Risking Together: The Commons in the Anthropocene - Bangkok 2024

[Music] there's not even a title right and uh are you looking for slides no I don't have any slides so no slides okay okay all right U thank you very much I'm like an impromptu speaker I was just called in because someone was missing from the program I'm just a fill in um so don't expect too much but uh yeah my name is Adam and I'm going to talk about um I think the title the title of talk is like uh the Commons in the anthropos yeah brisking together brisking together the commons the yeah okay so it's a bit of an abstract title but that's because I'm sort of an abstract guy I'm not do anything pratically practically I'm a I'm a professor of sociology and Michelle bow asked me to talk about my new book so so it's going to be a little bit different but still maybe it'll be a little bit of context because one of the things that I one the problems that I've sort of been posing uh to myself for a lot of time both researching and teaching Etc is that there seems to be a certain impass around right that we have we have a certain model of the digital and digital Technologies um that theoretically has a lot of potential right and we've seen a lot of ideas and a lot of technical um initiatives um and a lot of innovation going on but the way which is being used um unfortunately seems to be part of the problem rather than the solution right so so how can you how can you get out of this how can you sort of think about building a different type of digital right because there's no uh doubt about the fact that digital Technologies blockchains artificial intelligence like a lot of the very very interesting examples that we've seen this morning as they've shown right is that whatever type of effort that we make to confront the situation of the anthropos scene will require these types of Technologies right but yet it seem seems that most of the investments in digital Innovation right now is going into prolonging a consumer society that was from from the last century which is sort of everybody knows it's unsustainable and un um un um unreliable right um so in in this book um I was trying to think a little bit about um what are the challenges around this right and the challenges I think are mainly political because there's no doubt that there's no lack of ideas right ideas are cheap they used to say even in startups like 10 years ago but there's a lot of brilliant ideas around right whether these are technological ideas or whether these are ways of implementing organizational fors that are developed in very complex corporate organizations and putting them to use for the common good Etc right but the problem is what we lack I think is a reliable social force that can Implement these ideas right because because technology and ideas never ever change anything on their own right we tend to put a lot of faith perhaps in technology but historically Tech te the way in which Technologies are being implemented and the way in which the direction in which they drive change uh is heavily dependent on the surrounding political climate right so if you take AI for example AI has an enormous potential of course to do all these sorts of things that we've been talking about today to make Forest speak for themselves or to local localize environmental destruction via satellite imagery etc etc um but the ways in which things are going right now it seems more likely that AI is going to be put into the service of the one or perhaps 0 1% of the elites that are actually now controlling the Investments right so the thing is a question of a of of of of a politics right and how and what do you need what do you need for a politics well you need of course ideas and you need Visions but most of all you need a coalition of actors right you need something that you call a social block right I mean if you think about the present Silicon Valley model of the digital it's not something that has simply um been derived from these features of Technology right it's a way of which you which to use a combination of certain established Technologies smartphones mobile connectivity uh databases systems um um targeting algorithms Etc uh that have been favored by a particular configuration of actors right Financial Capital which is looking for Investments uh the California tech industry State apparatuses all around the world um not least at the local level City governments are seeking Urban Development think it's a good idea to invest in startups and and and incubators and these sorts of things but then not least the global middle classes who in the last 20 years have seen significant upgrades in their capacity to consume right and you know now you don't have to call the pizzeria you can just press a button and the pizza arrives so that's like a significant upgrade right so so you've got this Coalition of actors who are supporting a particular model right and I think what we need to think about if we want to achieve some sort of technologically empowered change is also to think about what is the Coalition of actors that we can find that can be supporting this type of different Paradigm right um and in order to think about that what I wanted to do in this book is of course not to suggest any solutions because if I had any solutions um I would be uh Rich right or I would be of Consulting to to the really important players in a sense but unfortunately just try to sort of sort out the terrain right I mean to identify a little bit the challenges of that need needs to be faced in order to build uh such a a kind of of um of social block right and in doing so I'm I'm I'm departing from this idea of the of the anthropos scene right which I think is like one of the best Concepts around to give a um coherent uh diagnosis of what our time is about right and I think you're all familiar prob probably with this concept right the anthropocene the anthropos scene is well it's a concept that comes from geology and in geology it means that we are generating a new strata in the sediments of planetary history right we are generating a new strata which is different from the strata of the Holocene that preceded those holen is about the last 10,000 years until the last ice age more or less and we're generating a new starta where future um geologists are going to find a very particular composition right they're going to find a particular composition which consist in lots of fossilized Plastics um not historically unprecedented but very high CO2 levels U radioactive isotopes that didn't exist before and an enormous quantity of chicken bones right because apparently our Agro uh um agroindustrial complex produces Chicken in geologically significant quantities right so this means of course that we have now become a Terra forming species right we have become like we have become the largest force of planetary transformation and this is quite important in terms of uh its implications from a philosophical and a political 10 minutes or 10 seconds minutes okay that's fine um from a from um um political or pH philosophical implication because it means that we can't really understand each other is ourselves anymore as being small insignificant beings in God's Great universe but we have to understand that we have become something close to Godlike ourselves right and then the question then is the the main challenge then of course is how do you conduct such terraforming activity in anything that resembles a responsible and sustainable manner right and we don't I don't think we really have the we might have the ideas for how to do that but we definitely do not have the organizational forms uh that allows us to do that right yet right so that is that is a major challenge right