets? 

Wong: I think we ought to be distributing goods, services and funds as directly as possible, which we saw in the child tax credit.

Just to take one example, we ought to be thinking much more fundamentally about public provision of child care. We have a public K-12 education system. Here in New York, there’s public pre-K, which is exciting. There’s no reason that you wouldn’t also look at public provision of child care, ages 0-3, which you see in many successful European economies.

Much of what’s in the Build Back Better Act is about consumer subsidy, making sure that most consumers don’t have to pay more than 7% of their income on child care. That’s very important.

But we’ve seen public child care in the United States before. It existed during World War II when it was important for women — you know, Rosie the Riveter — to be in the workforce while men were deployed in the military. We should be looking toward that again. Interestingly, in some of the early ideas around Build Back Better, you did see $25 billion — not a tremendous amount, but still something — deployed to building and renovating public child care facilities.

Why is it that water and electricity, for example, are public goods right now and not privately provided? Why do they have some very significant level of public oversight? This was a historical development that really came out of the progressive era in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it was not a foregone conclusion that those things would be provided as public goods, and we might think about other kinds of goods that way.

Obviously, we’re already thinking about broadband in that way. We should also consider public options for both media and social media, since the advertising model drives sensationalism and doesn’t provide a foundation of fact-based information for the American public writ large. 

When I say it’s important to have public investment in everything from semiconductors to green manufacturing to electric vehicle charging stations, I think you can use direct public dollars to incentivize private dollars so that the market will go as fast as the science requires. I also think that we can use the power of government procurement. Government is the largest single employer and one of the largest purchasers of things like cars. So the fact that Biden declared that the government was going to purchase electric vehicles very early on, for example — that in and of itself is a way to shape markets for good.

Goyette: What would the U.S. look like if the ideas you’ve been talking about become reality? Paint us a picture of your vision of the future.

Wong: We would have an incredibly robust economy that does not only rely on consumer goods — 70% of our economy right now is driven by consumption. We’d have an economy in which care workers, whether it’s teachers or home health workers or child care providers, would make at least middle-class salaries. American families would be very easily able to keep their homes and avail themselves of transportation that is clean and green, whether it’s solar or wind or geothermal. Electricity would be clean. And, most importantly, you would have labor markets and other kinds of public institutions and public systems, including public safety, that are truly racially equitable.

Painting a vision of the future is so important right now. Our politics can be either limited by, or driven by, our imaginations. Even given the dismay in our world today, or perhaps because of that dismay, we must remember: A new world is possible. Organize toward that vision.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Nils Gilman: In the last few years, you have been using the term “planetary” to describe the current state of world-scale interconnection. What do you mean by planetary? And what prompted this particular shift?

Achille Mbembe: For me, the planetary immediately evokes a connection between life and its futures on the one hand, and the Earth on the other hand. What comes to my mind is the biophysical organic material and mineral order — a geological magma-filled rock topped with the entangled orders of physical, organic phenomena such as plants, animals, minerals and so forth, as well as the artifacts and things and tools we have invented. 

In other words, the planetary evokes what we call in French le vivant, which in English is something like “the living world.” Le vivant is, for me, the planetary in its multiplicity, in its animate and inanimate forms, as it undergoes its endless process of transformation — a transformation which, for me, has no Omega Point. It is not supposed to reach an apex or a moment of unification. I find it almost impossible to think of the planetary without thinking about life and about the Earth. I probably owe that to my interest in the animist metaphysics of precolonial Africa. That’s the archive I draw on to propose this kind of understanding of the planetary as so closely linked to life, which itself is an indivisible process.

Jonathan Blake: In a 2019 essay, “Bodies as Borders,” you identified three “mega processes” that are transforming the future of humanity and the planet. First, the extreme and growing power of high-tech corporations and finance, whose “sphere of action,” as you write, “is not one country or one region, but the globe.” Second is the “technological escalation”: how computation is changing the way we experience the world, and particularly time. And third is the contradiction of living in an era of unprecedented mobility and interconnection that is also an era of enhanced borders. 

I found it striking that the first two overlap with an argument made by the Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang, who says that if we want to move to a true world politics that takes the world, not many nation-states, as its subject, we cannot start with institutions like the United Nations, which is founded on the logic of nation-state sovereignty. Instead, he provokes us with the idea that the foundation of planetary politics should be in the already-existing “structures and organizations that have real power, such as systems of global finance, global technologies and the internet.” I’m curious what you make of this claim.

Mbembe: It is true that a key driver of the process of planetarization is capitalism. It’s late capitalism, to put it simply. This is the source of the fact that we are all currently ruled by the market in one form or another, in addition to being ruled by our respective nation-states. 

The many different capitalist forms of the market have a common structure that is more inclusive, to some extent, than nation-states, which are premised precisely on the distinction between who belongs and who should be kept out. In principle, anybody who can buy or sell is entitled to belong to the market. 

To some extent, the market has become a totality, or in any case our core moral experience. But so has technology. Both the market and technology now set the rules and procedures according to which we are obliged to live together as a connective body within new planetary limits. 

We see this in particular in the apparently endless development of digital ecosystems, which now form what is known as “platform capitalism” — once again, one of the main drivers of planetarization. Now the key question is, to what extent can we rely on these infrastructures as parts of the Earth become inhospitable to life in the near future. 

Can we rely on infrastructures that have, to some extent, contributed to turning the world into a burning house? Can we rely on them to learn how to inhabit the planet anew, how to share it as equitably as possible? To foster a new consciousness that gives ample space to notions of bio-symbiosis — life in symbiosis with humans and nonhumans? 

Blake: The third mega process — the paradox that has emerged between our growing awareness of “planetary entanglement” and the simultaneous increase of “walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves” — seems to suggest that our future as a species depends on the politics of planetary entanglement defeating the politics of borders and separation. How could that happen? What should planetary politics look like?

Mbembe: In your essay on planetary governance, part of what you argue for is a proper actualization of the principle of subsidiarity — subsidiarity in relation to the planetary and in relation to what you call the local, with the nation-state poised somewhat in the middle but reconfigured in such a way as to allow for planetary issues to be addressed planetarily, and for local issues to be resolved where they take the most dramatic form. I totally agree with that, especially in relation to the part of the world I belong to, in which the nation-state is very recent, emerging amid the ruins of the multiplicity of forms of governance that preexisted it. The nation-state is contingent: It is not imperative or necessary. It wasn’t always there, and nothing says it will always be there. 

