technology – Green Social Thought

Digital enlightenment: an invitation

Tue, 02 May 2023 16:26:08 +0000

by Katie Singer

A few years ago, an engineer told me that calculating my carbon footprint by my monthly utility bill is like weighing an elephant by putting only the tip of its tail on the scale. Because, he said, buying any mass-produced item, including an “energy-efficient” tablet, an “energy-saving” appliance or even a solar PV system means engaging the global super-factory.

Mass production of anything, he explained, depends on worker-hazardous and ecologically-ravaging mining, fossil-fuel-powered smelters, water-polluting chemicals, assembly plants, energy-guzzling and radiation-emitting telecom access networks, and an intercontinental network of bunker-fuel-polluting ships, planes and airports, trains and rails, and trucks and roads.

This man left me speechless.

Then, I read about a laptop’s cradle-to-grave energy use. A laptop will consume 81% of its lifetime energy before its end-user turns it on for the first time.¹ The remaining 19% goes to operating and discarding or recycling the computer. This calculation does not include the energy used by access networks or data centers.

Call me digitally enlightened.

Would other people study electronics’ ecological costs—and move toward living within our ecological means?

Consider this an invitation to trace the supply chain of one substance in your smartphone (or another kind of computer).

STEP 1: Pick one substance used in manufacturing a smartphone.

The Screen: Aluminosilicate glass, aluminum, aluminum oxide, cerium, fluorinated greenhouse gas (F-GHG), gorilla glass, indium tin oxide, lead, lithium, nitric acid, oxide of silicon, potassium nitrate, sapphire, silicon dioxide, sulfuric acid, tin oxide.

The Battery: Aluminum, cadmium, carbon graphite, coal tar, cobalt, coltan, copper, graphite, lead, lithium cobalt oxide, lithium, manganese, mercury, nickel-metal hydride, organohalogen compounds, tantalum, zinc.

The Case: Aluminum alloys, bromine, magnesium, nickel, plastic, tin.

The Electronics (the circuit board, wiring, speakers, motors): Acetone, acetylene gas, antimony, arsenic, arsenic pentafluoride, arsine gas, benzene, beryllium, beryllium oxide, boron, boron tri-chloride (BC13), boron trifluoride, cadmium, charcoal, chlorofluorocarbons, chloroform, chromium, coal, copper, diborane, dysprosium, eucalyptus trees, gallium, gadolinium, gold, glycol ethers, hafnium, hydrochloric acid (HCL), hydrogen, hydrogen chloride gas, hydrofluoric acid, indium, lanthanum, lead, methylene chloride, neodymium-iron-boron, nickel, perchloroethylene, petroleum coke, palladium, phosphine, phosphorous, platinum, polychlorinated biphenyl, potassium, praseodynmium, quartz, scandium, silicon tetrachloride, silicon wafers, silver, sulfur dioxide, tantalum, terbium, tin, titanium aluminum nitride, titanium nitride, toluene, tri-chloroethylene (TCE), tungsten, water, wood, xylene, yttrium, zinc.

STEP 2: Describe what your substance does in manufacturing or operating a smartphone.

STEP 3: Trace your substance’s supply chain—and reference your answers. Note: below the questions, I list a batch of resources to get you started.

If your substance is an ore:

In what countries is this substance mined?
Who owns the mines?
At the mine, what kind of work is needed? How much does a miner earn in a day? Do any children mine for this ore? What are common health impacts from mining this substance?
To rinse the ores, how much water is used? What is the source of water?
What impacts does mining this ore have on the region’s waterways, farming and wildlife?
How many smelters and refineries does this ore travel through to become usable in a smartphone? By what means (air, ship, truck, train) is the raw material transported?
What kind of workers does a smelter need? How much does a worker earn in a day? What are common health impacts of the work?
How much electricity does the smelter consume in one day? What kind of fuel(s) power the smelter? What kind of toxins and emissions does it generate?
How/does smelting this ore impact the region’s waterways, farming, public health and electric power grid?
Can you access images of mining or refining this substance?
What regulations protect miners and refinery workers? What regulations protect the region’s environment, wildlife and public health while the substance is mined or refined?
In what year did mining of this substance begin?
When will this ore be depleted?
In the regions where mining and refining this substance take place, how have their local governance/democratic rule, per capita income, number of children per woman, life expectancy and educational opportunities for boys and girls changed in the last 25 years?
Can this substance be recycled? What toxins are emitted by recycling it? How much water is used to recycle it? If it is recyclable, what companies in what countries recycle it?

