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Striving to be Snowdenlike

Harry J. Bentham

If Edward Snowden had not taken refuge in a non-Western country, he would be under torture or worse. Even though this martyrdom was prevented by his asylum, Snowden has already become a model of personal resistance and a one-man revolution against the world's most powerful government.

Above all, we must recognize that Snowden is victorious. His actions have put the state on the defensive, forcing it to reconsider the policies it arrogantly implemented without the consent of the public. Therein lies an example to us all. Those of us who would criticize Snowden should examine themselves and their own deeds, and compare them with his. He is a titan. There is no chastising that the people who merely write or speak, such as I, can do to a man who accomplished such great deeds, but only praise. By contrast with him, the rest of us can only be called slacktivists: we have fought only for our freedom to do nothing. Now that the state (not just the US but Britain et al) has become even more paranoid at the potential for one man's dissent to humiliate and disrupt its immoral and illegal actions, it seems unlikely that any leaker in the future will have anything like the triumph Snowden achieved over the security state. Or will they? I write this question, because the theory of a technological emancipation, and of transhumanism in particular, has always made a prediction about politics. I would argue that prediction already became a reality in the person of Snowden. One day, governments, perhaps even whole armies, will be eradicated by solitary individuals in the right place, in the right time, and in the right information. Technology has always led to concentrating greater power in the hands of fewer people, but it is often indiscriminate and anarchic in doing so. The epitome of that technological perfection would be an individual capable of slaying whole armies and remaking the world according to the kind of justice and accountability that only a single, unburdened and unapologetic person can guarantee. Sociologically speaking, the time of monolithic collectives and nation-states is coming to the end of its "sociocultural evolution", at least in what we have called the western world. We are, more and more, beginning to realize that individuals rather than institutions will eventually be able to accomplish anything they set their mind to. Individuals: the so-called "smart rats" or "high-tech rebel elite" promised by Julian Assange in his conversations in Cypherpunks. Men and women who will be able to outmaneuver, outrun, and outfox entire governments, including the world's most powerful government. In the face of these titans, governments will need to admit that they have lost their monopoly on controlling who is respected or listened to, or what information the public is exposed to. Further, it is only a matter of time before they altogether lose their monopoly on force and are rendered politically powerless, mere artifacts of a brutish and primitive past. The ramifications of this spontaneous upgrade to our "societal operating system", positive and negative, have to be examined seriously by the upgrade's supporters and opponents alike. But the inevitability of this change of power-relations to adapt an increasingly horizontal form is hard to deny. The Internet, like any revolution in media, has its detractors. Arguments against its effects on society say that it creates heightened confusion, immersing people in profuse conflicting information that debases us in comparison with the sense of "truth" ensured by loyalist propaganda (people in Britain once only listened to the BBC and rejected any other source as foreign). This is true enough, but we would be wrong to believe that the state is not now equally confused and diverted from any sense of purpose as its people, and therein lies its new vulnerability. The Internet is annoying to everyone, whether for or against the government, or on either side of the political spectrum, precisely because it is impossible to control - for good or ill. Anarchy, which the Internet has been described as the "greatest experiment in", makes us more powerless than ever, but also more powerful than ever - if you know what to do. The reality is that those who relied on a neo-feudal monopoly, some form of estate, or more traditional top-down mechanisms of control - like the state, mainstream press outlets and "reputable" journalists - are more powerless, ignored and confused than ever in their history. The rest of us merely "feel" more powerless and confused than ever, but this is only because we weren't as aware of how powerless and confused we actually were in the past. In other words, the equilibrium between people caused by the Internet has created a world with fewer conspiracies but more conspiracy theories. For the majority of people, whether they realize it or not yet, the Internet has produced a net increase in the ability to disseminate vital information and grievances to others, and increased the opportunity to protest. This isn't to say that the preponderance of people with wrong or crazy ideas, or too lazy to take action in the real world, has decreased because of the Internet. Rather, that number has increased. But it is true that the groups of people with right ideas are bigger now, because of the Internet - much bigger, and more refined and geographically distributed. What has happened to the monopoly of information already will happen to the monopoly of everything else. It will crumble. The "leakers" of the future will not merely be leaking information, but entire proprietary technologies, even weapons that could drastically empower the self-defense of oppressed people and less fortunate nations on another hemisphere. Let me clarify by stating that if additive manufacturing or atomically-precise manufacturing allow vehicles and other personal technologies to be adapted and built on-site in impoverished regions with minimal resources, the world's biggest experiment in anarchy will no longer be just an experiment. After personal computers, and the leakers who used them, there will be dozens of other personal technologies and enhancements that will be equally challenging to the power and authority of the state. It is not outrageous to theorize now that these technologies will have their own leakers and their own vanguards of "high-tech rebels", who will recognize the needs of the many as the only arbitrators of a model global society. As many have predicted, future generations will admire Edward Snowden for the service he did for the public and, indeed, the whole world. His rebellion against the world's only superpower is unprecedented, in a way that compares only with messiahs spoken of in the past. Of all the individuals in the world to admire or strive to be like at this time, it can be argued that Snowden stands out as the greatest such authority. That is how he should be regarded by anyone who acknowledges the virtue of democratizing the utmost knowledge and power to each individual. Snowden should have special resonance for people who see technology as having the potential to liberate humanity and transform human "nature", so his actions should have special resonance for transhumanists. It is my assessment that the great power of single individuals may mean that we need no transhumanist collective, movement, party, or state, although these things are good insofar as they raise awareness of transhumanism's promise of change and bring more candidates into the pool. What political transhumanism needs are titans. We need super-activists, equipped with so much skill, so much personal technology, and so much insider knowledge that they can bring unjust governments and hierarchies crashing down with their own hands. These titans will know they have won, when they are recognized as world powers in their own right, and the futurists who foresaw their arrival will declare that we saw them coming and we can help adapt global society to the more horizontal form entailed by their arrival.

Harry J. Bentham

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Review: Death on Taurus by J. M. Porup

. @hjbentham. @toholdaquill. #sciencefiction. #book. #review.

Another excellent and striking contribution to the genre by J. M. Porup. Along with Dreams Must Die, this is an excellent book to start with for any reader new to J. M. Porup's sci fi. This epic story won't disappoint, and the only way you can discover this for yourself is to download. From the book description on Amazon:

On Taurus, there's only one good way to die. 

