Recent Blog Posts

Seismic Revolt

Nature is about to shake things up.

Micah White
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05 Mar 2010
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20 comments

Photograph by the Pan-African News Wire via Flickr

There was something left unsaid in all the coverage about the powerful earthquakes that decimated Haiti in January and rattled Chile in February. Of course, we heard about the tragedy – the human tolls were covered in detail and made us acutely aware of our own vulnerability. But despite all that, no one wanted to discuss what caused these earthquakes. In an age where the materialist-scientific outlook peers into every dark corner of existence, leaving such an obvious question unasked suggests we can’t handle the answer.

It is time to confront the fact that climate change will manifest in unexpected ways, including violent earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. This is the position of respected scientists. As the New Scientist magazine reports without equivocation, “evidence of a link between climate and the rumblings of the crust has been around for years, but only now is it becoming clear just how sensitive rock can be to the air, ice and water above.” Or as Bill McGuire, Professor of Geological Hazards at University College London, writes in an earlier New Scientist article, “as the balance changes between the stresses acting on the crust and the strains held within it, the result can be an increase in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.” Within the scientific community there appears to be a long-standing belief that there is a direct, causal connection linking earthquakes to climate change.

This connection is not being discussed because our civilization is unwilling to accept the full-spectrum reality of nature’s revolt. We are like the naive soldiers who came to battle prepared for trench warfare only to find their enemies armed with airplanes. We think of climate change as “global warming” alone and prepare ourselves psychically for delayed seasons while nature hits us from below – literally – with an earth-splitting seismic revolt. And as we scramble to amass the public funds necessary for retrofitting our decaying industrial infrastructure, nature will deploy volcanic ash to block out the sun and mysterious blights to erase our crops.

Nature is in revolt against our consumer culture. The only chance we have as a species is to heed its warnings, to trust that these sudden catastrophes augur a dark future that our governments, our money and our faith in progress cannot protect us from. Nature is the source of our sustenance and may easily become the cause of our death. Unless, that is, we are willing to risk joining nature’s earthly insurrection.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

The Great Escape

An audacious plan to jam Google.

Micah White
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26 Feb 2010
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51 comments

ZEVS - GZZGLZ.COM

There was a time not so long ago when I, along with nearly everyone I knew, was enamored with Google. Google inaugurated a new internet-era in which the sum of human knowledge would be easy to find and available to all. We turned our backs on the infancy of the web – the Yahoo! and AltaVista dark ages – and looked toward a future where knowledge would be liberated and culture would be opened up to the free play of innovation.

Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin captured the alternative spirit we once adored in Google in an academic paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (1998). In this document, the first public description of the philosophy and technology behind Google, the cofounders disparage the commercialization of search engines. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Citing the example of OpenText, a search engine that corrupted its results with paid placements, they conclude that “the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” For a time, this noncommercial approach was reflected in Google’s simple, ad-free website.

But then, something changed: Google forsook its founding vision. Perhaps Page and Brin’s guiding spirit was diluted by too much growth, or maybe the draw to be profitable made idealism seem irrelevant. In any case, Google opened the door to commercialization and advertising crept in. By 2000, text ads lined the side of the screen. Today a typical search in Google may yield ten results surrounded by 11 advertisements. If only it had stopped there. Now it is less about the ads Google puts on its own pages and more about the ads Google puts on everyone else’s pages.

By making it easy for mom-and-pop businesses to add advertising to their websites, Google has become the internet’s largest and most determined info-polluter – effectively killing the dream of a commercial-free internet. Since its recent purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, Google controls the ad-space on over 85% of all websites. Whether you are surfing the New York Times, MySpace or an infrequently trafficked blog, chances are that Google provides the advertisements that distract you. The fact is that Google is no longer primarily a search engine. As Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained in an interview with Charlie Rose, “now we are an advertising company!” Today 99% of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it strews on websites across the internet.