If you substance is a chemical:

In what countries is this chemical produced?
Who owns the company that produces it?
List your chemical’s ingredients.
What kind of work does the chemical’s production require? What does a worker earn? How does the work impact workers’ health?
What kind of toxins does this factory generate? Do they go into waterways, land and/or air? How does this chemical’s production impact the region’s farming, food chain and energy consumption?
How much electricity does this factory use per day? Per month? What fuel is used to generate this electricity?
Can you access images of this chemical and/or its production?
What regulations protect the waterways, wildlife and public health around the manufacturing plant?
By what means (air, ship, truck, train) is the chemical transported from its manufacturing plant to its next station?
In what year did production of this chemical begin?
Do any supply shortages or regulations threaten its future?
How has this chemical’s production changed the region’s local governance/democratic rule, per capita income, number of children per woman, life expectancy, and educational opportunities for boys? for girls…in the last 25 years?
Are less energy-intensive and/or less toxic alternatives to this chemical currently produced? What companies in what countries are producing (or researching production of) safer alternatives?

STEP 4: Share your findings with classmates, neighbors, co-workers.

STEP 5: Reduce your Internet footprint by 3% per month. Get your school, workplace and household to join you.

Limit video use. Delete unused data. Don’t let children use electronics until they master reading, writing and math on paper. Wait at least four years to upgrade to a new device. Rather than buying new equipment, enact right-to-repair legislation, access free repair manuals at ifixit.com and establish fix-it clinics in your town. If you’ve got a website, compress your image files, disable unnecessary plug-ins, limit data-intensive flashing photos and videos. Discover and share new ways to reduce.

STEP 6: Insist that manufacturers prioritize safer chemicals, less extractions and worker protections:

Buy raw materials and parts only from sources that verify worker and environmental protections. Make modular, repairable electronics that reuse and repurpose still-functional parts like ink cartridges and batteries. Make battery replacement easy and fire-safe. At the design stage, plan for a device’s second life.

RESOURCES For RESEARCH

For more resources, check out my reports at www.ourweb.tech/letters.

Chemicals

Compound Interest, “The Chemical Elements of a Smartphone,” Feb. 19, 2014. www.compoundchem.com/2014/02/19/the-chemical-elements-of-a-smartphone/

Green Chemistry & Commerce Council https://greenchemistryandcommerce.org/about-gc3/introduction

Green Screen for Safer Chemicals: finding safer chemicals and environmentally preferable products. https://www.greenscreenchemicals.org/

Rohrig, Brian, April 2015, “Smartphones: Smart Chemistry.” https://www.acs.org/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/archive-2014-2015/smartphones.html

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition www.svtc.org

White, Heather and Lynn Zhang, “Complicit,” 2017. A documentary about computer assembly workers’ exposure to n-hexane. https://www.complicitfilm.org/

Energy Use

Andrae, Anders S. G. and Tomas Edler, “On Global Electricity Usage of Communications Technology: Trends to 2030,” Challenges, 2015, 6, 117-157; https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/6/1/117.

Andrae, Anders S.G., “Total Consumer Power Consumption Forecast,” a powerpoint presentation, October 5, 2017.

Climate, July 13, 2019, “Is Netflix Bad for the Environment? How Streaming Video Contributes to Climate Change.” www.ecowatch.com/young-spoken-word-poets-take-on-climate-change-2639230969.html

Coma, Miguel, on 5G’s energy use, https://www.meer.com/en/authors/943-miguel-coma

DeDecker, Kris, www.lowtechmagazine.com.

Cook, Gary, Jude Lee, et al., “Clicking Clean: Who is winning the race to build a green internet?” Technical report, Greenpeace, 2017. https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20170110_greenpeace_clicking_clean.pdf

Kato, Kzuhiko, Akinobu Murata and Koichi Sakuta, “Energy Pay-back Time and Life-cycle CO2 Emission of Residential PV Power System with Silicon PV Module,” Progress in Photovoltaics Research and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, revised 19 December 1997. Note: manufacturing silicon for solar PV panels is similar to manufacturing silicon for transistors.