On the bullfighting planet of Taurus, in the far distant future, a genetically engineered race of half-man, half-bull stages ritual blood sacrifices to the gods—human viewers light-years away. Vizzer, the high priest who presides over the daily slaughter, loathes the fights and wants to end them. 

When news arrives that the humans have destroyed themselves in an interstellar civil war, he deposes the king and outlaws the fights. But not all the humans are dead. Carlos the Creator lies in stasis on Taurus itself. Vizzer comes face to face with an enraged and ancient god. And in so doing, he must also confront the truth of his own savage nature.

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham

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Review: Dreams Must Die by J. M. Porup

. @hjbentham. @toholdaquill. #sciencefiction. #book. #review.

All of J. M. Porup's science fiction is pioneering and valuable literature, and this is my perspective as a science fiction story contributor myself. In particular, I find the narrative voice present throughout Porup's work to be gripping and more stimulating in a way that would appeal to a vaster readership than mine. I discovered this mainly through Dreams Must Die and I encourage readers to download the book as a starting point to reading further sublime works by the author. I hope to be blogging more thoughts on it. From the book description on Amazon:

The time for dreaming is over. 

Jimmy Shade kills dreams. It’s his job. As a member of the elite Dream Police, he defends the Collective against that poisonous nocturnal ooze. 

But when Shade gets infected with a dream, he finds himself on the run from his former colleagues. He must choose between his love for the Collective--and the dream he cannot live without.

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham

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World Inequality, Digital Life & the State

. @hjbentham. @TheVenusProject. #futurism. #equality. #antistatism. #moneyfree.

The creeping social inequality in Britain has become a source of growing concern to many.  When strikes and despair over the income disparity within a single country or locale feature often in our politics, do we unjustly forget the scale of global wealth inequality?

I am not writing this article to belie the social calamity of income inequality in Britain, nor to argue for more urgency in remedial foreign policies such as development assistance.  This is purely an analysis of the long-term crisis represented by global disparities of wealth, and the historical choices it will force on many actors in the world-system, from states to activists.

In a talk I heard in my studies at Lancaster University in 2012, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke gave his predictions on the greatest threats to global security in the short-term and long-term future.  One of his predictions struck me as the most important: the ease with which modern media allows different strata of the world to see one another’s vastly different lifestyles, thus threatening to turn global inequality into an ever greater spectacle.  This spectacle has the potential to inspire global rage, perhaps justifiable in the same sense as encountered in the years preceding the French Revolution.  Indeed, the present world order resembles France’s Ancien Régime in many ways.

Interestingly, the term “Third World”, used to denote less “developed” states, comes from the term “Third Estate”, which referred to “commoners” in France’s Ancien Régime – the subjects who rose up and turned their kingdom into a republic.  Famously, Alfred Sauvy coined the term when he presented an analogy between exploited colonial states under the European powers and exploited subjects living under absolute monarchy, in an article for L’Observateur in 1952.

Since Sauvy coined the term, decolonization has achieved its popular ends, but an exploitative structure remains in place.  At least that is the view of dependency theorists, world-systems theorists and other structuralist critics of the international system.  The most eminent of these analysts is Immanuel Wallerstein, possibly the greatest sociologist alive.

In Wallerstein’s analysis, the modern thesis of “development” supported by the United Nations and other intergovernmental institutions is as much to blame for world inequality as Europe’s colonial “civilizing” thesis that came before it.  In his widely taught theory of the world-system, the world can be socially and geographically broken down into three strata based on the kind of production processes occurring in different states and geographic regions.

Immanuel Wallerstein sees world inequality not as something proceeding from countries lagging behind others as a result of historic oppression and debt, but as something proceeding from the existence of “countries” altogether.  In his assessment, the division of the world into distinct nation-states is founded on arbitrary distinctions among the human race, and this gives rise to world inequality.  Taking up such logic, it is hard for one to deny that the dissolution of the nation-state model itself would be a core part of any long-term political designs for remedying world inequality.

If the abandonment of the nation-state model seems too radical for you at this stage, it is not too radical for Wallerstein.  In Utopistics (1998) he predicts that a crisis that could occur as early as the coming half-century will create real opportunities to seriously challenge the nation-state model.  He does not say what alternative system this crisis entails, but argues that there will be a unique opportunity to construct something far more egalitarian than anything previously known.  If a more equitable order is indeed gained, this would involve borders ceasing to be necessary or recognized, and authoritarian state norms becoming unsustainable.

We can already see antagonisms that are directly tied to the transnational wealth inequalities on which this article is focused.  Often misleadingly framed as issues between two states, they are actually issues between opposing strata of the world-system itself.  Such issues include crises on the land, like migration to the United States through its brutally enforced border with Mexico, and the inhumane occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli State.  They include crises on the water, such as migration from North Africa to Spain and Italy.

The crises tied to the enforcement of borders are part of the larger crisis gripping what Wallerstein calls the “interstate system”.  This interstate system is the “political superstructure” of a global division of labor predicated on the historic industrial inequality persisting between entire continents and so-called nations.  Strong states possess advanced factories and skills, while weak states are left to mine arduously.  Wallerstein describes this exploitative situation in terms of a “core-periphery” relationship, in which the industrialized powers represent the “core”.

Another side to this crisis of the state is the alarming spread of internecine conflict and the growing perception of law enforcers as illegitimate, arbitrary and cruel (the 2014 Ferguson Riots are a compelling example of this and demonstrate that the US is not exempt).  Such trends point inexorably towards the view that the nation-state may eventually be fated to be abandoned – not just in a particular country, but everywhere.

In my view, Wallerstein’s analysis is compelling.  However, it lacks emphasis on the dawn of digital life, which has added a whole new dimension to the crisis of the world-system by literally turning the world into a community of individuals interacting on an unprecedented supranational level.  This is historically important and bound to change global politics for very profound and complex reasons.

Another key historian of the world-system, Benedict Anderson, says something insightful about our modern nation-states in his book, Imagined Communities (1982).  His analysis differs from Wallerstein’s, mainly due to his greater emphasis on technology and language.  He gives the example of Bismarck’s Germany as the first modern nation-state, which differs from Wallerstein’s preoccupation with revolutionary France.  In Imagined Communities, Anderson explains that the telegraph and rail systems allowed Germany to become a unified nation, by developing a sense of national consciousness.

