Another cracking edition of this relentlessly anti-capitalist journal. The articles present a sparklingly refreshing anarchic narrative, supplemented as usual with powerfully unnerving graphics that get to the very heart of our quite insane world. A world where growth invariably means the never-ending purchase of capitalism’s alienating gadgets and potions all designed, so the advertising corporations strive to convince us, to make us live more prosperous, happier and longer lives. Deep down we know that it is all an elaborate, gigantic scam but the advertising is so all pervasive, that capitalism’s absurd construct becomes the accepted normal. The Adbusters team dares to imagine a different normal and that, in this world of suffocating capitalist conformity, is a wonderfully subversive thing to do.

The lead article focuses on a sixty year old Italian academic by the name of Franco Berardi who is increasingly turning his attention to the debilitating side-effects of the new communication technologies. Here is Berardi in his own words:

Today psychopathology reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic and, more precisely, to a socio-communicational one. If you want to survive you have to be competitive, and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing amount of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a reduction of time available for affectivity.

Adbusters adds:

Today’s most popular gadgets those palm-sized avatars of hyper-activity and hyper-connectivity are precisely so seductive because they compensate for the physical, social, and erotic loses that technological advances bring. Every ding, tweet, ring and vibration promises a social, sexual or professional opportunity. And in less than a decade, our brains have been reprogrammed to respond to these dings, tweets, rings and vibrations with rushes of dopamine and adrenaline, such that our brains on smartphones look, on an MRI scan, identical to those of an addict on drugs.

The jury is still out on the costs and benefits of these new addictive technologies but, as I’m sure Adbusters would agree, it’s not so much the technologies per se that are creating this new alienating pathology but rather the corporate control lurking just below the surface. I for one have found the internet a wonderfully liberating experience, by-passing as it does, publishers, national boundaries and hierarchical control. It is also liberating I believe for billions of our fellow citizens who, through the use of cheap smart phones, suddenly find themselves connected to the wider world. Trade, education and global awareness suddenly in reach of every village and every shanty town. The question of course that immediately arises what sort of world is it that we are connecting to? Again, Adbusters usually gets the answer spot on.

But it was not this article, absorbing as it was, that most caught my attention. Immediately following the discussion on Berardi came a sobering thumb nail history of humanity, which, if the Adbuster editorial team will forgive me, I intend to reproduce here. There is no acknowledgement of authorship on the article so I will simply acknowledge the Adbusters editorial team whose intellectual property I duly respect. The article is quite seductive at first reading yet with the benefit of a few re-readings, its theme appears unnecessarily gloomy, a tad determinist and ultimately Malthusian. It’s the last paragraph that I particularly wish to take issue with. Here is the article in full. Brackets are mine.

As far as we know, we (Homo sapiens) emerged on this rock about 200,000 years ago. At this time we had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion. We lived in the wild and ate whatever we could forage or hunt. We were hard to distinguish from our closest cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos.

What came to differentiate us from them our remarkable capacity for innovation was still only a faint trace at this time, a latent capacity. During these first centenniums of our existence, we were confined to one small region in the hot, dry savannah of East Africa.

There we roamed, sweat and slept beneath the stars on hard ground. We lived like the animals we were. Agriculture was like a secret code. Once we discovered it, it unlocked a magical, controlling power over nature that until then had only belonged to the realm of supernatural beings.
We discovered our power to tinker with the processes of life that we could cull endlessly reliable sources of dinner by cordoning off our own pieces of earth, and bending the environment to suit our will.

We banned all other species from our space, except for those we planned to chew and swallow. Everything we sowed and everything we reaped was aimed at maintaining a single species ourselves.

When we figured out how to synthesize fertilizer from fossil fuels, we suddenly gleaned the ability to draw billions of people’s worth of food from the same small piece of land flouting competition and lack of resources, and spreading across the globe like contagion. We waged war on our microscopic enemies: bacteria, viruses, fungi and all other microbes. We conjured antibiotics, vaccines, water treatment plants and continued to annihilate as much of our biological competition as possible. In short, we were cunning.