um when people talk about the anthropos scene there are other people that says that well we shouldn't call it the anthropos scene because um it's capitalism and so and we we should call it the capitaline right and and that's true because if you look at the Historical records uh all of the curves that are indicating this new type of terraforming activity that we are exercising on Earth whether it's uh you know CO2 emissions or um water on water consumption or urbanization or travel or economic growth all these sorts of things all of these curves have the same form they are like basically static like this up until the mid 18th century then they start to grow uh and then in the late 20th century they have like the hockey fa hockey stick face right they become exponential so that means of course that the tropos scene coincides historically with the emergence and globalization of industrial capitalism right Plastics Plastics in the 1950s is the great substance of consumer Society we couldn't couldn't imagine the type of consumption we have today without Plastics right so um so this thing of course is um is um um this is because of a whole series of factors but um marks who was the the greatest analyst of capitalism in the last century when he used to think about Labor and the exploitation of labor but before he died he started reading uh the no new lot of things from the new discipline of organic chemistry um and he came up with this idea of a metabolic Rift so he essentially Mark says that what capitalism really does it doesn't just exploit workers and things like that it creates a situation where uh energy and nutrients are taken from the land but not brought back to the land right pre- capitalist communities societies tend to have a circular uh uh relation to Nature right you eat things you poop the poop sort of goes back and nurtures the land in right now but Mark noted that in the mid 19th century England well we get all this grain from the land and in fact we're now importing guano from South America to uh to f flize the land because we're consuming the natural nutrients and and then we bring the the grain to London and then people eat it and then they poop in the tames uh and you know and the poop becomes not a resource but a problem right so you get this um of cradle to grave system in a sense right and that's essentially inherently what capitalism does capitalism has created this situation of sort of planless terraforming not because of greed or because people are evil or anything like that but because one of the the system atic feature of capitalism is to H systematically externalize the costs of reproduction to sort of consume things that you don't pay back for right so you create cheap things by basically creating negative externalities by not paying for the actual costs that are being used and this so from this perspective of course the anthropos scene can be understood as a crisis of reproduction right and inability to reproduce the conditions for future existence and it's a crisis of reproduction that is articulated at different levels on the material Level of course which we all know resource depletion and we don't have to talk about that so much more but also at the symbolic level right and we have because we now have um a a capitalist system which is running out of steam right because it's going into the limits the you can also say that the experience of the anop procine is the experience of what you can say the end of cheap nature right this type of Simply sort of plundering and extracting resources which we have been doing for over 100 years has now reach a position where it's not so simple anymore right so there's less resources to plunder for each unit of capital so to say right and and this means that capitalism tends to start to self cannibalize in a sense it starts to try to make money from the crisis that it's generated itself right um and you can see that very um if you look at the what I call the crisis of symbolic uh reproduction in the sense that we are becoming very increasingly difficult for us to uh to come up with a common idea of a future or even as I think covid showed to a lot of us a a common truth right a common definition of the situation we're in a situation now where we have like you know a multitude of different thought communities that is are arguing for their own truth right or vaccines good are they bad uh is um is climate change right is climate change wrong and all these sorts of things right and that is of course um to a large extent it has to do of course with the fragmentation of communities which in still in itself is also uh a consequence of the sort of the general speeding up of Life uh in particularly in the last decades but it also has a lot to do with the way in which social media business models operate right they operate by trying tending to produce uh easily marketable advertising targets which tends to polarize right so that's a a situation whereby things like social media make money uh by sort of trying to address the crisis of uh things like truth or a common a common ground but in ways that tends to sort of worsen the situation right um and then of course we have a fundamental crisis of social reproduction in the sense that not only um is this uh the anthropos scene par Paralyzed by by a by a situation whereby you know we haveing amounts of loneliness in the world I think about 40% of North American males middle-aged North American males claim that they don't have a single friend right [Music] um children come to school in the UK without uh having been properly socialized without knowing how to speak without without knowing how to control their poop etc etc because uh the situation of mothers in particularly single mothers is not such that you have the sort of network and framework enough to to raise a child right these are and we have growing problems with depression and anxiety and all these sorts of things right um so in that sense I think um any type of sort of effort to um create some sort of coherence around a particular model uh of a different model of the digital that is able to achieve what we want needs to work also on these levels right there needs to be something that is not simply able to offer alternative ecological or economic functions but also able to offer different answers to this crisis both of the imagination right how do we imagine a different world together how do we come together around what we understand to be a truth right but also the question of social reproduction right which in a certain sense boils down to the question of risk right how do we find new ways of risking together of um sharing this type of exposure to uncertainty um which sort of social institutions have always achieved throughout history right finding ways in which people can face uncertainty together in ways that are risky that is in ways that are calculable and hand able to be handled in different ways and I have one minute left and could you know um but what the last thing I wanted to say is that someone said before that we have to fix the plane as we're flying right and I also I'm a strong believer in that Paradigm I don't think there are any solutions that we can come up with right now because the paradigm shift that we are facing is so great that we simply have no idea about what these solutions would look like these are probably things that as has happened throughout most other similar times in history these types of Solutions and remedies will be something that we developed as we go through a crisis which in all likelihood would be probably quite severe and probably uh is going to uh be enacted within our our LIF so thank you very much all right thank you so much [Music]