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Low-tech Magazine: Is ecotech the new asbestos?: May 21, 3:03pm 5 reviews science, sustainability, modernity
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/05/nanotechnolog-1.html; Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine by Kris De Decker
It's hard to keep track of the soon-to-be-implemented technological solutions that will solve our energy and environmental woes by means of nanotechnology - the science of manipulating individual atoms. ... Unfortunately, more and more research indicates that nanomaterials might become a severe health problem and an environmental nightmare. Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine Carbon nanotubes that look like asbestos, behave like asbestos in EurekAlert Image/Low Tech Magazine Observing the reality that modernity has unleashed upon humanity one can't but be stunned at the systemic impasse it has landed us in. What is even more stunning is to observe the religious like belief that has overtaken the rationality based community whose members are carried away by the absolute belief that science and technology are destined to solve all the problems unleashed by modernity forgetting that rationality and science and technology, as its functional instruments, have been driving modernity since its inception and are thus largely responsible for the numerous side-effects of modernity that we are confronted with today. With much fanfare, the last few years, nanotechnology has been erected on the pedestal of the ecological, of the sustainable, and its applications have been presented as the solution to the energy crunch, climate change, the food crisis and so on. And one sees the same mechanism at work with other new scientific approaches as genetics for example. The potential of new sciences and technologies are always presented as worldchanging, never is there a thought for non-intended consequences. The implementation of the technology eventually is followed later by such consequences as has been the case along the last century with CO2 and all kinds of poisons that have crept into our food chain and the materials used in the manufacturing of our toys, tools and instruments. The apologists of science and technology would want us to believe that these are founded in the absolute truth opened to us by rationality. But believing that rationality is the absolute in terms of access to the truth is a kind of fundamentalist belief in par with any religious fundamentalism. This kind of belief in rationality is simply making abstraction of history. How did rationality emerge? After merchants had been obeying the logic of capital for a few centuries that logic extended its influence among the academics. The understanding and application of the logic of capital was indeed conferring richness and power to the merchants. It was thus only logical that its influence would gradually be felt in the other fields helping thus displace religious belief as the ultimate access to the truth. This historic detour lets us understand that rationality is no more than the leading belief about truth that is gradually adopted by all societies entering modernity. In late-modernity we start to understand that the truth about reality is something unattainable to humanity. We are indeed such extremely tiny particles in the whole that encompasses us that the whole remains out of our field of vision and out of our field of understanding. Once we accept our limitation we start to understand that we are interconnected with all the other particles in the whole. We start to understand that we are in a bind with all particles around us. We start to understand that the harmony between ourselves and with all the particles around us is the condition of our reproduction as a species. That's when we start to understand that we have to reduce drastically the footprint of our species for humanity to survive in postmodernity.

Tibet: dream and reality, by Slavoj Zizek: May 10, 1:40pm 6 reviews china, globalization, modernity
http://mondediplo.com/2008/05/09tibet; Tibet: dream and reality in Le Monde Diplomatique by Slavoj Zizek philosopher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and author most recently of Violence, Big Ideas/Small Books
The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is - and China too. Tibet: dream and reality This simple "good guys versus bad guys" story that we are being fed about the relationship between China and Tibet is indeed troubling, for, it is such a far cry from reality. The nine points offerered by Slavoj Zizek are a useful reminder of some hard facts that debunk this simple "good guys versus bad guys" story. What happens in Tibet is indeed no more than the imposition of modernity on a "pre-modern society". The same has been going on since centuries at the hand of the West while this time around the operation is conducted by China. We should thus be asking why the tyranny of modernity is never questioned instead of accusing the Chinese to commit a cultural genocide. China enters modernity so abruptly and with such devastating consequences for the West that it is tempting to refer to it as "the bad guy" but we ought to remember that it is the West that initially bullied China on the road to modernity. The entry of nearly 25% of the world population into a game that for centuries has been played exclusively by less than 10% of the world population is world-changing, no doubt about it. Without the knowledge that China acquired along its millennial experience in management of a huge bureaucracy the country could simply not have succeeded the rapid economic boom that we all are witnessing. Unfortunately the knowledge of this reality is not part of the Western analytical toolbox. Slavoj Zizek provocatively sketches this Western ignorance in the following question " What if the 'vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market' proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?"