If this is our governing predicament, it is also important to relate it to the complexity of our technological present. When I say technology, I mean technology in the classical sense, and also technologies of governance. One of the paradoxes of our time, which lies at the heart of our technological present, is that the questioning of technology as an expression of the forces of becoming has increasingly been cut off from the political questioning of the sense of that becoming. Force, in its crudest sense, has overtaken the interrogation of meaning, the question of meaning. 

In a recent conversation between Stewart Brand and former Governor Jerry Brown of California, the governor made the point that humans were once rational beings, but now are mostly attached to beliefs. For me, this interrogation of beliefs is the same as the question of being. When politics or the political emancipates itself from judgments, and now suffices unto itself, this makes the response to the question of what planetary politics should look like even more complicated.

Planetary politics should be connected to a politics of life, to a politics of the Earth. That includes all creation: all the people of the world; the creations or works of humanity; the mass of things we have invented; animals, plants, microbes, minerals; and mixed bodies (which is what we all are). In other words, the whole physical universe, all of reality, including (since I’m drawing from the African pre-colonial archive) spiritual and biological energies consistent with the definition of the living world.

Gilman: In your essay “Planetary Entanglement,” you wrote that with “concepts of agency and agency having been extended to nonhumans, conventional understandings of life must be called into question. To be a subject is no longer to act autonomously but to share agency with other subjects who have lost their autonomy.” This seems to follow directly from your description of what normative planetary politics should look like: A problem that any planetary politics has to confront is the vast differences in power between different humans, between the human species and other species and indeed between all the geophysical aspects of the planet. How should we think about bridging these inequalities of power?

Mbembe: We need to begin by agreeing on what is at stake. From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. This precariousness is to some extent the result of the imbalances we have been discussing, yet at the same time, in the kind of archives I’m working with, life has been understood as a dynamic, positive and often risky exposure to the unknown and the unpredictable.

When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe, but we do not simply breathe individually. We also share the vital breath. 

In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it, between the human universe and the universe of nature, of objects and so forth. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. It is a different ontology. 

We start from the assumption that imbalances do exist, but fundamentally they never trump the sharing of agency — the fact that it is possible for something that might appear to lack power to affect that which we think has more power. It’s a different metaphysics of power and of agency. Therefore, the liberation of the vital forces, les forces vitales, is how imbalances are dealt with.

Gilman: The diversity of cosmologies also raises the problem of epistemology and knowledge production. You’ve written that “The biggest challenge facing critical theory now is arguably the reframing of the disciplines and critical theory in light of contemporary conditions and the long-term sustainability of life on Earth.” You then specify that “The extent to which new modes of being human are prefigured in the contemporary arts, technology and natural and environmental sciences is increasingly at the core of ongoing projects to rethink knowledge itself.” 

What are some of the ways in which the human itself is being refactored in technological, artistic and scientific practice? How do we need to rethink our modes of knowledge production to make sense of this new techno-phenomenological institutional matrix? What sorts of “alternative acts of thinking” are required of philosophy today?

Mbembe: One major event of our times — and it is an event — is the fact that we are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding forms of calculation. Calculation has reached a stage we have never seen before. Techne is becoming the quintessential language of risk. It’s threatening to become, in fact, its only legitimate manifestation. 

This is happening at a time when we are witnessing the shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological: Technologies are moving toward general intelligence and self-replication. Think of the development of algorithmic forms of intelligence, some of which have been growing in parallel with and allied to genetic research. The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere is not only bringing with it a greater belief in techno-positivism, in modes of statistical thought, it’s also paving the way for regimes of assessment of the natural world, modes of prediction and analysis that are treating life itself as a computable object. This is a very important change that is affecting not only our political imagination, but also the ways in which we understand what knowledge stands for, and what is it is all about. 

I would go as far as to insist that more than any other time in our brief history on Earth, we are experiencing a clash of temporalities: geological time, the deep time of those processes that fashioned our terrestrial home; historical time; and experiential time. All these times now fold in on one another. We are not used to thinking of time as simultaneous. We think of time as linear: past, present, future. So how do we begin to think about time in a way that takes these concatenations seriously? 

Gilman: You have observed that a defining feature of life in Africa today is temporariness, which we read as a sense of not just of the fragility of political and social institutions, but indeed of ontological destabilization. Doesn’t the condition of late capitalism, unsustainable petro-agriculture, the Anthropocene, the plantationocene, etc. — all of which add up to what Donna Haraway calls the Cthulucene — mean that in fact we are all in a condition of growing temporariness, with Africa merely having arrived there first? 

And if that is the case, would it be fair to say that we live in a moment where Karl Marx’s infamous dictum — that the more developed countries only show to the less developed ones the image of their own future — has become inverted?

Mbembe: I wouldn’t go so far as endorsing wholesale the argument made by two good friends of mine, the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, who wrote a book not so long ago in which they made the argument that the rest of the world is becoming like Africa — that Africa has been at the forefront of some of the key transformations of our time, and now Euro-America, in particular, is simply following the same trajectory.

We are in an epoch when time is no longer differentially distributed along human and non-human scales — that’s what the Anthropocene shows us. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, there’s no longer a social history separate from natural history. That is over. Human history and Earth history are now indivisible. 

The epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations. Times of concatenation presuppose that our bodies have become repositories of different kinds of risks, including those kinds of risks that not so long ago (and in many cases still) were thought to be the peculiarity of certain classes of the population — or “races,” to use that infamous term. What used to only happen to some is now happening to more than just them. It seems to me that these new structures of destabilization have now expanded their reach and are provoking a whole set of displacements that we have to attend to sociologically, empirically and ethnographically. But my point is that the interfaces of life, the structures of provisionality, have expanded well beyond what we have long been used to.

Blake: This raises a question about the diversity of human life across the Earth. There is immense diversity among what we experience, what we desire, our visions of the good life. How can we speak in a universal register that also recognizes the pluralism of desires and of ways of life? How do we reconcile the fact that there are nearly 8 billion people who all have hopes and desires with the fact that there is only one Earth, one shared home?