Mills, Mark P., “The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure and Big Power: An Overview of the Electricity Used by the Global Digital Ecosystem,” 2013. https://www.tech-pundit.com/articles/ See also Mills’ Digital Cathedrals from Encounter Books, 2020; and “Unobtanium,” https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=308699784174165

Smil, Vaclav, “Your Phone Costs Energy—Even Before You Turn It On, IEEE Spectrum, 26 April 2016. https://spectrum.ieee.org/your-phone-costs-energyeven-before-you-turn-it-on

Strubell, Emma, A. Ganesh and A. McCallum, “Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP,” 5 Jun 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243

Troszak, Thomas, “Why Do We Burn Coal and Trees for Solar Panels?”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we_burn_coal_and_trees_to_make_solar_panels Manufacturing silicon for transistors and solar panels uses similar processes.

Labor

Glum, Julia, “The Median Amazon Employee’s Salary is $28,000. Jeff Bezos Makes More Than That in 10 Seconds,” https://money.com/amazon-employee-median-salary-jeffbezos/

Smith, Ted, David A. Sonnenfeld and David Naguib Pellow, Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Envornmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry, Temple University Press, 2006.

https://www.uspirg.org/feature/usp/right-repair

Mining

www.anatomyof.ai Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, 2018, an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources.

Abraham, David S., The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age, Yale University Press, 2015.

Amnesty International and African Resources Watch, “This is What We Die For: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global Trade in Cobalt,” 2016. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-google-Microsoft-tesla-dell-sued-over-dobalt-mining-children-in-congo-for-batteries-2019-12-17/

Choi, Hye-Bin, et al., “The impact of anthropogenic inputs on lithium content in river and tap water,” Nature Communications, 2019.

Eichstaedt, Peter, Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict minerals in the World’s Deadliest Place, Lawrence Hill Books, 2011.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/apple-and-google-named-in-us-lawsuit-over-congolese-child-cobalt-mining-deaths

Hodal, Kate, “Death metal: tin mining in Indonesia,” 23 Nov. 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/23/tin-mining-indonesia-bangka

Jensen, Derrick, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, Monkfish Book Publishing, 2021. While focused on the ecological impacts of manufacturing, operating and discarding “renewable” power systems, the Internet demands similar substances. See also Julia Barnes’ documentary, “Bright Green Lies,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJFQmBW4RE

Kara, Siddharth, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, St. Martin’s, 2023.

Katwala, Amit, “The spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction,” 8.5.18; https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact

Klinger, Julie Michelle, Rare Earth Frontiers: from Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes, Cornell University Press, 2017.

Sovacool, Benjamin K., et al., “Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future,” Science, Vol. 367, Issue 6473, 3 January 2020. See Sovacool’s publications at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p373957-benjamin-sovacool/publications

Standefer, Katherine, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, Hachette, 2020. Tracing a defibrillator’s elements.

https://www.techwalla.com/articles/what-materials-are-used-to-make-cell-phones

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/graphite-mining-pollution-in-china/

Shipping

Mims, Christopher, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, HarperCollins 2021.

Schlanger, Zoe, “If shipping were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter,” Quartz, 18 April 2018.

Waste

www.ifixit.com

Lepawsky, Josh, Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste, MIT Press, 2018. www.worldingelectronicwaste.xyz

McGovern, Gerry, World Wide Waste: How Digital is Killing Our Planet and What to Do About It, Silver Beach, 2020. www.gerrymcgovern.com

Needhidasan, S., et al., “Electronic waste–an emerging threat to the environment of urban India,” J. Environ Health Sci. Eng., Jan. 20, 2014; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3908467.

Purdy, Kevin, “How Eric Lundgren and BigBattery are Changing How We Think About ‘Used’ Batteries,” ifixit.com, April 12, 2021. https://www.ifixit.com/News/49861/how-eric-lundgren-and-bigbattery-are-changing-how-we-think-about-used-batteries

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/11/explosive-problem-with-recycling-ipads-iphones-other-gadgets-they-literally-catch-fire/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1a455bbe165e

Water

Asianometry, “The Big Semiconductor Water Problem,” March 9, 2022. https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-big-semiconductor-water-problem

Reference

Needhidasan, S., et al., “Electronic waste–an emerging threat to the environment of urban India,” Environ Health Sci. Eng., Jan. 20, 2014; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3908467.

