jacobin |David Moscrop: Well, speaking of grifts, let’s talk about Twitter.
The site was never a utopian online space, but it was previously at
least better than it is now. What’s driving its collapse beyond Elon
Musk purchasing it? Is there something better out there or something
better to come?
Cory Doctorow: I think we should thank Elon Musk for what he’s doing
because I think a lot of the decay of platforms and the abuses that
enable that decay is undertaken slowly and with the finest of lines, so
that it’s very hard to point at it and say that it’s happening. And
Musk, a bit like Donald Trump, instead of moving slowly and with a very
fine-tip pencil, he kind of grabs a crayon in his fist and he just
scrawls. This can help to bring attention to issues on which it would
otherwise be difficult to reach a consensus.
With Musk and with Trump, it’s much easier to identify the pathology
at play and do something about it — and actually get people to
understand what the struggle’s contours are and to join the struggle. I
think in a very weird way, we should be thankful to Musk and Trump for
this.
The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is
something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form
of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform
is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier
intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it
has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates
between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where
antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.
To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can
leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory
pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about
Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just
eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it
seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see
predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many
domains.
Jeff Bezos is a grocer twice over. He runs a company called Amazon
Fresh that’s an all-digital grocer and he runs a company called Whole
Foods that’s an analog grocer. And if Amazon Fresh wants to gouge on the
price of eggs, he just clicks a mouse and the price of eggs changes on
the platform; he can even change the price for different customers or at
different times of the day. If Whole Foods wants to change the price of
eggs, they need teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns. And so,
the ability to play the shell game really quickly is curtailed in the
analog world.
The digital world does the same things that mediocre sociopath
monopolists did in the Gilded Age, but they do it faster and with
computers. And in some ways, this contributes to the kind of mythology
surrounding the digital world’s Gilded Age equivalents. They can compose
themselves as super geniuses because they’re just doing something fast
and with computers that makes it look like an amazing magic trick, even
though it’s just the same thing, but fast. And the way that this cycle
unfolds is you use this twiddling to allocate surpluses — that is, to
give goodies to end users so they come into the platform. This is things
like loss-leaders and subsidized shipping.
In the case of Facebook or Twitter, it’s “you tell us who you want to
hear from and we’ll tell you when they say something new.” That’s a
valuable proposition; that’s a cool and interesting technology. And then
you want to bring business customers onto the platform. And so, you’ve
got to withdraw some surplus from the end users. So, you start spying on
end users and using that to make algorithmic recommendations.
Just look at grocery stores in Canada. Loblaws is buying its competitors, engaged in predatory pricing,
and abusing both its suppliers and customers to extract monopoly rents
and leave everyone worse off. But there’s a thing that happens in the
digital world that’s different. Digital platforms have a high-speed
flexibility that is not really present in analog businesses.
John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years
ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I
use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my
rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer
an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a
mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply
until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train
line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands
incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call
“twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.
consentfactory | To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc. cc: Elon Musk
Dear Ms. Irwin,
This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3,
2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my
@consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels for approximately two years.
First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further
censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter
is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels
from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going
back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s
Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this
matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about
taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and
defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become
rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That
said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken
action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I
apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.
Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake,
defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the
@consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would
appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:
(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and
defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult
content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:
Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets
containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the
sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed
the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which
contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure
you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets
was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to
illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism,
and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism
or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly
mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact
that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed
gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the
application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”)
in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the
account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an
image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which
suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.
In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by
Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how
this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions
or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and
defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will
demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to
transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the
“Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt
Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”
(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering
tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from
2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of
any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the
removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter
for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being
and/or has been “filtered.”
(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and
desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been
engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and
income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for
example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.
There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian,
or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to
real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet.
Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to
discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s
reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in
addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory,
“interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively
widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines
make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these
“interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has
been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and
to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole
proprietors.
counterfire | It is not surprising that Marx’s concept of class is unpopular in the
mainstream. Marx’s picture of a brutally divided society with organised
robbery at its heart amounts to a devastating moral condemnation of
capitalism. It also directly contradicts the various ways in which the
establishment want us to understand the world we live in. Their
preferred model of society is a giant market in which individuals
interact freely and equally. In reality, of course, individuals are born
into society with drastically different levels of wealth. Marx stressed
however that it is the way production is organised that more than anything shapes society. ‘The arrangement of distribution’ he says in Capital,
‘is entirely dependent on the arrangement of production’. What people
consume, even what people regard as needs, depends in the first instance
on what is produced in any given society. The way the goods are
distributed depends on the distribution of wealth, itself determined by
one’s position in the productive process.
Politicians also like to tell us ‘we are all in it together.’ This
illusion can only gain traction because the economy appears to operate
independently of human will and control. The idea can’t survive contact
with an understanding that the whole system is driven by a tiny minority
forcing profit from the labour of the many. We are also told that
capitalist investors are ‘wealth creators’. Looked at from the point of
view of class, the capital that an investor brings to the table has been
extracted – stolen – from past labour. The investor is simply recycling
the spoils to make still more money.
