The Global Elephant in the Living Room

Our nation is in decline. Deeply polarized, our government running huge deficits and weakened by futile military interventions abroad, the gap between rich and poor approaching Third World models, while indices of civilization, like longevity, infant mortality, percentage of homelessness, percentage of child poverty, and percentage of home ownership are among the poorest in the industrial world.

You always have to ask, when a crisis like this occurs, cui bono? Who benefits from this state of affairs? Who benefits from a weak government? Not the poor, obviously, who are bearing the brunt of budget slashes. Not the sick, not the elderly. Not children, who will be finding it harder and harder to survive, get fed, get an education, make a decent living in the world of the future. Not the environment, which will suffer more and more despoliation.

Yet to call attention to corporate power—the real beneficiary of this crisis, is almost taboo in the United States. As if it were somehow unpatriotic. Which is ironic since most major corporfations are international and owe no allegiance to any nation. It would be absurd to expect them to. Their only allegiance is to their stockholders. They’re not supposed to be loyal, they’re supposed to be profitable.

This is not a moral issue. It’s simply a practical one: mutinational corporations are the most powerful force in the world today, and simply by intelligently following the bottom line and being good at it, they are threatening the well-being of the vast majority of human beings on the planet. They are just doing their job. But the job of government is to make sure that in the process they don’t poison or impoverish their consumers, kill their workers, and destroy the planet.

Government regulation is not anti-corporate behavior. Corporations may moan and groan that regulation is crippling them, but it’s actually for their own good—their own long-term survival. It serves to protect them from self-destructing through their own short-sighted, competitve greed.

And since we’re a democracy, it’s our job to see that the government does its job. Because what corporations think they want is often bad for them in the long run.

It was, after all, runaway corporate greed, and the absence of adequate government regulation, that produced the financial meltdown and the prolonged recession we’re experiencing today.

The 1950s are usually remembered as a glorious time for business. Corporations were expanding, a Republican was in the White House, opportunities were proliferating, profits were high. The income tax system had created a booming middle class, and consumerism was in full bloom. Yet in the midst of this era of prosperity and conservatism, corporations contributed half of all income tax revenue, and labor union power was at an all-time high.

Today, unions have been decimated, corporate share of the tax burden is only about 10%—with the resulting burden falling on those with low and middle incomes. As Leona Helmsley famously said, “only little people pay taxes”, By ‘little people’ she refers to the 99% of Americans who are not pathologically addicted to the accumulation of symbolic wealth. Our middle class is shrinking rapidly, safety nets are diappearing for the elderly, our educational system is increasingly impoverished, and our rapacious health care industry is pushing more and more and more people into homelessness. Our parks are being defunded, support for the arts in almost nonexistent, and the only area in which we can compete with other societies is our gargantuan, wasteful military bureaucracy, almost equal to those of the rest of the world put together. While nations like China and India are approaching the status of the United States in the 1950s, we seem to be trying to emulate the classic military regimes of Latin America in the 1950s.

It is bizarre that political conflict today is framed in terms of the ‘populist’ Tea Party movement for small government vs. ‘Liberals’ who want big government, when the Tea Party movement was created, organized, and financed by a pair of oil company billionnaires, and when corporations are the main beneficiaries of the Tea Party agenda. But after all, the media are financed by large corporations, and It would be absurd to expect them to voice any serious criticism of their funding sources. This is why right-wingers are eager to cut off government funds for NPR, which is somewhat less biassed than other networks since it is only very partially funded by corporations.

Corporations want a government that will do their bidding—that will provide subsidies, bargain-rate resources, and sweetheart contracts—not one that will ‘regulate’ them and police white-collar crime. They often demand concessions on the grounds that they ‘provide American jobs’. But any good executive tries to eliminate as many jobs as possible, or send them overseas, since. labor is the major cost for any big corporation. Corporations are supposed to make money. That’s what they’re about. The best ones do this from a long-term perspective. The worst ones—among which the oil companies are conspicuous—are just after the quick bucks. None of them are supposed to be civic-minded, except for PR purposes.