Hunger led us to agriculture. Later, lust, pride, cleanliness, power, order and control drove us to even greater discoveries: penicillin, ethanol, organ transplants and silicon breasts. Every new discovery harboured a prophecy, a vision of future humanity sublime and indestructible promising to extend our life spans, make us invulnerable, make things easier, more comfortable, more convenient and efficient.

In just these past two hundred years, the number of humans inhabiting the Earth went from one billion to seven billion. We’ve taken over the whole planet and we just keep growing.

We’ve reached Peak Humanity.

We’ve exploited and exhausted the resources of our planet, turned the atmosphere toxic with our waste, and now we torture ourselves with fear, denial and self-reproach. Messing with the processes of life, conquering microbes – were we not mad to try to rise above, even defy nature?

But perhaps the same thing which led us to our downfall remains our only hope perhaps we haven’t yet used our minds for what nature has made them. Maybe we’ve only been animals up to this point feeding, fighting and fucking. Now teetering at the brink, can we finally live up to our metaphysical disposition, can we finally use our self-consciousness to reflect on the state we are in and act wisely? At this stage in our evolution, can we not overcome our base instincts foreswear short term gratification for the sake of survival?

As we realize that the only way to save ourselves is to do the most unnatural thing for any living being to do something no other species has done nor could ever do stop our growth.

So there you have it, a narrative that suggests that we humans have outgrown ourselves and that we now need to use our unique consciousness to draw a halt to our plague like growth or else we will consume ourselves and take the planet with us. It sounds plausible but let us, for the moment imagine a very different scenario. Imagine that our exponential growth continues, along with our ever growing command of technology and nature. We continue our rapid urbanisation so that in the relatively near future we will all live in 500 well provisioned mega cities each consisting of some 50 million citizens. If my arithmetic is correct, that is 25 billion of us all living potentially harmonious lives; well fed, well housed and well educated.

With the complete urbanisation of the world’s population there would also come a corresponding protection of the countryside and a new found respect for biodiversity. Our energy needs would all be solar powered and therefore both clean and infinite. Giant international parks would be created to allow for us technocratic humans to regularly reconnect with our ancient animalistic pasts. Even our mega cities would be environmentally harmonious and sustainable with vegetable gardens on every rooftop and public parks, waterways and lush gardens at every juncture. Production and services would be highly automated thus freeing ourselves from the dull, mind-numbing routines of previous generations. Free time would enable all of us to become part-time gardeners, part-time philosophers and part time poets. We could thus, all of us, start to learn to become full time human beings, realising the immense potential that our five million year evolution has wondrously afforded us. Natural and man-made scarcity would be replaced by socially responsible abundance. Work would become a social pleasure rather than an alienated burden.

And critically, a well-educated, urbanised population would inevitably see a steady decline in the world’s population as the peasant culture of hopelessly large families would soon become an anachronistic thing of the past. Repressive states and religions would also wither away as people learned the skill of self-government. No more pompous Popes, arrogant Ayatollahs and rabid Rabbis dictating this and forbidding that.

So what is standing in the way of speeding up this new normal? Certainly much of the technology needed for such a human advance is already here. As each new day passes the answer becomes ever more obvious. You simply can no longer run a planet of seven billion citizens on the principle of private ownership and corporate oligarchic rule. The whole damn thing will need to switch to forms of collective and social ownership where production and governance is singularly orientated towards human development rather than the absurd enrichment of the 0.1 percent. So the answer is not so much to arbitrarily halt our growth, as suggested by the Adbuster article, but rather to use our consciousness to regain what was once in common ownership the rich and abundant resources of planet Earth. In this way, we humans may finally emerge from our long and tortuous pre-history and begin to embark on our story proper, whatever that might turn out to be. No need for doom and gloom. The possibilities are literally endless.