How Tech’s Richest Plan to Save Themselves After the Apocalypse

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 02:24:36 +0000

by Douglas Rushkoff

Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind

Facebook Server Farm Powered by “Clean Energy” Will Increase Denmark’s Greenhouse Footprint

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 23:17:45 +0000

by Stan Cox and Paul Cox

Last month, the social-media giant Facebook announced plans to build a new data center near Odense, Denmark. The expansion of server capacity was needed, the company said, to support "richer content" such as live-streaming and virtual reality.

The Facebook executive who made a public announcement of the decision (live-streamed, of course), noted that the new facility would have the "smallest footprint possible" and be "powered by 100 percent clean and renewable energy." Well, not exactly.

Recent reports by Rasmus Svaeborg for the Danish newspaper Information tell a different story. What may resemble, at least in the view from Silicon Valley, an exercise in green corporate responsibility will actually mean a big increase in Denmark's contribution to greenhouse warming.

Data centers consume prodigious quantities of electricity to power servers and keep them cooled down. The Danish government estimates that server farms now planned or under construction—primarily Facebook's and another being built by Apple in the town of Viborg —will add 4 million megawatt-hours, or about 13 percent, to the nation's current annual electricity consumption. Between now and 2040, server farms will account for a whopping one-third of the expected increase in Denmark's electricity demand.

Facebook and Apple are eager for their new data centers to share the bright green aura that surrounds Denmark's strong wind-energy commitment. But only about half of the country's electricity is supplied by renewable sources, so there's no spare green energy available to cover Silicon Valley's needs. The increase in national power consumption spurred by the new facilities will have to be generated from nonrenewable sources.

So the two corporations won't have "the smallest footprint possible" on Danish soil; they'll actually be substantially boosting the country's carbon output. Under the European Union's carbon emissions quota system, the server-powered increase in Denmark's emissions is supposed to be balanced by reductions in other countries' emissions. But that won't happen. Svaneborg quotes Peter Birch Sørensen, chair of the Danish government's Climate Council, who explains, "There is still a huge surplus of allowances [in the EU system], so increased emissions from Denmark will not cause lower emissions from other EU countries."

On its own, the prospect of getting green facelifts would not have been enough to entice the two corporations to set up shop in Denmark. According to Svaneborg, the crucial inducement was the ongoing rollback of an electricity tax called the Public Service Obligation (PSO). The elimination of the PSO will save the typical Danish household the equivalent of only a few dollars on its monthly bill. But it also means, writes Svaneborg, that the government will supply renewable electricity to businesses (including the new data centers) "at a price that is below production costs," in effect encouraging them to consume more power and cause more emissions.

There are additional ways in which repeal of the tax could hamper efforts to reduce Denmark's dependence on fossil fuels. Revenue from the PSO was earmarked exclusively for renewable energy development. Now, funds to foster new wind farms will have to come out of the taxpayer-supported general budget, where they will be politically vulnerable in every year's round of government budgeting and appropriation.

The PSO was introduced to avoid this very state of affairs, during the liberalization of the power sector in the 1990s, and it's a key reason why Denmark can offer tech companies such a green bounty of wind energy today. The country's renewable energy capacity was carefully cultivated over many years with a subsidy from every Danish power customer. Now Facebook and Apple have simply arrived for the harvest.

Given their vast cash reserves and self-proclaimed commitments to green energy, the two corporations could have built their own wind farms to power their new server farms, rather than piggybacking on Denmark's renewable-energy efforts. But even that would not have solved the deeper problem: wind and solar development, whoever is doing it, is a perpetual game of catch-up. Across the globe, whether in countries like Denmark who have vigorous clean-energy development or in slacker countries like the United States, capitalism's uncanny ability to crank out new electricity-dependent goods and services is easily capable of outstripping the buildup of renewable energy capacity.

Growth in technologies designed to curb air pollution (such as electric cars), to soften the impact of greenhouse warming (such as air conditioning), to purvey entertainment that can provide comfort in a world on the brink (such as streaming video), and to provide myriad other services threatens to scuttle our best efforts to wean society from fossil-fueled electricity.