If telegraph led to the formation of national consciousness through an illusory sense of community enough to give rise to a nation, surely it follows that the internet – with its profound revolution in our lives – will give rise to something equally significant.  The champion of today’s rebel “cypherpunk” elite, Julian Assange, has said something very approximate to this in his own rhetoric, arguing that a “new body politic” is rising to challenge government authority through the internet.  He also describes digital life as borderless and free, in such a way that can only become more and more real as digital technology continues its exponential growth.  It is no accident that this sounds like the egalitarian post-state future leaned towards by Wallerstein as humanity’s noblest alternative.

Modern political legitimacy is founded on the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as Immanuel Wallerstein repeatedly points out in his works.  One may be the citizen of a “nation” by having certain arbitrary qualities or place of birth, and as such may be treated equally and defended by a given state.  This is what we call being part of a nation, whether it is the United States or a highly contested “state” like Palestine or Abkhazia.  However, the basis of such an institution is very much in question, and in the future it will become increasingly weakened by the growing transnational consciousness brought about by weakening borders and exponential digital communication.

Where does this lead us?  Shall we reject popular sovereignty as obsolete?  Impossible.  It is the sacrosanct foundation of all modern democracy and civil rights, and the only reliable metric of social progress.  Self-determination of nations has been part of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as is the idea that regimes must be legitimately elected to power by their constituent nations.  However, if the nation is to become obsolete, as predicted in Wallerstein’s analysis of the crisis of the world-system, self-determination still stands because human rights are sacrosanct.  The self-recognition of transnational humanity as sovereign must follow, and global lines of transport and communication make that feasible.  The hard part is educating people that their dear “nation” no longer exists, and that is why speech and writing to sustain a global social narrative are so vital.

Perhaps the end result of the self-determination of humanity is not necessarily “global citizenship” as predicted by some (redundant, since citizenship is designed to exclude others and serves no purpose if it lacks this proscriptive power).  Nor is it necessarily “world government”.  However, we can know that human rights like self-determination will outlive the existence of the nation-state, and the alternative regime will then be designed and elected by the whole of transnational humanity rather than a particular group.

A new form of network-centric governance, authoritative but not authoritarian, based on scientific methods of evaluation, and tolerating no disparities in wealth or information, is a model that could supersede all the nations and make world inequality obsolete.  Such a revised politics would be intellectually consistent with and assist to usher in a Global Resource-Based Economy.

By Harry J. Bentham – More articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published in Issue 13 of The Venus Project Magazine

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Utopistics (1998) by Immanuel Wallerstein

. @hjbentham. @IWallerstein #utopistics. #sociology. #futurism. #crisis.

This review is being reprinted for renewed consideration at a time when the world is facing massive crisis. Such a crisis is explained best as part of the structural crisis of the historical political and economic order that has prevailed since the Sixteenth Century.

Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century may be the quickest and most accessible way to get into the theories of American historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, so it should be a recommended book for political “futurists”. An expansion on talks Wallerstein gave in 1997 at the University of Auckland, the book is short enough to be studied by any reader in a day. It is divided into three essential chapters to give an overview of modern political history, address factors that are weakening the current world order, and talk about possible alternative world orders. Making it relevant to h+ readers, it is certain that Wallerstein’s Utopistics is encouraging a realist kind of futurism, distinctive in its position that any succeeding civilization will likely depart from the current arrangements of sovereign states and “citizens”.

Before you scoff at the word “utopistics” as a euphemism for utopianism, it must be said that the last thing utopistic theorists are meant to be concerned with is talk of “utopias”, which Wallerstein calls “dreams of heaven that could never exist on earth”. Utopistics as an exercise is not utopianism, but the “serious assessment of historical alternatives” (p. 1). It is the “sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity” (p. 1-2). This is a very productive approach to theorizing about the future, as it avoids promoting naïve expectations about human behavior and focuses instead on the social constraints and emerging opportunities or breakthroughs in human creativity. To avoid being starry-eyed and formulating unrealistic targets, we must keep our focus on developing appropriate uses for the grimy but certainly undeniable social and technological trends in the world. In spite of this realism, it is still incumbent on us to believe a better world is possible and to speculate on what it might look like (p. 2).

In Wallerstein’s theory of the history of social change (p. 1-33), as presented in his main academic works, the current world order with its exploitative economic features and disparities originated in the Sixteenth Century (p. 9). Revolutions provided pressures for this world order to gradually evolve, although ratios of global inequality and exploitation have not decisively changed since the Sixteenth Century. Even though the French Revolution “failed”, it disseminated “widespread assumptions of what is accepted as the legitimate premises of political action”: the understanding of social change as normal, the requirement of popular sovereignty for states, and the modern idea of citizenship (p. 14). Modern politics, with its distinction of left and right, is a feud emerging from the French Revolution even though the tacit admission of all modern politics is that the French Revolution values won and are the basis of modern state legitimacy (p. 15-19). States are not autonomous but an “institutional feature” in a global social system. National revolutions have presented no challenge to the exploitative features of the world order because they fail to change the global institution and eliminate nation-state regimes. (p. 10). Citizenship, Wallerstein teaches, is the practice of exclusion and the conferring of privileges. The idea of one being a citizen and another not being a citizen justifies exploitation by replacing class divisions with national borders, thus “excluding from the division of surplus value and political decision making the vast majority of the world’s population” (p. 21). As for the trajectory of this archaic historical world order, “pervasive antistatism” (meaning the inherent weakening of the nation-state system) undermines an “essential pillar” of the modern world that has been used to justify disparity (p. 32). “So-called globalization”, writes Wallerstein, is actually “the crisis of this system” (p. 32) and does not (in the long run of history) benefit the powers that be. The reason the world order is in crisis is because of the loss of legitimacy (p. 4), primarily of the nation-states system.