Mbembe: It may be that we must let go of the dream of reconcilability. It may be that those dreams are so antagonistic that they will never be reconciled. The question then is: Is it at all possible to build anything in common in the face of such agonism? How do we live with irreconcilability? What kind of life is likely to emerge out of conflictive opinions and positions that will never be reconciled? And how can we live with them without opening up the doors to civil war? A civil war not only within specific nation-states, but a civil war at a planetary scale. I think that’s probably where we are. 

We see this happening, including within all democracies, where people don’t seem to agree any longer on anything. More and more we are facing instances in which negotiation as such is dismissed as a sign of weakness, and where the politics of purity trumps the politics of negotiation. 

What will be the future of democracy in a context such as this? Democracy itself will have to be reinvented in relation to two or three key planetary issues. If indeed we all are rightful inhabitants of this one Earth that is our common shelter and our common roof, this implies, for instance, that we must enact a universal right to breathe — breathing here meaning the capacity to participate in the vital flows that constitute us all. It would mean imagining a new generation of rights that do not depend on being implemented by the nation-state — rights that are beyond the nation-state. For instance, the universal right to mobility. If the Earth belongs to all of us, there’s no reason why anyone who wants to shouldn’t be able to visit it. This would translate into some juridical dispensation that would be close to a borderless world. It would entail one form or another of the abolition of borders. 

If you take the history of most people of African descent, since the advent of the modern age, they haven’t been able to move freely. Whenever they have had to move, they often were moved in chains. This question of enchaining, those who have been accustomed to moving in chains, should be part of that new political imagination. This is not even to speak of the right to exist, to have access to the means of existence, most of which are being destroyed by the forces we know of. Democracy would have to accommodate those new demands that are common to being alive on Earth and not peculiar to being a citizen of a specific nation-state, because that’s where some of the inequalities begin.

Blake: If we move beyond the nation and think instead of the planet as the subject and object of politics, we have to ask: Who gets to speak for the planet, and how? 

Mbembe: Who will speak for the planet? I’m not sure that we will ever exit the situation where some speak for the planet while others speak against it. And also, speaking for the planet and listening to the planet are not exactly the same things. Maybe the first step is to listen. 

The question then becomes, how do we listen to the planet? Does the planet speak for itself? It has to speak for itself before we can listen. And I think it does speak for itself. 

To understand how it is that every single living being on Earth speaks for itself, we have to get out of a certain epistemology that has been premised on the fact that humans are the only speaking entity, that what distinguishes us is that we mastered language and the others didn’t. But we now have studies showing that plants speak, that forests speak: a de-monopolization of the faculty of speech, of language. 

When we look into the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West, broadly speaking we find knowledges of how other-than-humans speak — and how humans, or some humans, have learned to listen to those languages. This requires a radical decentering, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together. 

The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.” We have to institute an act of radical decentering that forces us to be born together again. It seems to me that that’s what a new planetary consciousness forces us to undergo — and I believe it is possible.

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Nils Gilman: You argue in “The Tyranny of Merit” that the concept of merit, as it has been deployed within our democracy, has curdled into something that fundamentally undermines social respect. Specifically, you argue that it “invites the winners to consider their success their own doing and the losers to feel that those on top look down on them with disdain.” How does one become a meritocratic winner? Conversely, what or who is a meritocratic loser?

Michael Sandel: It’s important to distinguish between merit understood as competence (which is a good thing), from meritocracy, which is a system of rule, a way of allocating income and wealth and power and honor according to what people are said to deserve.

Let’s first take the perfectly common-sense, unobjectionable notion of merit as competence. If I need surgery, I want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it. If I take a flight, I want a well-qualified pilot to be flying the plane. No sensible person objects to the general idea of competence. But that idea of merit-as-competence is used to defend a much more contestable idea, which is also familiar and influential: the ideology of meritocracy.

Meritocracy, like any “-ocracy,” is a mode of rule, a way of distributing income, power, wealth, opportunity, honor and social recognition. The principle of meritocracy, simply put, says that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings.

So what distinguishes meritocracy from simply aligning people’s skills with social roles for which they are qualified? The idea of moral deservingness. What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful. As inequalities of income and wealth have widened in recent decades, meritocratic attitudes towards success have tightened their grip and led the winners to believe that their success is their own doing.

When we think of aristocratic or caste societies, meritocracy seems like a liberating idea. It stands for the idea that nobody should be consigned to the fate of birth, the accident of birth. And the meritocratic idea initially seemed liberating in the sense that it said that everyone, whatever their birth or background, should be able to compete along with anyone else for jobs and social roles, for income and wealth and power. So yes, if the alternative is a feudal aristocracy, there is certainly something very attractive about meritocracy.

As meritocracy has tightened its hold on our public life, however, what began as a principle that seemed to offer an alternative to inequality has become instead a justification for inequality. What’s more, meritocracy has become a kind of hereditary system, much as aristocracy was. Affluent, privileged parents have figured out how to pass their privilege on to their kids, not by bequeathing them land or estates, as in aristocratic societies, but instead by equipping them to compete successfully on standardized tests and to win admission to highly competitive universities.

The growing awareness of the problems with meritocracy in recent decades is a direct result of the deepening divide between winners and losers. The divide has poisoned our politics and set us apart. This has partly to do with widening income and wealth inequality. But it has also to do with changing attitudes toward success. In this way, a seemingly attractive principle — that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings — by implication comes to mean that those who struggle and fall short must deserve their fate as well.

Now, you could also say, and many people do say, that the real problem is we don’t live up to the meritocratic principles we profess. And that’s certainly true. To take one example: despite generous financial aid policies at Ivy League universities, there are more students from families in the top 1% than there are students from families in the entire bottom half of the income scale combined. So we don’t live up to the meritocratic principles we profess.

But suppose we did? My argument is that even a perfect meritocracy would still have a dark side. Even if perfectly realized, meritocracy is corrosive of the common good and of solidarity. Indeed, the more perfect the meritocracy, the more the winners can say to themselves, “Everyone had a fair chance to succeed and I won. I therefore deserve all the benefits that the market bestows on me.” This way of thinking leads the successful to inhale too deeply of their own success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped him on their way. It also leads them to lose sight of their indebtedness to the people and circumstances who made their achievements possible. In other words, even a fully realized meritocracy would reinforce meritocratic hubris — or rather, hubris among the winners and humiliation and resentment among those who struggle.

Gilman: What makes meritocratic hubris particularly toxic is not just that the meritocratic winners considered themselves somehow morally superior to the meritocratic losers, it’s also that the so-called meritocratic winners are often highly incompetent and yet they seem rarely to pay a price for it.