Global efforts to curb greenhouse emissions were derailed last year by American voters. And America's image-conscious corporations are doing nothing to get things back on track when they play the "powered by 100 percent renewable energy" shell game.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) and Paul Cox (@Paul_Cox) are the authors of “How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia.” Write to them at cox{at}howtheworldbreaks.com.

Book Review: People Get Ready

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 13:27:25 +0000

by R. Burke

In their new book People Get Ready; the Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy Robert McChesney and John Nichols contemplate a coming scenario which had been foreseen by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, his posthumously published outline for Capital: “but to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology…labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself…as soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well spring of wealth labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure…”(1) In the past the economics profession has rejected such predictions, claiming that as technology advances new fields of employment would be opened up. Increasingly there is evidence that this may no longer be the case. As automation proceeds fewer jobs become necessary, and those that remain tend to pay less.

McChesney and Nichols begin with a survey of recent developments in technology and its effects on employment. “In 1988, one hundred years after it’s founding, Kodak employed 145,000 people. But history, innovation, and a record of treating workers like human beings was no match for the new age of cell phone communication and instantaneous photo-sharing tools such as Instagram… by 2015 the total number of Kodak workers was less than 5 percent of what it was just a quarter century earlier.” Referring to the recent words of Google chairman Eric Schmidt they report that he “acknowledged that due to rapid advances in technology, including some of the projects Google was working on, countless middle-class jobs that had seemed beyond the reach of computers and automation were going to be at risk in the near future. More and more middle-class workers were going to lose their jobs and there was little on the horizon to suggest there would be new jobs for them. This would be, according to Schmidt, the “defining” issue of the next two to three decades.” The authors back up their position with numerous statistics demonstrating that, as automation and technology have continued to advance, there has been greater unemployment and a decline in labor force participation; meanwhile profits per employee and income shares of the wealthiest have increased. Globalization and offshoring have undoubtedly played a role in exacerbating these trends; McChesney and Nichols show however that even the low wage zones of the less developed countries are not immune to the technological onslaught. “In 2010, world attention shifted to Foxconn’s factories that produced Apple products following a string of suicides by its workers. Soon thereafter Foxconn began an aggressive program to eventually replace many, or most, of its workers with one million robots.” Citing a recent New York Times article headlined “Cheaper Robots, Fewer Workers” the authors quote that: “so although building robots to replace workers is seldom cheap, a growing number of companies are finding it less costly than paying ever-higher wages in China or moving to another country.” When automation becomes cheaper than offshoring, the consequences for workers become grim.

The authors are far from being luddites and in fact celebrate the potentially liberating effects of the new technologies. Their concern is directed instead at the political and economic arrangements that allow the benefits to accrue to those at the top of the income scale at the expense of workers and citizens. As these technological trends have proceeded, recent decades have seen an undermining of the ‘democratic infrastructure’ that allows citizens to respond appropriately to these developments. A major factor in this situation has been the promotion of the ideology of neoliberalism, with its fetishizing of the “free market’ and the denigration of government as the source of our collective problems. Since the 1970’s both the Democratic and Republican parties have accepted this ideology, and have promoted policies derived from the neoliberal worldview. McChesney and Nichols argue that this ideological offensive was carefully promoted by the capitalist ruling class as a response to the ‘crisis of democracy’ resulting from the social movements of the 1960’s and early ‘70’s. As a result economic doctrines that had once been considered marginal and extreme have come to dominate public discourse. The objective was precisely to undermine and disillusion potential opposition to the schemes of the ruling class, in a word to foster what the surrealist movement has termed miserablism.

Far from succumbing to miserablism, the authors find much reason for hope, especially in looking back at similar periods in US history. They demonstrate that a concern for fostering the public good and checking the power of economic elites, however imperfect, has been a recurring theme since the founding of the country. The Progressive and New Deal eras in particular are a point of reference for McChesney and Nichols. They point to the recent, and growing concern about economic inequality as a reason for optimism regarding the future.

While People Get Ready is invaluable for making the case regarding ongoing trends relating to technology and employment, as well as for fostering an optimistic mindset about the possibilities for progressive change, one area in which they fall short is in providing practical proposals for dealing with our current dilemma. The idea of a guaranteed income is dismissed in a cavalier fashion, the authors laboring under the fallacy that it was first posited by left wing proponents in the 1960’s. Correctly recognizing that there are also right wing advocates of the idea, they then proceed to set these up as a straw man to knock down without even attempting to engage with the more progressive versions of this proposal. Instead the authors argue vaguely that “a more humane approach would be to go in the opposite direction and simply remove certain functions from the market altogether as the society grows wealthier,” without explaining how this would work, in what way it differs from previous social-democratic welfare-state reforms, how this reduces unemployment or why doing so would be mutually exclusive with a guaranteed income.