Marxism also challenges the idea that capitalism will ‘lift up’ the
poor over time. Capitalism has produced unimaginable wealth, but as Marx
predicted, its drive to keep wages down means that for most of its
existence the distribution of that wealth has become more and more
unequal. Forty years of neoliberal capitalism has brought us to the
extraordinary point at which just eight men are worth as much as half
the world’s population. Marx’s analysis leads to the devastating
conclusion that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Generalised poverty and inequality are a necessary outcome of a system based on competition for profit.
The most radical aspect of all of Marx’s class analysis is however
that it shows that in the process of conquering the world and achieving
by far the highest levels of exploitation in history, capitalism has
created its own nemesis, its own ‘grave digger’ in the working class.
Marx believed workers had the potential to overthrow existing conditions
for a number of reasons. The first was directly economic. The fact that
workers are denied the material benefits of a more and more productive
society gave them an immediate interest in resistance. The second was
that the degradation experienced by most of humanity under capitalism
was concentrated in the working class. The denial of human
self-fulfilment, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’, was most
acutely experienced in exploitation and its attendant alienation.
Workers have through their experience the most acute consciousness of
the immensely destructive and degrading capacities of capitalist
accumulation.
Secondly, as well as having an interest in change, workers have the
means to make it happen. Just as workers rely entirely on capitalists
for their livelihood, capitalists are completely dependent on workers
for their profits. Powerless as individuals, collectively, workers have
immense potential power. As Marx put it, ‘of all the instruments of
production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class
itself’. By forcing huge numbers of workers together at the point of
production, capitalism creates a counter-power. Struggles over pay and
conditions have the capacity to generalise into a political conflict
between different class organisations:
Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people
unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the
maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their
boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination…
If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages,
combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as
the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and
in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association
becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…In this struggle – a
veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle
unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a
political character.
quantamagazine | When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi).
In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange
appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small
wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop
wings. What made this even stranger was that clonal raider ants don’t
even have queens: In keeping with their name, these ants reproduce
asexually, so all the ants in a colony are nearly perfect genetic
clones.
Kronauer was intrigued by the miniature
queens because they seemed so different from the other clonal raider
ants even though he believed them to be the same species. But answers to
his questions weren’t forthcoming, so he took some specimens, shot some
photos for records and then moved on with his work.
A few years later, Kronauer established a
lab at Rockefeller University and set up a colony of clonal raider ants
for study. One day, his then-doctoral student Buck Trible found a few more of the odd miniature queens in that colony and decided to characterize them.
Trible found that the wings weren’t the
ants’ only unusual characteristic. The strange ants also showed
different social behaviors, had larger ovaries and laid twice as many
eggs. Using genetic tools, he traced all of these changes to a
2.25-million-base-pair-long stretch of DNA. In the ordinary ants, the
DNA on each of the two copies of their chromosome 13 was different. But
in the miniature-queen ants, the two copies were identical.
As Trible, Kronauer and their colleagues reported in March in Current Biology,
all of the characteristics of the odd ants — the wings, the social
behaviors and the reproductive traits — were caused by what geneticists
call a supergene, a collection of genes that are inherited as a unit and
are highly resistant to being broken up. At some point in their
evolution, the ants had acquired a second copy of that supergene, and
that chromosomal change had transformed their bodies and behaviors. The
findings suggested a new mechanism for how complex combinations of body
parts and behaviors can sometimes surface all at once in evolution:
through a mutation that duplicates a supergene, toggling on entire
suites of traits like strings of lights controlled by a light switch.
Ant researchers are excited by the work,
and not just because it seems to solve a decades-old mystery about how
at least one form of social parasitism evolves in the insects. The
supergene discoveries may also help them pin down long-sought features
in ants’ genetic architecture that make their colonies develop as
hierarchical castes of queens and workers.
More broadly, the new study also offers
insights into a fundamental evolutionary question about how different
the individuals in a single species can be.
kunstler | Reality has become so elastic in America
now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight
Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times
report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no
proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money
laundering and racketeering operations.
In fact, the committee outlined a
shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly
how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a
dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden
family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s
preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its
journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank
accounts it landed in. Thus: No evidence of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, another whistleblower from
the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an
FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme.
Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris
Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc
contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau
can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah….
Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration:
I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source.
They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter
was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger,
the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.
This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer
is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.
It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable
despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and
influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS
bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield
Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stefan ‘Hamburger’
Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers
have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive
intelligence, methods and foreign sources.
Would they dare pull this one with
Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop
stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him. The
people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes
running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential
election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes.
Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will
be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big
newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets
that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.
Does the Party of Chaos actually
suppose they can keep pretending “Joe Biden” will run for a second term?
