Babak Fakhamzadeh
A short history of the reintroduction of the military in Brazilian politics, from the end of the dictatorship to today. Mixing this factual history with the deeply personal experiences of some of those who saw their family killed as ‘collateral damage', the book is almost like a literary painting of the current state of Brazilian political affairs.
I read the book in Portuguese, which means my observations might be a bit disjointed.
Brazil's presence in Haiti, leading the UN peacekeeping force, for about a decade from 2003, was the testing bed for deploying the military for similar ‘peace keeping' missions within Brazil's borders.
The book primarily details how bad an idea it is to deploy the military within a country's own borders, supposedly to fight crime. The army is not trained to resolve conflict, they are trained to eliminate threat. Add to that, that excesses are not dealt with in civil courts, and that Brazil has historically leaned towards authoritarian rule and suffered decades of military dictatorship, which too many still fondly think back on, it's perhaps a surprise that there have been not many more excesses as a consequence of the ‘pacification' projects in Brazil's favelas.
It's easy to discuss this recent history in abstract fashion, but an intellectual discussion obfuscates the deeply personal tragedies of the murders, accidental, collateral, or not, perpetuated by the military forces on a population that might be caught in a crossfire, or is intentionally targeted without justification.
This is not to say these interventions were a complete failure, particularly initially.
But as, over time, caution was let go of, military action became more brazen, efficiency lagged, and increased conflict led to more unnecessary violence and death.
These interventions, ‘pacification', in Brazil's favelas, were triggered by preparations for the arrival of both the World Cup Soccer and the Olympics. In part seeking meaning, finding it in pacification within, and outside of, Brazil's borders, top brass whetted their appetite for increased political influence, augmented by widespread misogyny, put in overdrive with the arrival, and eventual removal, of Dilma Rousseff as president of Brazil.
Where Rousseff tried to limit military influence in politics, her successor Temer, who agreed to move judicial cases against military action to military, not civil, court, and Bolsonaro, himself formerly of the military, welcomed more military presence.
It's perhaps too early to tell, particularly as next year Brazil will undergo another round of national elections, but a picture emerges where it appears that the top layers of Brazil's military machine seem reasonably happy with their current levels of influence.
They're not too keen on Bolsonaro, they're not too keen to take more of a center stage, while also pushing for reinstating more conservative and ‘Brazilian' values, mirroring the kinds of policies pushed by, say, right-wing European politicians.
With their increased influence and control, however, it will be very difficult to limit the political influence of the Brazilian military, moving forward
This copy started with introductions to the three sections, antisemitism, imperialism, totalitarianism, written some 15 years after initial publication, of which the first two are very difficult to unpack, for all it's assumed knowledge and rather obscure (in 2021) references.
The third introduction, on totalitarianism, is easier to follow, but Arendt's preliminary analysis of China, before the annihilation of Chinese culture during the cultural revolution, is dated and inadequate.
The first claim of the book is that antisemitism at the end of the 19th century coincided with the decline of nationalism and the decrease of importance of the nation state, through the rise of the pan movements.
Though antisemitism grew while Jews had lost most of their political power, Arendt addresses the justification of antisemitism through Jews having been the typical scapegoat of history, antisemitism benefiting the Jewish community, with no nation-state of their own, to shape its identity.
Arendt states that Jews were ‘naturally' in a position to provide credit to states, with their ‘age old experience as money lenders', creating first a select group of privileged Jews in Europe, eventually extending this perceived position to all Jews. Apparently. Naturally?
Arendt then states that with the European attempt at societal equalisation, Jews not only managed to preserve a certain privilege through their position as money lenders, they also actively avoided being absorbed in existing classes, maintaining being identifiable as a group.
As financial needs of states grew, Jewish lenders became just peers amongst a broader group, their perceived unity remained, creating an image of apparent wealth without actual influence, per Tocqueville, the masses tolerate the wealthy, if they are in control. With their waning control, they became more despised (and possibly why the wealthy seek political control).
(For Arendt claim that Jews were the only ‘non-National European people'. Gypsies, Sami, Basque would like a word.)
Arendt posits late 19th century antisemitism as the combination of the petit bourgeois feeling abused by Jewish money lenders and the elite finding a convenient scapegoat in the Jews, for them losing their privileged position. Though how this convinces the masses, Arendt does not explain.
She also claims that social discrimination against Jews evolved due to the growing social equality of Jews.
(Arendt puts an interesting shift in Jewish interests at the turn of the previous century, when Jewish heirs successfully moved from banking, into media and entertainment circles, while fostering their international connections and using that as a direct asset for success.)
(An extensive analysis of the Dreyfus affair feels terribly archaic.)
Arendt‘s second part deals with imperialism, where she claims that this evolved from when the ruling class under capitalist production processes came up against national limitations in its economic expansion.
(She uses a kind of true-Scotsman fallacy that only modern-day imperialism is imperialism. The British, Dutch, Mongols, Romans all rejoice.)
Either way, Arendt points out that what was fairly unique is that political expansion followed economic expansion, not the other way around and makes a seemingly more dubious claim that the rise of imperialism was the direct consequence of the capitalist struggle due to declining growth at home. Didn't the industrial revolutions in Europe provided immense growth?
Arendt's overarching point is that imperialism was the political rule of the bourgeoisie, which I might reluctantly accept, though also can't really find a stunning insight.
Foregrounding economics as a driver for expansion, politics became infused with economic thought, and the necessity for the protection of economic interests became the driver for political security, facilitating capitalism as the driving force for societal development on a political level.
And if a political establishment derived its authority from exerting power, they can only retain their authority by continuing to exert power; it is in their need to expand their powers and seek conflict, anywhere.
Not Arendt's claim, though she refers to it often, is that the export of capital, in the run up to imperialism, favours an imperialist policy, hence the distinction between politics at-home and abroad. Then, big capital and the mob are perfect bedfellows; the first for seeking excessive expansion, the latter for being able to pursue opportunity denied at home, bringing together, in imperialism, the objectives of the financial elite, and the marginalised masses.
