Towards an Empathic Civilization
February 14, 2018 12:34 AM   Subscribe

 
Yes: the same Jeremy Rifkin who claims that automated supply chains and logistics will eliminate waste and usher in the golden age of sharing. Zero Marginal-Cost Society was largely a credulous endorsement of contemporary corporate imagineering, taking all claims at face value, and if such credulousness is touching, it's also disqualifying for any attempt to think seriously about the material-energetic future.
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:59 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


he is somewhat of a 'monorail' huckster! but i find him compelling :P
posted by kliuless at 6:19 AM on February 14, 2018 [3 favorites]


(That book was also, as I've said elsewhere, transparently assembled by interns. I can't respect any writer who doesn't do their own work.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 6:19 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


he is somewhat of a 'monorail' huckster! but i find him compelling :P

Maybe this is more of a Shelbyvillefilter post?
posted by thelonius at 6:31 AM on February 14, 2018 [12 favorites]


I thought we're about to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
posted by cendawanita at 7:24 AM on February 14, 2018


Part of the genius of the U.S. founders was their design of a system that acknowledged and took account of human greed, selfishness, and other imperfections by creating a balance of power in the three branches of government. I have yet to find persuasive any system that requires human nature to somehow magically become more noble and selfless for it to work.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:00 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Tenement farmers were also said to belong to a 'cropshare'...

This is nothing new asides from the terminology used to make you feel ok while companies strip you of your possessions and privacy then turn you into indentured servants
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:18 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


Part of the genius of the U.S. founders was their design of a system that acknowledged and took account of human greed, selfishness, and other imperfections by creating a balance of power in the three branches of government.

That's funny!

Also today: https://www.metafilter.com/172394/The-Chickensht-Club
posted by sneebler at 7:46 AM on February 15, 2018


Well, they underestimated our capacity for greed and selfishness, clearly.

I started to write that with tongue in cheek, but I think there's a serious point to it—I think the level of selfishness we're capable of increases with the size and relative anonymity of our society. Our system was built to cope with the average level of greed and general zero-sum shittiness that a (rich, landowning) person circa 1780 could get away with, without attracting a lot of opprobrium from their peers; as society got more complex the level of apparently tolerable shittiness increased (though getting rid of that whole chattel slavery thing was kinda nice, but since it only happened when it started getting in the way of other rich people's mercantilist ambitions, perhaps it's a bit short of the mark for altruism), but government in particular never really changed.

We still have a system that rests, in surprisingly large part, on expecting everyone involved at its highest echelons to behave like late-18th-century gentlemen. Which works great, until it doesn't.

I guess there's some small consolation in that our first real breaking-the-mold populist only seems to want to enrich himself and his cronies, and not, say, exterminate a good fraction of the population or something. Because I have zero confidence at all that our institutions would stop that from happening.

We have a very long way to go, to get to an "empathetic civilization". And the whole "zero marginal cost" thing seems pretty suspect; it's just another variant of the "all-service economy" circlejerk that was being peddled back in the 80s and 90s as a justification for hollowing out our industrial base and shipping all the jobs to low-cost locales. Which as it turned out, was mostly just a way of breaking unions and labor generally, and further concentrating wealth—which is to say, power—in the hands of fewer and fewer people, who then used it to accomplish regulatory capture, further enriching and entrenching themselves in an apparently unstoppable feedback loop.

Again, the only thing stopping this from really being the darkest-timeline, grim-meathook-future, is that the ambitions of our elites are so... bland. Vacation homes in Aspen, pied a terres in London and New York, maybe a yacht or two. But they still, perhaps irrationally, see themselves as belonging to the same species as the rest of us, and this—along with a certain lack of creativity, frankly—seems to largely circumscribe their ambitions. But it's their restraint, not functioning global institutions, that prevents someone with the resources of Elon Musk from going full Baron Harkonnen (movie, not book) in some bought-and-paid-for jurisdiction somewhere.

So, I think we've got a ruling class that's simultaneously worse than our predecessors anticipated, but better (or at least more boring) than they could be. Land of contrasts.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:30 PM on February 15, 2018


Our system was built to cope with the average level of greed and general zero-sum shittiness that a (rich, landowning) person circa 1780 could get away with, without attracting a lot of opprobrium from their peers; as society got more complex the level of apparently tolerable shittiness increased (though getting rid of that whole chattel slavery thing was kinda nice, but since it only happened when it started getting in the way of other rich people's mercantilist ambitions, perhaps it's a bit short of the mark for altruism), but government in particular never really changed.

-Abolishing Capitalism
-The New Human Rights Movement
-The case for taxing wealth
-Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality?
-On neofeudal capitalism
-One way to help America's middle class? Redistribute wealth
-The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality
-How the public is 'being deceived' over GDP: "Gross domestic product was devised as a shorthand way of measuring the American economy in the 1930s; but it is not much good at measuring modern economies; and it is downright misleading as a basis for government policy."
posted by kliuless at 9:16 PM on February 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


engaging in some idle armchair theorizing, the inklings (tolkien, lewis, et al) from what i understand were pretty obsessed with the idea of 'the myth that is true' (mythopoeia)* that is, if enough people believe something -- say in daylight savings time, money or the rule of law -- then it takes on its own 'social reality' (is socially constructed ;)

but if 'true knowledge' is as twain admonished -- "what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. it's what we know for sure that just ain't so" -- then "wealth—which is to say, power," while perhaps an outward marker of (relative) status among some hierarchy most folks tacitly agree upon -- that everyone knows! -- may also just be another myth?

so when navigating and mayhap amending power relations, consider pierre bourdieu:
First, Bourdieu believed that human society creates certain patterns of thought and classification systems, which people absorb and use to arrange space, people, and ideas. Bourdieu liked to call the physical and social environment that people live in the "habitus," and he believed that the patterns in this habitus both reflect the mental maps or classification systems inside our heads and reinforce them.

Second, Bourdieu also believed that these patterns help to reproduce the status of the elite. Since this elite has an interest in preserving the status quo, it also has every incentive to reinforce cultural maps, rules, and taxonomies. Or, to put it another way, an elite stays in power over time not just by controlling resources, or what Bourdieu described as "economic capital" (money), but also by amassing "cultural capital" (symbols associated with power). When they amass this cultural capital, this helps to make the status of the elite seem natural and inevitable...

He did not think that people are robots, programmed to obey cultural rules automatically. Indeed, he did not like the word "rules" at all, preferring to talk about cultural "habits." But he also believed these habits and the habitus shaped how people behave and think. Social maps are powerful. But they are not all-powerful. We are creatures of our physical and social environment. However, we need not be blind creatures. Occasionally, individuals can imagine a different way of organizing our world, particularly if they—like Bourdieu—have become an insider-outsider by jumping across boundaries.
posted by kliuless at 10:34 PM on February 18, 2018


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