Articles of impeachment await for bribery, at least, and perhaps
treason. At this point, the case couldn’t be more clear-cut. The House
is solely in-charge of the impeachment process. The hearings will be
brutal. A bill of impeachment would then go to the Senate for trial, as
we’ve seen twice before recently. Do you think the mainstream media can
avoid covering that?
You must conclude that there is no
way that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. He may resign rather
than face impeachment. And then what? I’ll tell you what: Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr. starts making-over the Democratic Party the way that Donald
Trump transformed the Republican Party in 2016. Bobby Kennedy has the
tremendous advantage of standing completely outside the matrix of
corruption, lying, and Woke mental illness that the Dems have made of
themselves, and the voters are going to notice, even if The New York Times doesn’t.
counterpunch | Our government is run by second-raters.
Mediocrities in the state department and national security apparatus
have seized the political steering wheel, because president Joe Biden,
like senator Dianne “No Show” Feinstein and many others in our extensive
gerontocracy do not inspire confidence. And the results are disastrous
for Americans. De-dollarization across much of the planet and the
possibility of a two-front, conceivably radioactive war against China
and/or Russia. You think these two developments sound far-fetched? Well,
the former is already underway, and as for the latter, rabid neo-cons
and jingoistic four-star generals have stepped into the vacuum at the
top and on your TV screen, and these dimwits can’t imagine losing, so
now we move closer than ever before, even during the Cuban Missile
Crisis, to igniting nuclear Armageddon.
Just picture the Ukrainian drone that
struck the Kremlin May 3 and ask yourself what would have happened had a
Russian drone collided with the roof of the white house? The U.S. might
well have launched nuclear missiles – amirite? We denizens of planet
earth are all very lucky, and especially those of us who reside in
American cities, that Russian leaders were rational enough not to target
western metropolises with nuclear warheads. They have made clear that
they won’t be further provoked, even by preposterous U.S. media claims
that the Kremlin droned itself, claims that reveal yet again two sorry
facts: first, our press outlets think we are morons and second, they
parrot CIA talking points.
That’s the hot war. Then there’s the
economic one. Dollar boosters like Treasury secretary Janet Yellen like
to note that it would be very difficult for any other country’s money to
replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. True enough. But
who says the world has to HAVE a reserve currency? What China, Russia
and the Global South show, as they stop trading in dollars and dump U.S.
Treasuries, is that they can conduct business in their own currencies
and will do so, having witnessed Washington’s idiotic sanctions on
numerous nations and thus having been terrorized by the imbecilic
weaponization of the dollar. So most of the world, aside from the west,
now takes steps to abandon the U.S. financially. The dollar’s reign is
ending, and soon we Americans will face a radically altered and
indisputably grimmer future. All thanks to the stupidity of the very
pedestrian people at the top in Washington, starting back in the Clinton
administration.
As for the China-Russia alliance, anyone
with a brain could see that coming. But not our congressmembers. And
those forewarned had not a care in the world. As long ago as 1997,
senator Joe Biden proclaimed: “And then the Russians say to me ‘You keep
expanding NATO, we’re going to make friends with China.’ I almost burst
out laughing. I could barely contain myself, I said ‘Good luck to you
guys. If China doesn’t work out, try Iran.’” Well, who’s laughing now?
Not the U.S. president, who can’t even get China’s leader to answer his
phone calls. Not the American people, who, according to some polls (58
percent, said a Reuters-Ipsos poll in October), worry that this
administration of very unexceptional people will enrage the Russia-China
colossus and thus stumble into a nuclear holocaust.
Meanwhile congress throws gasoline on this
political dumpster fire with its Ukrainian Victory Resolution. In the
House, Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen and South Carolina Republican Joe
Wilson sponsored this bill. A companion resolution, introduced by
senators – Connecticut Dem Richard Blumenthal, liberal darling and Rhode
Island Dem Sheldon Whitehouse, and South Carolina Republican Lindsay
“Bombs Away” Graham – now percolates through that chamber of the
capitol. This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation
mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine
into NATO after the war is over,” according to Daniel Larison in
Responsible Statecraft April 28.
This is called asking for trouble. Because
these are precisely the points that led to Russia’s invasion in the
first place. Moscow tried to negotiate over Kiev joining NATO, but
Washington turned up its nose. And as far as the Russians who populate
the Donbas are concerned, well, it looked like Ukraine had ethnic
cleansing for them on the schedule, and the west didn’t object. So
Russia invaded. In short, congress now actively touts its own recipe for
nuclear World War III, since that is what the Ukrainian Victory
Resolution will bring.
unherd | In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level
down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off
citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given
direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US
extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off,
and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only
options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and
in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure
will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include
most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact
of their dissolution will be severe.
In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back
to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the
trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty
habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but
not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those
things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of
the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into
overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.
We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what
we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a
long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of
unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to
produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts
accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial
economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper
wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the
very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate
public and private life, and the vast majority of the population
impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.
The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is
that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get
there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce
earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services.
That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter,
foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes
profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of
course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices
meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be
undone.
The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government,
corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a
sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer
economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes.
Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers
whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay
cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air.
It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired
some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are
pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same
degree.
The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to
amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large
language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more
predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs
these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that
category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so
on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to
LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as
well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling
predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent
paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.
Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s
announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising
will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers.
Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next.
We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the
footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new
Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire
living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic
decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.
The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the
top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and
another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those
are the only two options our collective imagination can process these
days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.
What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes
in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow
demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries
in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining
salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP
WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the
businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose
their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out
the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English
Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of
upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the
income streams that supported them disappear.
unherd | When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last
century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational
and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed
the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined
after the First World War. National economies were layered over with
private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of
treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international
organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was
coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased
steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global
exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global
Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.
The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to
the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by
centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard
Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and
deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing
inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear
all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of
welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the
privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity —
as “neoliberal”.
To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the
commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a
package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still
committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats —
often from democracy itself.
The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a
group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second
World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek,
Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who
share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to
the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly
for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events.
Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary
Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon
Smith.
What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves
sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won.
At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin
Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public
squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.
Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational
institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan
Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan
put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is
fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars,
was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the
Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw
that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may
come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views
the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.
Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:
“Look at the reaction in the US to the
collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in
Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a
summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the
supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over
enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans
with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”
At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s
fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar
notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The
three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands
for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was
intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice
sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig
Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned
of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to
Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets
of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw
as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.
In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on
the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration.
Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of
liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president
Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps
even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus
driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to
was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain
and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.
vice |New
York City’s mayor and the state’s governor, who have tied their
reputation to increasing the vaguely-defined feeling of safety that
people get on the subway, were alternately vague or quick to deflect
blame. When asked about the killing on Wednesday, Governor Hochul initially said,
"People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of
mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the
factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior." It was not
clear who was deserving of consequences, in Hochul’s view, but many
interpreted it to be Neely.
On Thursday, Governor Hochul tried to strike a different tone, saying,
"I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of
Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on our subway trains.
And so our hearts go out to his family. I’m really pleased that the
district attorney is looking into this matter. As I said, there had to
be consequences.” After apparently viewing the video, she said, “the
video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was
snuffed out of him, I would say it was a very extreme response.”
Mayor
Eric Adams is more hesitant to denounce Neely’s killing.“There’s a lot
we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from
commenting further,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to Gothamist.
“However,” he added in his statement, “we do know that there were
serious mental health issues in play here, which is why our
administration has made record investments in providing care to those
who need it and getting people off the streets and the subways.” In a CNN interview,
Adams called comptroller Brad Lander and others “irresponsible” for
labeling the man who killed Neely a vigilante and calling his killing a
lynching.
When
asked during the same interview whether it was right to intervene,
Adams, a former transit cop, told interviewer Abby Phillip of CNN: “We
have so many cases where passengers assist other riders. And we don't
know exactly what happened here,” he said.
The statement released
by Daniel Penny’s lawyers seemed to mostly reflect Adams’ perspective,
pointing to the mental health crisis as the real culprit. They also
presented Penny’s actions as a group attempt to maintain order and
safety: “Daniel, with the help of others, acted to protect themselves,
until help arrived,” they wrote.
The
idea that visible homelessness means public order is breaking down,
with an attendant rise in violent crime, is a powerful narrative being pushed by right-wingers and the wealthy, but Democratic mayors and civic leaders also participate in this rhetoric. Predictably, vigilantism has become normalized across the country.
There
have been a few high-profile cases just in the last few weeks where
these violent fantasies are on full display. In San Francisco, a
businessman named Don Carmigniani claimed to have been assaulted by an
unhoused person wielding a metal pipe on April 5, and a 24-year old man named Garrett Doty was arrested for it.
During
the criminal case against Carmigniani’s assailant, video was released
showing Carmigniani moments earlier approaching Doty while he was lying
on the sidewalk and appearing to spray him with bear spray before Doty,
startled, gets up and is confronted by Carmigniani, who a third party
witness said was threatening the unhoused man. Based on police reports,
defense attorneys alleged that Carmiginiani was regularly spraying
houseless people with bear spray. Prosecutors later told the 52-year-old
Carmigniani that they were dropping charges against Doty.
Public
camping bans have sprung up independently all over the country, and a
single conservative think tank headed by a co-founder of surveillance
tech company Palantir has successfully made it a felony to sleep outdoors in multiple states.
nps.gov | The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established by Congress on March 31, 1933, provided jobs for young, unemployed men during the Great Depression. Over its 9-year lifespan, the CCC employed about 3 million men nationwide. The CCC made valuable contributions to forest management, flood control, conservation projects, and the development of state and national parks, forests, and historic sites. In return, the men received the benefits of education and training, a small paycheck, and the dignity of honest work. Three CCC companies operated in the North Dakota badlands between 1934 and 1941, contributing to projects that today’s visitors can still appreciate.