In the second chapter (p. 35-64), Wallerstein talks about the transition we are allegedly living in the early stages of (p. 35). He cautions that there is “a time of troubles, a black period that will last as long as long as the transition lasts” (p. 33). We should not necessarily be shocked by the social problems and horrors of current times, because in the long term they are part of a historical transition. This is described as “a period of conflicts and aggravated disorders, and what many will see as the collapse of moral systems” (p. 35). Our individual and group efforts will be able to create shockwaves, because the ability of the system to automatically restore equilibrium will disappear with the loss of legitimacy. The state system has been required to protect monopolies with patents and other, more subtle means (p. 36-37). Wallerstein rejects the idea that the current profit-driven economic system takes “unlimited laissez faire” as a pillar, instead arguing that strong states back up monopolies and are a pillar for the profit-driven system (p. 38). Ultimately, “state structures” are weakening and the trends results in the weakened capacity for monopolies (p. 46). The trend is dissected to reveal the “growing collapse of the ideology of liberalism and the vulnerability of corporations” – itself caused by the “increased democratization of the world and the deligitimation of the states linked to it” (p. 48). For the affairs of ordinary people in the social system, the transition carries significant dangers. Delegitimization of states leads to a fear of security threats such as violent crime and ethnic conflict (p. 51-52). This vicious social breakdown noted by Wallerstein seems to resemble what is commonly reported in South Africa, above all other places. To explain the social symptoms, Wallerstein notes the incapacity of states to provide effective and credible policing and protection for members of society who traditionally felt the state gave them security (p. 52-53):

“What had been seen by many as the friendly and protective police officer comes to be seen as the somewhat dangerous and often arbitrary police officer” (p. 53)

In response, people lose confidence in the state, and seek “extrastate self-defense” (transnational activism and other searches for security that will not rely on the state) as their refuge. They feel the state owes them nothing, and can be expected to reject taxation ever more fiercely. In sum, if a state is lawless and incompetent, it has no reason or right to survive and is nothing more than an illegitimate regime.

Wallerstein illustrates another trend delegitimizing the state system. Democratization of technology (especially weapons technology) and movements of people (especially from poor “non-White” states to traditionally “White” states) are disintegrating forces working against modern states. To express Wallerstein’s tolerance of both such trends, he states that from his perspective, “nuclear proliferation is inevitable” (60-61). Some would argue a more positive case that a similar explosion is happening with information through the web and its activists. Not all is looking grim, because highly creative emerging technologies may soon also be spread around the world with no regulation and have liberating effects. Chaos may produce some undesirable situations, but history is never free of inconveniences, and “chaotic realities produce, by themselves, orderly systems” (might take 50 years) (p. 63). Wallerstein encourages us to strike the historical iron while it is still hot, promising “the world of 2050 will be what we make it” although it will entail “terrible political struggle”. This gives politics in this period the opportunity to help shape the structural features of the social system that will dominate the next five hundred years (p. 82).

In the third chapter (p. 65-89), Wallerstein draws our attention to two questions. First, what kind of world do we want to live in? Second, by what paths could we likely achieve our target (p. 65)? To determine which kind of world we want to live in, Wallerstein identifies three defining dilemmas that are the basis for the arguments about whether or not the current world is good. The first dilemma is material abundance versus material inequality, the second is liberal political structures versus the exclusion of most humans from decision-making, and the third is longevity versus degraded quality of life (p. 66). In sum, the dilemma is a maximally democratic and egalitarian new system versus a system conserving the privileges that already exist (p. 69). The defining feature that enables the conservation of privileges is the social priority of making profit (p. 70). This priority must be deactivated to construct a superior social system. Enter the global social challenge that must be completed prior to 2050:

“Could one devise a structure that would give primacy to maximizing the quality of life to everyone (presumably the original Benthamite liberal ideal) while at the same time limiting and controlling the means of collective violence so that everyone felt relatively and equally secure in their person and enjoyed the widest possible range of individual options without threatening the rights of others (presumably the original John Stuart Mill ideal)?” (p. 70)

To achieve this, Wallerstein recommends rejecting remuneration (p. 71-76) in favor of “nonprofit productive enterprises” flanked by systems that will punish “true sloth and incompetence”. In addition, Wallerstein rejects meritocracy in its present form, accusing it of keeping racial, gender and cross-borders inequalities “stacked” and offering insufficient chances for the social system to truly adjust towards equality (p. 76-77). A better solution, he suggests, is to use a system whereby an employer picks employees randomly from a large middle tier of achievers and discards the minorities of top achievers and bottom achievers. This, Wallerstein says, would “drastically reduce institutionalized racism-sexism” (p. 78). A method of stopping a new privileged “nomenklatura” (bureaucratic class) emerging is to remove the economic rewards of participating in politics and enforce limited terms in office (p. 79). One can see from these forecasts that Wallerstein sees a role for a bureaucratic government in administrating the egalitarian post nation-state world, but believes it must have carefully designed democratic safeguards to maximize efficacy and decrease corruption. Interestingly, Wallerstein cites advances in information technology as the guarantor of true popular political participation in a much truer sense than what is observed in current “democracies” (p. 80). With regard to limited natural resources, Wallerstein expresses the idea that human creativity is a resource that has no limits (p. 82). Perhaps the most difficult barrier to Wallerstein’s hypothetical alternative world is something he cautioned us about earlier in the book. Namely, that an alternative system needs to be more than simply constructed: it also needs to achieve legitimacy, or it will fail (p. 4).

In terms of the efforts of the privileged side to preserve their privilege through the transition, Wallerstein’s view is that the habit of exercising caution in the face of global change simply reflects the view of the “better off” (p. 6). Those who have much to lose will tread carefully. Further, they cannot be reasoned with when we are trying to build a better order. Appealing to ethics won’t get them to surrender their privilege (p. 83). They will try to conserve their privilege using either repression or co-option by “giving away a small piece of the pie in order to save the rest” (p. 89). Any successor system that beneficiaries of the current system are allowed to devise would probably follow the “di Lampedusa Strategy” by co-opting “a lot of the terminology of the discontented”, e.g. it could be an ecology movement (p. 85) still aimed at conserving privileges.

Whatever the future holds, Wallerstein’s argument is that the stakes are high in this alleged period of transition. The disadvantaged section of the world, he argues, has “never been as badly off” relative to the privileged section of the world (p. 89). As the reader should be able to discern from this review, the analysis is “neither optimistic nor pessimistic” (p. 90), and it is not particularly pretty, but it aims to be useful and remains certainly worth consulting.

By Harry J. Bentham – More articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published at h+ Magazine on 4 September 2013

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Obama’s extremism spares no-one

. @hjbentham. #Iraq. #Syria. #imperialism. #aggression. #analysis.

If we look at its actions and its rhetoric, the Obama administration seems destined to make the same errors as the previous administration, this time in both Iraq and Syria.