(On South African history, Arendt states that South Africa became the first example of what happens when the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital, also meaning that race always trumps ‘rational labor' and production policies.)
Next is discussion of the Pan-Germanic and Pan-Slavic movements as prelude to German and Russian hegemony before and after the Second World War.
Arendt points out that these, focused on the continent as opposed to overseas, did not attract business men, nor adventurers, were therefore primarily ideological, and more so run by the mob as opposed to economic interests of an elite, while also based on race theories.
Austria-Hungary, home to Germans and Slavs, become the centre for both movements, both angling for its destruction.
(With the abolishment of royalty, the state is captured by the nation, for its members to identify with.
If true, states without a monarch should be more racist.)
Arendt follows with that the pan movements' shift to anti-semitism was due to their fear that it was not them, but the Jews, as per their own long standing thinking, and successful state-less history, were the chosen people of god.
She observes that Russia and Austria, at the time, were states ruled by decree, not by law. Anonymous by nature, this, by design, results in continuous contradictions, without coherent structure, and, by design, creates Kafkaesque constructions.
Next, Arendt discusses the consequences of the First World War, where the League of Nations and its minority treaties evoked the displeasure of minority peoples who were left without a state, or not granted even minority rights. As a consequence, a Congress of National Groups (insignificant after 1933) was formed, where nation, not nationality, was the binding factor.
States defined along national lines, saw the creation of the stateless, and the more neutral term ‘displaced persons', struggling to assimilate. As a consequence: “The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law [that is, deprived of human rights] is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime”, which moves them to within the scope of the law.
Then, Arendt discusses human rights, supposedly inalienable, but also proven to be unenforceable when concerning the stateless: Hitler carefully assured that no one claimed Jews as their own, before challenging their right to live.
Human rights are a very human constructs: “we are not born equal, we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.”
On totalitarianism, Arendt argues that individual totalitarian leaders are easily forgotten, but warns that this does not mean the masses are easily cured of totalitarian tendencies; as totalitarian behaviour fosters adaptability, and the absence of continuity, forgotten leaders are a feature of totalitarianism.
Arendt argues the masses are indifferent, without a common goal, apolitical. A direct consequence would be that these masses are not persuaded by political arguments.
Then, by not actively participating in politics, or by not being able to actively participate, citizens do not feel personally, and individually, responsible for political consequences.
Apt: “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships”, with Stalin purposefully pursuing the individualisation, compartmentalisation, of society, in order to ease totalitarian control.
In the balance between propaganda and indoctrination, totalitarian movements use propaganda for outsiders, indoctrination, and terror, for those that need to be controlled.
Using 'science' as justification, a totalitarian ruler presents the future as facts, a natural consequence of scientific principles. Not only will they tell you what they will do and what will happen, presenting this as the only thing that can happen, establishes an inevitability that is beyond discussion.
Meanwhile, secret societies, and totalitarian propaganda, focus on hidden truths, layers and ritual: “They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations.”
(Offhandedly, Arendt observes that the reason the allied forces had such a hard time finding Nazi sympathisers after the war was due to the extensive internalisation of the Nazi mindset; because Nazi propaganda and policy was so internalised, few consciously associated with it as a movement.)
As for the structure of the totalitarian state, society is organised in a kind of collection of concentric circles, with, moving outward, each group being more connected to the outside world, each tier cushioning the next tier from the previous tier, ideologically.
She then makes a distinction between dictatorial and totalitarian leaders; totalitarians identify with all aspects of the state apparatus, where no layer can accept critique. A dictator can offload responsibility on a subordinate, in a totalitarian environment, all bureaucrats are extensions of the leader, which also means they are absolved from any responsibility.
Meanwhile, gullibility and cynicism are essential ingredients to the functioning of a totalitarian system. The further from the leader, the more gullibility, the closer the more cynicism.
Through this, the leader is always right, there's always a hidden justification, the details only known to the great leader.
Arendt argues that totalitarianism needs to continuously pursue world domination, as no alternative exists; totalitarian is not total if it applies to only one country.
Another necessity is the constant wrong-footing, through obfuscated power structures, in order to avoid uncontrollable shifts of power; “real power begins where secrecy begins”.
(Authority aims at restricting freedom, totalitarianism aims at abolishing it. Under authoritarianism, there is divulging of control, under a totalitarian system, control needs to stay with the leader.)
(Arendt mentions a method of the KGB's predecessor of establishing graphs of connections between different types of people, she points out that if these graphs could be perfected, they could serve as a tool to completely obliterate individuals without a trace, as if they had never existed at all.)
Concentration and destruction camps are integral to totalitarianism. Terror enforces oblivion. Also, incarcerations need to be enacted for no clear reason, the randomness integral to their inability to fight the system, as it precludes the possibility to develop a legal identity based on which action can be formulated and camps be regulated and their effect diminished.
It is the objective to annihilate the moral and juridical person, after which the destruction of individuality, and spontaneity follows: “Those who aspire to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity”
In the final chapter, Arendt makes the case that totalitarianism is a form of government different from all types described before. It does not attempt to define a closed set of law, it operates completely outside of defined law.
Totalitarianism requires total explanation; it becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn, insisting on a' truer' reality instead; as they have no power to transform reality, they achieve emancipation of thought from experience through methods of demonstration.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
“Terror can rule absolutely only over man who are isolated against each other. [...] isolated men are powerless.”
“What prepared men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness (not contributing to society, as opposed to isolation), once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” The absurdist but attempting-to-be brutally consistent logic of totalitarianism then can seem like a welcome escape.
Generally speaking, it's no surprise Arendt is immensely insightful. But, also, often she just rambles on, while several sections are lost in the obscurity of time and feel irrelevant. And, too often, she posits claims as evident truths, which they not always are (anymore?).
At times, Arendt's generalisations, in the face of denouncing the generalisations of other scholars, can be annoying. Like “if [Jews] showed a preference for monarchical governments as against republics, it was because they suspected that republics were based on the will of the people, which they mistrusted”.
