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Come Together Right Now: The Nature and Hope of Collaboration

August 10, 2016 By Yoav Litvin 2 Comments

In the age of celebrity role models, epic Twitter rants and reality TV presidential candidates, money talks and the cult of the individual reigns supreme.

But does the idealized image of the self-made man turned Silicone Valley billionaire reflect a healthy and productive society, or does it indicate a deep crisis of our civilization? Does human innovation come from the inspiration of lone geniuses, or is it a product of a slow process of cooperation within collaborative networks?

The lone genius/rags-to-riches narrative is compelling and lucrative. It boosts book sales, TV ratings, Facebook friend requests and Twitter followers, but it is largely inaccurate. Upon close inspection, many individuals revered as lone geniuses are in reality the public face of a collaborative duo.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Media & Culture Tagged With: art, capitalism, cooperation, future, inequality, solidarity

The Crisis: Where Is The World Headed?

June 3, 2016 By David Seaton Leave a Comment

I think almost all of us, progressive and otherwise, are conscious that we live in a strange and special era. “The best of times and the worst of times” … yada yada; not “evil” like the 1930s, but strange, dysfunctional, unstable, unpredictable and of a sinister syncopation.

How could we define it?

I would define this time we live in as “the end of the post-Cold-War,” the end of one thing, without the new thing being yet apparent.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Media & Culture Tagged With: capitalism, democracy, future, history, propaganda

The New Emancipation Movement: Facing the Servitude of Energy and Machines

November 10, 2014 By Dennis Riches 1 Comment

The use of fossil fuels, and later nuclear energy, created a new form of slavery that degraded the masters’ spiritual well-being and social relations. It was a change that put the future in peril and increased human misery by damaging ecosystems and forcing millions of people to earn their living by the dictates of the extractive industries and the technological bureaucracies of nation states obsessed with security and control.

In “The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude,” [2] Andrew Nikiforuk provides an excellent discussion of the authors of the 19th and 20th centuries who decried the effects of the new servitude of machinery, yet these earlier critiques of energy have been largely forgotten in present times, even by people who are very active in the contemporary battle against climate change.

Nikiforuk began with a brief history of slavery in Rome and in the early Industrial Revolution. The new servitude is a continuation of the same problem in a new form, one which suggests the necessary energy transition will be as contentious as the emancipation struggles of the past. If we get it wrong, our way of life may collapse like Rome’s, which never gave up its addiction to slavery. The empire just kept trying to acquire more slaves until the unquenchable demand led to decline and invasion from the regions that once supplied the slaves.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Environment Tagged With: Andrew Nikiforuk, Climate change, energy, fracking, future, history, Human Rights, hydraulic fracturing, Idiocracy, nuclear, oil, Qatar, Rome, Saudi Arabia, slavery, Steven Pinker, technology, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, Wall-E

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