Based on the same ominous neoconservative extremist rhetoric and ineffective diplomacy that characterized the shamed George W. Bush administration before it, the Obama administration’s Syria policy is maturing into a true disaster. The result is likely to be remembered as the downfall of the Obama administration, and the most significant moral and political defeat of the United States in the Middle East to date.

When trying to gather public support for his so-called “strategy” against the ISIL insurgent group, Obama anchored his military campaign in the ideas of neoconservative fantasists who led the US to disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. “This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven”, he said. This approach is based on ignorance of international law, and the construction of illegitimate “coalitions of the willing” – a bizarre brainchild of the Bush administration that we have seen resurrected in the so-called anti-ISIL coalition.

Step by step, every approach taken by the Obama administration towards the crisis in Syria has been negative, rooted in outright lies and fantasies, or at the very least based on a deeply flawed and propagandized analysis. We have now watched the US approach to the crisis in Syria deteriorate from the more nuanced position of supporting what were called “Arab Spring” uprisings, to the outright violent and offensive claim that crisis in Iraq and Syria will only be solved through overt US aggression. Let us not be shy about using the term “aggression”, as this is precisely what the US did when it threatened military force against Syria in 2013, and it is what we are seeing again in 2014.

The Obama administration’s façade of supporting popular forces in the region, as we saw broadcasted in the early days of the Syrian Conflict, when the extremist Takfiri violence was conflated with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, is gone. In its place, we are left with overt US threats to flatten everything and every faction in the region to rubble, in line with the neoconservative worldview that peace and security are reliant on the brute use of US military force to subjugate everyone. This is the same approach taken by the discredited Bush administration regarding Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. That aggression is continued by the executioner-President Obama, to the disadvantage of hundreds of thousands who still suffer for the sake of the US regime’s extremism and vendetta.

Little more than a year after the Obama administration failed to build a coalition to hide the true nature of its aggression against Syria in 2013, Obama has taken the even more destructive and callous position of threatening all sides in the now four-year old crisis. While ostensibly targeting ISIL in Syria, Obama has not only attacked the territory of Syria without any valid legal justification. He also threatened to “wipe out” and “overthrow” the Syrian government if it resists the US, escalating his violence to target the Syrian state if it attempts to keep its airspace closed to external aggression.

It must be reiterated that every US intervention into the conflict in Syria, without the United Nations Security Council’s approval, is an act aggression. The best understanding of the crime of aggression by the United Nations is based on Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the Charter, where the “threat or use of force” are both forbidden to be used against any state. The Charter of the United Nations therefore rules the “threat” of force as completely unacceptable in international relations, which means even the barbaric remarks by Obama and British PM Cameron about striking Syrian territory without permission by the host country are forbidden in the Charter.

For the last few months, the United States has claimed to stand by the legal understanding of aggression above, at least when it thinks Russia is the offender, due to its alleged role in supporting separatists on the territory of Ukraine. So, while the administration was discrediting Russia’s humanitarian arguments for delivering baby-food to the starving people of Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine, it was presenting the very same arguments to “wipe out” entire nations. To argue in turn that US citizens like Steven Sotloff were under threat and needed US military support is no good, since Russian citizens like Andrey Stenin were just as arguably in need of Russian military support at the same time in Ukraine.

As bizarre as it sounds, Obama’s reckless and wanton idea of threatening all sides to a conflict with attacks by US warplanes is not limited to senior warmongers in Washington, but is also consistent with the suggestions of senior British and French politicians. French President Francois Hollande, in August, described Syrian government forces as the “objective” allies of the so-called Islamic State, despite the fact that Syrian government forces are leading the offensive against the militants on the ground and continue to be the primary targets of IS attacks in turn. In an equally lethal display of comedy, senior UK MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who vocally called for bombing Syrian government forces in 2013, just as vocally called for bombing the other side in 2014. What this shows is an apparent need to blow someone up, but confusion as to who the target should be.

There are many ways that we can compare Obama’s erroneous policies to those of Bush. Arguably, Obama is trying to exploit public angst over the tragic deaths of US journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, just as Bush exploited public feelings after the 9/11 attacks to justify his military aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, while it is one thing to get a rush of public support at a time of mourning for lost American citizens, it is another thing entirely to maintain this support for a prolonged military aggression – especially as the bodies begin to mount due to this aggression.

US public opinion is a very faulty basis on which to model feasible military objectives, and relying on emotional excuses for involvement leads to a lack of politically nuanced objectives. Inability to calibrate military objectives to political ends always leads to “mission creep”, as the US fails to follow any concrete objective and is blown off course by random, emotionally highlighted events as they occur. The fact that the US public is willing to support some form of military action after the killings of US journalists does not, in the long-term, mean that the Obama administration is going to be remembered any more fondly than the Bush administration.

In the end, Obama’s hawkish eagerness to threaten both sides in Syria with punitive military strikes, while presenting no political solutions to the crisis, just bolsters the US’s vain image of itself as a military superpower, but leads to a de facto political defeat for the US. There is no contingency in which both sides to the conflict will be destroyed by the US military action and the US will be left in charge of Syria’s future. There is only the contingency in which the United States will be responsible for causing thousands of deaths, calibrated to meet no political objectives other than revenge for Sotloff and Foley’s deaths, before withdrawing from the region in shame once again.

The most obvious factor that has been surprisingly overlooked by many analysts is that US military intervention is seldom clean, especially when it relies solely on air power, and the primary victims of the US campaign against ISIL militants in Syria will surely be civilians. As the pictures of the dead and the dismembered circulate on social media, even the people who had staunchly opposed Assad will begin to call out Obama himself as an assassin and a hypocrite, and any State Department arguments for deepening intervention will collapse.

With the victims of Obama’s bombing of Syria most likely to be civilians, and more ISIL radicalization and recruitment likely to be byproducts of the aggression, where will these radicals vent their anti-American frustration? The people of Syria, in both government and militant-held areas, will most take out their anger on the US-backed “moderate” opposition, who will lose all moral standing and be recognized as the real killers of their own people. As a result of this, it is likely to be the “moderate” opposition and its US backers themselves, who will be most severely “degraded” and “dismantled” by Obama’s reckless and ill-conceived bombing of the country.

