Mark Higginson

Reports are that Tony Blair, once Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, convert to Catholicism and warlord will be taking a job at Louis Vuitton. Tanya Gold says of the man:

The Copenhagen summit on climate change is drawing to a close, an exercise in legitimation for the world’s governments. The facts of climate change are but one strand to a wider problem that goes beyond any kind of agreement on the tricky issue of emissions. The root cause of the worsening state of the environment on which we depend is too many people consuming too much. It is in our nature to reproduce; it is in our nature to be ambitious and acquisitive beings. The debate stops abruptly at the point where those labelled as various stripes of green advocate a radical reorganisation of our entire global society and everyone else stays in denial, either by simply ignoring the problem or getting angry at what should by now be obvious. None of these people are helping.

The juggernaut of our collective manifest destiny that is lurching to this precipice for our species goes way, way back. Back before access to abundant energy in the form of oil caused our present population spike. Back as far as when we first began to spread across the planet and started to change the environment we inhabited to make survival a little easier, day-to-day and generation-to-generation, unable to have the foresight to understand that eventually this would have far-reaching consequences.

It has become a serious problem since the exploitation of abundant and accessible sources of energy in the 19th century was responsible for an explosion in human population numbers, a growth rate of such rapidity and enormity that 150 years later the species is left in what looks to be an increasingly precarious situation. We have an economic and political situation that is reliant on finite resources for growth, but encourages such growth in the face of irrefutable logic that counsels otherwise. The debate around the effects of human beings on their environment is pressing yet is at a level that seems absurdly myopic to the key feature of our predicament, one of too many people. It doesn’t matter whether we become more efficient at using what we have, or whether we develop new technology to deal with problems we’ve already caused. If the population keeps growing, or even if it stabilises at some future point, the consequences are still the same as we can expect the majority of people to desire ever higher standards of living in the form of the ability to overconsume.

Those who haven’t got past the primitive notions of religious tenets as a meme for tribal survival most frequently advocate unfettered expansion, an attitude that belies a hideous cruelty to those not fortunate to be born in the wealthier parts of the world. The crunch, when it comes, will be felt by those least able to afford it. But what of the more enlightened movements of our age? How do they perceive this problem?

One way to get a rough idea of the priority with which mainstream pressure groups view a particular topic is to perform a site restricted search on Google for the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘overpopulation’.

The keywords ‘climate change’ appear together over 27,000 times across these 8 sites. ‘Overpopulation’ in the context of human overpopulation is mentioned a total of 4 times. This looks like not so much a case of emphasising one issue over another but of deliberately ignoring a major issue that is seen as problematic to address. Government isn't interested and neither are human rights groups, despite population size being a significant pressure on resources.

Greenpeace: climate change (6,480) / overpopulation (0,001)
Oxfam: climate change (6,150) / overpopulation (0,000)
Friends of the Earth: climate change (4,490) / overpopulation (0,002)
WWF: climate change (4,130) / overpopulation (0,000)
defra: climate change (2,860) / overpopulation (0,001)
People and Planet: climate change (2,590) / overpopulation (0,000)
Amnesty International: climate change (633) / overpopulation (000)
Green Party: climate change (511) / overpopulation (000)

Greenpeace UK’s tagline is: “Providing solutions is just as important as identifying problems”. Except when the problem is so massive and unpalatable to a donation-funded pressure group they’d rather ignore it. The same goes for Friends of the Earth: “Making life better for people by inspiring solutions to environmental problems”. Friends of the Earth mention ‘overpopulation’ on their site four times, excluding forum mentions, with two mentions being directly relevant. One is a motion to the board from September 2008 from a local group calling for “the promotion of the stabilisation, and ultimately the reduction, of the human population; both within the UK and, via the Friends of the Earth International network, globally, in line with depleting natural resources”. The motion was denied. The reason for the denial was the same as given in the other mention which is part of their FAQs. The reason given is that they do “not believe that population growth is the main cause of environmental pollution. The richest 20% of people consume 86% of the Earth's resources and have the lowest birth rates”. Incredible. Their reasoning is therefore that we have to reduce consumption, which I would argue requires not only a complete change in the way global society presently operates but a complete change in human consciousness. I am not saying I don’t find this desirable; it is more that I think it highly unlikely to happen.

These groups would ask that you do not stick your head in the sand over the issues they care about yet are quite happy to ignore the size of the human population as having anything to do with the issues they supposedly wish to solve.

