© Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
By Joaquin Flores | July 2, 2021
There is no running from the 4th Industrial Revolution, but the IMF's version of it can be stopped, Joaquin Flores writes.
On June 29th, the World Economic Forum announced its 'Global Coalition for Digital Safety' and its furthering commitment to censorship and the rising technocratic despotism in a press release titled, 'World Economic Forum Launches Coalition to Tackle Harmful Online Content'. Here we are informed that the WEF will, "accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online. It will serve to exchange best practices for new online safety regulation, take coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harms, and drive collaboration on programmes to enhance digital media literacy."
This represents a furthering of the WEF's commitment to coercive use of technologies, in particular what's been termed 'Technology Facilitated Coercive Control'.
There is no running from the 4th Industrial Revolution, but the IMF's version of it can be stopped. What the IMF and WEF propose would not represent a 4IR in a meaningful sense, but rather a series of technical adaptations to delay technologies implicit in an actual 4IR. An actual 4IR would to the contrary liberate humanity from the centralizing tendencies of the production-driven society. It would also upend concerns on population growth and carbon by eliminating planned obsolescence.
But in the false version of the 4IR proposed by the IMF and its WEF, we see a plan to implement technologies in very selective and limited ways, while the real aim of introducing new coercive technologies is pursued. In that sense, it is a bait and switch. And unfortunately, as a consequence, 4IR has a bad name, 3D printing is misunderstood, and the original meaning of the internet of things has been replaced with the internet for things.
We previously discussed the impossibility of running in 'The Triumph of Mankind Over the Great Reset: Guns, Books, and the Social Contract' and we gave both practical and historical references for that, dealing with early man and the fight between state-building hydraulic societies and free nomadic man. Free nomadic man lost precisely because of the technological advantage of the state-building hydraulic societies during a period that the earth cooled, rainfall declined, and deserts grew.
There is no running from the 4th Industrial Revolution, but the IMF's version of it can be stopped. What the IMF and WEF propose would not represent a 4IR in a meaningful sense, but rather a series of technical adaptations to delay technologies implicit in an actual 4IR. An actual 4IR would to the contrary liberate humanity from the centralizing tendencies of the production-driven society. It would also upend concerns on population growth and carbon by eliminating planned obsolescence.
The World Economic Forum Headquarters – Cologny, Geneva Canton, Switzerland
But in the false version of the 4IR proposed by the IMF and its WEF, we see a plan to implement technologies in very selective and limited ways, while the real aim of introducing new coercive technologies is pursued. In that sense, it is a bait and switch. And unfortunately, as a consequence, 4IR has a bad name, 3D printing is misunderstood, and the original meaning of the internet of things has been replaced with the internet for things.
We previously discussed the impossibility of running in 'The Triumph of Mankind Over the Great Reset: Guns, Books, and the Social Contract' and we gave both practical and historical references for that, dealing with early man and the fight between state-building hydraulic societies and free nomadic man. Free nomadic man lost precisely because of the technological advantage of the state-building hydraulic societies during a period that the earth cooled, rainfall declined, and deserts grew.
Marxism and Despotism
It is very difficult to understand the rationale behind the Great Reset and the ordering of industrial revolutions as is inferred in the phrase 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', without an understanding of Marxian analytic and historical frameworks. While it is typical for liberty-driven populist movements to make a heuristic inference to Marxism as the plans of the plutocracy to rule in a new way, the explanatory and predictive power of Marxian analysis is lost on them.
Regions with heavy and consistent rainfall, whether above or below the desert climatic zones, were also 'late' to civilization. Wittfogel's approach allows us to postulate that this was because a centralized despotic authority could not control access to water, and therefore did not form.
What is different now is that the coming 'even cooler' period being both scientifically and socially constructed, not naturally occurring, using the knowledge of technical and sociological methods which, in the area of the social sciences, was largely pioneered by Marx and the Althusserian Structural Marxism school that followed a century later. In other words, the next cooling period would be a technical and scientific project of the ruling elite. The aims would include both a monopoly over the food and water supply.
More than this, the new 'despotic' hydraulic society seeks to up-end other decentralizing tendencies of new technologies like 3D printing and the IoT.
There is apparently a cyclical desire to return to the life of free nomadic man, a man living on the land as part of the land, for whom daily life takes on the surreal even supernatural quality of rootedness.