Companies and Camps The North Dakota State Historical Society sponsored the three CCC companies that worked in the badlands from 1934 to 1941. All three CCC companies in the badlands arrived in 1934. About 200 men were assigned to each company.
When CCC Companies 2767, 2771, and 2772 arrived, the men lived in tents until buildings could be erected at their camps. When completed, each camp included a full complement of buildings: barracks, mess hall, recreational hall, bath house, latrine, supply, garage, and headquarters. The camp complex also included its own classrooms, hospital, barber shop, post office, canteen, and sometimes a theater. The buildings were frame structures heated by wood and coal burning pot-belly stoves.
Company 2767’s camp was located on the west bank of the Little Missouri River in what is now the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park from July, 1934 to 1937. Companies 2771 and 2772 established camps adjacent to one another in 1934 on the north bank of the Little Missouri River near what is now the entrance to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Company 2771 moved out in 1935, but Company 2772 remained until the fall of 1939. In 1939, Company 2771 moved to a site on the east bank of the Little Missouri River just south of Jones Creek, which they occupied until November, 1941.
The Work The CCC sought to provide the maximum opportunity for labor at a minimum cost for materials and equipment. With little more than strong backs, shovels, and picks, the CCC built roads, trails, culverts, and structures. When building structures, the CCC utilized native materials, such as the local sandstone, which they quarried themselves with star drills, sledge hammers, muscle, and sweat.
In the badlands, the CCC, along with the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked on numerous projects. Even as the men were working on these construction projects, it was unclear who would ultimately be responsible for managing these recreation areas; Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park was not established until 1947.
In the North Unit of the park, the CCC built the two picnic shelters in the Juniper campground area and the River Bend Overlook shelter. In the South Unit, the CCC built the now-abandoned East Entrance Station, the entrance pylons, and portions of the park's roads and trails. The CCC also built structures at the nearby Chateau de Mores State Historic Site.
CCC Work Crew A CCC veteran who worked in the badlands reflected on the 50th anniversary of the CCC, "You learned how to live with other men, you learned self esteem ... you learned about yourself."
The People The CCC was open to unemployed men ages 17 to 23.5 who were U.S. citizens. Enrollees served 6-month terms, and were allowed to re-enroll at the end of each term up to a maximum of two years. A CCC worker’s salary was $30 a month, most of which the men sent home to their families. Meals, lodging, clothing, medical, and dental care were all free for enrollees. The men generally spent $5 to $8 of their monthly salary on toiletries, postage, haircuts, and occasional entertainment. The few enrollees promoted to Assistant Leader and Leader positions earned a bit more, $36 and $45 per month, respectively.
While the CCC men lived and worked on a regimented schedule, there was time for continuing their education through evening classes and for leisure activities on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Living and working together, the men learned to get along. Some formed life-long friendships.
As the generation who participated in the CCC passes, the legacy of their work lives on. When you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drive the roads, stop at the River Bend Overlook, or hike out to the old East Entrance Station. Take a few moments to reflect on the CCC, the men who labored on these projects, and the investment America made during its most desperate economic period. The Civilian Conservation Corps' hard work all those years ago still continues to pay off today.
wikipedia | The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects,[1]
including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was set up
on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal.
The WPA's first appropriation in 1935 was $4.9 billion (about $15 per person in the U.S., around 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP).[2] Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA supplied paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States,
while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks,
schools, and roads. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more
than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges,
in addition to many airports and much housing.
At its peak in 1938, it supplied paid jobs for three million
unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA employed 8.5 million people (about half the population of New York).[3] Hourly wages were typically kept well below industry standards.[4]: 196
Full employment, which was reached in 1942 and appeared as a long-term
national goal around 1944, was not the goal of the WPA; rather, it tried
to supply one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.[5]: 64, 184
In one of its most famous projects, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.[1] The five projects dedicated to these were the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project
(FAP). In the Historical Records Survey, for instance, many former
slaves in the South were interviewed; these documents are of immense
importance to American history. Theater and music groups toured
throughout the United States and gave more than 225,000 performances.
Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the
rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the
development of professional archaeology in the US.
The WPA was a federal program that ran its own projects in cooperation with state and local
governments, which supplied 10–30% of the costs. Usually, the local
sponsor provided land and often trucks and supplies, with the WPA
responsible for wages (and for the salaries of supervisors, who were not
on relief). WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs
that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration programs (FERA).[5]: 63
It was liquidated on June 30, 1943, because of low unemployment during
World War II. Robert D. Leininger asserted: "millions of people needed
subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance
(the dole) because it maintained self-respect, reinforced the work
ethic, and kept skills sharp."[6]: 228
livingnewdeal | The CWA was created on November 9, 1933 by Executive Order No. 6420B,
under the power granted to President Roosevelt by Title II of the
National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 [1]. Harry Hopkins was made
head of the CWA.
