Category Archives: democracy

Israel’s democracy for Jews

The Israeli historian, Alexander Yakobson, writes in Haaretz:

Many people believe that Israeli democracy relies on a shaky public and ideological foundation, liable to collapse at any moment. It’s true that this is a society created, for the most part, by people from non-democratic countries and shaped during a bitter national conflict; the worldview of many of its people include things that do not easily accord with liberal democracy – if they do at all.

The secret to the strength of Israeli democracy may actually lie in another feature of this society that cannot easily be reconciled with a well-run democracy: the quasi-tribal sense of Jewish solidarity, the general sense that we are a kind of extended family. The vast majority of Jews from all backgrounds who came here have had no desire to kill or imprison other Jews because of politics, for reasons that are better defined as tribal rather than democratic. But in a society where this is the prevailing feeling, it is impossible to maintain any type of dictatorship. A society like this can be governed only democratically, and even then with difficulty.

So where in this democracy built on Jewish solidarity does this leave the 20% of Israel’s population who are not Jewish? Jews have no great desire to kill non-Jews, Yakobson says reassuringly. So if Israel’s democracy is ethnically based, the consolation for the democratically-deprived minority is that they are not dead.

To what extent Yakobson’s perspective has been represented on the streets of Tel Aviv this weekend remains unclear.

The veteran anti-occupation activist and conscientious objector, Haggai Matar, writes in Hebrew (translation from Dimi Reider):

Odeh Bisharat, the first Arab to address the mass rallies, greeted the enormous audience before him and reminded them that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, which has suffered from inequality, discrimination, state-level racism and house demolitions in Ramle, Lod, Jaffa and Al-Araqib. Not only was this met with ovation from a huge crowd of well over a hundred thousand people, but the masses actually chanted: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” And later, in a short clip of interviews from protest camps across the country, Jews and Arabs spoke, and a number of them, including even one religious Jew, repeatedly said that “it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens.” A state for all its citizens. As a broad, popular demand. Who would have believed it.

Yet how could anyone in a state that already calls itself a democracy say it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens?

Stated in plain English that means: it’s time for Israel to become a democracy.

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‘The days of Turkey’s military calling the shots are over’

Anthony Shadid reports:

Fifty years ago, when a populist prime minister tangled with the Turkish military, he ended up on the gallows, the mandate of three election victories little consolation. This time around, the rivalry climaxed with most of Turkey’s military command resigning simultaneously, its leader complaining of powerlessness and bad press.

As Turks grappled Saturday with the shock of the resignations — and an extraordinary moment in modern Turkey’s history — officials scrambled to project a facade of business as usual, even as their critics warned of a creeping authoritarianism engineered by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has governed since 2003.

But in broader ways, the resignations on Friday delivered Mr. Erdogan a perch to reshape a military bound by civilian control, pursue a foreign policy emboldened by the decisive victory of his conservative and populist party in elections in June and pursue constitutional changes that could transform politics here.

The struggle that has posed the most serious danger to Mr. Erdogan — a powerful military willing to act above the law — in many ways appears to have come to an end.

“The days of Turkey’s military calling the shots are over,” said Cengiz Candar, a prominent columnist. “There’s a new equation in the politics of the country, and anyone depending on the military to score points on a political issue has to forget about it.”

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Crime and punishment

Norway's prison guards undergo two years of training at an officers' academy and enjoy an elevated status compared with their peers in the U.S. and Britain. Their official job description says they must motivate the inmate 'so that his sentence is as meaningful, enlightening and rehabilitating as possible,' so they frequently eat meals and play sports with prisoners. At Halden high-security prison, half of all guards are female, which its governor believes reduces tension and encourages good behavior. -- Time Magazine

Reading Anders Behring Breivik’s account of his preparations for his July 22 attacks in Oslo and Utøya evokes a certain dread at the sight of such a deliberate effort to cause carnage. Breivik expresses no doubt about what he is doing other than the fear that he might run out of funds and be unable to rent the car in which he intends to load explosives.

Mass murder, committed with such cold calculation surely merits the harshest punishment. Many Americans are thus now perplexed to learn about the apparent leniency of Norway’s penal system. Eli Lake’s views, as expressed in conversation with Hans-Inge Lango, will be shared by many.