Eurozine - The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism - Sven-Eric Liedma…: Apr 8, 12:31pm 1 review religion, modernity, worldviews
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-04-01-liedman-en.html; The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism via CQD, in EuroZine by Sven-Eric Liedman
The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed, that all of life's and society's integral components be ingested into the same process. The dominating figure of thought was, for a long time, that modernity and religion were incompatible. Today, that notion occurs as outmoded. Religion has a stronger hold now than for a long time in many parts of the world. Often, it is paired with hard modernity. It is warranted here to speak of a renewed enchantment with the modern world. ... reality is comprised of a number of levels where each one has its origin in the closest, lower level, but where each higher lever implies new qualities and conditions which cannot be explained with reference to lower levels. What levels one wants to distinguish relies, in the end, upon the human knowledge. To imagine a creator behind all of this is to set up a simple explanation to something much greater. The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism Great article. The fact is that humans everywhere feel the need to share with others a same view about reality; a worldview. Modernity wanted to replace the anterior religious worldview with rationality but it failed to supply a worldview that all could readily share. Rationality acts like the process of modernity. It is its ideology. It's central idea is that what can't be explained today science will explain or solve tomorrow. Under rationality one is thus left waiting for a future answer or solution. This demands a blind belief in the process of modernity without giving the reassurance one finds in a readily available interpretation of everything. Late-modernity gives us to observe a set of intertwining crises that destabilize our belief in the possibility of a future answer: SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY,: Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air, Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food. Societal Atomization + ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag and finally disruption of collapse. This is a time when we all feel an urgent need for societal comfort. Fact is this societal comfort can only be bestowed through the sharing of a common worldview.

Pankaj Mishra: At war with the utopia of modernity | Comment is free | The Guard…: Apr 2, 8:59am 4 reviews china, geopolitics, modernity, worldviews
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/22/tibet.china1; Tibet at war with the utopia of modernity in The Guardian by Pankaj Mishra and in "Informed Comment: Global Affairs" by Philip J. Cunningham.
Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands. Well-off Chinese supporting harsh suppression of the "ingrate" Tibetans echo the middle-class media commentators in Delhi and Mumbai who egg on the police to "crush" those daring to resist their dispossession. But then corporate globalisation has rarely been more successful in inculcating a culture of greed and brutality among its most educated beneficiaries. Western commentators may continue to tilt at the straw man of communism in China. Tibetans, however, seem to have sensed that they confront a capitalist modernity more destructive of tradition, and more ruthlessly exploitative of the sacred land they walk on, than any adversary they have known in their tormented history. At war with the utopia of modernity by Pankaj Mishra MIDDLE WAY TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM by Philip J. Cunningham Reading the media recently about what is going on in Tibet one is confronted mostly with propaganda that is reminiscent of the old days of the cold war and don't get me wrong it is not just Beijing that propagandizes; Western media and NGO's are equally painting their reporting and affirmations in propaganda colors. Here are 2 articles that stand out for their more objective tone. Pankaj Mishra observes a totalitarian modernity that is fighting the resistance of "primitivism" or religion or localism. The fact is that Tibetans like muslims and other local cultures are resisting their dispossession at the hands of capital holders. In the case of Tibet the capital holders are the Communist Chinese State and some of its Han citizens. Philip J. Cunningham narrates the dilemma of the Dalai Lama. "... after going on the CIA payroll at a time when the US sought to wage psychological warfare in tandem with covert destabilizing of China along its borders from 1959-1972"; the Dalai Lama is now preaching socialism as the future economic road for Tibet. What he envisions is not socialism with Chinese characteristics but socialism in its pure Marxist form. A form of socialism that he hopes will come to the rescue of traditional Tibetan culture that is being aggressed by the modernity of the logic of capital. The comments on Pankaj Mishra's article are most illuminating.