We can conclude that these groups will only push things so far. They are happy to accept financial support from their members to campaign on issues sufficiently abstract that it does not require change to the lifestyle or thinking of the general populace. Recommending actual solutions such as changing your diet or choosing not to have children will not be contemplated as a position that will prove acceptable to the continuing survival of the organisation. If this is the best we can expect from campaigning groups then the chances of most of the population alive today surviving and perpetuating themselves are vanishingly small. None of this is about ‘saving the planet’. It has always been about ‘saving ourselves from ourselves’. The Earth will endure even if we pass.

The human mind represents the pinnacle of evolved information processing ability in the universe; from the big bang to big brains. The destiny of such a feat of complexity does not lie in the drudge labour of hand-to-mouth survival or of a ghastly fate from preventable disease, nor should it fall prey to petty ideological squabbles or a poverty of imagination as to the path we travel through our days. The challenge we face in our time is to elevate our perception not to raise the population. That necessity is obviously long gone, the aberration of our recent explosion in numbers would be horrifying if we could perceive it over a longer timeframe than the snapshot our threescore and ten grants us. Irony of ironies, the very act that once ensured the survival of the species now edges it closer to destruction.

Good post on Bristling Badger about the weasel words being used regarding attempts to reach some sort of agreement to manage climate change and the futility of such agreements under the present system:

"An economy based on growth will increase total consumption and so rapidly eat up any carbon savings from reducing 'carbon intensity'. Basing any agreements on carbon intensity is a guarantee that we will not reduce carbon emissions."

In other news oil is on the up-and-up and nearing $80 a barrel. A leak from 'whistleblowers' at the International Energy Agency say that their reassurances that global production can reach 105m barrels a day is impossible; in fact we're past peak and the ongoing fabrication is due to a desire not to trigger panic on the markets. The UK government bases its energy policy on figures from the IEA. In other words successive administrations would rather make believe the problem doesn't exist and pay this ever-growing elephant-in-the-room forward. You can download a report from the UK Energy Research Centre that says there is a significant risk of terminal decline in production before 2020.

Between climate change and our out-of-control use of energy use we're about to hit ever more interesting times. Preparedness will be essential in the years ahead.

Read this post entitled Entropy Gets No Respect over at The Archdriuid Report. It sums up the way it is and why we don't talk about it. We need to face truths such as these collectively, moreso now than ever before. A great post and well worth your time and consideration.

"The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future. Fossil fuels are not renewable resources in any time frame accessible to our species. Every barrel and ton and cubic foot of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; despite an orgy of handwaving, no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend."

I read on Schnews and Corporate Watch that the Big Green Gathering has been bailed out of its financial difficulties by a joint venture involving "AEG - the largest sports and entertainment corporation in the US, owning arenas, cinemas, newspapers and sports teams". It reminded me of what was said in The Rebel Sell about the counterculture being the vanguard of capitalism. The Big Green Gathering say that they:

"... developed organically in response to a desire from people within the green movement for a festival that was focused on Green issues. Now we have somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people expected this year. Staying Green is now a bigger challenge than ever."

Quite. I'm reminded of something the character Cayce Pollard says in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition:

"It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does." "And then?" "I point a commodifier at it." "And?" "It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed."

Which brings me onto this scene that I witnessed today:

The village green of the 21st century

Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is not some visual trickery at work. This photograph actually shows people sitting in deckchairs on a piece of artificial turf on a sunny day in the middle of Brighton. It causes my brain to disengage and spin uncontrollably. This is some weird copy-of-a-copy where there was an error in the duplication process so all we're left with is this ersatz thing that has had all meaning removed. I actually saw a flyer the other week advertising events happening in this location; a place where I'm entirely unclear as to whether it is a public space or private land on which the public are permitted to roam between chain coffee shop, chain hotel, chain cocktail bar, chain sushi restaurant and chain grocery store. You can see another chain logo reflected in the monolithic front of the library, which I suppose is intended to define this 'public' rather than commercial abomination in the middle of the North Laine that is without trees, grass or any pleasing natural form. We've not only sacrificed the places where we once gathered together but have also sacrificed our very ability to gather together freely.

I had been looking for a way into discussing what is defined as ‘social media’ when I encountered this funny post in which the author alludes to its panoptical nature. It provoked a lot of rattling of cell bars in the comments though no one recognised that the problem lies in the definition itself. In this shared reality people ‘go and do stuff on the web’. In the parallel world of marketing these people may or may not be described as ‘participating in social media’. It has been defined as:

"... a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues into dialogues... the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content or consumer-generated media."