Watching Schmitt rejoice at Google’s new business model should cause us to pause and consider the long-term cultural consequences of relying on an advertising company to organize the world’s information. For the first time in human history, a single company both controls our access to information and corrupts that same information through advertising. Google makes money not from censorship – although it recently proved its willingness to engage in this behavior too – but from altering our worldview through the commercialization, commodification and adulteration of our culture’s collective knowledge. Google is, in other words, the most radical reordering of information to benefit advertisers the world has ever known. If Google continues to play the role of librarian to the internet, the greatest warehouse of human knowledge ever built, we face tremendous danger.

The consequences of Google’s commercialization of knowledge are apparent in our inability to confront the existential challenges we’re facing. While the physical world is dying, we remain transfixed by the shimmering digital world. We’re unable to critically sift through information, digest it into knowledge and combine it with personal experience to produce wisdom and action. Instead, we drift in a sea of disconnected facts, getting a buzz from being connected. But this passivity is not entirely our fault – it is induced by the experience of searching for knowledge online when everything has become a trivial, mindless commodity. Who can take the looming ecological catastrophe seriously when online content is squeezed between ads that either distract us or stimulate us to consume?

Google is to blame for encouraging the internet to become a space for consumption – let’s stop it from profiting. Sever the connection between advertising, clicks and sales. Instead of ignoring ads that annoy you, click on them. Let it be known that you are a protest-clicker, a culture jammer who is sick of what the internet has become and who is doing something about it. Clicking on advertising undermines Google’s ability to determine which clicks are real and which are fake. Advertisers will refuse to pay for protest clicks, as they already do with fraudulent clicks, and the myth of the online advertising system – that clicks translate into profit – will be thrown into disarray. With this myth under assault there will be little justification for increased online marketing.

While we undermine the commercial foundations of online advertising, we must also discover a radically anticommercial way of organizing information. Humanity needs a new knowledge paradigm – one that values the unity of information and finds pages based but on the broader ideas behind digital words, not on what is literally written. Unlike previous attempts at organization that have relied exclusively on computer scientists and automated spiders to index the internet, any new attempt requires something more. We need a system informed by an interdisciplinary approach, a system that critiques the assumptions inherent to the search engines developed thus far.

To give impetus to this project, I suggest that we gradually begin making portions of our websites unavailable to Google. Google has enjoyed unparalleled, free access to the information we put online, which has in turn encouraged users to rely exclusively on this corporate search engine. Not anymore. By blocking Google’s access to the most important bits of our online data we will encourage the development of alternative forms of knowledge organization. This movement of sites “not in Google” will fundamentally undermine the assumption of its omniscience. To build a new system for the organization of knowledge is by far the most audacious plan ever proposed for cultural activists, but it may be our movement’s greatest gift to the future.

It is time we prove to the world that the knowledge we seek is not in Google.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He lives in Berkeley and is writing a book about the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Liquid Courage

Can a culture be defined by the toxic combination of alcohol, caffeine and sugar?

Lauren Haehnel
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25 Feb 2010
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5 comments

For the first time in Alpha Sigma Sigma history the Michigan State University frat threw a party that guests actually attended. Until recently the nerds of ASS never knew the secret to throwing a good party. They missed all the signs: the neon lights illuminating every club in town; the car stalking the streets hunting down impressionable students; the cans littering every party. If the ASS brothers wanted people to come to their house and get rowdy, they needed a sponsor. And that sponsor had to be Red Bull. Alpha Sigma Sigma threw down big last night, and half the campus was wasted.

Guests filled every room in the house, spilling out onto the lawn. Every student there drank Red Bull mixed with whatever kind of vodka they could find. As the 80 grams of caffeine and 27 grams of sugar from each can of liquid speed combined with each shot of vodka, the pledge brothers made fools of themselves in all 26 rooms of the house. It didn’t matter that Matt told half the campus the secret password to get into chapter meetings or that Erick puked down every corridor in the house before passing out in the front lawn, they had their wiiings on and they could do anything. The fact that almost half the brothers were already hugging the toilet by 11 p.m. went unseen – everyone was too inebriated to notice. The party wrapped up sometime after the second ambulance came to whisk away yet another girl suffering from alcohol poisoning.