The Graying of Modernism - artnet Magazine: Feb 15, 10:07am 1 review arts, art, painters, modernity
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit2-12-08.asp; THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM in Artnet by DONALD KUSPIT about "Jasper Johns: Gray," NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.
From Impressionism onward modernism has moved steadily away from reality testing into the deceptive wonderland of hallucination.(3) It has moved away from the real thing and towards the perverse reality of the hallucinated thing -- into the bizarrely timeless and spaceless limbo of "vision" where things are real and unreal simultaneously. What began as an epistemophilic adventure ends in epistemophobic stalemate, which is what I think we have in Johnsu2019 engulfing grayness. ... Suspending the reality principle, it becomes a realm of dubious pleasure -- pseudo-esthetic pleasure. It also loses moral value, however indirectly; if white and black have moral significance, as Kandinsky and innumerable others have noted, then mixing them together to form neutral gray renders art morally indifferent. ... Modernism was re-playing itself like a broken record, squeezing every last bit of enigma and insinuation out of the medium. ... I thought I was looking at the suicide of art in process. THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM Jasper Johns. Map. 1962. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Jasper Johns. 0-9. 1959-62. collection of Martin Z. Margulies The search for a reality that the eye can't see was at the heart of the artistic adventure of the artists-thinkers of high modernity (1910-1930). They were unfortunately followed by artists who never understood the artistic quest of high modernity and who then all naturally concluded the experience of modernity in the one way street of "whatever is art" which unmistakably is a total failure or the "Death of art" as Kuspit posits in other works of his.

http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf: Feb 12, 11:21am 1 review reality, postmodernity, modernity, worldviews
http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf; Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming via Metafilter / Kattullus; in avantgame.com by Jane McGonigal, PhD game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster.
Jane McGonigal, one of the lead designers of I Love Bees writes about collective intelligence, the phenomenon of massive groups of people gathering online to solve problems, as it played out in I Love Bees. Can a computer game teach collective intelligence? The term "collective intelligence", or CI for short, was originally coined by French philosopher Pierre Levy in 1994 to describe the impact of Internet technologies on the cultural production and consumption of knowledge. Levy argued that because the Internet facilitates a rapid, open and global exchange of data and ideas, over time the network should "mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity" in new and unexpected ways. As part of his utopian vision for a more collaborative knowledge culture, he predicted: "We are passing from the Cartesian cogito" - I think, therefore I am - "to cogitamus" - we think, therefore we are. The result of this new "we", Levy argued, would be a more complex, flexible and dynamic knowledge base. Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming Alternate Reality Gaming The polarities ( ) of humanity are: - the individual ( + ) - the societal ( - ) The polarities of any unity are permanently striving to attain harmony. Little moves from one of the polarities destabilize the harmony within the unity and provoke a chain of interactions that will reset harmony at a new level. Along the history of humanity we observe successive stages that are characterized by given forms of harmonization between societal and individual: 1. animism: individuals belong to the group. They are glued in the understanding of reality transmitted to them by their man of knowledge. The shaman is a free man! 2. religious and/or philosophic: individuals are coerced into submission to the king or emperor. They are glued in the understanding of reality transmitted to them by the priest or wiseman. The priest and the wiseman are at the service of the king or the emperor. 3. modern and rational: shared collective belief systems are eroding and individuals are free to believe whatever they want. In this context of societal atomization the reason of capital imposes its logic upon all. 4. postmodern: In late modernity we are witnessing a string of parameters that are emerging simultaneously and interacting upon one another: SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY: Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air, Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food. Societal Atomization + ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag, ). Those interactions most probably are shaping the contours of a new paradigm of reality out of which will emerge a new form of integration of the individual within the societal. Jane McGonigal's thesis is that the internet will "mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity" from where will emerge a "Collective Intelligence". Another vision is that of a collapse of modernity.