Like other New Deal emergency employment programs, the CWA was
designed to put jobless Americans back to work and to use them on
beneficial public projects. More specifically, the CWA was designed to
be a short-lived program to help jobless Americans get through the dire
winter of 1933-34 [2]. It did just that: Two months after its start, the
CWA had 4,263,644 formerly unemployed workers on its payroll [3].
The CWA received funding from the Public Works Administration ($400
million), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration ($89 million), and
an appropriation from Congress ($345 million) [4]. At its launch, two
million workers came over from FERA and “Nine million people swarmed to
the [United States Employment Service] offices to apply for the other
two million slots” [5].
The accomplishments of the CWA included 44,000 miles of new roads,
2,000 miles of levees, 1,000 miles of new water mains, 4,000 new or
improved schools, and 1,000 new or improved airports [6].
Remarking on the program a few years after its termination, Harry
Hopkins wrote: “Long after the workers of CWA are dead and gone and
these hard times forgotten, their effort will be remembered by permanent
useful works in every county of every state. People will ride over
bridges they made, travel on their highways, attend schools they built,
navigate waterways they improved, do their public business in
courthouses and state capitols which workers from CWA rescued from
disrepair. Constantly expanded and diversified to offer use for the
special skills and training of different types of workers, the CWA
program finally extended its scope to almost every kind of community
activity. We had two hundred thousand CWA projects” [7].
The CWA ended in July of 1934 (although most employment ended by
March 31, 1934) [8], but its success was so remarkable and its closure
so clearly felt that it was recreated in the form of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) in 1935; and the WPA was led by some of the same
administrative workers from FERA and CWA.
Sources: (1) The American Presidency Project, Franklin D. Roosevelt:
167 – Executive Order No. 6420B, November 9, 1933, University of
California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14548,
accessed February 9, 2015. (2) Harry L. Hopkins, Spending to Save: The
Complete Story of Relief, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1936,
p. 116. (3) Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment:
The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 2007, p. 47. (4) See note 2 at p. 117. (5) See note 3 at
p. 46. (6) Ibid. at 51. (7) See note 2 at p. 120. (8) Works Progress
Administration, Analysis of Civil Works Program Statistics, Washington,
DC, 1939, p. 6.
iai | The first affirmation of the possibility of a fourth spatial
dimension comes through the Cambridge Platonist Henry More in his book
of 1659, The Immortality of the Soul, where he calls the fourth dimension spissitude.
This rather spiritual apprehension of hyperspace was reflected in the
twentieth century by certain writings [31] of the Welsh, Oxford
philosopher H. H. Price – who, incidentally, was one of the first
philosophers to write on the psychedelic (mescaline) experience. [32] In
his later book of 1671, the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, More
explicitly writes that ‘besides the three dimensions which are filled
with all extended material things, a fourth must be admitted, with which
coincides the spirit’. [33] A century later in 1746, in his very first
publication, Immanuel Kant considers hyperspace as the condition of
other universes:
‘If it is possible
that there are extensions of different dimensions, then it is also very
probable that God has really produced them somewhere. For his works have
all the greatness and diversity that they can possibly contain. Spaces
of this kind could not possibly stand in connection with those of an
entirely different nature; hence such spaces would not belong to our
world at all, but would constitute their own worlds. I showed above
that, in a metaphysical sense, more worlds could exist together, but
here is also the condition that, as it seems to me, is the only
condition under which it might also be probable that many worlds really
exist.’ [34]
‘the
characteristic property of space, that of having three dimensions, is
only a property of our table of distribution, an internal property of
the human intelligence … . [We] could conceive, living in our world,
thinking beings whose table of distribution would be four dimensional
and who consequently would think in hyperspace.’ [35]
It was,
arguably, Kant’s conjectures that sparked the later interest in the
fourth dimension, especially in the later nineteenth century. As one of
the most prominent popularizers of hyperspace, the British mathematician
Charles Hinton, expressed it in 1888:
'the exploration of the facts of higher [dimensional] space is the practical execution of the great vision of Kant’. [36]
We
will leave to the side the controversial question as to whether time
can properly be a dimension of space. [37] But looking back in time, we
see that in the shadow of Kant, concepts pertaining to the fourth
dimension were being considered in serious fashion by a series of
first-rate mathematicians. [38] These mathematicians, first and foremost
the German Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, discovered that spaces of
any number of dimensions, n-dimensional space, were not contradictory or paradoxical, but in fact intelligible and systematically congruent.
Riemann was the student of the equally great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
In
the words of the prominent logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach, ‘[in]
analogy to [Gauss'] auxiliary concept of the curvature of a surface …
Riemann introduced the auxiliary concept of curvature of space’.
[39] That is, the curvature of three-dimensional space itself into a
fourth dimension, analogous to the curvature of a two-dimensional sheet
into a third dimension. Riemann’s ultimate end was to simplify the laws
of nature through his complexification of the laws of geometry – for
instance by reducing “force” to curvature.