Impressively prescient, written some 70 years ago, as to the dominance of capitalism, particularly ‘ad men', in controlling society.
And, also impressively, contains the first mentioning of now widely accepted English words like “soyaburger”, “R and D”, “muzak” as a generic term, and “survey”, in the sense of carrying out a poll.
But, the novel is also a product of its time; the characters are flat, practically impossible to relate to, operate on nonsensical incentives and through hopelessly outdated gender-roles.
The book could have been stellar if the storyline and characters had been much more fleshed out. Even today, the narrative would have an excellent shot at, say, a 10 part miniseries made for television. But, in its shortened form, and its archaic context, the story raises just too many odd questions.
For me the biggest one being why the lead character was not killed, but instead his death was faked, and he clandestinely transported across half the world to be forced to work under a system of modern day slavery (modelled on the working practices of the United Fruit Company based on which the term ‘Banana Republic' was coined).
Written in 1974, Nourse's description of a future some 40 years ahead, is, at times baffling spot-on, though, in the same way as Philip K. Dick can be, sometimes wildly off the mark, particularly in the advances of technology; cars fly, but it's still mainframes that need to be booked to make complex calculations. Meanwhile, sophisticated members of society smoke pipe, and, a doctor specifies he is ‘in', by flipping a physical marker next to the entrance of his office. State agencies can drill a hole through your floor to put a visible, but small, listening device in your room, but pervasive surveillance is non-existent.
That said, this is the kind of retrofuturism that can produce fascinating literature.
Nourse, though on quite a bit of fire in the first half of the novel, seems to want to be done with the story, roughly after the halfway point. As with much ‘good' sci-fi, Nourse investigates how society can be radically different as a consequence of small, credible, but far-reaching change.
In this case, it's the effective introduction of draconian eugenics laws, as a consequence of an ageing society and the prevalence of pandemic spreads and the need for comprehensive healthcare. Indeed, particularly now, with the COVID pandemic still a major problem throughout the world, Nourse unwittingly had the opportunity to be surprisingly prophetic. However, sadly, the second half of Nourse's book is an anticlimactic, formulaic and boring, finish to an excellent start.
Highly entertaining, fast-paced, gritty, I picked up this book because I was looking for authors influenced by the ideas of the Situationists.
Manchette's leftist views seep through in several locations of the story. Even if it's not totally clear what the point of these are, within the frame of the story, they add an interesting colour to the narrative.
Perhaps due to the Situationist plot, somewhat akin perhaps to the type of rollercoaster not quite unlike a story like Pulp Fiction, on a small number of occasions, I found the lead character's actions and decisions to be surprisingly unlikely. Most particularly, when he, married with two kids, disappears for a year, while not leaving France.
One surprising realisation, while reading ‘Three to Kill', were the similarities, in style, with Philip K. Dick's. In Dick's novels, often, too, protagonists are the victim of circumstance, stumbling from one situation to the next.
And, as in this novel by Manchette, Dick's women are often not very well fleshed out, serving more as scenery, as opposed to actors in their own right.
Nevertheless, ‘Three to Kill' is a thoroughly entertaining, cinematic, easy to read novel, by an author infused with strong leftist ideals, where these ideals at times pleasantly seep into the storyline.
Their lives and activities so filled with scandal upon scandal, many not too publicly known some four years ago, many having come to light in the intervening years, it is truly amazing that the Trump family and their surrogates are, mostly, still standing.
For the Kushners and Trumps, the book is essentially a biography of their business dealings, showing how their work has been a continuous string of nefarious, corrupt, abusive and manipulative deals, which if perhaps not always technically illegal, continue, exactly because the perpetrators are comfortable enough that, when they are illegal, they can manipulate their way out of it, while gaining millions, if not billions, offloading risk and consequences to third parties.
However, though the likes of the Trumps, particularly, as well as their Russian oligarch partners, perhaps take the cake in abusing the economic systems they work in, it is very clear that their manipulation of the economic and political systems is something that, within the circles they operate in, is exactly the way things work. They are perhaps excessive abusers, but they are one amongst very many.
It's eye opening how, indeed, it is a big club, and we are not in it. The economic and political elite is corrupt and completely disconnected from the man on the ground.
Perhaps worse, is that Bernstein also shows that the context and scope of corruption so endemic to the workings of this elite, is functionally identical to what we assume is only typical for struggling third world countries. What is different is not the methods, but the scale. Corruption, as documented by Bernstein, almost completely occurs outside of the scope of the general public, at a scale that is incomprehensible.
It's also amazing how so many now household names, intertwined with Trump's politics, have been around, playing bit parts for decades. And how so much is intertwined; one little aspect that struck me was that a particular trip by Jared Kuchner and Ivanka Trump to Moscow in 2014 was hosted by Dasha Zhukova, then wife of Roman Abramovych, Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea football club.
At that time, Thrive Capital, Jared's brother Josh‘s VC firm, had invested in Artsy, a successful online platform for selling art, which is Zhukova's.
In passing, Bernstein also paints a picture of economic decline through huge increases in inequality in the US, triggered by Reagan's anti-government stance and politics.
My only problem with the book is Bernstein's certainty that Russia hacked the Democratic emails in 2016, and the extent to which she implies Russia influenced the 2016 elections.
Enjoyable enough, but the book's subtitle, “True stories of people nostalgic for life under tyranny” is very misleading.
No one featured in the book is nostalgic for ‘life under tyranny'. A few of the individuals are ‘nostalgic' for some aspects of a past that, in some ways, for some, were better, or thought to be better, under ‘tyranny'. Though, what exactly that ‘tyranny' exactly was, is not clear, as it's never discussed while, for some, they not even experienced this tyranny themselves.
The last chapter of the book, which is about anti-capitalist and anti-European demonstrations in Greece during the economic crunch, makes all the stories more confusing in their underlying intention or objective.
If anything, almost all stories, including half the book dealing with ‘dancing bears', are about people in, mostly, Eastern Europe, dealing with the shift from communism to capitalism.