Countdown to a Meltdown: Jan 26, 10:50am 4 reviews economics, politics, globalization, postmodernity, modernity
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows; Countdown to a Meltdown in The Atlantic by James Fallows
The hopes of our nation are bleeding away along with our few remaining economic resources. Here is the challenge: - Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals. - Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair. - Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power - and our military is still ahead of China's. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far. To deal with these problems once in office, we must point out basic truths in the campaign. ... But remember that the reality of the story reaches backward, and that is why I have concentrated on the missed opportunities, the spendthrift recklessness, the warnings America heard but tuned out. To tell it that way in public would of course only make things worse, and we can't afford the recriminations or the further waste of time. The only chance for a new beginning is to make people believe there actually is a chance. Countdown to a Meltdown January 20, 2016, Master Strategy Memo. Subject: The Coming Year - and Beyond READ THIS ARTICLE but be aware only to read it if you are not enslaved to our "infotainment-drunk society". It is a fiction, supposedly written in 2016, but its real subject is about the strategic economic blunders of the West between 1990 and 2008 that are now starting to explode in our faces. This is a real eye-opener on the stakes that are at play in the 2008 election. It makes no doubt that we are at a turning point in the economic and political history of modernity. But the subject of James Fallow's article has to be placed into perspective. What it describes is the short-term history of the US. Hereafter is a trial-sketch of the long history of the world in which this short term enfolds. More particularly an accelerating double process is at work that spans between the boundaries of two epochal periods on the ladder of the long haul history: 1. We are in the last phase of modernity (destructive late-modernity). What I mean to say is that the logic of capital and its ideology of rationalism have spread to the four corners of the earth. Capitalism is now putting in competition the citizens of the earth for the limited salaried jobs it makes available thus unleashing a process that acts like a great income equalizer: reducing incomes in the West and increasing incomes in the East and the South. This equalization on a global scale happens in an institutional vacuum. National states are no match indeed for what is going on, at best, they compete with one another to attract the localization of big capital's investments within their shores. A backlash against globalization is reaching its sketching phase in the West. How it will turn out is anybody's guess (protectionism, war?) but its consequences will be felt by all. In parallel to this more classic economic and political rebalancing goes a far deeper non-classic movement that will largely subdue the conflictual relationship wrought upon nations by the initial classic rebalancing. (side effects of modernity, peak resources, societal atomization) 2. We are in the early phase of postmodernity (constructive early postmodernity): Some trends are slowly emerging that reject the premises of modernity: 1. the logic of capital is incompatible with the principle of life. It has thus to be subdued by a set of rules, 2. reality is too vast to be accessible in its entirety by science, 3. science has to encompass itself within the value system of a postmodern foundational story, 4. humans feel a dire need to believe in a credible global worldview, 5. humanity's polarities have to be rebalanced (societies / individuals), and so on.

Sustainable Futures By Ashok Agrwaal: Jan 13, 11:00am 1 review society, postmodernity, modernity
http://www.countercurrents.org/agrwaal120108.htm; Sustainable Futures via TOD, in Counter Currents by Ashok Agrwaal
In fact, the European notion of expansion, growth, etc, along a linear path was wholly misconceived. This does not negate everything that they thought and did during this period. But it is not possible to make a selection from out of the millions of ideas that emerged from their mindset. The rejection has to be wholesale. The rejection is of linearity, which continues to rule the roost as a paradigm of thought and action despite the development of ideas negating it during the 20 th century, from within the European mind itself. This linear, non-contextual reality that we are in the grips of must be replaced with a non-linear, context sensitive world view; which is what the non-western people of the world have lived with for thousands of years and, which is now getting destroyed by "development", "growth" and "progress". Sustainable Futures Non-linearity is the essence of the animist worldview that has been shared by the whole of humanity along tens of thousands of years: - Observation of the vastness of the whole of our universe (whole, one,...) - Observation of the inter-relatedness of humanity with all the other life forms within the whole - Observation of overlapping natural cycles within the whole (change) - Observation of the need to balance the human polarities (societies and individuals) The advent of agriculture destabilized the tribal arrangement with the "shaman as man of knowledge" in charge of interpreting reality for his tribesmen. Where it arose agriculture gave rise to military and political power. Force being not sufficient to assure the control over the population the new powers forced their subjects to adhere to a belief system. The sharing of a belief system is what ultimately glues the citizens in the togetherness of their nation being it taking the form of kingdoms, empires, or republics. The advent of force using belief as a societal glue received two radically different applications: - From the Middle-East to Europe animism was brutally extirpated from people's minds and replaced with dualism that gave its foundation to the edifice of the religions of the word. - Further East animism was maintained as the foundational story only being adapted to the local circumstances by various add-ons. Linear development is a strategy derived from the dualistic worldview of the religions of the word: - Reality is conceived of as being what happens between beginning and end. It starts with the creation by God and it ends with the non-worldly after-life in heaven or hell. - This straight line between the creation and the ending of the world follows an arrow of "development, growth and progress. With the advent of modernity this dualistic worldview was automatically integrated into the ideology of rationality that was derived from centuries of practicing the logic of capital by the Western European elite. This is what today gives dualism its hegemoniac operational principle. The central most important question today for humanity is whether Chinese, Indians and the other people entering modernity will succeed keeping their animistic foundations alive. It's surely noteworthy to observe that they represent some 80-85% of the world population and the logic of capital is now entering their lives. What's most frightening is that nowhere have we seen the logic of capital sparing non-dualistic foundational stories. At this critical juncture of humanity's history the answer given to the question asked by Ashok Agrwaal could very well decide of humanity's fate. "How much of our past - the collective past rather than the European one - do we wish to carry forward into future?".