Man, that party was awesome.

Amid all the wreckage, silver and blue coats the landscape like freshly fallen snow. The only real distinguishable items – besides some broken furniture – are the slim, chic silver little cans that made everyone’s night awe-inspiring and everyone’s morning a living hell. Red Bull did its job in more ways than one: It not only got every student at the party tanked, it also got its logo plastered all over both the campus and impressionable young student minds.

The “extreme” image being promoted by Red Bull plays perfectly into college culture, and is spawned from unique and delicately designed marketing campaign. Each time that crazy skydiver lands his base jump or that BMX biker does a triple tailwhip, the daredevil is accompanied by that scheming little bull. This same little bull is found in the hands of every student trying to fulfill their desire to be hardcore. It’s as if with each crack of the tiny 8.4 oz can, the drinker develops a new superhuman complex. With each gulp of liquid courage, their muscles bulge a little more and their ego follows suit.

Can a culture be defined by the toxic combination of alcohol, caffeine and sugar? If so, what’s the next step?

Lauren Haehnel is an up-and-coming writer from Michigan State University. She is a sophomore dedicated to a pre-nursing degree. Lauren’s rock will beat your scissors and paper any day!

Cancerphone

We are in the early stages of industry denial.

Micah White
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09 Feb 2010
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19 comments

Photograph by Tom Schierlitz via GQ Magazine

The first study linking cigarettes to cancer was published in 1939, but it took two decades of further medical research before the World Health Organization recognized this fact in 1960. And despite the unanimous consensus that cigarettes kill, Philip Morris – the world’s largest tobacco company – continued its campaign of denial until October, 1999, when it finally admitted on its website that cigarettes are deadly. It took 60 years for the cigarette/cancer connection to become an irrefutable fact. We are now beginning to repeat the same pattern, only this time with cell phones.

A recent article in GQ magazine , which should be required reading for all cell phone users, suggests that we are in the early stages of industry denial. A smattering of research indicates a connection between cell phones and cancer, but well-funded industry-backed studies refute this evidence. When I share this article with friends they often respond with a shrug of indifference, thereby indicating that cell phones have passed from luxury to necessity. Any risk of cancer has been relegated to the same category we accept when we drive a car or board a plane.

It’s disturbing that it’s easier for us to agree that the cell phone/cancer connection poses an acceptable risk than it is to imagine a world where cell phones have been banned. Perhaps this is because cell phones and smart phones are still considered cool – like cigarettes were in the 1950s. We envied the rebel’s pack of smokes just as we now lust after our neighbor’s iPhone.

It is time culture jammers launched a campaign to uncool the cancerphone. Only then will our society be able to have an honest discussion about the risks of wireless devices.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Revolutionary Time

Averting disaster means accepting its inevitability.

Micah White
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28 Jan 2010
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8 comments

Zizek

In his most recent book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek blames the failure of contemporary activism on our assumption that time is a one-way line from past to future. He argues that activism is failing to avert the coming catastrophe because it subscribes to the same notions of linear time as industrial society. According to Zizek, a regeneration of activism must begin with a change in our understanding of temporality. Paraphrasing Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Zizek explains that “if we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this ‘historical’ notion of temporality: We have to introduce a new notion of time.” This new notion of time is a shift of perspective from historical progress to the timelessness of a revolutionary moment.

The new role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. “This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of ‘divine violence’ would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress,” writes Zizek. Accomplishing this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present looking forward to the future looking backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Zizek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dreaded catastrophic event – sudden climate catastrophe, a “gray goo” nano-crisis, the widespread adoption of cyborg technologies – has already happened and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. “We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny – and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” Only by assuming the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would be necessary to prevent its occurrence. We could then take these steps. “Paradoxically,” Zizek concludes, “the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.”