Somewhat interesting, but not what I was looking for.
The book's a factual account of the story of Amedeo Guillet, an Italian commander during the second world war, in Italian occupied Libya and eastern Africa. The author mixes Amedeo's personal story with informational, occasionally detailed but always well written historical accounts and backgrounds for Italy's adventures as a colonial power in Africa.
Although Amedeo's story is quite spectacular, nearly being killed on numerous occasions, fighting on for the Italians long after the Italians surrendered to the Allied forces, escaping to the Yemen, struggling to get back to Italy, only to volunteer to continue fighting immediately, the first couple of chapters are a bit confusing at times when the mix of historical fact and personal (although factual) adventure is a bit too fluid. It not always being clear when historical accounts stop and personal memories continue.
Nevertheless, the author has captured quite an amazing story and has been able to write it down in an enjoyable style, keeping the suspense in the personal tale and supplying a very good backdrop of information on Italy's reasons for its conquests.
Even though iran's political woes have been played out in the press over recent years, the primary underlying cause for Iran's political establishment's disenchantment with the US and, to some extent, Britain, is still understood by few, outside of Iran. The root cause is the 1953 coup which was fully staged by the US, with support from and after asking for help by the British, removing the democratically elected president Mohammad Mosaddegh and setting the stage for the 1979 revolution, a quarter of a century later. Indeed, the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, which saw Carter's chances of getting reelected evaporate and delivered 8 years of the white house to Ronald Reagan, were staged as a direct reaction to the US allowing the ousted Shah to seek medical treatment in America. As this was seen as explicit support for Iran's royal family, many Iranians expected a similar turn of events as a good 25 years earlier, when it was also the United States who helped the Shah get back on the throne after he had fled the country in the wake of a failed initial attempt at removing Mossadegh.
Sadly, the whole episode of removing Mosaddegh was the result of a very one sided business deal between a British millionaire and the previous Iranian royal dynasty, some 45 years prior, which had been finalized on wildly unreasonable terms for the Iranians. With the British their colonial mindset and Churchill, the archetypical colonialist, reclaiming the British Prime Minister's seat in 1952, Iran's demands of more favorable terms fell on deaf ears. As a result, the Brits presenting their conflict to the newly elected American president Eisenhower as a conflict between East and West, after Mossadegh had expelled all Brits from Iranian soil and nationalized the oil company, it was Eisenhower who became the torchbearer of British interests, inheriting the Brits' intelligence apparatus and, eventually, using it to crush the, at least then, most democratic government in the Middle East. The levels of profit raked in by this oil company, both before and after the coup, were astronomical, yet little flowed back into Iranian coffers. Originally known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it changed its name in 1954, to British Petroleum.
Kinzer's book, full of details which were uncovered little under a decade ago with a partial opening up of the CIA archives, is a thrilling read and makes it very clear that if only the Americans would have stayed away in 1953, Iran would most likely have been the most democratic country in the middle east for decades. That's not to say everything hinged on the US' decision to instigate the coup. More than half a dozen of crucial moments could have gone just slightly different and would have resulted in a much more favorable outcome for both Iran and Mossadegh. But alas.
Provides a superb impression of the Third Reich on a ‘human' level.
German society between the two world wars, as described by foreigners who lived or traveled through it, sees plenty parallels with both the present day United States and China, as well as other modern countries where populists are able to provide a certain economic success at a cost of vilifying those that are positioned as outsiders.
Woodard identifies eleven nations in North America, from the north of Mexico to the whole of Canada. These include nations with names like Yankeedom (northwestern US), New Netherland (the center of New York) and Greater Appalachia.
All have sufficiently distinct histories, cultures and politics, infused by the first settlers who managed to put together a sustainable community in these respective locations.
As one example, New France, founded by a colourful pair of Frenchmen in what is now eastern Maine, extensively shaped the future culture of that colony as well as Canada as a whole.
Interestingly, these nations have, over the last few decades, not become more mixed, but more segregated.
Spain was early in its attempt to control North America. In its attempt to conquer the New World, through which the 30 years War was funded in Europe, Spain also engendered a strong anti-Spanish sentiment amongst the Protestant Northern Europeans, who took that feeling with them to the new world which then influenced the cultural stance towards Spanish speaking southerners for centuries and to this day.
The Spanish treasury drying up with the failure of Spain's European wars also meant they, eventually, could no longer fund expansion into Northern America. ‘El Norte' became a poor backwater, easily overrun, when the nations entered on the eastern seaboard, expanded west (though more recently seeing a resurgence through the arrival of Mexican immigrants coming from El Norte across the Mexican border).
In ‘Tidewater', the colony settled by the Virginia company and where John Smith married Pocahontas, the ceremony that saw that happen was actually a subjugation ceremony lead by the Indian chief, Pocahontas' father, which from the Indian perspective would have made the English colony into a subjugated settlement.
The British landlords in Tidewater exported poor labourers from the outskirts of British towns to work as near-slaves for years, under conditions similar to those of the later actual slaves from Africa.
Though, here, indenture was neither forever nor inherited.
Woodard points out that the concept of freedom, in the north, is based on the Northern European, Germanic, concept of inalienable rights, while the southern concept of liberty is based on the Greek and Roman concept of the privilege to be able to be free to do what you like (as part of a selected elite). Hence, a source of friction, to this day, between the ‘north' and ‘south'.
The concepts of ‘American exceptionalism' and ‘manifest destiny' are the products of the nation Woodard calls Yankeedom, centered on Boston and founded by puritans from Great Britain, who thought they not only were the chosen people, but were also impelled to propagate their way of life through proselytizing.
In New Netherland, the Dutch-founded nucleus of New York, its characteristic of diversity, tolerance, upward mobility, and an emphasis on private enterprise, have come to be identified with the US, but were really the legacy of the United provinces of the Netherlands, itself then just having thrown of the Spanish yoke. Woodard: “The Dutch didn't celebrate diversity, but tolerated it, because they knew the alternative was far worse.”