In Science Fiction novels about the future the dominant planetary organization is often ‘The Company’ rather than a planetary government. As is so often the case sci-fi is prescient. Over half of the world’s largest economic entities are multinationals rather than nations, and they are able to block democratic processes with the economic power they wield. Through campaign contributions and their armies of lobbyists they can determine public policy. Through their ability to buy air time and column space they can determine what ideas and images appear, and don’t appear, in the media. Through their ability to hire large, expensive legal teams they can manipulate the law to their advantage, and make it prohibitively expensive to punish them for malfeasance. They have all the legal protections and rights of private citizens. Yet a private citizen cannot, like Exxon Mobil, avoid paying taxes—even get a refund—despite making the largest profit in corporate history. Nor can that citizen, like Exxon Mobile, spend a half billion dollars on propaganda to persuade the American people that climate change is a myth.

Corporations are international and they act globally, while our benighted ‘patriots’ are stuck in a parochial mindset. And all governments are handicapped today because they can’t get these corporate giants to pay taxes. Their ultimate weapon is: ‘Tax us and we’ll move’.

The voice of the Tea Party in America today is not even an American voice. It is the voice of multinational corporations, who have the wit to realize that the notion of national sovereignty is simply an annoying inconvenience on the tiny planet we inhabit.

Kevin Kelly’s Frozen Future

Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010) is by far the best of the burgeoning genre of technophilic literature. For while Kelly is a committed and unapologetic technophile, he’s also a very thoughtful and intelligent man, and while most geek writers carry on like Barnum & Bailey hucksters about the wonders to be enjoyed in their solipsistic technocratic futures, Kelly’s work is consistently complex and carefully balanced. He has a deep understanding of the roots of technology, its role in human evolution, and its quasi-organic nature, and he appreciates its negatives as well as its positives. For anyone concerned about the future, and the diminishing human role in it, this book is the place to begin.

 

But while I admire a lot about the book, I have three serious disagreements.

 

First, Kelly doesn’t entirely avoid the linear extrapolation trap that tends to snare futurists: when a trend suddenly starts to escalate, they expect it to continue indefinitely. Every land rush, every consumer fad, and many a futurist’s blunder has been based on looking at half of an S curve.

 

Kelly is sophisticated enough to recognize this problem and purports to solve it by broadening the frame—while any given technological phenomenon will follow an S curve, he says, each new one will leapfrog the previous one to provide a more or less linear path for the ‘technium’ (a handy term coined by Kelly) as a whole, which, Kelly says, will continue on a path of linear growth.

 

Kelly knows, unlike free-market capitalists, who base their system on perpetual expansion of the GDP, Kelly realizes that such physical growth is not sustainable. But he assumes that since information is not physical it is free from this constraint. Yet too much information can have the same effect as no information. We’ve already seen this on the Internet. There is so much information that dialogue is both unnecessary and unlikely—one can find a host of supporters and arguments for what one already believes, and need never encounter a new idea. This effect is amplified, as Kim Zetter points out, by preference algorithms that continually channel us back into our own comfort zones.

 

Kelly’s second error is his belief—stated several times—that technology can solve the problems it creates. Kelly is very even-handed in recognizing the dark side of technology, but for reasons known only to himself, decides that its effects are 51% positive, and that it will eventually get all the bugs out. He insists that the problems caused by the technium can be solved with improved technology.

 

We don’t usually think that the problems of an OCD patient will be solved by becoming more orderly, or that a paranoid patient will be cured by taking greater precautions against his persecutors, or that a drug addict will be cured by purer heroin. As Einstein once pointed out, “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”

 

Which brings us to Kelly’s third and most serious error: He implicitly views the technium as an extension of the human organism as a whole. But it is not. It is merely an extension of the human ego—that limited portion of the organism concerned with its individual safety and preservation. Like the ego, the technium is about exercising control over the environment—to limit the environment’s impact. Our egos seek to control our world so we can’t be taken by surprise—so we can avoid shock, danger, discomfort, pain, disaster.

 

Technophiles envision a world without risk, without setbacks, without emotional pain. It’s all about convenience, comfort, and safety. The only adventures in their fantasy world will be virtual. You can have the exciting life of Odysseus without leaving your lounger. The ego’s dream—fingertip control. But the more one can command pleasure, the less fulfilling it becomes, as many a dictator or billionaire has discovered. We want to be loved for ourselves, receive gifts that aren’t compelled, enjoy pleasures that weren’t expected. The quest for security and control debases the currency of whatever it seeks to ensure, decreasing the ability of the environment to refresh, renew, surprise and delight us. Control deadens experience. Ego-satisfactions will be abundantly available in Kelly’s future—the kind of cold, short-term elation that comes from winning an athletic event. What it cannot offer is joy—the pure joy that a healthy 3-year-old experiences several times a day, and from the simplest things.