Zizek is right to suggest that activism is at a crossroads. Any honest culture jammer will admit that our signature moves have lately failed to arouse more than a few tepid responses. The fact is that our present is being swallowed by the future we dreaded: a dystopian sci-fi nightmare of enforced consumerism and planet-wide degradation. Activism now faces the dilemma of how to walk the line between false hope and pessimistic resignation. It is no longer tenable to hold the nostalgic belief that educating the population, recycling and composting and advocating for “green capitalism” will save us from the brink. Likewise, it is difficult to muster the courage to act when the collapse of civilization seems unavoidable, imminent and, in our most misanthropic moments, potentially desirable. Zizek’s shift in temporality offers us a way to balance the paralyzing realization that our demise is inevitable with the motivating belief that we can change our destiny. By accepting that we are doomed, we free ourselves to break from normalcy and act with the revolutionary fervor needed to achieve the impossible.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Howard Zinn

He gave us back our history.

Micah White
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28 Jan 2010
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4 comments

There is a tendency among culture jammers to harbor a pessimistic worldview – to assume that we’ve always been on the losing side of history and that, despite our best efforts, nothing will change. Against this narrative of predestined defeat and perpetual victimhood stood Howard Zinn, whose sustained commitment to pointing out that we, the people, have often risen up victoriously against the moneyed corporate elite made him a hero.

Zinn’s greatest achievement is the monumental A People’s History of the United States, an alternative history book originally published in 1980 and revised several times since, which documents the suppressed stories of triumphant abolitionists, socialists and rabble rousers. For many of us, reading Zinn for the first time was a revelation: an emboldening experience of finding continuity between our acts of resistance today and the long and glorious history of passionate dissent we had known nothing about.

Howard Zinn, August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010, will be remembered because he gave us back our history and made it clear that in these dark times of corporate domination, the rumblings we hear from below are the aftershocks of past uprisings and the first signs that things are about to change, again.

Video: Remembering Howard Zinn (via Big Think)

Part 1 of 3: The Legacy of Howard Zinn

Part 2 of 3: Howard Zinn’s Personal Philosophy

Part 3 of 3: Howard Zinn on the World Today

A Struggle for Freedom

Gaza Freedom March activists take on Egypt’s security matrix.

Max Ajl
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27 Jan 2010
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1 comment

Photo by Dana Elborno from The Electronic Intifada

It was amazing: groups of foreign activists choosing to jet across the ocean and slam into the Cairene security forces (by now open collaborators in tending to Gaza’s prison wall). The Gaza Freedom March saw thousands of people exposing themselves to beating, bloodying, arrest … the physical force of state power. The last time this happened in such numbers was 70 years ago, when the Spanish Republic fought desperately against Franco’s military junta on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. And 70 years ago, too, the fascists received aid from imperial powers while the Republicans made do with immiserated or capricious allies.

In Cairo, Egypt, a year after Israel’s Cast Lead winter massacre – during which Israel slaughtered 1,400 Palestinians – 1,400 internationals came to Cairo. They came from the West, and they came from the global South. They flew across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Mediterranean basin. Even after the Egyptian government announced that the Gaza Freedom March didn’t have a chance of entering the Gaza Strip, they came from the world over. When Egypt’s authoritarian regime resorted to the manifold, abrasive, spirit-killers that permeate its security institutions and its bureaucracy, the participants of the Gaza Freedom March weren’t cowed. We did not listen.

We went to Egypt, with its security force of over a million, and demonstrated. French dissidents occupied the ground in front of their own embassy. Others were arrested or threatened with deportation. Others were beat in the streets. It was an atypical struggle. Not for domestic social reforms but for something else. It was a struggle for the freedom of 1.4 million Gazans ringed behind razor wire. A struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians, a ghettoized people facing one of the world’s strongest militaries on three of its frontiers and a massive militarized police state on its fourth.