But, also, as New Amsterdam was the domain of the Dutch West Indies company, which simply pursued any profitable venue, New Amsterdam saw the arrival of slaves as early as 1626, before slaves became a feature in the south.
The Deep South itself was founded by slave owners from Barbados, who brought an exceptionally severe and harsh slave system with them, accompanied by vast wealth for their owners as a consequence of the sugarcane industry.
Woodard characterises the Deep South as an institutionalised caste system from 1670 to 1970.
The author shows that the American War of Independence was actually an amalgamate of conflicts fought on very different terms from nation to nation, not all actually fighting for independence, while some also fighting with each other or having to deal with internal conflicts between opposing parties.
Then, after warding of the British, the US constitution was the product of compromise among the rival nations; Tidewater and the Deep South required a strong president selected by an electoral college; New Netherland was responsible for the Bill of Fights, guaranteeing individual freedom; the Midlands (founded by Quakers) required the absence of a strong unitary state under a British style national parliament, instead requiring state sovereignty; The Yankees ensured equal representation in the senate, for small and large states alike, as well as that slaves were counted as 3/5th for tabulating congressional numbers, to avoid disproportionate representation by states where large numbers of the population were not allowed to vote.
Then, independence was followed by a volatile period where individual states fought each other some more, considered seceding, changed constitutions, and fought over control in the Union for decades.
According to Woodard, until the 1830s, slavery was seen as something somewhat embarrassing by the South, initially led by Tidewater. But when cotton started to take over as the primary crop and the Deep South sought to expand throughout the US while also having designs on countries outside of the United States, slavery became seen as a point of pride and natural state of affairs, with the south's society modelled on the ancient states of Rome and Greece, with, similarly, the elite at the top elevated from the rabble through the labour of indentured slaves.
It's eye opening how the American Far West, from the moment it started being populated, was the domain of corrupt big business and their placeholder politicians, in exactly the same way as American, but not only American, business has manipulated weaker countries around the globe since the Second World War. (This big business, predominantly owned by individuals from the north, means that there's also a vested interest in the north that matches the desire for hierarchical societies in the south.)
Even now, its politicians require extensive federal funding for public works, while denouncing federal regulation.
It was only after the Civil War that ‘The South', a collection of three of Woodard's nations, really became unified, as a reaction to losing the war. One eventual outcome was the polarization between ‘public Protestantism' of the north, aiming to improve the lot of the poor and state of society, with ‘private Protestantism' of the south, aiming for personal salvation, not encumbered by societal woes while accepting ‘natural' hierarchies.
This cultural difference has not disappeared. When in the 1950s and 1960s the civil rights movement gained ground in the south, the north supported the movement successfully. Then, when the liberal student movements in the north started to progress, the south supported its repression. Initially unsuccessful, successive decades has seen the south successfully erode the earlier gains made.
Woodard wore the book in 2011, but it's impossible not to see the current American political situation through his lens, with the obvious impression being that Trump is the south's reaction to a shift in favor of the north's central policy of improving society at the cost of restricting privilege, or, as the south sees it, freedom of the elite, to do as they please.
It also explains how Trump's fraudulent and autocratic behavior fails to alienate a significant core of his supporters; it's the model they are historically familiar and comfortable with, and wish to return to, at the cost of a majority, seen as inferior, losing their rights.
Likewise, the southern nations, the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, have supported virtually every war since the 1830s, when their interest was raised to create a ‘golden circle' of states, centred on the Caribbean, including everything from Florida, via Texas and Mexico, to the north of Latin America.
Woodard's central premise is excellent and appears to make a lot of sense.
However, he writes for an American audience and, perhaps because of that, is awfully and unnecessary detailed in parts of this narrative. This, while at other times, particularly when referring to the south, he paints with a seemingly broad brush.
Skinner wrote the book in the 1940s, but it only took off in the decades following, when operant conditioning in a societal setting started to become possible and desirable.Operant conditioning is manipulating individuals into changing their behaviour, often without them knowing they are being manipulated.In this copy from 1976, Skinner looks back in his foreword where he is surprisingly current in his descriptions of the worlds problems; overpopulation, joblessness, excessive meat consumption, climate issues. But also excessive military spending and the implicit threat to the wealthy nations from the very poor.And, in Skinner's mind, operant conditioning is the answer.But also, Skinner is probably too much of a believer in his, or our, ability to shape society to what is rationally ideal, seemingly believing personal emotions are not important or relevant.The book deals with a fictional small society where individuals are nudged into better behavior. The story is mildly interesting, but mostly for revealing Skinner's ideals.Skinner would be proud of google and Facebook, but would also probably realise that, notwithstanding the morality of what he believes in, operant conditioning can be used for better and for worse.The book reads like [b:The Fountainhead 2122 The Fountainhead Ayn Rand https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1491163636l/2122.SY75.jpg 3331807] or [b:Atlas Shrugged 662 Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405868167l/662.SY75.jpg 817219] and, in the end, is a bit ridiculous. The small community described is a little utopia, where everyone is a little genius and unbothered by existing societal conventions, improving every aspect of everyone's lives.The constant utopian propaganda wears thin quickly. Yet, the General description of how ‘Walden Two' works as a society sounds very similar to the egalitarian beliefs of the first online communities in the 1980s. The description of the community's school system are very similar to Waldorf and Montessori schools.For its flaws and ignorance of the future of the world at the time off Skinner writing the book, the protagonist's portrayal of the problems of modern democracy are impressively spot on, applicable directly to the challenges of the democratic system as we see them today, in our area of fake news and Cambridge Analytica.But, skinner's suggested solution of small communities and technocrats is also not of our time.In addition, the books protagonist, Skinner knowing that the community's communal living conjures up obvious comparisons with Soviet life, identifies several real and intrinsic shortcomings to Soviet style communism, some 40 years before its demise.Painfully, China has been great at taking Skinner's principles of positive reinforcement to heart; many Chinese do what the state wants them to do because they think they want to do them as doing them generates the most favourable outcome as perceived by these individuals.