Another factor that has been ignored in a great deal of analysis is that the US is behaving no more morally than ISIL, and shares many of the same features as the terrorist group. Both are extremist, blinded by their rage and their obsession with revenge and vendetta. Both ignore the will of the people, insisting that their narrow and dogmatic ideology will prevail with the actions of a small, vetted vanguard of dedicated extremists in Syria. Both engage in extrajudicial executions and assassinations to further their aims, and try to justify these actions with their respective dogmatic and extremist ideologies. In sum, any objective analysis of the conduct of the US and the ISIL group would reveal they are equally immoral, equally extremist, and equally ignorant of the wishes of the Iraqi and Syrian peoples. Neither has a moral leg to stand on, they cannot compensate for this by making adversaries of one another.

All moves to intervene heavily in Syria will backfire on the United States in numerous ways, and bring the downfall of the administration’s Syria policy, just as the idiotic and groundless campaign in Iraq was the Bush administration’s downfall.

By Harry J. Bentham – More articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published at Press TV on 3 October 2014

Image via Twitter user dsmeek36.

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Cypherpunks (2012) – Book Review

. @WikiLeaks. @ORBooks. #Transparency. #Privacy. #Anonymous. #WikiLeaks.

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a fascinating series of conversations between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. While illuminating the political dangers of state “total surveillance” of the uploaded lives of the population of the entire industrialized world, the more positive case on the internet at the end of the book draws attention to the unprecedented level of popular influence and freedom it can still represent. For those who only go with a highly optimistic view of technology, Cypherpunks may cause disillusionment, but it also offers hope and a brilliant direction for incumbent technological change to be channeled. At the very least, this book enables those of you who consider yourselves to be “hackers” or to be striving for positive technological change in society to quickly know thine enemy. The book captures how hacking is the popular conquest of technology, while “centralization of technique” is the state conquest of technology for sustaining the power of a privileged few.

In stores prior to the disclosures of Edward Snowden in May 2013, the book nevertheless captures the awareness of the extensive nature of the surveillance yet unrevealed by Snowden at the time. The book’s concern seems to be that state political and economic abuses, particularly repression, unequal exchange and insider trading, will become rampant if government officials exploit their present information privilege (p. 4). While currently governments enjoy high privacy and citizens are made transparent by surveillance, instead the opposite ought to be enforced (p. 141-147). Going beyond the normal political spectrum, the book posits that both the state and powerful firms are enemies of our newfound technological liberation (p. 53-54).

The book considers how governments believe secrecy is needed for the sake of “slowing down processes to better control them” (p. 22). This kind of state thinking is an admission that states currently consider themselves too sluggish to keep up with popular technology and the popular wills expressed through it. Knowledge can be interpreted as the power to understand and effect change (p. 23).  States, which depend on borders, regard the internet as a horrible wound, and their vicious reactions to leakers resemble the throes of a fatally wounded beast. They are afraid of the popular “ability to affect government affairs by travelling to other countries, speaking to people, and spreading ideas.” The “most dangerous” thing that state authorities believe they are facing is that they can be popularly rejected and contradicted because of the information explosion (p. 113). However, the internet in politics can be seen as a double-edged sword for both sides, as it can be used to track down dissidents as well as criticize governments. One decisive point that deserves particular attention at our juncture in history is the simple observation of how, rather than it remaining the case that state technological advantages and monopolies are accepted as practical necessities by the public, those state advantages are increasingly only ever justified through a variety of paranoid and autocratic security narratives (p. 72).

In their horror at the newfound popular power of the internet, states want to bypass the war of information and seek the last-ditch defense of hardware dominance (p. 3). Perhaps they feel the urgency to control the ground upon which data centers rest. Yet, in spite of all their efforts, high “centralization of technique” is historically succeeded by “democratization of technique,” as more people are empowered by the historical flow of technology (p. 26-27). Everything rests on the way in which the technology exists and can be used, and inherent democratic properties and potentials in the technology itself can indicate inevitable democratization of the technique of using the technology.

The state retains control of many hackers by teaching a “cog in the machine” mentality (p. 36) to them. This goes against the current historical trend of the crisis of state social cohesion. Hackers, among tomorrow’s educated youth, reject the “nation”. The true trend is that the youth are becoming increasingly difficult to use as nationalistic automatons, and must directly be affected morally in order to compel them to do anything. They are more morally affected by their peers, who reject state authority, than they are by the state. This trend ought to be encouraged if technology is to move in the direction favorable to freedom.

Part of the war of position of the hackers is their encouragement of legislation to counter surveillance, as explained (p. 41-49). However, this is not possible unless in a small country where rulers can more easily be known to be violating their mandate and easily held accountable. In a larger country, it is far harder to know when legislation and treaties are violated by the government itself. Hacker culture is also part of the war of position, as transnational civil society has proven overwhelmingly sympathetic to the hacker activist element (p. 68). Cryptographic tools are the key option in the maneuver warfare of hackers to circumvent the prying eyes of states, because they subvert the ability of governments to threaten violence to stop information (p. 59-65). Violence cannot be used when the source of the information is unknown.

A fascinating observation shared by Assange is the fact that there seems to be only two kinds of escape from the “totalitarian surveillance society”. One is the path of the hackers (people who are trained and willing to take apart and understand systems to conquer them) and the other is the path of the neo-luddites (people who simply avoid communication technology to escape surveillance, but become politically irrelevant as a result) (p. 62-63). With the larger public, there could arise the problem of self-censorship, in which true political grievances go unexpressed because all people know they are being listened to and don’t want to be investigated or harassed (p. 65).

The end of the book looks beyond the apparent dystopia forming around us, to imagine a better world through free technology and information (p. 149-161). Most importantly, technology has a life of its own and can run free from the hands of the powerful and even its own creators:

“Technology and science is not neutral. There are particular forms of technology that can give us these fundamental rights and freedoms that many people have aspired to for long” (p. 151)

 Compare this with the fact that the political vision of the modern world has really always been in favor of liberty and equality. Nothing could be more foolish than to throw away an opportunity to impose those revolutionary images in the architecture of our world with technology. A free world requires free software and free access to technology (p. 152-153). We must make the world hacker-friendly, and the key to this is to win the war of opinion and education to create individuals who are both skilled and free thinkers with a strong ability to chastise the powers that be when they are behaving in an undemocratic way.  Making the world hacker-friendly could go beyond mere internet freedom to the real world, with 3D printing and other technologies to allow people to “build their own three-dimensional objects” (p. 153). This DIY technological world threatens to debase states and monopolistic firms in the world, which is why it is so necessary to win the popular battle of encouraging a decentralized culture which maximally values freedom.