The Gaza Freedom March should rightly blaze bright; its light won’t soon fade. International solidarity efforts are still waxing – the Palestine solidarity movement has mounted a series of stunning campaigns in reaction to the territorial fragmentation of Palestine. Flotillas of freedom ships continue to arrive from Cyprus. Viva Palestina moves over land and through sea, fighting off Egyptian riot police with stones and barricades.

The Gaza Freedom March took another route. Massive nonviolent civil disobedience targeting the core Arab partner in the blockade of Gaza: Mubarak’s dictatorship, which is now constructing a steel wall 30 meters deep in the dirt and sand between Egypt and Gaza. We inserted ourselves directly into that state’s security matrix, making front-page news across the Arab world in a series of increasingly spectacular direct actions, fighting a next-generation war – not a war of movement on Catalonian and Astourian battlefields but a media war. We fought for information, visibility, symbolic legitimacy, putting a claim on the world’s attention that couldn’t be ignored, that wasn’t ignored.

The tactical victory has also been pedagogical. No modern war has been truly fought simply within national borders, and the Palestinian fight for survival has been no different. So we’ve made it clear, if it wasn’t before, that if the stolen bankroll of the Empire stands behind Zionism, the world’s peoples stand behind Palestine.

But the vise tightens. High-visibility mobilizations like the Gaza Freedom March can’t be campaigns in a failed war, not when the struggle isn’t for democracy but against politicide, not when failure is so unimaginable. The Cairo Declaration against Israeli apartheid, drafted by core international organizers, brings those facts into stark relief, and enjoins the movements’ passive supporters – the world – to rise up. The moment is now.

Max Ajl

I Will Work Harder

South Korea is determined to rebuild its economy, but it’s the country’s soul that is scarred.

Steven Borowiec
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27 Jan 2010
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0 comments

Photo by by sladewalters on Flickr

In South Korea the economy is seen to be recovering, but that is just one part of the process of healing from the economic crisis. The psychological side of the crisis is rarely discussed. It defies diminution into growth rates and statistics. There are deep, difficult to detect scars on the South Korean people. The country has an extensive history of tragedy that has never been thoroughly addressed. It suffered through colonial occupation and a brutal civil war. It remains divided.

By nearly any measure, South Korea’s economic development has been stunningly successful. It’s gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries 50 years ago to one of its richest today. It boasts multiple internationally competitive companies and a strong domestic market.

The country’s government and major financial institutions are forecasting a healthy growth rate of 5% for next year. In our economic analysis, we have come to rely mainly on figures that indicate the health of elite institutions. With some celebrating the end of the crisis, recovery has yet to trickle down to many regular people. Unemployment is still a huge issue. According to the state-run agency Statistics Korea, 2009 will see the biggest one-year decline in youth employment since 1998, when the total number of jobs fell 598,000 from the previous year. Much of South Korea’s recovery can be attributed to government stimulus plans. When that money runs out next year there will be a real possibility of a double-dip recession. Given the government’s fiscal situation, there will be no funds available for another stimulus package.

South Korean president Lee Myung-bak is nicknamed “the bulldozer.” Before entering politics he was the CEO of Hyundai’s construction division, and he retains close ties to the industry. It’s therefore unsurprising that much of the government’s stimulus package has been comprised of new construction projects. South Korea is already one of the world’s most developed countries. Little is accomplished by piling concrete over concrete and steel on steel.

The economy is not the problem – it’s not what holds the country back from taking the more influential global position it craves. Material comforts have failed to bring full happiness to this country. South Koreans work longer hours than people in any other OECD country. The country’s education system is arguably the most demanding in the world, placing young people under massive pressure.

The South Korean concept of success is narrow: a degree from one of a few elite universities, employment at a major corporation, marriage to a tall, thin spouse with large eyes and a small face.

