Dunkirk: Abandon War

“You must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer” Ernst Jünger, a famed German lieutenant from WW1 wrote. “Now it’s cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it’s struck the post and the splinters are flying – that’s what it is like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position”.

The concept of shell shock was new to the world in 1918. Society had never experienced war to this degree, what was ‘the great war’ was vowed to never happen again. Now it is 2017, and we have since witnessed waves of depression and PTSD wash over our soldiers. These traumas have been internalised, and what once was horror is for many a macabre cliché, and in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan revisits these tropes and jabs at the conscience of any who valorise these clichés.

The central question posed by the film is simple: how can it be worth it? Nolan accepts the beauty of the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of mutual aid that history has thus far highlighted in its accounts of the three days of evacuation. Thousands of civilians sailed into war to rescue their nation’s sons; more than 300,000 of them.

Nolan requires the audience of Dunkirk to reconsider the tales their father passed on to them of the heroism of battle. The courage and bravery of all involved should not be discredited, but it shouldn’t be overstated either, here we are told to forgive the heroes that turned to cowardice as we are reminded that war is a machine designed to break men. From the very first scenes of the film, we are taught to fear what is to come (although we already know the events of Dunkirk, Nolan places us in a very claustrophobic world). Hans Zimmer’s score is the engine of the film, it maintains the momentum, and its constant ticking percussion is designed to make us feel as if time is running out.

We follow three young Privates as they flee for their lives, we see them rescue an injured man on the beach, to be denied a ride home on the first line of transport. Nolan creates a nightmare when a U-boat sinks their second attempt at escape. We see darkness and hear only struggle, screams, sobs.

As we follow the Privates we see good intentions devolve into cowardice, strong men leave people behind, and the Dunkirk Spirit is nowhere to be found. The escape from land is a Lynchian realm of fear. The German menace is here a spectre: we never see their face, only the machines they operate. This fear is manifested in Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of a shell-shocked survivor of a U-boat encounter. He is found, stranded in the English Channel by a civilian rescuer, his son and a teenage crew member named George.

 

Cillian Murphy: Shellshocked and Manic

Here Cillian Murphy Channels Ernst Jünger’s cowering victim, every disturbance is a hammer. Here the character’s path diverges from the usual trope. There is no patronising sentiment regarding how we should support our veterans, Murphy’s character is manic, and we both fear and pity him. The crux of this arrives when he strikes down George in a panic, blinding him and eventually killing the boy. Often directors use this character to construct a context of care, of an obligation to assist. But Murphy’s character is alone, floating in a dissociative misery, and the consequences of trauma are bared naked.

 

The only character arc that resembles the classic Hollywood approach to war is a spitfire pilot played by Tom Hardy. We see him valiantly fight off a bomber and save hundreds of lives, all while running out of fuel and flying alone. But as the film progresses we see his fate as it was for thousands of heroes in the war: in a pivotal final scene we see his plane burning, and as he stands alone with no gratification for his heroism, the silhouettes of hostile Nazis surround him, guns toted.

Our tendency to valorize war often stems from a curiosity towards the evolutionary instincts of man to survive. The post-modern man fetishises tales of heroic survival to the degree where they forget the contextual tragedy that needs to underpin every one of these tales: that they should never have happened in the first place.

Of course, this curiosity is natural, we are animals, we will die, and those who have already confronted this proposition appear to hold wisdom regarding life and death. Perhaps the violent context of war needs to naturally be repressed for society to collectively function without an overwhelming burden of guilt. But this curiosity requires transference; it needs to be directed towards a greater narrative of peace.

War is the state of the world as it is now, but peace is the goal we ought to achieve. The men and women that have shaped our society all espouse this belief. Thomas Hobbes famously declared the natural state of man to be a state of war, order and planning had helped tame the interpersonal war mankind waged before it was subjected to the rule of law, government, and later on further developments such as the democratic process.

Hegel too purports an abolition of interpersonal violence. In his philosophy of history, he declares that all events that have passed, and what are yet to come, are part of a historical process towards the ultimate freedom of people. Freedom itself is a contentious word, but we can understand that an incredible barrier to freedom is the threat of violence from others. When disagreements between nations result in organised violence, we are slowing the progress of humanity towards our ultimate goals.