Similar to this argument that the web is neither subject nor object we should question our acceptance of the idea that ‘social’ is part of the fabric of the ‘media’ itself rather than an outcome of the discourse it provokes. The definition is based on the presupposition that, in the context described, conversation ("monologues", "dialogues") is part of a power relationship ("democratization") in which currently the discussion is owned ("consumer-generated"). The implication is that this social technology places the means of production in the hands of content creators; the only other form that may exist being that of professional operations ("publishers"). This is a capitalist fantasy of how the social dynamics of the web function. Before the term was used by a groups of experts, was contributing to forums, newsgroups, using IRC or sending group emails social media? Was participating on Plastic back in the distant days of 2001 social media? How about chatting with friends? Or painting on the wall of a cave? Here’s my alternate definition:

"The monitoring of comment and opinion on the web by power elites for the purposes of reporting and response with the goal of altering the perception surrounding the interests of the organisation concerned."

Why the difference? Well, if you consider what the first definition is trying to describe then nothing has actually changed apart from the fact that what is loosely called ‘conversation’ can now be interrogated through the use of technology as part of a permanent and ever-expanding dossier on people’s opinions. Evidence for justification of this use of social technology is to be found in the language used; definitions are being created by self-appointed gatekeepers to knowledge who understand that this perception management can be geared towards attaining ‘competitive advantage’ for their clients and themselves and that in this context this is being driven by the profit motive. Take this chap, a self-described “evangelist of social media”, and his identification of this issue:

"How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior... corporations whose main motivation is not in service of 'customer empowerment' but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet."

Customer empowerment is one and the same as market share in the larger scheme of things. He can’t see beyond this, thinking our defining role in society is as consumers, confused as to which side of the bars he is actually on. This artificial distinction that is called social media by its proponents could more accurately be seen and described as an attempt to form a social technocracy via the co-option of ideas that define a framework that already exists, that people are widely aware of and is determined to be suitable for manipulation, i.e. the web. To further the achieving of this goal it is useful to question the 'nature of the thing', not to develop the 'thing' per se but to give it a discrete integrity that then allows the testing of the boundaries that presently define it, e.g. referencing The Enlightenment is an attempt to give it both a historicity and a validity for the purposes of advancing the overarching agenda.

Update: I am sobbing quietly. Responsibility rests with this post entitled: Social Media is the New Punk. There is a hideous video with sound and everything. I rest my case.

2 original comments:

Terrif post. I think you’re talking along the lines of the extraction of surplus value and the harnessing of mass intellect Marky Marxist.
I recommend that you have a look at the work of Adam Arviddson. Quite a few of his papers online.
He doesn’t write explicitly about social meed, but I think much of his argument about branding is very relevant here.
Comment by Chloe — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

Thank you for the comment; it was your fantastic Bruno Latour post that set me thinking about this. I will go and look up Adam Arviddson immediately while I’m still occupied with these ideas.
Comment by Mark — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

Terrible article over on The Guardian about the recent protests in London. Not only is it poorly written it reveals the insulting contempt those in power have for the right to protest. No great surprise as any act of protest is, of course, a challenge to their 'legitimate' authority. So bad is this article I've actually had to pull it apart as there are too many points to easily roll into a neat flowing post.

"Untrained officers must never again be put in the frontline of policing public protests… some inexperienced officers, who were clearly quite scared, used ‘inappropriate force’."

Define 'untrained'. Untrained to do what? Deal with members of the public? Deal with a large crowd? This notion of inexperience is a get-out, pure and simple, to put the blame on an understandable human reaction such as fear to explain what were pre-determined police tactics to suppress dissent.

"Their inquiry also calls for the police to seriously consider whether they can continue with the use of tactics such as kettling and the controlled use of force against those who appear hostile..."

What the hell does "seriously consider" mean? Surely the police should be told that the use of kettling against citizens who are exercising their democratic rights is illegal as is the  meting out of pre-meditated beatings to anyone who is thought to deserve it. Unfortunately this segment is not a direct quote and demonstrates the problems with relying on a journalist's take on what has been said.

"... film footage of those incidents shocked the public and have the potential to undermine trust in the police... the ability of the public... to monitor every single action of the police through... mobile phones and video equipment means they have to take even greater care to ensure that all their actions are justifiable."

Here's the nub of the issue. Up until fairly recently it was common for the media to report on protests by quoting the police as saying one thing and the 'organisers' saying another, e.g. the often wildly differing accounts of the number of individuals involved in a demo. This makes it easy to obscure the truth of what went on under the weight of tit-for-tat claims. Video footage of stony-faced officers dressed in riot gear using the edges of their shields to smack people in the face who can't move due to the crush of the crowd doesn't need a few hundred words of copy from some paid hack to muddy the waters of what actually happened. That said, the ability of the public to watch the watchers shouldn't be the determining factor in ensuring that the police don't abuse their power.