To begin with, anyone familiar with the history of socialist thought beyond a narrow focus on the Marxian current is aware that socialists from the beginning of the movement have advocated for some form of a guaranteed income. Early utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made it part of their schemes for social reform. Edward Bellamy’s 19^th century classic Looking Backward depicts a society in which the means of production are publicly owned, and each citizen receives a guaranteed, indeed equal, income. George Bernard Shaw in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism also argued for a guaranteed share of equal income for everyone, which for him was the very definition of socialism. In Bertrand Russell’s Roads to Freedom he advocated that “a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not”(2) along with Guild Socialism, and germane to McChesney and Nichols’ argument, he called for the free distribution of products that society produced in abundance as a long term goal. The suggestion that guaranteed income proposals are a right-wing idea adopted by leftists in the 1960’s is demonstrably wrong, and the truth is rather the other way around. Ironically, one advocate for this measure who comes from the Marxian current is conspicuous by his absence: Andre Gorz. Indeed it was Gorz who linked guaranteed income proposals to a demand for the progressive reduction of working hours precisely in response to increasing automation, pointing out that this would allow everyone to work, but to work less. Clearly McChesney and Nichols did not do their homework on this issue!

That aside, People Get Ready the Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, is of major importance. The authors call attention to technological trends, and their impact on employment, which many on the world-left have been ignoring to their political peril. The book is well researched, backed up with statistics, and full of important historical insights that counter the prevailing cultural trends toward miserablism. For that, Robert McChesney and John Nichols’ new book deserves to be widely read.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Vintage Books, 1973 pp 704-705.
Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, Routledge 1993, p 93.

People Get Ready; the Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy
By Robert McChesney and John Nichols
ISBN 9781568585215
Nation Books, New York, 2016
360 pages, Hardcover, $26.99

Remember the Future?

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:13:29 +0000

by R. Burke

A review by R. Burke of Douglas Murphy's Last Futures; Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture.

Those of us who lived during the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s can remember a time when it was taken for granted that technological progress would lead to some kind of utopian world. The 1964 World’s Fair in New York and Expo 67's “Man and His World” exhibition in Montreal played a big role in defining our images of the future. These expositions, in which the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller joined other examples of modernist architecture and design, were held up to us as glimpses of a coming golden age. Today such dreams of the future seem dated, even quaint, the relics of a time when people actually believed that the ‘world of tomorrow’ would be a better one. In his new book Last Futures; Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture, Douglas Murphy examines a period of time in the 1960’s and 1970’s when such visions could be entertained and taken seriously by the larger culture.

As Murphy so perceptively examines, World’s Fairs such as those in 1964 and 1967 have a long history in the political economy of empire. He likens these to the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, drawing particular attention to the Crystal Palace, then the epitome of industrial modernity. A massive building of iron forming an almost de-materialized framework, both transparent to the light yet affording comfortable sanctuary from the elements, the Crystal Palace is essentially a greenhouse filled with plants from around the globe arranged and tended as an orderly English garden; nature pacified and obedient to human purposes. This was the image of a harmonious world purporting to represent capitalism’s desired future-despite all the polluting factories, worker exploitation, and imperialist escapades that were necessary for it’s construction! As Douglas Murphy so clearly perceives, the power that image had as propaganda for the establishment is precisely that it appealed to real social needs and desires.

Last Futures is an investigation of the last time modernist architects took seriously the idea that architecture and urban planning could help change the world. This could take more politically conscious forms such as Constant’s New Babylon project as a member of the Situationist International. Others, such as Buckminster Fuller, were politically naïve in thinking that their proposals could be presented as purely technical and apolitical. A guaranteed income, world government, urging the abandonment of fossil fuels and its replacement by renewable energy; all of which Fuller quite sensibly advocated, is actually a political project.