Sandel: Yes, the meritocratic elites who governed in recent decades haven’t done very well, especially compared to the elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980. The economists who brought us neoliberal globalization, deregulation and the financial crisis were meritocratically credentialed in a way that the earlier generation was not. And yet that earlier generation won World War II, helped to rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state and dismantled segregation. They presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to all income groups. (The Vietnam War was one of their great failures, but as David Halberstam made clear, this was an early instance of the folly of “the best and the brightest,” brought about by hubristic technocrats.)

By contrast, elites of the age of meritocracy produced four decades of stagnant wages for most workers and inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s. They produced the Iraq War and a 20-year failed effort in Afghanistan. They brought us financial deregulation and the financial crisis of 2008. A decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that make a mockery of democracy. This has been the achievement of governing elites in the age of meritocracy.

I agree entirely that an important source of the resentment and legitimate anger that people have toward the meritocratically credentialed elites of the past four decades is that their record of failed governance doesn’t seem to have diminished their self-satisfaction or their tendency to look down on those who struggle. And a big part of this has to do with the role of higher education. Over these last four decades, higher education has been enlisted in defining merit and conferring the credentials that a market meritocracy rewards. Focusing on the credentializing, networking and merit-conferring has distorted the mission of higher education. Instead of being about teaching and learning and providing a moment for young people to reflect on what’s worth caring about, higher education is increasingly enlisted as the arbiter of opportunity in a meritocratic society.

Higher education is also essential to this story because, in addition to becoming an arbiter of merit, it has also taken an increasingly technocratic form over the last few decades; there is an important connection between the technocratic faith and the meritocratic faith.

The technocratic conception of merit that has brought us this string of follies and calamities represents a stark departure from traditional, even ancient, notions of merit in governance, which, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and Confucius, connected the concept of merit to the concept of virtue.

In this tradition, to govern well required not only technocratic expertise or scientific knowledge; it also required the capacity for good judgment about human and political circumstances. This in turn required the ability to reason and deliberate with and to persuade fellow citizens and also to care for the common good — that is, to have a certain understanding of what the good of the whole consists in, which cannot be captured in strictly utilitarian or technocratic terms. Aristotle thought that moral and civic virtue, along with reasoning about the public good with fellow citizens, was a necessary component of excellence in governing.

Unfortunately, all of this drops out during the period that we’re discussing, and merit is narrowly reconceived as technocratic expertise. And this, in turn, has to do with the rise of systems theory and cost-benefit analysis — and more broadly with the rise of economics and the faith in economics, as if it were a value-neutral science of human behavior. The concept of social choice becomes influential during the same period that we’re discussing, and it disfigures and corrupts the idea of what merit or excellence in governance traditionally was understood to be.

Admission By Lottery

Gilman: How does it feel to be making an argument like this while you sit in an institution like Harvard, which is typically considered the acme of the concept of meritocracy?

Sandel: Harvard and the upper reaches of American higher education more broadly are certainly complicit in reinforcing the technocratic, meritocratic tendencies that have enervated American democracy. We in higher education are complicit in fostering this system, mainly by having accepted the role of arbiters of opportunity in a market-driven meritocratic society. Embracing the role of conferring meritocratic credentials comes at the expense of the intrinsic goods that higher education should serve. To rethink meritocracy requires, among other things, rethinking the mission and purpose of higher education.

There are two areas in particular that require rethinking. One of them has to do with the high-pressure, stress-strewn, anxiety-producing tournament that the college admissions process has become.

We’ve discussed the unfairness of higher education being dominated by those from affluent families. In fact, if you look at, roughly, the 100 most selective colleges and universities, 70% of the students come from the top 25% of wealthy families. And those from poor families, from the bottom 25%, are only 3% of the students on these campuses.

But the tyranny of merit also bears heavily on the winners — the young people who win admission — because they are subjected to intense pressure to achieve not only through the adolescent years, but in many cases, from a very young age. By the time they survive this gauntlet, they are so accustomed to hoop jumping, to gathering credentials, to pleasing and performing for parents and teachers and counselors and admissions committees, that they lack the ability to step back and reflect during their undergraduate years on what it is they want to study, on what is worthy of caring about, on what purposes are worthy of them. The alarming statistics about the mental health challenges of many college students and the epidemic of anxiety and depression are directly related to intense pressure to achieve.

A further problem is that these young people, having survived this meritocratic gauntlet, can’t help but believe their success is the result of their own efforts. They know how desperately hard they have worked. And this leads them to forget the element of luck and fortune and contingency that made their admission possible.

My suggestion here is that universities with far more applicants than they can admit should winnow out those who are not well-qualified to flourish and excel in their courses, and then, from among the rest, admit by lottery. You could weight the lottery based on various elements to ensure diversity, but a lottery would send a message to parents and students: that there’s a lot of luck in this. After all, it’s folly to think that even the best admissions committee can really discriminate among tens of thousands of superbly qualified students — they can’t tell who really will make the greatest impact on society or who will write the great American novel or who will excel in fields of endeavor that are very difficult to predict. The general point is to revamp admissions systems in a way that recognizes that merit is a threshold concept, not a quality that can be maximized or predicted with much certainty for 18-year-olds.

Finally, I think we need to rethink the deep hierarchy of prestige in educational institutions, with four-year higher education at the top. This hierarchy has led to the neglect of forms of learning on which most Americans depend to prepare themselves for the world of work — and for that matter, to be citizens. I’m thinking of community colleges as well as vocational and technical training. The federal government spends $149 billion helping people go get a college education, and only about $1.3 billion to support vocational and technical training. We woefully underinvest in the forms of learning on which the majority of our fellow citizens depend.

This is reflected not only in spending, but also in the inequality of social esteem, which goes back to meritocratic attitudes toward success. Underpinning that difference in spending is the fact that we don’t accord social esteem to career paths that involve vocational and technical training. So, in addition to providing greater financial support, we also have to rethink the way we accord social value to the contributions of those who do important work and who make important contributions to the economy without having acquired a college degree. Those of us who spend our days in the company of the credentialed can easily forget that nearly two-thirds of Americans do not have a four-year college degree. It’s folly to create an economy that sets, as a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life, a four-year degree that most people don’t have.