Martin Moore believes there is no way back after, now, how democracies are manipulated by third parties through online direction of voters. What is undecided, is which direction we will take; platform democracy, surveillance democracy, or digital democracy.In the first, digital platforms are the gateways to public services. In the second, the state will amass stronger powers, curtailing citizen freedom. What happens in the third is yet to be defined (and Moore does not define it).Moore starts with the backstory to where we got where we are.The mid-1980s saw the rise of hacker conferences, the WELL, the counter culture paradigm that ‘information should be free', and that cyberspace should be governed by those that inhibit it.Fast forward to 4chan, as the perfect source of collaboratively created highly successful memes, through a self conscious, offensive, taboo-breaking and transgressive culture.The first major public success of 4chan came with Project Chanology, which saw Anonymous attack Scientology in 2008, which ultimately flowed into support for Wikileaks and Occupy.This was followed by 4chan diehards despising the subsequent rise in users of their platform, and the attitude towards outsiders hardening.Steve Bannon, with Breitbart, managed to recruit plenty of this vitriolic a-democratic, extreme, community in the context of Gamergate, harnessing ‘freedom' and ‘sovereignty', in opposition to positioning the left as representatives of ‘political correctness' and ‘pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender policies', portraying this conflict between right and left as a war with the left and a war with the mainstream.In this war, it was not about using democratic tools, but using anything that would further the cause of disruption.Moore stops short of stating that the Chans and Reddit's users at the the_donald forum influenced the 2016 presidential election, though he admits that the impact was far-reaching.Exporting these methods to other countries met with mixed success. Failing completely against Macron, and Kurz in Austria, but gaining traction for the AfD in Germany, and in the 2017 UK elections.So, using the justification of being ‘at war', the proponents of extreme free speech justify any behavior, including violence, to obtain their goals and secure a win.Moore continuous with the billionaire Robert Mercer, providing funding for Breitbart's plans to fight ‘cultural marxism' and to try and take over the media for the far right.With mixed success at first, the move in 2014 to pushing much more controversial ‘news' of ‘folk devils and moral panics' saw them reach the influence they desired.Mercer then invested 5 million in Cambridge Analytica (CA), in large part for CA's data centric approach to influencing behaviour (as opposed to influencing opinion), which dovetailed with what Mercer had pioneered at IBM for machine translation, which later became the basis for Google translate.The framework for defining human personality, created at the end of the 20th century, called ‘Big Five', defining personality on five scales of people's traits (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), provides the context to classify people and defines what actions can be taken to nudge particular individuals into particular behavioural directions.With the ability to use big data, and the above model for describing human personality, it was now, roughly from 2013 onwards, possible to target political messages based on personality type. It's debatable whether CA succeeded in influencing the 2016 American elections, but it's beyond a doubt that future elections are likely all to be influenced like this.In the end, Mercer, Bannon, the Kochs, and Arron Banks in the UK, see their power stemming from not so much creating another narrative framework within the democratic landscape, but from subverting the perception of the veracity of all media, bringing down the concept of a free press.Then, Moore looks at Russia's alleged role in influencing political discourse in a host of locations, using Cold War tactics that are well suited for the digital age, where disinformation does not need to be sourced and can spread virally.Putin was shaped in his KGB years by Andropov's mentality of disrupting foreign politics and social cohesion in any subversive way, not unlike a guerrilla warfare, as long as the source of the disruption could not be traced back to the Soviet Union. Then, in the 1990s, with Yeltsin's election, it became known that American advisors actually did help Yeltsin win the presidential elections.When, around the time of the Arab spring, protests also started to erupt in Russia, using Facebook as their means to organise, Putin saw, again, an American hand at work, specifically Hillary Clinton's.As a consequence, social marketing campaigns that had been indirectly directed by the Kremlin from the mid-2000s, were professionalized, creating content and social media farms with the aim of furthering the Kremlin's plans in support of Putin and for disruption of foreign political processes. A kind of ‘guerrilla geopolics'.(Interestingly, for the Podesta emails, no original source from Podesta was ever provided (as compared to the hacked Macron emails), meaning that if that hack also originated in Russia and it being likely that, then, some were altered or left out, it would have been presumably easy to debunk the subsequent pizzagate madness.)Moore then paints a picture of the world of politics from roughly 2008 onwards, when more extremist candidates the world over recognised Facebook and other social media as the perfect platform to engage with, and mobilise, supporters directly, extending these politicians' reach far beyond that of their competitors. This resulted in surprise landslide elections, including those of Obama, Duterte, Beppe Grillo, eventually Trump, and many others.Their campaigns used the Facebook feature at the core of how individuals are influenced; not by mass media, but by influencers within users' social circles.But, Moore is not exactly vilifying Facebook, regularly pointing out that Facebook was guided by increasing their reach, the interconnectedness of their users, and their understanding of their users, all to increase interactions and, via that, commercial success.Moore continuous by diving into a description of how add tech, that is, how Facebook and Google's ad systems, works, recognising that the produced knowledge is asymmetrical. That is, they know all about you, while you know nothing.Google's add tech lead to creating click bait, which lead to the Macedonian fake news machine during the 2016 presidential campaign. And, not surprisingly, though violence and porn were banned from Google's ad-network, extremism of any kind was not, meaning, advertisers were funding extremist websites which were showing their ads.Then, with Google and Facebook knowing you, online, it didn't matter anymore whether you were visiting this particular article on the website of, say, the New York Times, where advertising rates were high. They could catch you on, say, your sister's blog, where advertising rates are low. So, as a result, the money made by the big publishers dropped.Facebook followed suit with tracking their users, and, less inhibited than Google, and with troves of data not just on you but also on your popularity, saw Google playing catch-up, which responded by tracking you even more.Instead of adding friction to the add platforms in order to police them better, both Google and Facebook see the only solution to controlling adverse results as more tracking, more data on their users.Next is a discussion on how Twitter and Facebook have replaced local news as a source for what's happening around us, while failing to inform us what's happening outside of our circle of friends and family.Typically “We gain the feeling of being well informed, regardless of actual knowledge acquisition”.Twitter. Initially a boon for local reporters, a godsend during the downturn in journalism, with