But if Norway’s approach to crime is really sending the wrong message, just look at the numbers: an incarceration rate of 71 per 100,000 Norwegians versus 743 per 100,000 Americans; and while in Norway 80% of prisoners once released never return to jail, in the US almost 70% end up back behind bars.

Americans should not be asking whether Norway is capable of being tough enough with terrorists, but instead why a country that spends more on its security than any other also imprisons more of its own citizens than any other. (And for any of the xenophobes out there who might want to attribute America’s high incarceration rate to the high number of immigrants in this country, Germany has a similar proportion of immigrants and an incarceration rate of 85 per 100,000.)

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Norway believes democracy is the best way of challenging terrorism

Just imagine if these words had come out of George Bush’s mouth after 9/11: “The American response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.”

The Guardian reports:

The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, says his country will “not be intimidated or threatened” by Friday’s terror attacks, which left 76 people dead.

The country would “stand firm in defending our values” and the “open, tolerant and inclusive society”, he said. “The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.”

The “horrific and brutal” attacks were an assault on Norway’s “fundamental values”, added Stoltenberg. “We have to be very clear to distinguish between extreme views, opinions that it’s completely legal, legitimate to have. What is not legitimate is to try to implement those extreme views by using violence,” he said.

Earlier, police detonated a cache of explosives at a farm rented by Anders Behring Breivik. Detectives believe the 32-year-old made the bomb that killed eight people in Oslo on Friday using fertiliser he purchased under the guise of being a farmer.

The controlled explosion came after police named four of the victims, including three caught up in the city centre bombing and a 23-year-old shot dead on Utøya island. Police would not reveal the quantity of explosives found at the farm in Rena, about 100 miles north of the capital, Oslo.

As the investigation continues, security officials have cast doubt on Breivik’s claims that he has accomplices who are still at large. At his first court appearance in Oslo on Monday, he told a closed courtroom he had links to “two other terror cells”.

But Norway’s domestic intelligence chief, Janne Kristiansen, said no proof has yet been found to link Breivik to rightwing extremists in the UK or elsewhere. She told the BBC: “I can tell you, at this moment in time, we don’t have evidence or we don’t have indications that he has been part of a broader movement or that he has been in connection with other cells or that there are other cells.”

Kristiansen added that she did not believe the killer was insane, but was calculating and evil, and someone who sought the limelight.

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Proposed law would mandate jail for critics of Saudi king

The New York Times reports:

A proposed Saudi counterterrorism law that would give the Interior Ministry sweeping powers and mandate jail sentences for criticizing the king would effectively squelch political dissent, human rights advocates said on Thursday.

The law would allow prisoners to be held without trial, and trials and appeals to be held secretly, Saudi and international rights advocates said. It would also grant the Interior Ministry broad powers including the ability to tap telephones or search houses without permission from the judiciary.

Saudi activists have long accused the judicial system and the Interior Ministry of a lack of respect for human rights, even when such rights exist legally. The new law, the activists said, would legalize those practices, removing all restraints.

“Every single thing we criticized them about in the past is going to be legitimate,” Bassem Alim, the defense lawyer for a group of men imprisoned in 2007 on terrorism charges, said by telephone. The men were formally charged only last August, and their real crime, Mr. Alim said, was taking rudimentary steps toward forming a political party.

“Ninety-nine percent of the law has nothing to do with terrorism, it has to do with political dissent,” he said.

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Phone hacking: These resignation statements are meaningless

Gary Younge writes:

“Action,” argued philosopher Hannah Arendt, “without a name attached to it is meaningless.” It leaves you with objects without subjects and consequences without causes.

So it is with the resignations that have emerged from the phone-hacking scandal so far. Time and again people with huge salaries and immense power acknowledge they had responsibility, but are careful not to concede accountability, for fear that it will suggest culpability. Nobody claims they were just following orders because apparently there were no orders and no one to give them. It appears what we assumed were extremely hierarchical organisations such as News International and the Metropolitan police apparently operated like anarchist collectives.

So with each new revelation – and not before – those who resign concede that “apparently” something terrible was done on their watch but insist that they knew nothing about it nor did anything related to it. They left not because of any wrongdoing but because the wrongs were being done to them – wait for it – by a hostile media. Then they make a break for it to spend more time with their lawyers.