The Dignity Of Work

Gilman: Although the examples you use in the book are mostly drawn from the United States, the place where these ideas have already had an important impact turns out to be Germany, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) won an unexpected victory in the German general parliamentary elections, something they hadn’t done in nearly 40 years. The new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, drew explicitly on the themes of “The Tyranny of Merit” in his campaign. What does the SPD’s victory tell us?

Sandel: In recent decades, center-left parties — the Democratic Party in United States, the Labour Party in Britain, the social democratic parties of Europe, which had traditionally been parties of the working class and middle class — became more attuned to the values, interests and outlook of the well-educated, professional, credentialed classes than to the blue-collar voters who traditionally constituted their base.

Part of this shift is that center-left parties responded to growing inequality by telling workers to go get a college education. But this was an inadequate response to wage stagnation and job loss and the inequality brought about by globalization. Instead of arming people for meritocratic competition, we should shift toward renewing the dignity of work and increasing both the social esteem and financial rewards for those who do not have a professional degree or university credential.

Prior to this most recent election, the SPD had fallen to its lowest level of voter support since the end of WWII. But this year, the SPD put the dignity of work at the center of the campaign. Scholz spoke about respect for those who make society work. He shifted the focus, very explicitly saying that we should not valorize meritocratic elites and professional classes but instead should build an economy that responds to the needs of working people and that accords respect and dignity to working people.

Last winter, when most political commentators had written off the SPD’s chances, Scholz’s people contacted me saying he had read the book and wanted to have a public dialogue about it, which we did at an SPD event. Scholz clearly grasped the themes and was working out how to apply them to Germany. He made the dignity of work the main theme of his campaign.

Gilman: What are the lessons here for the United States?

Sandel: The Biden campaign in 2020 was not as explicit about the dignity of work as was the SPD in 2021, but Biden’s candidacy did shift from the meritocratic emphasis of previous Democratic presidential candidates. It’s worth noting that Biden was the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without an Ivy League degree and indeed is the first president of either party since Ronald Reagan without an Ivy League degree. In a way, it was a kind of secret weapon for him in this campaign, because it enabled him to connect a little bit more easily with working class voters that the Democratic Party has struggled to attract in recent decades.

Biden was less invested in the meritocratic way of thinking about politics. In his campaign he spoke less of the idea that everyone should be able to go to university to develop their talents. He avoided the impulse to respond to wage stagnation by telling people to better themselves by getting more education. This had been the standard meritocratic political offer of Democrats and Republicans, but especially Democrats, over the past four decades. Bill Clinton, for example, said if you want to compete in and win in the global economy, go to college. He also used the mantra, “what you earn will depend on what you learn.” Barack Obama also spoke often about higher education being the answer to inequality, using the phrase “you can make it if you try” more than 140 times in his presidential speeches and statements. What all this rhetoric missed was the insult implicit in it. The implication was that if you didn’t go to college, your failure is your fault. You have only yourself to blame.

Joe Biden, though he has been a fixture of Democratic politics for decades, never quite imbibed that meritocratic rhetoric. That enabled him to gravitate more readily to the dignity of work as the central organizing ideal of his candidacy. He was not captive, during his campaign, to the neoliberal economic experts on whom previous Democratic presidents and presidential candidates had relied. It remains to be seen if his more ambitious policy proposals will pass, but Biden certainly appears to be the first Democratic president of the post-Reagan era, in that he does not buy into the idea either that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good or that the answer to inequality is individual mobility through higher education.

The post The Dark Side Of Meritocracy appeared first on NOEMA.

Gardels: You and your coauthor, the celebrated Chinese science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan, have created a new genre with your book, “AI 2041” by conjoining speculative fiction with analysis of realizable technologies. You call this “scientific fiction,” and Qiufan’s work has been labeled “science fiction realism.” Your take is quite positive, if not a practical utopian perspective, instead of the dystopian view of AI promoted, for example, by Elon Musk, who thinks super-intelligent machines will one day end up ruling us.

The book lays out 10 scenarios for the future. Can you give me one of the most compelling?

Lee: One area that’s poised for a major breakthrough is AI for health care: New drug discovery and, ultimately, new diagnosis and treatment, could revamp the entire health care system in a way that improves lives over the next few decades.

Drug discovery is the easy, low-hanging fruit because it doesn’t require any substantial disruption to current medical practices. Clinical trials will be the same, pharmaceuticals will be the same. The doctor will still prescribe drugs and the results will be measured the same way as before. That makes progress go faster. AI can sift through possible molecules, targets and potential diseases. It can sift through previous experiences of how drugs have worked, or not worked. It can discover the molecular structures of drugs that work on different types of people. In doing so, AI can infer and propose new candidates for clinical trials.

Some companies have even started using AI alongside scientists without jobs being displaced or anyone claiming machines are superior to humans; it’s true symbiosis. And the costs for pharmaceutical companies researching treatments for rare diseases that were previously too expensive to justify can go way down because of AI. That means rarer diseases can be targeted. It also means that, for common diseases, multiple drugs can be proposed for different types of people who have different family histories or allergies and so on, thereby potentially improving the rate at which people can recover from their sicknesses. 

The overall opportunity for AI in medicine is for it to become a full assistant to the doctor: proposing diagnosis and treatment for specific cases. That’s precision medicine. There’s no doubt in my mind that eventually, with enough data, AI will outperform the great majority of physicians. 

The process will take a long time because there’s personal data that is sensitive, the treatment process may cause disruptions and there are legal, ethical and moral implications about using software to treat people. What are the consequences if there’s malpractice, for example? So, the AI presence needs to be carefully crafted as a mere assistant to the doctor, who will make the final call. In this sense, recommendations and information from AI should be considered a form of input to a human decision: just another piece of data. 

In the end, the human makes all the decisions. But over the next 20 to 25 years, doctors will realize that AI tools are becoming really sharp. And then they will start rubber-stamping decisions made by AI — they might even become afraid of reversing a decision made by AI or disagreeing with it. 

When that moment comes, humans in general will face a key decision. Are we willing to entrust our lives to AI? 

Gardels: Do you think the applications in the next couple of decades will make it faster to develop vaccines for COVID-like pandemics?

Lee: That is possible but less likely because we don’t yet have a sufficient amount of historical data on COVID to train AI — all the success and failures of clinical trials, reliable information on what kinds of people with what kinds of underlying illnesses and family histories were infected, whether treatment succeeded or not. The SARS outbreak in 2002 provided too few samples. The Spanish flu was too long ago. 