Only a small amount of the book’s attention is paid to the human element in the fight for freer information and technology. However, hackers are characterized as being “away from our national identity” (p. 156) and have their own “common consciousness”. Transnational in nature, the democratic conquest of technology is necessarily something that must leave the current kind of state behind in the pages of history. More hopeful is the prospect that a generation of new political minds will arise who understand the internet and the democratization of technology, and know it is unstoppable and necessary (p. 157). In this sense, the web freedom controversy can be seen as a conflict between the global youth and the current old geopolitical states system. Perhaps those of us who wish to understand the future should regard the controversy in a non-emotional way as a necessary part of a historical social transition.

However, Assange considers the pessimistic scenario to be a far more likely outcome, and is more committed to cautioning people on the emerging technological dystopia than positing a utopia (p. 159). If the dystopia is certain, the only way to oppose it is through a “high-tech rebel elite” (p. 161) because only the hackers hold the key to lifting technologically-imposed injustice. Highlighting the most positive trend that could be taken by accelerating technological progress is the observation that global problems simply necessitate the global freedom of information enabled by the internet (p. 131). Thwarting this freedom could seriously hamper the ability of humanity to articulate and address their primary concerns or avert catastrophes of civilization. There must be a “self-knowing of human civilization” (p. 158), meaning that the world of the future must be a hacker’s world, occupied and led by those individuals who play with technology and, driven by their curiosity, truly conquer the machines our new world has been suspended upon. 

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham Originally published at h+ Magazine on 23 August 2013

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Book: Jacque Fresco's Designing the Future

. @TheVenusProject. @JacqueFresco .#futurology.

Jacque Fresco’s futurist book, Designing the Future which serves as something of an introduction the revolutionary Venus Project, is a manifesto for redesigning civilization itself.

Jacque makes a call for a renewed modernism: “The application of scientific principles, for better or worse, accounts for every single advance that has improved people’s lives.” However, the real aim of the Venus Project is the abolition of money, which is described by Jacque as nothing but a source of debt, servitude and other injustice.

The book elaborates an anti-war and one-world vision that is very difficult to oppose. Indeed, its statements reflect some of the most enlightened views in the world today, with its staunch opposition to nationalism. Conflict, Fresco states, “is now totally unacceptable and dangerous because of war’s extreme human and environmental costs.” Even more appealing is Fresco’s encouragement that we treat the world as an “interrelated system with all its people as one family.” This amounts to an open-borders and anti-militarist position that I think reflects the aspirations of some of the most desperate and mistreated people on Earth and could lead to a profound reduction of hostility for all (p. 4-5).

Jacque writes that we need “new outlooks and approaches” and we should “direct the future”. This is a call for everyone to get involved – not just the elite. He challenges us to think how we might organize the world, if it were up to us. Personally, I do not feel qualified to organize the world, although I do think we can all say what we don’t think should happen. The solution, Jacque writes, must be “free of bias and nationalism”, which translates to an acknowledgment that Nineteenth Century nation-states are well beyond their best-before date.

In recognizing that nation-states are obsolete, Jacque warns we should still avoid generating “bad feelings” (p. 6-7). Jacque forewarns that what he is advocating is a “difficult project requiring input from many disciplines”. This recognition of the academic side of what he is advocating makes me bring in another respected theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein, whose work has focused on “reconceptualizing” the world to understand things like nation-states and vast global inequalities as production relations.

In a way, I am fully onboard with what Jacque is advocating already. If we could reconceptualize global society at a more popular level, rather than purely at an academic level, our task would be somewhat similar to the popularization of science attempted by such people as Carl Sagan. Nations, within the global social system, are only fleeting entities. If we could get people to accept that interpretation of society, we would accomplish what Jacque Fresco is talking about, but it is hard. I consider my own anti-statist essays as a contribution in that direction, and I would encourage other commentators to do their part, using whatever rhetoric or teaching methods they think best.

Jacque puts forward the idea that the scientific method should be rigorously applied to avert some of the biggest killers in modern life, e.g. car crashes (p. 15-17). This is a fairly convincing case, and one that I think has not been advocated yet by any other theorist, so Jacque deserves a lot of credit for it. The way to achieve it would probably involve integrating the local authorities with scientific advisory boards and ethics committees. This would have the added benefit of creating nice jobs for a lot of the students who tend to be thrown into positions that do not let them fulfil their true potential. One could argue that there are already plenty of science committees influencing governments, but it is not unreasonable to advocate there should be more, and at more local levels.

Matching what many intellectuals have pointed out, Jacque says “technology is moving forward but our societies are still based on concepts and methods devised centuries ago”, calling out the “obsolete values” that still shape many countries (the US not least of all) (p. 9). Another grievance mentioned is the corporate takeover of government, as protested against by the #Occupy movements. There are, today, “common threats that transcend national boundaries”, e.g. hunger, natural disasters of the kind that UN agencies are already attempting to combat (p. 10).

One of Jacque’s ideas resembles extropy, as articulated by Kevin Kelly. He states, “The history of civilization is the story of change from the simple to the more complex” (p. 13-14). Change is the “only constant”, the biggest enemy of which is the people in power who have trade advantages over others and strong reasons to maintain the status quo.

The best side of Jacque’s book is found in the compelling images of future architecture and design solutions that would reflect an economy geared towards human needs rather than profit. At least some of these principles will almost certainly become a reality in the future (p. 29-44, 48-52). However, Jacque’s ideas can be attacked from many angles, and these make it hard to accept the abolition of money that is really the core of his thesis:

“A much higher standard of living for everyone all over the world can be achieved when the entire Earth’s resources are connected, organized, monitored, and used efficiently for everyone’s benefit as a total global system – not just for a relatively small number of people.”

The problem with the above is that it is advocating globalization as it already exists, but neglecting a very fundamental element of that globalization: financial globalization. It is harder to believe that we can connect the entire world together solely in terms of resources than that we can connect it together financially. It is likely that going back to resource-based disparity rather than money disparity would lead to a more localized and therefore tribal existence with states becoming more possessive over natural resources. This would not be consistent with globalization as we have seen it thus far.