Rebekah Brooks, former News of the World editor and chief executive of News International, said she left because she was feared her presence was “detracting attention from all [her] honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past”.

Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor and prime-ministerial spokesman, said “when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it’s time to move on”.

John Yates, the senior police officer who took just a few hours to dismiss Guardian allegations that the original hacking investigation had been bungled, framed his resignation not as a matter of public disgrace but public service: “This has the potential to be a significant distraction in my current role as the national lead for counter-terrorism. I was unable to give total commitment to the task of protecting London and the country during this period.”

So we have a narrative with no protagonists. Ignorance is claimed lest malfeasance be inferred; a verdict of incompetence is invited in preference to incrimination.

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Israel’s boycott ban is down to siege mentality

Carlo Strenger writes:

The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.

Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that was passed on Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech. This law makes any call for boycotting Israel economically, culturally or academically a civil offence that can be punished with a fine. Any public body making such a call will lose its legal status and will no longer be eligible for tax-deductible contributions.

The law, as Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz from the leftist Meretz party said, is outrageous, shameful and an embarrassment to Israel’s democracy.

Despite the outrage, I will try to analyse the question: what stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is simpler than many assume: it is fear, stupidity and confusion.

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Indigenous resistance is the new ‘terrorism’

Manuela Picq writes:

If you thought there was anything romantic about environmental activism or indigenous rights, think twice. Socialist ideas about nature – such as keeping water a pubic good – can get you facing charges of sabotage by a leftist government. In the land of the Incas, if you protect the pachamama [“Mother World”], you might just be a “terrorist”.

It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.

In Ecuador, “terrorists” are indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the Andean highlands fighting to preserve access to water in their communities. Old penal codes written in times of dictatorship are being revived by leftist presidents to repress indigenous activists. As “terrorists”, they are labelled as enemies of the state, and arrested – by the very president that claimed leftist credentials and staged his inauguration in overtly ethnic style.

When the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala gathered delegations from the entire hemisphere in Ecuador last month, the focus was on the criminalisation of environmental protest.

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Transparency is the new objectivity

The Economist reports:

With the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century came a more detached style of reporting. In effect, a deal was struck between advertisers, publishers and journalists, says New York University’s Jay Rosen. Journalists agreed not to alienate anyone so that advertisers could aim their messages at everyone. That way the publishers got a broader market and the journalists got steady jobs but gave up their voices. Objectivity is “a grand bargain between all the different players”, says Mr Rosen. When radio and television emerged, America’s private broadcasters embraced impartiality in their news reporting to maximise their appeal to audiences and advertisers and avoid trouble with regulators.

These days different countries have different preferences. In Europe overt partisanship in newspapers is widespread and state-run television channels often have partisan allegiances: Italy’s three state channels are each aligned with specific parties, for example. The political independence of the BBC in Britain is unusual, and is in any case contested by critics who complain that it is too left-leaning. In India 81 of the 500 satellite-TV channels that have sprung up in the past 20 years are news channels, most of them catering to specific political, religious, regional, linguistic or ethnic groups. Only a few take an objective, pan-Indian approach, says Daya Thussu of the University of Westminster.

If impartiality is already the exception rather than the rule, the internet is now eroding it further. In America it undermines local news monopolies by reducing advertising revenue and providing access to a wide range of alternative sources, thus undoing Mr Rosen’s grand bargain. In Britain and other countries where news broadcasters are required to be impartial, at least in theory, the convergence of television and the web makes such rules seem outdated. Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, said at a seminar last December that he thought the case for polemical, opinionated news channels was “persuasive”, though the BBC’s own news coverage would remain impartial. The internet has also compressed the news cycle, with headlines delivered instantly by smartphone or Twitter, creating a demand for immediate analysis and opinion.