Figure skater Yu-na Kim and South Korean female pop groups have enjoyed massive popularity over the past year, according to a report by Samsung Economic Research Institute. As opportunities vanish, South Koreans have retreated into the illusion of fame. The example of celebrity shows it is possible to thrive amid misery.

The nation was shaken on May 23, 2009, when former President Roh Moo-hyun threw himself off a cliff near his home in the country’s mountainous south. He had been implicated in a corruption scandal that involved his friends and associates. His death would have been even more shocking had it been exceptional. In spite of an avowed Confucian aversion to the practice, South Korea has the highest suicide rate of the OECD countries. It takes place disproportionately among those who make it to the top of South Korean society.

These topics are rarely breached in the media or in polite conversation. South Korea is a country where blunt expression is dangerous, lest the fragile sentiments of those within earshot be offended. It is then routinely the speaker who is held at fault, regardless of the content of their statement. There was uproar in the fall of 2009 when a 20-year-old university student said during a television talk show she thought that men shorter than 180cm were “losers.” The comment became a national controversy. Men claimed great psychological damage across the country. Repeated attempts were made to punish the young woman under South Korean law.

It is expected that a recovered economy will cure all. But it is the other areas of society that need attention. For a real recovery to take place, South Koreans need to broaden the scope of how the country’s health is determined. Full recovery will not be found in improving GDP figures, but in more attention to the neglected sides of existence: art, culture and time to think.

The Korean concepts of yeolsimhi (work your hardest) and ballee ballee (hurry, hurry) are called upon during difficult times. Koreans are determined to improve the current crisis with more of the same.

The diligent but simplistic Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm faces every challenge with the mantra “I will work harder.” He eventually collapses from overwork.

Steven Borowiec is a writer based in Seoul. More of his work can be found at www.stevenborowiec.blogspot.com

Objects of Desire

Israeli diamonds are forever … on your conscience.

Sean Clinton
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11 Jan 2010
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49 comments

In recent years the romantic image of diamonds as objects of desire has been tarnished by bloody conflicts in central Africa that are often funded by the trade of locally mined gems. Human rights organizations have begun a campaign against “conflict diamonds,” or “blood diamonds,” and the ensuing global attention has forced the diamond industry to take action against the trade. The Kimberley Process, introduced in a 2003 UN resolution, is a certification scheme designed to prevent rough diamonds used to fund conflict from entering the market. But the process operates with a very narrow definition of conflict diamonds. Cut and polished diamonds, regardless of what bloody conflicts they may fund, do not qualify for regulation under the Kimberley Process. Israel’s blood diamonds, therefore, are kosher.

Israel is the world’s largest producer of cut and polished diamonds. In 2006 diamond exports worth $16.7 billion accounted for a significant portion of the country’s total manufacturing exports. (The importance of the diamond industry to the Israeli economy can best be appreciated when one considers that the budget of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in 2008 was $13 billion.) Because cut and polished diamonds are not regulated by the Kimberley Process, jewelers continue to sell Israeli diamonds to consumers who are, for the most part, completely unaware that the gems were crafted in Israel – where taxes from the diamond industry are used to fund the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and the brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Despite the fact that Israeli diamonds are feeding Israel’s war machine, the Kimberley Process has yet to broaden its definition of conflict diamonds. Furthermore, the international campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestine (BDS) has failed to speak out against this major revenue source. Efforts have been made in Ireland to raise public awareness through the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), which has called on the Kimberley Process to expand its definition of conflict diamonds. The IPSC has lobbied the diamond industry to laser-inscribe all gems with their country of origin, which will allow consumers to choose diamonds from countries that respect human rights.