Jacque expresses the view that rather than laws and ethical people (as envisaged since as far back as Aristotle), we only need “a way of intelligently managing the Earth’s resources for everyone’s wellbeing” (p. 18-21). He is of the school of thought that “when we look at things scientifically, there is more than enough food and material goods on Earth to take care of all people’s needs – if managed correctly” (p. 19). This is also a view articulated by Ramez Naam in The Infinite Resource (2013), and that I have responded to in the past. The only problem is, it isn’t true. There are almost no distinguished scientists and scientific bodies who have stated that there are enough resources as we currently understand them to support the expanding population. There are even some prominent scientific bodies like the Club of Rome and various committees warning about our dwindling resources, constantly stating the exact opposite of what Jacque and Ramez have stated.

As much as I agree with what Jacque is trying to accomplish, it is patently false to say that looking “at things scientifically” is the same as using the scientific method, or that the scientific methods leads to redistributing resources to support everyone. Most scientists would disagree with what Jacque is saying.  However, I am not arguing that they are right. I am arguing that we need to learn to tolerate how radical the idea of supporting everyone on the planet through the intelligent application of emerging technologies is, and how hazardous it could actually be. If we take the leap, we must wholeheartedly take any burdens and possible hazards into account as we do so. Humanity must know the risks, and not be persuaded to walk blithely towards something that still has so many unknowns.

Jacque lays out his case for abolishing all money. He gives 14 succinct grievances against the monetary economy that has been the norm for quite a few centuries. Most of these 14 points reiterate the same basic grievance that money enables people to be super-rich and others laden with debt, because… the rich people control it. However, in repeating these grievances against money and giving each of them more credit than they deserve, Jacque neglects the good points about money. It is still the only thing a lot of poor people have, and is the only way they can get their next meal.

It is not the unfair distribution of money, but the unfair distribution of resources, which keeps people and states poor or powerless. The rich are not rich because they have more money in their pockets, but because they physically control the resources that make money. They own keys to the factories and stockpiles. Rich states physically possess and control the world’s mineral wealth, and the labs where high-tech products are designed and tested. They use money merely as a way of throwing scraps to poor people where it would have been too inconvenient to give shares of their resources. So, if anything, money exists as a tool of remuneration to poor people, and would actually be a necessary component in any scheme to create more equality.

I, unlike Jacque, am what most people would call poor. If my money became worthless tomorrow, I would not be grateful. In fact, I would have few means of survival, and would wander the world begging for actual food and other resources from people and providers who are fortunate to possess a stockpile of resources. These providers in turn would wander the world begging for supplies, and other essentials they require to stay active. Therefore, the vacuum left by abolishing money would be more oppressive than any amount of debt, and it would also consume a lot more time and energy for everyone.

Not only would the abolition advocated by Jacque make life a lot more difficult for most poor people and businesses, but it would lead to the loss of a very basic source of dignity for the poor – the only medium with which they could actually buy and share resources. No matter how detrimental monetary greed can be, a poor man or business will always be grateful he can carry a wad of money around. He can’t pick up and carry a resource. One would hope that Jacque would at least try to overcome this terrible paradox of what is going to take the place of that money in a poor person’s hand, but he doesn’t. What is advocated instead is idealistic at best, and leaves one feeling hungry for the pizza that is probably never going to be delivered to your door by a drone if we really do get rid of money.

In fact, the form of remuneration posited by Jacque relies on “distribution centers” from which anyone can order an unlimited quantity of anything to their very door due to the unlimited capacity of the technology of the future (p. 76-78). If such a thing is inevitable from existing engineering trends, then we should be in awe of that technology, and not the Venus Project.

Something similar to the above occurs when Jacque states “Machines of the future are capable of self-replication and improvement, and can repair themselves and update their own circuitry.” Once again, this makes me ask, why then advocate Resource-Based Economy, if in the end we are always going to stand in awe of the machines and get unlimited free pizzas delivered to our doors anyway?

In a Resource-Based Economy, it is established there is no money, no credits, no debt, and no servitude. Here, “all of the world’s resources are held as the common heritage of all of Earth’s people” (p. 21). Unfortunately, the thing getting in the way of declaring our resources as a common heritage isn’t money, but the resources themselves. Just look how some states and firms have better resources than others, be it in the form of more high-tech facilities or more qualified personnel. One can’t just declare these people and things to be equally owned by all, or change their status in any significant way, by abolishing money, because they are still physically located in certain more advanced states (usually the US).

When it comes to how the RBE would manifest in practice, Jacque argues that all wealth and wellbeing should be based on immediate resources, such as water and fertile land. Unfortunately, this means areas with more resources would be better-off than those without, which takes us back to the problem already highlighted above.

Jacque says that increasing automation and peak oil are signs of “collapse” (p. 22), and that this collapse will provoke people to “lose confidence” in monetary economics. People will then turn to a global Resource-Based Economy as the solution. Unfortunately, this is not what usually happens in a collapse. In a collapse, people do not actually grasp at the most ideal solutions, never mind solutions prematurely based on future technologies. Just look at Iraq and Syria, where the failures of the state did not lead to a utopia but to a vacuum filled by pseudo-religious terrorist authorities.

The prediction that removing capitalistic competition by getting rid of money would result in the hippie-like outcome of peace and harmony (p. 69-76) is not convincing. If Christianity got one thing right, it is that humans are prone to sin. Even in a system with unlimited resources, there would be factionalism, security concerns, hoarding, vanity, greed, jealousy, power-mania, sex offenses, plain insanity and a plethora of other reasons for people to do evil. In sum, law enforcement and compliance would still be necessary.

Rethinking society is important, but the catalyst should be technology itself and the results spontaneous, rather than someone’s grand design. People should be in awe of the amazing things being made possible by nanotechnology and biotechnology, but they should be advocating that people invest in these technologies. Abundance is almost certainly going to rely on biotechnology, but there are many grievances against this field and promoting it might involve tolerating the directions taken by some large and rather controversial corporations.

Transhumanism differs from social design in that transhumanism is advocating the redesign of the human individual; a departure from our biological limits themselves as a way of escaping scarcity. Transhumanism is about maximizing the available choices and chances of survival of every human individual. We could go even further, and biologically re-engineer the world to access more resources, as I argued in my outlandish “terra-enhancement” article.

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham Originally published at h+ Magazine on 19 August 2014

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