But in time, AI might soon play an almost equal role side by side with scientists. They might propose a vaccine template and then use software to verify it, for example. 

Gardels: So, AI assistance in this realm depends on the availability of data, but the technology is there already.

Lee: Yes, that’s right. AI can already be useful in some parts of the problem. Look at DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for example, a deep learning system that makes predictions about protein structures. That is a subset of the problem of coming up with vaccines. With a tool like that, a scientist could come up with vaccines, or at least insights, that speed discovery. Tools like that are secondary for now, but they are improving. 

Dematerialization

Gardels: In your analysis of Chen Qiufan story, “Dreaming of Plenitude,” you mention the idea of “dematerialization” — that compressed capacity increasingly enables smaller and smaller devices, such as cell phones, to do vast computations, while the internet of things will provide services virtually for free.

This is challenged by the materials scientist Vaclav Smil, who pointed out to me recently that, while cell phones might weigh less than they used to, there are billions more of them around the world now. So, he argued: “The total amount of materials going into cellphones has gone up, not down. People always make a fundamental mistake between relative and absolute dematerialization. What matters is the absolute energy intensity and use of materials.” 

He was referring not only to the energy intensity of mining and manufacturing all those devices, but also that the servers that store data for computation devour massive amounts of energy. Many of those server farms are located on cheap land in places like Kazakhstan and powered by fossil fuels.

In the end, doesn’t the positive development of AI in a holistic sense depend on the transition to renewable energy, and some constraints on the consumption of services that drive the spread of such devices?

Lee: I agree with this concern. If we want to continue to develop advanced forms of AI, computation capacity must grow rapidly. Just to train an AI algorithm or deep learning model can cost millions of dollars and put a lot of stress on server farms.

I think we’re a little stuck right now because the state of the art requires so much computation. As ordinary companies seek to make breakthroughs like Microsoft and Google and OpenAI have done, the amount of computation power needed will go up. It is therefore important to invest in efficient software and tools that can make top-end technologies more practical, perhaps slightly reducing performance while still providing the computation they need. 

Aside from this, of course, we need to move towards clean energy sources, which are also hopefully a lot cheaper and more plentiful. In the book, I talked about distributed energy that combines solar with advanced battery technologies beyond lithium. Optimistically, we might reduce energy costs to 10% of what they are today over the next few decades. Even that may not be enough, but we have to balance the two. 

Gardels: So there are two dimensions to this — improving the efficiency of computation while shifting to cleaner energy and storage capacity? 

Lee: Right. It helps tremendously that deep learning AI and its descendants get better with more data and more computational capacity. So if you tweak the algorithm a little bit each time, then add more data and more compute, performance can quickly become much better and more efficient. We have never seen a technology that worked like that. Inventions like electricity or the internet were zero and one: When you didn’t have it, you didn’t have it; when you had it, you had it. They don’t improve at the geometric pace that AI does. 

There is the flip side as well. We have to consider how to make AI smarter without just throwing more data and computing power at it. Unless we figure out how to do that, we may never reach a true artificial general intelligence. 

Gardels: What are the limits to deep learning AI? Some critics argue that while intelligent machines can outperform humans in manifold tasks, as well as learn new ones, they literally do not “understand” what they are doing — “unthinking intelligence.”

Understanding comes from context. The uniquely human labor of filling in the cracks between bits of data with unprogrammable awareness is what creates meaning and constitutes a whole reality. 

Furthermore, some say, the more our minds are trained by daily interactions with digital technologies to think like algorithms that lack understanding, the less intelligent and more artificial we ourselves will also become.

Lee: I think deep learning has demonstrated it can master some notion of context, though not in the same way as human understanding. But if you’re looking at self-supervised learning as we see with GPT-3 and other technologies, they’re basically trained without supervision by drawing on the context of the data they have available. That is, you don’t tell the robot, “this is a dog, this is a cat, this is a person.” You don’t tell it the ground truth. You just say “here’s a lot of text, learn what you can.”

Let’s say you’re reading the last chapter in a book. There are deep learning algorithms now that can predict the next sentence or answer a question about something that happened previously by using context. Today’s technology will, much of the time, produce an answer as good or better than mine might be, while sometimes it would be just nonsense. That cannot be done without some notion of context. It’s not just about memorizing millions of words. You need to know which ones matter. An AI built by Microsoft and Alibaba even outperformed humans on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset in 2018. That’s pretty impressive. It shows that AI can detect some context. 

That said, I don’t contend that AI has a soul or self-awareness, knows what it’s doing or has emotions and beliefs and communicates intently. I don’t think it’s doing that. It’s just figuring out a way to find context.

But considering how much progress we’ve already made, think about where we’ll be in 20 or 30 years. There will be many more improvements on top of today’s self-supervised learning. 

Self-supervised learning overcomes the previous problem of deep learning that required an accurate expert label on everything. And that put a limit on how much data could be processed. The fact that AI can be trained with no human labeling supervision suggests just how powerful deep learning technology is. If we throw more data and compute at it, it gets better and better. 

But AI being able to recognize context doesn’t mean it will supersede humans or reach singularity or AGI. Can it be us? Can it do everything we can do? At each stage of development, we ask questions that have been framed in terms of what we humans can do: Can it play chess? If it can play chess, can it play Go? If it can achieve reading comprehension, will it be able to reach self-awareness such as we have? 

It’s somewhat narcissistic, if natural, for humans to compare everything to us. That’s why, in most science fiction, every object you see — whether it’s aliens or pets or a robot — somehow has a familiar form. We want to see everything in our image. Maybe we should consider the reality that humans and AI are completely different. 

Advancements in AI are not necessarily creating a superset of human qualities. We do the things we do because of the way we apprehend the world, because of the way our physiology functions. Maybe, encoded in our DNA, there is something called a soul — distinctly human self-awareness and emotions that formed instinct and helped us survive. But that doesn’t mean there could not be another form of organism that is just as real. We should be open to that. What we should care more about is what AI can do that we never thought people could do, and how to make use of that. That is a much more constructive angle.

Gardels: Your last book, “AI Superpowers,” expressed a hope for cooperation between the two leading nations in developing this technology, the U.S. and China. Now, competition between them has grown fierce. Will that inhibit or spur the kind of advances you see taking place by 2041?