But the physics of
Riemann’s age was behind the mathematics, and so his endeavour to
explain natural law through geometry was unfulfilled. But his geometry
did enable the new physics to come: the theories of Relativity. As
physicist and a co-founder of string theory Michio Kaku puts it,
‘Einstein fulfilled the program initiated by Riemann 60 years earlier,
to use higher dimensions to simplify the laws of nature.’ [40] The
well-known instance of this is the reduction of the “force” of gravity
to spacetime curvature. As Bertrand Russell puts it:
‘the
sun exerts no force on the planets whatever. Just as geometry has
become physics, so, in a sense, physics has become geometry. The law of
gravitation has become the geometrical law that every body pursues the
easiest course from place to place, but this course is affected by the
hills and valleys that are encountered on the road.’ [41]
The notion that imperceptible spatial curvature is perceived through forced feeling rather than vision
is one that was brought out through the English translator of Riemann’s
aforementioned paper, the great mathematician and philosopher William
Kingdon Clifford. [42] In the 1870s Clifford wrote of a hypothetical
one-dimensional worm (AB) that lived in a thin oval tube, endlessly
circling it clockwise, without any degree of freedom to go
counter-clockwise let alone escape “up” or “down” (which would be
useless concepts or intuitions to the worm). The worm itself would not
even see the second dimension, that is, the oval-like shape in
which it lives its life. However it would perceive differences in
extra-dimensional curvature (i.e. two-dimensional curvature) as bodily feelings, because its body would curve more at points of acute curvature (viz. H, E, F, and G in Figure 2). [43]
Figure 2: Clifford’s one-dimensional worm
Clifford writes that:
‘a
being existing in these [<3] dimensions would most probably
attribute the effects of curvature to changes in its own physical
constitution in nowise connected with the geometrical character of its
space. … [If we consider ourselves,] changes in shape may be either
imperceptible … or if they do take place we may attribute them to
“physical causes” – to heat, light, or magnetism – which may be mere
names for variations in the curvature of our space. … [We may be]
treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to
changes in the curvature of our space; … some or all of those causes
which we term physical may … be due to the geometrical construction of
our space … variation in the curvature of our space…’ [44]
Following
Einstein’s revelations [45] we see how advanced Clifford was, at least
with regard to the feeling of gravity. Yet there are perhaps further
developments to be made in this field relating extra-dimensional
curvature to qualia [46] – thereby correlating not just force to
geometry but qualia too. That is to say that a relation of
(n-dimensional) space and sentience is here suggested.
Mathematicians
and physicists, then, have given feasibility to the idea of
n-dimensional space. [47] We have seen how Clifford relates such space
to sentience, let us augment this relation by looking at the ideas of
John R. Smythies (1922 – 2019), a neurophilosopher and associate of
psychedelic cognoscenti Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond. Smythies
provides two sub-theories through which we can understand the relation
of space to sentience:
Theory I: ‘Sense-data[48] ... are
spatial entities distinct from physical objects and bear temporal and
causal relations but no spatial relations to physical objects.’[49] –
i.e. an exclusive theory.
Theory II: ‘Sense data … are
spatial entities distinct from physical objects and bear both temporal
and causal relations and higher-dimensional spatial relations to
physical objects.’ [50] – i.e. an inclusive theory.
Theory I is taken by certain figures such as H. H. Price[51] and Bertrand Russell, [52] but Smythies considers Theory II preferable as it is more parsimonious and offers a contiguous spatial connection
between mind and matter; mind-matter spatial relations that would be
lacking in Theory I (which would then only have temporal (i.e.
successive) and causal (i.e. transordinal) relations between physical
space (PS) and visual space (VS).
Theory I advances that
all the three-dimensional spaces of all beings’ sense data, and the one
three-dimensional space of physicality are a multiplicity of separate spaces.
In emergentism, each VS would ‘emerge’ from sections (such as those
within brains) of the singular PS. We have already hinted at the
inadequacy of this mysterious transordinal upward transition. Theory I
would require causal rather than spatial relations between all myriad
spaces, and thus would be an emergentism, and thus the mystery of
transordinal nomology emerges once more. Thus we reject Theory I.
Theory II then advances the actuality of a unified space of multiple dimensions (= n-dimensional
space) in which all of VS and PS are cross-sections. Moreover, Smythies
agrees with psychiatrist Paul Schilder that the perception of
PS is VS. He quotes Schilder thus: ‘The space in which objects are
perceived and the space in which they are imaged, are one and the same.’
[53] This in turn implies, Smythies writes, that ‘[in] this n-dimensional space Scientific Space [PS] and a visual field [VS] would not be two different kinds of section but would merely be two different sections.’ [54]
This is not to say that PS is not real but rather to say that our access to it is through VS (plus other senses) which is prosaically
three-dimensional. Thus the reality of physical space as more than
three-dimensional is not falsified by our common perception of it as
three-dimensional. I write ‘prosaically’ because it may be possible to
visualize objects of more than three spatial dimensions – Smythies does
suggest that ‘[t]here is no a priori reason why we should not develop the ability to appreciate directly an n-dimensional spatial system’, and there are reports of such vision. [55] Indirectly,
we can easily conceptualize and work with[56] more than three
dimensions of space through algebraic topology using the Cartesian
coördinate system where points, areas and volumes, etc., can be located
by numeric variables of each dimension’s axis, e.g. point h: (x1, y2, z3). To locate a point in a four-dimensional space, one simply adds an axis and its variable, e.g. point h: (x1, y2, z3, w4). Ad infinitum. Alternatively, one can visually represent (though not prosaically present) [57] four-dimensional space through for instance a four-dimensional cube, or tesseract (hypercube) – see Figure 2.