But these are not simply geographic or spatial preferences, but the product of the failure of late modernity to produce a life superior to the life that man could make on his own, for his own. As we have presented, it is for society to make the case that man should join it, not man's obligation to make the case to be included in it. Life with society comes with certain costs, and those must be weighed against the benefits. If society has no tangible benefits to weigh the costs against, then the solution is simple.
There could not be any tendency for wealth to upwards distribute in centralized societies unless, on the whole, the broad masses in that society were putting in more than they took out.
Decentralization conversely relates to an increased desire for self-reliance. With the UN and the WEF openly 'threatening' (in the cant form of lamentations and warnings) that food and water shortages are the 'challenges' of the near future, the strategic move for individuals would be to become food self-sufficient.
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To wit, the type of society that can be managed by the elites in their gambit to transform from a plutocracy into a technocracy, using certain limited and targeted new technologies while holding others back, is a hydraulic society.
The work on analyzing hydraulic societies is a development of a prior analysis on the so-called Asiatic mode of production – an intra-Marxian debate on the nature of social evolution outside of Europe. But what is a hydraulic society?
Human groups living in areas like the Fertile Crescent formed into large state-building societies where waterways controlled by a ruling class were the only way to irrigate land. This important relationship between class-power, coercion, the state, technology, and access to the basics of life was explained in the Marxian analysis of ancient hydraulic societies as described in 1957 by Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988) in his seminal work, 'Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power'.
The work on analyzing hydraulic societies is a development of a prior analysis on the so-called Asiatic mode of production – an intra-Marxian debate on the nature of social evolution outside of Europe. But what is a hydraulic society?
Human groups living in areas like the Fertile Crescent formed into large state-building societies where waterways controlled by a ruling class were the only way to irrigate land. This important relationship between class-power, coercion, the state, technology, and access to the basics of life was explained in the Marxian analysis of ancient hydraulic societies as described in 1957 by Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988) in his seminal work, 'Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power'.
Likewise, today's plutocracy is developing a new kind of hydraulic society. Of course at face value, we see the push to cool the earth under the pretext of 'global warming', even as we are merely in a warmish eleven-thousand year period of an ice-age. It was at the start of the present ice-age that hydraulic civilizations blossomed. The cooling of the earth to work against warming, would have the effect of promoting the growth of deserts and lower crop yields. Cooling may reduce the rainfall cycle, making fresh water a more valuable resource.
Regions with heavy and consistent rainfall, whether above or below the desert climatic zones, were also 'late' to civilization. Wittfogel's approach allows us to postulate that this was because a centralized despotic authority could not control access to water, and therefore did not form.
What is different now is that the coming 'even cooler' period being both scientifically and socially constructed, not naturally occurring, using the knowledge of technical and sociological methods which, in the area of the social sciences, was largely pioneered by Marx and the Althusserian Structural Marxism school that followed a century later. In other words, the next cooling period would be a technical and scientific project of the ruling elite. The aims would include both a monopoly over the food and water supply.
More than this, the new 'despotic' hydraulic society seeks to up-end other decentralizing tendencies of new technologies like 3D printing and the IoT.
Just as the word 'justice' is used by a corrupt establishment to obstruct actual justice, the term ‘4IR’ is being used to obstruct an actual 4IR, and put in its place a new kind of hydraulic despotism controlled by a centralized technocratic oligarchy.
The Long Road Home
There is apparently a cyclical desire to return to the life of free nomadic man, a man living on the land as part of the land, for whom daily life takes on the surreal even supernatural quality of rootedness.
But these are not simply geographic or spatial preferences, but the product of the failure of late modernity to produce a life superior to the life that man could make on his own, for his own. As we have presented, it is for society to make the case that man should join it, not man's obligation to make the case to be included in it. Life with society comes with certain costs, and those must be weighed against the benefits. If society has no tangible benefits to weigh the costs against, then the solution is simple.
There could not be any tendency for wealth to upwards distribute in centralized societies unless, on the whole, the broad masses in that society were putting in more than they took out.
Decentralization conversely relates to an increased desire for self-reliance. With the UN and the WEF openly 'threatening' (in the cant form of lamentations and warnings) that food and water shortages are the 'challenges' of the near future, the strategic move for individuals would be to become food self-sufficient.
Please go to Strategic Culture Foundation to read more.
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Related:
More:
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Note: Since obviously this is Google blogger this blog is likely being censored.
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