Lee: The perceived competition at a geopolitical level is problematic because it’s potentially separating the world into two sets of technologies and standards that are not interoperable. That is clearly inefficient. On the other hand, that dynamic creates more funding for the technology in both countries, which is a good thing. I would argue that Sputnik helped advance both American and Soviet space efforts in this way. 

When I wrote “AI Superpowers,” I didn’t anticipate that competition would be like this. I had hoped that AI advances in the West would wake China up. And then as China developed its internet companies infused with AI in ways more advanced than the West, it would wake the West up. That mutual awareness, I hoped, would forge new ways of working together. In health care, for example. China has more data, the U.S. more advanced medical technologies. Joining these assets in a common direction would be a big lift for humanity as a whole.

Well, that has not happened. The best we can hope for in the coming few years is that there are problems identified by both countries that are important enough to collaborate on, like climate or health care. 

One bright point is that, despite the geopolitical challenges, academics and scientists are still working together. At large AI conferences, you can see American, European and Chinese researchers continuing to share their ideas so that people can stand on the shoulders of others. Hopefully, we’ll reach a state where China and the U.S. will be very competitive in certain areas and collaborate in other areas. We’ll have to see if we can get there.

The post How AI Will Advance In The Next Two Decades appeared first on NOEMA.

Jonathan Blake: One of the themes in your work is the disconnect between sovereignty, which is held exclusively by national governments, and the actual work of governing, which is often done by many different actors working at multiple scales. Can we reconcile the gulf between the theory — nation-state sovereignty — and the practice, where governance comes from all sorts of institutions?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: It’s not good enough to do what we’ve always done, which is to treat the state as a black box. We have to find ways to recognize the different parts of states — to think and act in terms of horizontal disaggregation (among departments or ministries) as well as vertical disaggregation (cities, provinces, etc.). Legitimate, recognized status is important for the system to function — international organizations need legal status to be able to participate formally in global institutions and conclude agreements as official actors on the world stage.

What we need to do now is to enable official action at more levels. For example, we could formally recognize the role of sub-national actors. It’s telling that the Paris Agreement included the category of “non-party stakeholders.” Some of these were billionaires and foundations, but a lot of them were sub-state actors, like governors and mayors. That matters because when President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the agreement in 2017, California Governor Gavin Newsom and the mayors in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, as well as a number of CEOs and foundations heads, stepped in and committed to continue working toward the agreement’s goals. 

Nils Gilman: At a practical, legal level, what kinds of institutional work needs to be done to achieve that?

Slaughter: We must be able to work in a networked way as well as in a hierarchical way. You have to be able to identify the different actors who are going to be in your network. Consider, for example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a committee of central bank governors, or the International Organization of Securities Commissions. These groups have no formal legal status but are crucial for generating norms and developing ties among central bank officials.

We need both function and legitimacy. Institutions have to be functional — they have to deliver the goods — but they also have to be seen as legitimate. Every time I give a talk on my vision of world governance, someone says something like, “Bill and Melinda Gates are just as important as the U.N. secretary-general!” What they mean is that both the Gates Foundation and the U.N. serve an important function — they both deliver the goods — and as a result have some form of “output legitimacy.”

At the same time, it’s important for subnational governmental actors and international organizations to have a formal legitimacy gained via legal recognition by national governments. States are the best representatives of large communities of people, and given norms of popular sovereignty, they remain the best vehicles for providing legitimacy. So on the one hand, we have to be able to solve problems through transnational and nongovernmental networks, but on the other hand, we cannot deny the status of states, which remain crucial nodes in the network.

Gilman: We at the Berggruen Institute have recently been promoting the idea of “planetary realism,” which we define as the need for intensifying cooperation on problems like the climate crisis and pandemics — which don’t care about our petty human concerns — despite ongoing political tensions among states about everyday human affairs. 

Just recently, a number of groups published a letter saying the West and China need to put aside their differences in order to focus on climate change. But this generated pushback from people on the left and right, who each think this approach ignores vital concerns (human rights and security, respectively). 

Where do you see the possibility for cooperation between China and the West, given the reality of the geopolitical tensions? 

Slaughter: My basic proposition is that great power politics are very 20th century. When President Joe Biden says, “We need to win the 21st century,” anybody under 40 — and certainly those under 30 — asks, “What the hell does that mean? Win the 21st century?! We’re worried that we’re not going to make it to the end of the century! And it’s not going to be nuclear war or a Chinese empire that does us in.” 

It’s clear that there are other threats that are far more pressing. There will always be some elements of great-power politics, but much of this mindset is really generational. Biden’s approach to China, reasonably enough, is deeply 20th century.

The old-school, statist way to achieve the cooperation we need is to get the U.S. and China together and say, “Look, let’s stop rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and instead face shared threats together.” The problem is that great-power politics are locked in. Many folks in the U.S. government right now are more interested in standing up to China than they are in thinking about global survival. 

The alternative is to look past all that and create what I call an “impact hub.” For example, let’s create a Gavi (the public-private partnership to increase global access to vaccines) for climate change. We have what we need to do it right: get the signatories of the Paris Agreement together, get funding, adopt standards, work those through mayors, governors and businesses as much as we possibly can and then ask smaller nation-states to get on board. Once that’s in place, China and the U.S. will face real pressure to join in.

With pandemics, it’s a little easier because we already have the World Health Organization as the nucleus of a potential impact hub, though it’s admittedly captured by the interests of powerful states. A group of WHO states might be able to pilot an impact hub focused specifically on preparing for and fighting pandemics.

With this alternative approach, we don’t wait for the big players — we just go do it, knowing that our younger folks are going to be with us. I’m not saying we should work against states — just that we should not necessarily start with them. Assume that governments are still important, but don’t wait for them. Let the great power rivalries play themselves out as they will; get the important work done other ways. I know that sounds naïve, but think about the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders or the Landmines Treaty — all begun and ultimately achieved by civic entrepreneurs who weren’t willing to wait. 

Gilman: You published “A New World Order” 17 years ago, arguing that we already have a far-reaching global governance system, just not the one that people typically think we have. This system is made up of global networks of government officials coordinating and cooperating to tackle all sorts of shared problems, from transnational crime to constitutional jurisprudence to regulating financial markets. What’s your assessment of how these networks have fared in the years since the book came out? Do we need new ones to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Slaughter: There are definitely new ones. In the financial arena, for example, the Financial Stability Board — which emerged out of the global networks of insurance supervisors, securities regulators, finance ministers and central bankers — was essential during the 2008 financial crisis. We would not have gotten through the crisis without it.