The word tesseract
was coined by the aforementioned mathematician and author Charles
Howard Hinton, [58] whose work on the fourth dimension can be used to
our ends. In his essay of 1880, ‘What is the fourth dimension?’ –
published four years prior to the related book Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott–
Hinton employs analogy to lower dimensional worlds to elucidate a
speculated four-dimensional world. I shall briefly explain it, then
connect this four dimensional world to the n-dimensional world
of Broad and Smythies, so to entertain a theory of the relation between
space and sentience. Note that by four dimensions, we are speaking of
four spatial dimensions, not a fourth temporal dimension in addition to three spatial dimensions. [59]
Let us imagine a two-dimensional world, a plane, or a Flatland
as Abbott calls it, like a sheet of paper. Any beings therein would
only be aware of two dimensions, and would only be aware of borders
describable with two axes (x,y). Thus they would be unaware of the
existence (as we perceive it from our three-dimensional perspective) of
the top and bottom faces of their plane that is also contiguous, that
borders, their two-dimensional world. Now, we three-dimensional
observers could see a multiplicity of such planes, sheets, each floating
one above the other. Although each entity of the flatland could not
perceive the other flatlands (just as in our world we cannot perceive other entities’ experienced three-dimensional spaces), as they were not contiguous at the x and y axes, wecould
perceive the multitude of flatlands, or worlds, from our
higher-dimensional space – and we could perceive the spatial contiguity
(i.e. fundamental unity) of two-dimensional worlds in a
three-dimensional space. Thus though each such two-dimensional world
would not be contiguous with another two-dimensional world, [60] each
two-dimensional world would be contiguous with, i.e. within the same space as, all the other two-dimensional worlds via the intervening three-dimensional space. Thus the relationship between such flatlands would be spatial rather than merely causal,
under the perspective of a world with a higher dimensionality than that
of each two-dimensional world. The nomology would be of one order
rather than transordinal, because the levels would be unified here. Rather than one world emerging from another (as in emergentism), they would each be equally fundamental and unified. Now, let me allow Hinton, 1880, to shift the argument up a dimension:
‘Take
now the case of four dimensions. Instead of bringing before the mind a
sheet of paper conceive a solid of three dimensions. If this solid were
to become infinite it would fill up the whole of three-dimensional
space. But it would not fill up the whole of four-dimensional space. It
would be to four-dimensional space what an infinite plane is to
three-dimensional space. There could be in four-dimensional space an
infinite number of such solids, just as in three-dimensional space there
could be an infinite number of infinite planes.
Thus,
lying alongside our space, there can be conceived a space also infinite
in all three directions. To pass from one to the other a movement has
to be made in the fourth dimension, just as to pass from one infinite
plane to another a motion has to be made in the third dimension.’ [61]
Thus we place Smythies’ n-dimensional
spaces (i.e. PS with a multitude of beings’ VSs) within the Hintonian
four-dimensional space so to render intelligible the Theory II relation between VS and PS.
So: through this approach, we exhibit the possibility that though visual spaces and physical space are not strictly identical, refuting the Psycho-neural Identity Theory, they neither need be strictly distinct, as in Substance Dualism. Neither need one (VS) emerge
from the other (PS). Through a four-dimensional perspective, we can see
that the mental (all of which for James is necessarily spatial) [62]
and the physical can be both fundamental and unified, i.e. a mind-matter
monism. The imagined triangle and the physical correlates thereof are
both part of one n-dimensional space rather than members of distinct
categories. This is all to say that the More-Broad-Smythies Theory (Theory II) is one, albeit radical, way to respond to the mind-matter mystery. It is a radical monism of space and sentience.
Whether
we can call such a monism an identity theory is merely a matter of
definition. Spinoza’s system, for instance, is certainly a monism and
has certainly been classified as an identity theory.[63] In this regard,
it is interesting to note that Hinton, in the above-quoted 1880 essay,
also writes that:
‘In the
[four-dimensional manifold] which we have traced out, much that
philosophers have written finds adequate representation. Much of
Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, could be symbolized from the preceding pages.’ [64]
It
is also interesting to note here that Hinton corresponded with William
James on the subject of four-dimensional consciousness.[65] Both Spinoza
and James were, in the end, panpsychists, and the full extent of the
relationship between higher-dimensionality and panpsychism – or more
broadly, between n-dimensional space and sentience – is a woefully
underexplored world, [66] a world where one may find idios kosmos within koinos kosmos, thought within extension.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
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My birthday
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