Moreover, the internet makes it easier than ever to find and synthesise different views, says Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News. The idea for the site occurred to him in the months after the attacks of September 11th 2001, when he became frustrated by the inefficiency of visiting lots of different websites to get a broader picture of the news. When news comes from multiple sources, a mix of strong opinions becomes more desirable. “It’s time to embrace the fact that certain news sources have a point of view, and that’s why they have the following they do,” says Mr Bharat. “I think there’s a place for all of them.” By undermining many of the traditional arguments for objectivity, the internet may thus cause a wider “Foxification” of news and a return to the more opinionated and partisan media landscape of the 18th and early 19th centuries. “Almost every country that has an open society is going to have some kind of opinion television programming,” says Mr Shine.

This does not mean that all news organisations should take overtly political positions. Mr Rosen is just one of many media watchers who think it is time to release journalists from the straitjacket of pretending that they do not have opinions—what he calls the “view from nowhere”. Journalists signal their impartiality by quoting people on opposing sides of an argument and avoid drawing conclusions, even when the facts are clear. “There have been times in the past when CNN has been criticised for being neutral—not only non-partisan, but not really having positions,” says Mr Whitaker. But lately, he says, “we have been stronger in taking a point of view when we think it is supported by our reporting and by facts.”

One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”. In part, this involves journalists providing information about themselves. For example, on AllThingsD, a technology-news site owned by Dow Jones, all the journalists provide an “ethics statement” with information about their shareholdings, financial relationships and, in some cases, their personal life (two journalists are married to employees at large technology companies). “People are more likely to trust you if they know where you are coming from,” says Mr Rosen.

Transparency also means linking to sources and data, something the web makes easy. Bloggers have long used the technique to back up their views. Ezra Klein, a blogger at the Washington Post, has suggested that news organisations should publish full transcripts of interviews online. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, a fan of radical transparency if ever there was one, makes a similar argument. “You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results. That should be the standard in journalism,” he said last year. Mr Weinberger has observed on his blog that transparency prospers in a linked medium: “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.”

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The internet’s private enterprise

Carne Ross writes:

On the internet, as elsewhere, information is money, and information is power. So why have we given it away so lightly?

Something extraordinary has taken place over the last few years. Voluntarily, and without coercion or, indeed, payment, internet users have handed over vast amounts of highly personal data – their preferences, where they live, who their friends are and what they do – to private companies, whose primary goal is to profit from that data. And every day, we hand over more, willingly.

On Facebook, we think we are sharing only with our friends the information – the news, the messages, the photos – that we place on “our” pages. But thanks to Facebook’s confusing privacy settings, users are propelled to default and “recommended” settings that make public almost everything – and in so doing, also permit Facebook to make use of your information. Yet more obscure are the complicated and multi-caveated user and privacy agreements most never bother to read. It is only here that Facebook admits that the content (your “intellectual property”) belongs to the company. They own it; once it’s on the site, you don’t.

Google’s professed aim, apart from its famous motto to “do no evil”, is to organise and share all the world’s information. Less loudly avowed is its parallel objective: to make large amounts of money from that venture. This is not a cynical view: profit is – and must be – the goal of all share-held enterprises. If Google did not promise good returns to its shareholders, its share price would collapse and it would cease to exist. (Facebook has not yet been floated on the stock market; it is widely assumed that it soon will be, for perhaps $50bn.)

Both Google and Facebook offer their services to users apparently for free. But the services are not of course free. Both companies sell the information that users provide – in search data, or personal profiles. Apparently, these companies mostly sell their (your) information to advertisers who mine the data in order to target consumers more effectively. But, despite fervent declarations about transparency, in fact, it’s very hard to find out exactly to whom they sell the data or what the “data miners” do with it. McDonald’s or the CIA? We’re not told, even though it is information about us that they are trading.

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A July Fourth shame on America’s founders

Ray McGovern writes:

Yes, that was I standing before the U.S. Embassy in Athens on the eve of the July Fourth weekend holding the American flag in the distress mode — upside down.

Indignities experienced by me and my co-guests on “The Audacity of Hope,” the American boat to Gaza, over the past ten days in Athens leave no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama’s administration has forfeited the right to claim any lineage to the brave Americans who declared independence from the king of England 235 years ago.

In the Declaration of Independence, they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a new enterprise of freedom, democracy and the human spirit. The outcome was far from assured; likely as not, the hangman’s noose awaited them. They knew that all too well.

But they had a genuine audacity to hope that the majority of their countrymen and women, persuaded by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the elegant words of Thomas Jefferson, would conclude that the goal of liberty and freedom was worth the risk, that it was worth whatever the cost.