"The MPs repeat their belief that there are no circumstances in which it is acceptable for police officers not to wear their identification numbers and urge those who consciously remove them to face the strongest disciplinary action."

So, how many investigations are in progress regarding such incidents? How many officers have ever been disciplined for removing their numbers? Is it a tactic that a blind-eye is turned towards or are certain officers advised to do so by their superiors? What does "consciously remove" mean anyway; is 'forgetting' to wear your numbers therefore an acceptable excuse? The language used in this article makes it sound suspiciously like this MPs inquiry has precisely no power to get the police to do much of anything.

"He (Commander Bob Broadhurst) said there were 2,500 officers who had only two days of public order training a year and the vast majority of whom had never faced a situation as violent as the G20 protest before."

Are we to simply accept without challenge his assessment that this was a violent situation and that such violence as occurred was not as a result of police tactics such as kettling? Apparently so.

"Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary is considering whether to endorse a 'human rights-based' approach to policing advocated by Sir Hugh Orde, the incoming chief of the Association of Chief Police Officers."

This says it all. Yes, I would consider that the police, who are there to serve the public, should base their approach on the ways it is decent and proper to treat reasonable people who are going about their lawful business. The worst of it is that amid the death of one person and the beating of others the actual issue of that day doesn't even warrant a mention. Which is all very convenient for MPs who would rather not debate why it is thousands of people are out on the streets demonstrating.

Update: The article referred to above makes it pretty clear that the Police would like to blame  inexperience for their use of violence. This article says that:

"The officer under investigation over the death of Tomlinson was a constable with the force's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the specialist unit used at protests. The officer under investigation for assaulting two women at the protests, including protester Nicola Fisher, was a TSG sergeant."

Ah. So they weren't inexperienced, untrained officers who meted out the worst violence we heard about on the day then? They were in fact members of the Territorial Support Group, which, according to Wikipedia, replaced the Special Patrol Group, members of which allegedly beat an Anti-Nazi League protestor to death in 1979 during a demonstration. Some might say this an unfortunate parallel. I would say that this quote from the aforementioned Wikipedia article sums it up:

"One ex-Metropolitan Police officer suggested that TSG members, 'spend (their) days waiting for action and far too many officers join seeking excitement and physical confrontation'. Some officers are ex-military personnel and these are 'the worst bullies' as 'the laws of the battlefield are not appropriate to the streets of our capital'."

Surely this is one of those cases where actively wanting the job should disqualify you from getting to do it. Much like MPs in fact.

The fact we may find this unpalatable says more about our modern sensibilities than about our forebears.

"Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them."
Fernando Rozzi, Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique

Why not? Just because to our eyes Neanderthals look like us is not to say that earlier Homo sapiens didn't see them as food. If you eat meat you should be prepared to eat any meat, not just the creatures we've stupefied for the purpose. Why is the eating of cow or a pig any more acceptable than dolphin or human? The article refers to the eating of Neanderthals as the socially taboo act of cannibalism. Perhaps we owe the Great Leap Forward that happened around this time to our ancestors eating brains; this act ringing down the millenia in our collective unconscious as our fear of zombies risen to devour us as the Neanderthal was hunted by hungry humans. Comments on this over on BoingBoing.

1 original comment:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1535
Comment by Joe — 10 June, 2009 @ 10:52 pm

The Guardian reported that the Metropolitan Police said protests on 1st April would be "very violent" and that they were:

"... up for it, and up to it."
Metropolitan Police, quoted in The Guardian, 27th March 2009

There I was thinking that their role was to protect the public, not to take on an antagonistic stance which could be argued leads to an attitude where you perceive the people you serve as 'the enemy'. When you give a person power with the knowledge they almost certainly won't have to answer for their actions, give them a club,  a mask and turn them loose on the streets there are likely to be terrible consequences. This video shows Ian Tomlinson being assaulted from behind by a police officer. He died minutes later.

Update: here is an excellent post that puts the above in the wider context of police tactics.

1 original comment:

Spot on Mark.
We have witnessed our human rights get stripped off of us in the last 20 years or so and up until Obama brought some sense into the US, our governments were routinely using so called evidence gathered during torture sessions to convict people behind closed doors and without access to legal representation.
The (Met) Police never seem to learn that we pay their salaries and hence they are ultimately answerable to we the People. Steven Lawrence & Ian Tomlinson RIP.
To end on a positive note: at least we live in a society where we can expose the underbelly of the Beast.
Comment by Ifraz — 23 April, 2009 @ 10:05 am