When speaking of Fuller note must be taken of The Whole Earth Catalog, which played a role in promoting his ideas to the counterculture. Murphy manages to be fair in investigating his subject, critical in his thinking yet sensitive to the motivations behind these movements. He portrays communities such as the Lama Foundation as places where people went to retreat inside themselves from a world that resisted radical change. Such people hoped, however naively, that their spiritual explorations would somehow change the world. While Murphy claims he is anti-utopian, it is clear that on the whole he is sympathetic to the goals of many of these dreamers. This does not prevent him from being able to take a critical distance from the subject of his studies. In writing about the south London housing project of Thamesmead for example he recognizes the alienation, and sense of isolation that these impressive megastructures can inspire. Such reactions would ultimately lead to a rejection by the larger public of modernist architecture, and its ideals of improving the world.

Capitalism could pretend that it would lead to utopia, but not indefinitely. As awareness of the environmental crisis grew the size and status of world’s fairs declined. It was becoming harder to ignore the environmentally destructive aspects of capitalism, and pretend that its technology would lead inevitably to a better world. While the kind of modernist utopianism represented by Fuller, with it’s visions of a technology in harmony with nature managed to appeal to the popular imagination into the mid-‘70’s, the days of such dreams were numbered.

In the 1970’s the capitalist world-system entered a more competitive phase as Europe and Japan, badly damaged in World War 2, recovered their economic strength. The social democratic reforms of previous decades would fall into disfavor as the ruling class, challenged by the social movements of the 1960’s, came to view those as threats to their hegemony. Modernism, like Keynesianism, was dropped. A vision of progress was abandoned for the postmodern conception of history as leading up to today, and the future as merely the indefinite repetition of things as they are now. In such a perspective there can be no ‘brighter tomorrow,’ and the best we can hope for is to defend the way things are today. Ultimately the dominant style of architecture became postmodernism. In this concerns for the social function of architecture are eschewed in favor of draping a decorative façade around a functional box design, and endlessly quoting previous historical periods. This of course is the architectural accompaniment of neoliberalism, with its idolatry of markets, and political interference in them deemed sacrilege. Visions of a better tomorrow, even when promoted for the benefit of capitalism, have the danger of encouraging criticism of the status quo. Neoliberal postmodernism dropped anticipation of the future for celebration of the world as is.

This world has crashed. Global warming, financial crisis, and endless wars have killed it no matter how much the power elite may pretend otherwise. Now is the time to re-examine the alternatives, the opportunities that were missed. Murphy sees signs of a re-appraisal of the Last Futures. While he is quick to condemn the postmodern rejection of modernist aspirations he is also concerned that the rethinking of the modernist project remains true to it’s egalitarian dimensions. There is the danger that a revived modernism will function primarily for the wealthy, providing harmonious ‘Tomorrowlands’ for the few while condemning the many to environmental collapse and deprivation. Like Marcuse, whose One-Dimensional Man is a point of reference for Murphy, he is concerned to both criticize the prevailing society while pointing out potentials for an alternative. “There is overall a sense that these last futures might have been the final chance to change the world, and even if we see flickers of their reanimation, it will be nothing if these new spheres do not include absolutely everyone.”

A perceptive observer of history might note that the period of the Last Futures also corresponds to the last time in in which the world-left was politically successful. This is no historical accident. Immanuel Wallerstein has commented on how for the last few decades the left has been in a depressed state in large part because it has lost the belief in inevitable progress that once sustained it. Since then being a leftist has largely meant having a critique of capitalism and established society, but little to say about how the world might be better. The irony is that as the capitalist world-system has lost it’s own ability to imagine a ‘World of Tomorrow,’ the world-left, which took the promise of a better world in the future even more seriously than capitalism did, found itself increasingly ineffective. The ability to effect sweeping progressive social change requires a socially shared belief in at least the possibility of progress. Utopianism, or at least utopistics in the sense of the “serious assessment of historical alternatives” that Wallerstein proposes, is a vitally necessary component for the political success of the left. Last Futures; Nature, Technology, and the End of Architecture is thus more than an investigation of the naïve dreams of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, but a reminder of how ideas can become a material force. What happened before might happen again.

R. Burke is an activist, artist, teacher, and writer living in St. Louis.

Last Futures; Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture
By Douglas Murphy, Verso Books,
London 2016 ISBN -13:978-1-78168-975-2
234 pages, $29.95