the letting go of vast number of journalists, those that kept their job were still able to do local reporting without leaving their offices.But, with Twitter's growth, and the dialogue turning exclusionary and aggressive, Twitter remained useful for covering freak events, but not for regular day-to-day reporting. The result was that local news reporting died out, particularly in poorer and more remote areas.Some public authorities hired more PR staff, essentially generating propaganda, while particularly younger users started to rely on opinion leaders, with the most popular ones those that are the loudest and most prominent, which dovetails with more controversial and more aggressive. And, with that, we expect the news to come to us, not that we have to seek out what is important.The end result is that we all just listen to the big stories. The local stories, important but dull stories, complex or obscure stories, they no longer show up in our feed and can't show up, because there is no capacity anymore to create them.Then, which direction will we go?For ‘platform democracy', Moore uses the example of how the big tech players, Google, Amazon and Apple all have moved into healthcare as a service, hoping to ‘disrupt'.Moore also brings up education as an example, particularly, but not only, the Summit School program, sponsored by Zuckerberg and his wife, and later also Bill Gates, investing in personalised learning.Not just limited to healthcare and transportation, ‘platform democracy' has started to move into the fields of transportation, energy, and policing, culminating in the concept of the ‘smart city'.The problem is that these platforms are undemocratic by design and gain more and more power, with their political partners only ever more becoming reliant on them, as it's the platforms that collect the data.Meanwhile, big tech might strive to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people, but serving the needy, the poor, the vulnerable, is not a priority, or even desirable. If you ever received a letter from Amazon stating they don't want your business anymore, you understand what this means.For ‘surveillance democracy' Moore echos [a:Shoshana Zuboff 710768 Shoshana Zuboff https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1563298665p2/710768.jpg], using India's Aadhaar systeem as the main example, which turns out to already have grown into a Medusa comparable to China‘s social credit system.Singapore's E3A, which measures every aspect of everyone's lives, though the country's president laments he's playing catch-up to China, sees state and big business thoroughly intertwined to monitor the citizen.In the end, these systems give the state extreme control, undoing the separation of powers and making it impossible for the citizen to dissent, entrenching discrimination based on past behaviour or perception based on crowd sourced data.What's the alternative?Though trials have been run with forms of direct participation in many contexts, results tend to be of mixed, or even little, success. Moore points to three causes; direct votes can lead to frivolous results, like Boats mcBoatface; politicians do not like to vote themselves irrelevant; it's hard to get people to participate.But also, the general public are not specialists in most issues that need to be decided on a high level; everyone wants better schools but also lower taxes.So, neither the internet nor social media are inherently democratizing.In fact, if the likes of Facebook and Google would take more steps to control the use of their tools in the service of a perceived set of proper policies, the more likely result is that we end up living in a platform democracy, uncontrolled by the state or the democratic processes available to us.Moore finishes with two examples of successful ‘digital democracy'. First Taiwan, where he fawns over Audrey Tang as a source of positive change, and Estonia, with its e-citizen initiatives. Though neither examples are easily reusable in different contexts (and both vary wildly from eachother).In the end, this book is an excellent overview of how we ended up where we are, as far as the decline of conventional democracy is concerned, at the hands of the information revolution.But, it's also a book with a bit of a disappointing end.
Necessary, but too long and with way too much too florid and unnecessary prose.
The title of the book immediately makes itself understood, which makes it surprising Zuboff needs so many pages to explain herself.
Surveillance capitalism: An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty.
We are an ‘information civilisation', where acquired data not used for product improvements is a ‘behavioural surplus', fabricated into ‘prediction products', traded in a behavioral futures market. Then, to optimise profit, those in possession of this ‘instrumentarian power' move from just knowing our behaviour to shaping it, putting themselves in a position of uncontrolled power.
In political terms, surveillance capitalism doesn't just feed on labor, but on every aspect of human behaviour.
Zuboff points out we are not the products of these free services, but the raw material, used to construct a product. Ownership of the means of behavioural modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power. Operating outside of a framework of accountability, surveillance capitalism is anti-democratic.
To combat surveillance capitalism, we have to realise that it does not equate the digital nor technology. It's only a particular implementation that is not inevitable, but a consequence of the overriding objectives of its masters.
Zuboff identifies the start of the surveillance capitalist journey with Apple's introduction of the iPod and iTunes, catering to markets of one, as remedies for inequality and exclusion. But, this shift to individualism dove tailed with the neoliberal economic paradigm of destroying individual agency.
Then, Zuboff identifies a ‘first modernity', the rise of industrial mass production, a ‘second modernity', the rise of markets of one and individualism and, now a ‘third modernity', the rise of surveillance capitalism, where the wide acceptance of neoliberal policies allows capitalists to disconnect from their social context, fostering societal instability and social inequality.
Google's move into surveillance capitalism started in the early 2000s, with the insight to not target search terms as such for monetisation, but to have the value of these search terms be defined by their usage, making the users of Google's search engine the raw material of the product Google was selling.
Google became a seller of ads, optimising the prediction of behaviour, directly also putting value on the ability to change users' behaviour.
Then, with the absence of meaningful laws in the virtual domain, with the state's need for monitoring and control after 9/11, where Zuboff uses the term ‘surveillance exceptionalism', the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon have become modern-day robber barons, bending laws to themselves and their own.
It also explains why these players want to avoid being seen as ‘publishers', which would require to police their own content, weeding out extremism, because these extremes are in themselves desirable data points which big tech can use to, in turn, exploit the masses.
Politically, big tech firms obfuscate their intentions and behaviour by blurring its public and private interests, through a revolving door where individuals move from politics to business and back, while heavily influencing relevant academic work.
Meanwhile, in the hunt for behavioural surplus, capturing information on how users behave, it makes perfect sense why Google and Facebook work on such a wide range of products, and why they are such strong supporters of the ‘Internet of Things'. Each move into unchartered territory has the promise of reaping huge amount of behavioural data, which in turn allows big tech to predict future behaviour and sell that information.