On the beaches of Dunkirk, men are portrayed as helpless beasts in a dangerous and primitive place. We leap backwards in time to Hobbes’ state of war. Men remain silent and alone, and the social element of humanity is absent (which has been the main complaint from film critics). Our social capacity is by far humanities greatest asset and is why we have evolved so successfully. Our ability to co-operate and engage in mutual aid is what has accelerated change, and as that capacity expands so too does our ability to flourish on this planet. The information revolution, despite its growing pains, is allowing cooperation on the greatest scale ever seen. We are evolving faster than ever.

Dunkirk is a significant change in direction, as cultural production is what dictates our desires as a society. For too long our culture has almost exclusively produced apologist pieces for war. And part of the reason for this is that we must respect and remember the men who died at war, but Nolan reminds us that they should never have been there in the first place and that the years of violence and atrocities are a stain on what will be the long span of human history.

Some reviews have stated that Dunkirk lacks context, an emotional core, a reason to care. But this misses the point; Dunkirk is an anti-war film par excellence. It completely disregards any interest in war, it shows the bravery of humans to be muted in the face of violence and is a major turning point in building a culture that is intolerant of the horrors of war.

Narciphobia

I am a Narciphobe. For me, this is an odd statement to make. In a twist of irony, this blog writing, excessively talkative, politically charged Facebook patron has a fear of narcissists. Go figure.

In her book “The Selfishness of Others” Kristin Dombek dissects the modern condition, Narciphobia: the fear of Narcissists. The problematic kernel that lies at the heart of any society which expresses itself online is a distrust of others. Here in Australia, we have our own particular flavour of distrust: Tall Poppy Syndrome, which cuts straight to the heart of this article.

Naturally, when we interact online, we deprive ourselves of a lot of the stimuli that comes with normal human interaction. We forgo body language for connectivity, we sacrifice politeness for brevity and we trade the ability to physically do something for a type of personal branding: we must tell all what it is we do, rather than be witnessed doing it.

To appropriate Hamlet, thus Facebook makes narcissists of us all. Dombek provides a concise diagnosis of Narciphobia, it naturally incorporates all of the hallmarks of modern human interaction, and contemporary psychology. I tick too many boxes.

Narciphobia

… Indicated by five or more of the following:

1. Is preoccupied with the idea that he or she is surrounded by people that are trying to manipulate him or her for self-serving purposes.
2. Requires excessive reassurance that there are ‘real’ people behind the avatars of others.
3. Has a tendency to spend large amounts of time in online ‘research’ seeking diagnoses for romantic partners, family members and sometimes complete strangers.
4. Is preoccupied with fantasies of ‘irl’ relationships and opposes them to meaningful virtual forms of relating.
5. Believes that he or she is ‘special’ and uniquely unselfish and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other people with low selfishness scores.
6. Has a grandiose sense of empathy (eg., exaggerates understanding of other people’s motives and feelings beyond quantified empathy brain scan scores.
7. Lacks empathy: unusually quick to judge others based on superficial interactions; a tendency to sprint away in the middle of conversations with others.
8. Inconsistent cultivation of personal happiness resources at the expense of freelance productivity
9. Inability to take responsibility for the floods; preoccupied with fantasies that the world is ending because of the selfishness of others.

-Proposed entry for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Sixth Edition (2026)

The flipside to narcissism is hinted at in article 2, the presence of avatars as opposed to corporeal subjects. When one is not physically present, it is easy to hide, and anonymity hangs like a spectre over social media.

The problem is compounded when this new form of communication (social media, do we yet feel this is a natural way to interact?) is used against us; which it consistently is. Recently the Guardian published a report outlining the Russian Government’s mass use of paid online propagandists (‘Troll’ is too tame a label for this), on the other side, members of the right wing community extol themselves for resisting our paid propagandists: the fake news, the false flags.

The problem arises here in the fact that no one can be trusted: the line between who is real and who is fabricated in order to push ideologies becomes increasingly blurred. If I am to be the sample for the population then it is clear that our vision is less than 20/20 in this regard.