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: Jan 8, 11:03am 1 review cars, globalization, change, modernity
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JA09Dj02.html; Eroding Western living standards in Asia Times by Martin Hutchinson
it is pretty clear that income levels in the West are converging with those in the more competently run emerging markets. The bad news is that in the years ahead this is likely to happen through an absolute decline in Western living standards. ... Thus the economic histories of a high proportion of the Western population under 30, except the very highly skilled, will involve repeated bouts of unemployment, with job changes involving not a move to higher living standards but an angry acceptance of lower ones. By 2030, it is possible that the median real income in the United States and Western Europe may be no more than 50-60% of its level today. ... Expansive governments will employ ever higher proportions of Western populations in unproductive ways, thus increasing exponentially the burden on their unfortunate taxpayers and quickening the exit of jobs. ... Once the world competes once again on a level playing field, with high-quality education and infrastructure as available in Bangladesh as in Baltimore, and no gigantic surplus mob of the unskilled, living standards will begin to increase in tandem worldwide, with both the ex-rich countries and ex-poor countries benefiting. Eroding Western living standards This article describes how the spreading of the logic of capital is equalizing incomes around the globe. In the West incomes come down while they go up in the South. This will go on until the whole earth becomes an economic level playing field for capital holders. This presentation is the vision of big capital that, in the seventies, gave the impulse to the movement toward globalization undertaken in large part through the Trilateral Commission. The bet behind this vision is that the logic of capital will finally impose itself as the ultimate value of a universal order emerging eventually out of the chaos wrought upon us by globalization. But what about: - The side-effects of modernity: these are now being addressed by the propagandists of this globalization of modernity as being unsolvable (climate change is real but we can do nothing to stop it). Their implicit meaning being that globalization should continue unabated. Later on they'll justify the starving of four-fifth of the world population as a collateral damage of progress. - Peak resources: they have no doubt that the peaking of oil and other resources will be solved by science and technology. Their belief in rationality is akin to religious. It is an unquestioning belief.

The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis, part 3: The end of the world …: Jan 7, 12:28pm 2 reviews society, change, modernity
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2803.shtml; The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis via The Oil Drum, in Online Journal by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development
This global system is hugely destructive of human life. Devoid of the capability to recognize and enact ethical values, it is driven purely by the imperatives of profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. Consequently, it is not only destructive of human life; it is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself. It is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 20 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now. part 1: The holocaust in history part 2: Exporting democracy part 3: The end of the world as we know it? part 4: A whole new vision of life itself An excellent presentation about modernity and its side-effects. For Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed the " origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries." Two comments impose themselves at this level: - first modernity is not a civilization it is one particular stage of societal and economic development along the evolutionary road of humanity. Modernity did not supplant the Indian and the Chinese civilizations; those civilizations are internalizing modernity. - secondly the origins of modernity do not lay in the "voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries". Those voyages came as a consequence of the groundwork laid earlier at the origins of modernity. The groundwork laid at the origins of modernity was made possible with the convergence of two factors: 1. a population increase, in Western Europe at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, led to higher consumer demand than what the feudal manors could produce and to secure their survival many were left with the only alternative to flee their manor and try to survive at their margins. This rapidly evolved into communities that grew in the early European cities. Those communities survived through agriculture and trade. 2. the crusades undertaken at the initiative of Pope Urban II, who enrolled the Squires and Lords under the guise of sin forgiving certificates (indulgences), were the occasion for the European aristocracy to discover the ingeniousness of Arab crafts, the richness generated by their commercial endeavors, and the high level of knowledge bestowed on their people in their universities. This encounter, of primitive Europeans with far more advanced Arabs, resulted in the plunder by the Europeans of the accumulated Arab richness (their gold, silver and crafts as well as their imported silks and other from the far East). Over the next decades those plundered goods find their way to the European regional market fairs that resulted from what is described in point 1. Long distance trade could not possibly have been made possible without the borrowing of financial and exchange techniques from the Arabs, most important among them the bill of exchange and the tools to enact a double entry accountancy system. The discipline and strictness imposed by the use of those instruments of commercial exchanges upon merchants, bankers and the others involved in long distance trade gradually fostered a more rational vision of the world that was dictated to them by the logic of their invested capital. The logic of capital is the blood of modernity. It is what dictated its whole history.