It is why Google shuts down so many of its ventures; they simply don't produce enough data to make them worthwhile.
Zuboff describes a tool in Google and Facebook's arsenal, the ‘dispossession cycle', first tried and tested with Google's Gmail; It goes from incursion to habituation to adaptation to redirection.
First, Google moves into a field where no legal boundaries exist, like the comprehensive scanning of email, or the collection of street view. Then, even if there are complaints, operating at the slow pace of democracy, we become habituated to the incursion. Then, if a large enough push back exists, cosmetic adaptations are followed by a redirection of the focus of the complainants.
Zuboff identifies Google's mantra:
1. Human experience is free for the taking;
2. We have the right to convert this into behavioural data;
3. We have the right to own that data;
4. We have the right to know what that data discloses;
5. We have the right to decide how to use that knowledge;
6. We have the right to preserve these rights.
This leads to a ‘division of learning', where the machine knows, business models decide and capital decides who decides.
To explain with an example, Facebook shows you your newsfeed, ‘optimised' for you, based on your past actions. But Facebook also keeps a vast trove of data on your behaviour that doesn't feed back to you, but is used to optimise predictions that are sold to third parties. This ‘hidden data' Zuboff calls the ‘shadow text'.
The result is that the likes of Google and Facebook are separated from the people through an insurmountable barrier of knowledge.
So, surveillance capitalism is inherently undemocratic. Only answering to the logic of accumulation, producing knowledge inaccessible to ourselves, while, as it is not the state, and relevant laws are absent, unaccountable for its own behaviour.
So, now, it's corporations that know, it's the market form that decides, and it's the competitive struggle between surveillance companies which decides who decides.
This one-sided control leads to the ‘uncontract'. The data collector acts, and we behave, not knowing how our actions are influenced in real time, while a future of ubiquitous computing and a globe covering IoT is presented as inevitable.
Zuboff sees the dispossession of human experience as the original sin of surveillance capitalism. She then calls ‘rendition' the process of turning experience into data; we talk about who owns our data, but forget that this data does not need to exist in the first place.
There can be no surveillance capitalism without rendition, but rendition is not automatically followed by surveillance capitalism. Data can not be collected and, if collected, does not need to result in profit margins for external parties.
In short, it is not you who searches Google, it's Google which searches you.
This manipulation of our real-time behaviour Zuboff calls ‘actuation' and provides ‘economies of action', achieving behaviour modification through tuning, herding and conditioning; “we are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance”. Because of that, our ‘future tense is endangered'.
How did we get there:
1. Surveillance capitalism is unprecedented in scope.
2. Invasion of the public and private by obfuscation.
3. Societal preference for businesses to self regulate.
4. Fortification through political lobbying.
5. The dispossession cycle, normalizing abuse before regulation can curtail it.
6. Our dependency on services provided.
7. Self interest of benefitting players, like small businesses.
8. Fear of missing out.
9. Our identification with the successful leaders of the surveillance capitalists.
10. Our viewing these leaders as authorities because of their success.
11. Social persuasion.
12. Lack of meaningful alternatives.
13. Feeling of inevitabilsm.
14. Exploitation of human frailty.
15. Ignorance of the abused.
16. The speed at which these processes operate.
Not unlike totalitarianism, instrumentarianism operates through behavioural modification, not through violence or the threat of it. This hidden hand of instrumentarian power, Zuboff calls ‘Big Other'.
Big Other is radically indifferent, it does not care if news is fake, as long as it generates behavioural surplus, generates data-points that identifies how we behave, which then can be monetised.
And. for Big Other, outlier behaviour serves no purpose. Individualism is unpredictability, which can not be sold; Only predicted outcomes are desired.
Surveillance capitalists aim for unfettered freedom as well as perfect knowledge. In a situation like this, there is no uncertainty, there is no invisible hand of the market.
Then there is the shift from a reciprocity between customers as employees and business, to users as sources of raw material sold.
That, in addition to the very small workforce employed by surveillance capitalists also means a political reciprocity between labor and capital is no longer required for big tech to flourish.
Then, surveillance capitalism's radical indifference is geared towards growth by any means.
All this makes surveillance capitalism profoundly undemocratic. It is tyranny with the objective of dominating human nature.
Zuboff doesn't mention it, but it appears that one way of tricking this machine, is to feed it bad data. The machine monitors what you do, so you have to make it appear you do what you do not. So, say, run a bot on your machine that behaves like a person, starting programs, searching for information, except that all actions are nonsensical.
Zuboff finishes: be the friction.
She could have used less words, though.
Zuboff occasionally throws in some real-world surveillance examples; Roomba which sold maps of individual users' houses, collected by the vacuum cleaners; Vizio, a manufacturer of smart TVs generating 100 billion(!) data points per day, selling this data to third parties which were then able to trace this back to individual users.
Ambitious in the way that earlier [a:Neal Stephenson 545 Neal Stephenson https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1430920344p2/545.jpg]'s book were and, set at the end of this century, but written in the mid-1990s, surprisingly accurate in some ways, while surprisingly dated in others.Too long, with the end of this fat tome only the beginning of an extended series, also entertaining enough to finish, but not interesting enough to continue the series.
Dick tends to be pretty bad when fleshing out his characters and often lacks the skills to make them credible. This is often worse for his female characters who, though often living in a post-feminist world, still cling to surprisingly archaic ideas on gender roles, while being characterised more by how they look than anything else.
Meanwhile, few books by Dick are not born from a striking, even fascinating, premise. While many of his short stories were also written too hastily, meaning they tend to be big on failed potential.
Clans of the Alphane Moon fits both of the above, and, here, there is just too little to redeem the book's failures. The characters appear to be made of cardboard but have so much potential, and the plot has gaping holes, that could have easily been fixed with a bit more attention.
But, it was the surprise introduction of the central couple's kids, at the end of the book, where Dick dropped the ball.