Because the international community – Western governments in particular – has long failed to protect innocent Palestinian civilians from constant attacks by the Israeli military, it’s imperative that the concerned citizens of the world take action in defense of Palestinians’ human rights. Rejecting Israeli blood diamonds is the most effective means of sanction available to civil society. Diamond exports significantly outperform all other Israeli export commodities, making the gleaming rock Israel’s Achilles heel. The country’s overdependence on a single luxury commodity leaves its economy vulnerable to trends and public taste. And unlike other Israeli exports – technology, software and armaments – diamonds are purchased by individual consumers, not companies or governments. When buying a diamond, each individual consumer has the power to withhold the money that powers the Israeli war machine. By choosing a stone that is truly conflict free, consumers will diminish funding for Israeli crimes against humanity – in Palestine and beyond. Israeli diamonds are forever … on your conscience.

–Sean Clinton

After The Car

An interview with John Urry.

Micah White
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07 Jan 2010
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4 comments

Cover image for After The Car.

Adbusters contributing editor Micah White recently talked to John Urry, coauthor of After The Car, about what to expect in the post-car world. Urry is a Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University.

ADBUSTERS: The part of your book that may surprise most people is your conclusion that a low carbon society may not be a freer society. Why did you come to this conclusion?

JOHN URRY: It is because the high level of carbon consumption may not be able to continue – partly because of climate change and partly because the oil may begin to run out or is already running out (depending on how you read the data). Forcing people out of their cars is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. One way to do it is by intensifying regulations around carbon consumption. A lot of societies may fall into this alternative, which I see as a kind of Orwellian future of highly surveilled movements and regulation. I suppose there is a bit of it in the island city-state of Singapore, which is probably the advanced country that has most reduced its carbon emissions. But it has done so through extensive regulation, control and surveillance.

AB: You describe three future scenarios in your book. The first, which you just articulated, you name the “digital networks of control” scenario. What would stop this from being the future that necessarily happens?

JU: First of all, it is an expensive system. It is no accident that I mentioned Singapore, which is obviously an affluent society with high per capita income. It requires lots of investment, it requires all cars to be effectively licensed and so on. So to implement such a system in Mexico City would obviously be a fantastic challenge. A second thing is that there are large amounts of resistance. It rather depends on the ways in which the state is regarded. Any of those systems would require state implementation, even if private corporations were involved in operating them. Obviously, there is lots of potential for resistance by organizations. If large multinational companies are involved there may be, with good reason, plenty of opposition and NGO opposition and so I think it will be an area of contestation.

AB: You discuss a future scenario called “local sustainability.” What would this look like?

JU: What I was envisaging there was a sort of localization of work, education, family, friendship and leisure patterns. This would entail finding your friends down the street. Families wouldn’t move away for education or to find jobs. Most friendship patterns would be locally based and therefore accessible through walking, cycling and maybe public transport but certainly through not flying to the other side of the world to meet your mates from university. So that is a vision of a localism.

It would be a lower standard of living than conventionally measured. It would entail foodstuffs being determined by season rather than the air freighting schedule and so on. And it would be a situation where people’s networks of connection – economic, social, familial – were based upon slow modes of travel.

AB: Between these two scenarios – “local sustainability” and “digital networks of control” – you propose a scenario called “regional warlordism.” What does this scenario look like?

JU: In a way, it is a dark version of local sustainability. It is the breakdown of long distance communication and transportation systems: a shift toward many kinds of resource wars. Rather than in local sustainability where the resources are benignly redistributed, this scenario sees many groups holding onto scarce resources, competing and seeking to stop other groups from gaining access to them. A lot of wars would be fought over oil (which is of course already happening), water and food. There would be tendencies toward strong borders around these gated areas. Life would be nasty, brutish and almost certainly shorter. And of course sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the former Soviet Union and parts of the huge global slums, already show some of these features.

AB: Do you think “regional warlordism” is the most probable future?

JU: I probably do actually … if I put my money on any one of the three scenarios. And that is partly because of my view about the 20th century, which is that it has dealt the 21st century a bad hand of very constrained and restricted choices.