What I left out of the book were cities. I knew they were there and I gestured at them. But since then, cities have become far more important. On terrorism, health, climate, equity and inequality, we can’t only work at the national level. City governments have a huge role to play.

Blake: Yet nation-states remain institutionally oriented toward other nation-states and towards the formal intergovernmental fora, like the U.N. How much of a barrier is this to achieving a fully networked world?

Slaughter: Much of this is due to the formation of officials’ professional identities: what they studied, what they’ve done in their careers. The pathway for diplomats is to go into government or maybe into an international organization. This shapes how people see the world: as a world of states, which is definitely how the State Department sees it. 

There’s also a divide in the issues that people learn about. Diplomats study war and peace and global commons issues, like freedom of the seas. But you have no training to help you think about vaccines, and certainly not treatments and isolation and all the things that we need to do during a pandemic. Similarly, when you get into the nitty-gritty of climate change — and the behavioral change we have to accomplish in almost every aspect of the way we live, produce and consume — we have to work far below the level of national governments and foreign policy practitioners. Something like the Paris Agreement is important, but only a beginning at best. 

By contrast, folks working in city governments often do have the necessary knowledge and experience. I tell my students if I could choose between Nina Hachigian’s job — Los Angeles deputy mayor of international affairs — versus being a midlevel official in the State Department, I’d take Nina’s in a heartbeat, because she’s really at the cutting edge. 

This also means that we need to rethink security outside the state-centric framework that we are used to. Governments with nuclear weapons still have the capacity to destroy the planet, but that threat is not what affects most people in their everyday lives. Health and climate are the paradigms for security in this century, in the same way that world wars were the paradigms for the 20th century. 

What’s key is to get people away from thinking strictly in terms of “international,” which connotes government-to-government interaction and state versus non-state, and instead to think in terms of the interconnected global. Our kids are much more keyed into thinking that way. Psychologically, my generation (I’m 62) started out with separation, and then figured out connection; by contrast, recent generations start connected. The idea of an interconnected ecosystem comes naturally to them because they were connected from the beginning. Not all connections are good, of course, so they also have to figure out separation and boundaries. 

Blake: Earlier you said that when dealing with climate change, we should set aside the U.S.-China rivalry and let other actors get on it. To what extent do global networks really have the power to deal with climate change, especially if powerful states don’t want to?

Slaughter: Having now spent 10 years working with foundations, I’ve become acutely aware that while the Gates Foundation has a lot of money, it’s still nothing compared to what governments can mobilize. I don’t think non-state networks can accomplish what governments can, particularly if those governments are against you. If a government really wants to shut you down, they will. 

But for most purposes, it makes more sense to start by figuring out what network can effectively push progress. For example, if we brought together the heads of the major foundations, big corporations, university presidents, etc., we could start shifting the starting point, moving the goals. This would change the backdrop against which governments work. It’s not enough to say we can rely only on networks, but I would not spend all my time pushing on the governments of the two major emitters either.

At the same time, remember that a government isn’t a single thing. Think about disaggregating it into its components. Develop structures in and around and through the existing skeletons of states. Use whatever parts of the state system we can, because governments can still do things at scales that are hard to do otherwise.

Gilman: At the end of the day, given the massive collective effort that’s going to be required to deal with something like climate mitigation, do we need some kind of Weberian institution sitting at a center that can wield force to enforce decisions?

Slaughter: The answer to that goes back to the underlying mental model and our vocabulary for understanding the world. Our thinking about governance is so outdated compared to what we now know about how the world works. You could compare Weberian institutions to Newtonian physics, which were already understood to be incomplete by the 20th century, let alone today, with chaos theory and quantum mechanics. In the same way, nothing works the way classical international-relations theory says it should. 

When I walk down Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., I look at all those enormous buildings, each a block long, each a perfect hierarchy, with a secretary at the top and information and authority flowing down from there. We need to tear that down and connect every single person who’s an expert, regardless of their place in the hierarchy. We need them to be able to connect, disconnect and reconnect dynamically. A “Google for government” would wipe out the old model and create a far more fluid (but far messier) system. Of course, we’re never going to get all the way there, but maybe we’ll get three-fourths of the way there, which would be much better than where we are now.

Gilman: But institutions are incredibly durable. They tend to stick around even when they have long outlasted their original logic or utility — which is a point the historian Arno Mayer makes in one of my favorite books, “The Persistence of the Old Regime.” From this perspective, all these ancient edifices, which as you say are literally cast in concrete in D.C., present a huge challenge for getting to the world of ad hoc and self-assembling networks that are capable of dealing with problems as they emerge in a fluid manner. How can we deconstruct the old statist order without producing total chaos?

Slaughter: One way to proceed is by building off our ongoing pandemic-driven experiment with remote work. Many of us are now used to working in virtual spaces; perhaps we can create the parallel world virtually — that is, designing new institutions from scratch without the risks of taking a sledgehammer to the old institutions. Virtual spaces allow us to create parallel institutions that are far more fluid and flexible without having to first destroy what already exists. Let’s create it virtually, make it work and then later we’ll figure out when and how to move people out of their rigid, hierarchical buildings.

Blake: As we’re thinking about these new fluid, hybrid networks, we return to the question of legitimacy. How can networks gain legitimacy?

Slaughter: Cities are an essential resource. If we look at where we need to tackle the issues we’ve been talking about, it’s mostly not at the national or even at the state government level, but rather at the city level. This is why I’m thinking a lot these days about city-states. Specifically, we need to think about the right jurisdictional unit for human beings to come together in ways that let them cooperate effectively to improve their collective circumstances. It has to be an entity that is big enough to have some real heft, but small enough to be directly connected to the people, which is how it will attain legitimacy.

Sovereignty is still defined as political independence and control over a defined piece of territory. But what if we can decouple governance from territory? What if jurisdictional boundaries didn’t have to be territorial? 

I’m fascinated with “condominium” governance arrangements — for example, the idea that Israelis and Palestinians would share all the territory from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, but that each would answer to a different government. Maybe we still need territorial boundaries for some things, but it’s worth thinking creatively about how these can be reconfigured. Does the future of governance rest solely with territorial jurisdictions? I’m pretty convinced it does not.

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