 

A programmer friend once insisted that the brain was the only important part of the human organism—that the body was just a pipe, with fuel going in and waste going out, its only purpose being to fuel the mind. Technology, no matter how brilliantly it complicates itself, cannot escape the box of the ego’s limited awareness. Lacking an unconscious, intuition, and most of all a sense of its connectedness with the rest of life, its doors of perception cannot be cleansed. Robots can’t meditate in order to transcend the limited awareness of the security-obsessed ego. Less complex than the organism it attempts to dominate, the ego cannot feel its own flawed narrowness.

 

This doesn’t mean, of course, that human beings can’t use technology in all sorts of extremely creative ways and toward extremely creative ends. It means merely that the technium itself evolves to serve ego needs, not those of the full human being. This is why we live today, for example, in environments that are structured for the convenience of automobiles at the expense of community life.

 

The ego is uncomfortable with the chaotic, asymmetrical, anarchic exuberance of nature, and wages an unending campaign of repression against it. Nature abhors straight lines and right angles, but the ego loves them. Hence we live in boxes, travel in boxes, work in boxes, and hire ‘landscape gardeners’ to force growing things into boxlike hedges and rectangular lawns. And any stray sprig or tendril that dares to violate this geometric rigidity is summarily decapitated. We live increasingly in a man-made environment, an environment we have made into a reflection of the ego, so that our egos have become the predictable stimulus to which we respond. It is an environment in which we’ve eliminated as much of nature’s threats and surprises as possible. To paraphrase Pogo, ‘We have met the environment and he is us.’

 

The ego, like a political dictator, not only wants to control everything around it, but to live forever, and it is deeply symptomatic that extending the lifespan indefinitely seems to be a universal preoccupation of technophiles, including Kelly.

 

Nature is wiser in this. Death is one of its greatest inventions, ensuring that life can continue to reinvent itself uncluttered with the patterns of the past. Evolutionary creativity depends on rapid turnover of generations. If the technophiles get their Monkey’s-Paw wish, we can look forward to a world of rigid, sclerotic beings encased in artificially rejuvenated bodies, perennially obsessed with self-preservation. But nature abhors imbalance, and will probably intervene with a well-timed catastrophe long before that happens.

 

PHOENIX DIARIES EXCERPT

My novel, THE PHOENIX DIARIES is now available at Lulu.com. Here’s an excerpt from the original diary:

FROM THE PHOENIX DIARY: III

Most of yesterday has disappeared. Like the day before and the day before that.  It’s like coming home at night and finding your house has been burgled.  Someone’s been going through the dresser drawers of my mind.

I wish you weren’t doing what you’re doing.  I worry about you.

The sun came out at last this morning.  It even got in my eyes.  I could hardly see the words as they twitched across the page.  The letters kept melting and blurring like watercolors.  I suspected submarine influences—my ink drawn from a squid and, like water, seeking its own level.

THE TRAP OF ‘PURITY’

Since I’m no longer blogging at Huffington Post I will, from time to time, post excerpts from my books. The following, for example, is an excerpt from the second chapter of  THE CHRYSALIS EFFECT.

Every cultural system comes with a price attached.  As Lewis Mumford once said, a system crams the complexity of life into an ideological straitjacket, ignoring much of what’s natural and real.  Similarly, every culture fosters and exaggerates certain human traits at the expense of others.

Every cultural system, in other words, is an oversimplification, a distortion, of our humanity.

A cultural system can make people believe the most bizarre ideas–even be willing to die for them, and to kill others for not sharing them.  It can transform the most unpleasant kinds of behavior into cherished virtues.

Today we in the west find it hard to understand how men in some cultures could feel virtuous about killing a sister or daughter to “preserve the family honor,” simply because a man had had sex with her.  We’re also appalled at fundamentalist parents who beat a child to death to “drive out the Devil” and ensure her entry into heaven.