These days we have been seduced into thinking that such principles have become “quaint” or “obsolete” – words used by President George W. Bush’s White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to make light of important international agreements like the Geneva Conventions.

As every American should know, and remember, the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were based on the firm belief that ALL men are created equal, that they have UNALIENABLE rights — among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Not just “all Americans,” mind you, but all people. The Declaration of Independence was meant to be a statement expressing the “self-evident” rights of all mankind. Those principles had a universality that was a beacon to the world.

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Anonymous declares cyberwar against Orlando

The New York Times reports:

The hacker group Anonymous has declared a cyberwar against the City of Orlando, disabling Web sites for the city’s leading redevelopment organization, the local Fraternal Order of Police and the mayor’s re-election campaign.

Anonymous, a large yet loosely formed group of hackers that claimed responsibility for crashing the Web sites of MasterCard and the Church of Scientology, began attacking the Orlando-based Web sites earlier this week.

The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.

“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”

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Criminalising Palestinian solidarity

Maureen Murphy writes:

The United States government has criminalised the Palestinian people, and now it is increasingly treating US citizens who stand in solidarity with Palestine as criminals as well – including those courageously putting their lives on the line to break the siege on Gaza.

I am a Palestine solidarity activist in the US, and one of 23 US citizens who have been issued with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury as part of what the government has said is an investigation into violations of the laws banning material support to foreign “terrorist organisations”.

None of us have given money or weapons to any group on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organisation list. But what many of us have done is participate in or help organise educational trips to meet with Palestinians and Colombians resisting the US-funded military regimes they live under.

The goal of these trips is to learn about the human rights violations happening in these places and to bring those stories back home to the US, to educate people and to organise to change US foreign policy for the better.

Travel for such purposes should be protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. But a year ago the US Supreme Court decided in Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project to dramatically expand the government’s definition of what constitutes material support for a foreign terrorist organisation.

Now the government considers travel to places like the West Bank and Colombia to be a predicate or justification for opening up an investigation and issuing search warrants to raid activists’ homes and seize their belongings. Political speech if made in a “coordinated way” can be construed as material support.

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NYT reporter seeks to quash subpoena; says gov’t tried to intimidate him

TPMMuckraker reports:

James Risen, the award-winning national security reporter for the New York Times who has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors to testify in a case against a CIA whistleblower, accused the government of attempting to intimidate him and his sources in an affidavit he filed to quash the subpoena.

“I take very seriously my obligations as a journalist when reporting about matters that may be classified or may implicate national security concerns,” Risen wrote. “I do not always publish all information that I have, even if it is newsworthy and true. If I believe that the publication of the information would cause real harm to our national security, I will not publish a piece.”

Risen has been called to testify against Jeffrey Sterling, who the government says gave Risen classified information that he used in his book “State of War.” The government has argued that Risen could testify about his previous relationship with Sterling without violating any confidentiality agreement with the former CIA agent.

But he wrote that he had found that the government “all too frequently” claims disclosure of certain information would harm national security, “when in reality, the government’s real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.”

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — Part One

Adam Curtis‘ latest documentary, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” is well worth watching — all three hours — even if by its conclusion he has not neatly tied together all its disparate threads and even if his style of production has a frenetic choppiness — “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote,” a reviewer joked about one of his previous pieces.

Curtis is perhaps best known as the creator of the BBC documentary series, “The Power of Nightmares,” which examined the politics of fear post-9/11.

His new documentary, just aired in the UK but presumably close to completion before the Arab uprisings began, nevertheless has relevance for every revolution across the region. The prospect of the end of dictatorial rule easily eclipses concern about what might follow — events of the present evoke a sense that the future can take care of itself. The leaderless movements currently reshaping the Arab world have organic features that sometimes seem to imply that social justice might just be a natural fruit.

But the history of self-organizing networks — a topic at the core of Curtis’ film — is that the egalitarian hopes these would-be post-political systems embody rest on an illusory foundation.

This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self-organizing networks’ – dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.

This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.

But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations – because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics. [Source: BBC]

Part One: Love and Power

(Watch Part Two here and Part Three here.)

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