I find myself betraying my values, when did I become a narc? In the last few months, I’ve reported exactly 11 profiles to Facebook’s admin team as fake accounts, I’ve suspected multitudes more that I have come across to be fake yet Facebook has confirmed none of these. Is it really my job to be policing my fellow humans? Or am I right in believing they’re fabricated?. A paranoia has taken me online, and it becomes more claustrophobic every day.

Undoubtedly I’m not the only one here, Narciphobes from all over the political spectrum voice their concerns. There is now a cloud that impairs the judgement of all online citizens, and one must be highly critical of all they encounter.

 

John Griifit you can’t be a real person.

Psychologically this is affecting many adults, we rise, we work, we go home, cook dinner, watch tv, sleep and repeat. Facebook is a small distraction that allows us to escape for a moment from the monotony of it all. Factor in the fact that too many of us work too often and sleep too little then you have a tired, apathetic and docile population that is constantly encountering fraudsters hocking opinions from fake profiles.

 

You can laugh at the image of me anxiously biting my nails as I panic over unknown digital marauders prodding us from every vulnerable angle but think for a second about the generation who now enter their teen years in a world where addictive social media is ubiquitous and anyone can spring from the woodwork with paid propaganda.

Indeed, addictive is the right word to use. Neuroscience confirms the dopamine rush that is hypothesised to hook us to our phones. We wait patiently for notifications, news, anything; and when they arrive we produce a chemical shot of joy that gets us every time. The same principle lies behind Australia’s grotesque addiction to Poker Machines: in the Sydney city council of Fairfield, $8.27 billion was slotted in 2015 alone.

Our children are growing up, without restrictions to social media. They will be the first generation of humans to ever grow up witnessing humanities full potential to be cruel, disgusting and egotistical.

They will be raised in an online environment where apathy and cynicism gain one popularity as we all rail against the narcissists we cannot know are real. We will hand rear each child to see them become dissociative and cold in an age of narciphobia. And they, an entire generation will develop a keen distrust of everyone from the very first years of their life.

Rather grim, no?

I sit here, staring at the profile of Monty B Moriarty, he doesn’t believe in Climate Change and wants all to know about it. He can’t be real, can he? My nails are down to the quick now, and I don’t even want to know anymore. I need to go camping or something. Fuck.

The Benefits of Inclusion: Please Explain

The papers read bloodshed for Pauline Hanson when she stated in the Senate debates over education reform that autistic children should be removed from mainstream classes. Her argument was utilitarian, and regardless how people felt about the issue, it seemed to stem from a desire for positive change. She gave a crude but simple argument: boost the potential of the many by removing the disruptors. It’s important for us as a society to discuss the argument and its many failures, as our support or dismissal of Autism as a social issue has a direct impact on people’s lives.

What we know now as the Autism Spectrum is the product of centuries of misunderstanding of symptoms, as is most of psychiatry. What was once known as a debilitating condition, is now beginning to be understood in more nuanced terms by the average person. The spectrum includes many more than those who appear autistic, including many of us who display mild autistic behaviourisms. Indeed you fall somewhere on the spectrum, even if you are practically neurotypical (showing regular brain activity patterns, without the delay or interference created by Autism).

The three most important characteristics of the Autism Spectrum are a difficulty in social interaction, social communication and social imagination (a fleshed out chart of these symptoms can be accessed here ). Undoubtedly you’ve experienced some of these difficulties at times, and they manifest themselves in a myriad of ways, making autism very difficult to categorise and track, the spectrum serves its purpose here.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, an Austrian Paediatrician named Hans Asperger studied atypical, rule-obsessed, intelligent children. Many years later in 1981, Lorna Wing, a pioneer in Autism research revisited these studies and coined the term “Asperger’s syndrome”. This was an instance in which the topic of autism was released to the public in a digestible, categorised manner. It neatly explained the symptoms and opened up a discussion about autism.

In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association officially classified Asperger’s Syndrome as a diagnosable disorder, yet in 2013 was cut from Psychiatric practice. Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer an official disorder. The difference between what was formerly known as Asperger’s and what is socially perceived as Autism lies only in the severity of the symptoms a person displays. We know this now, but if it weren’t for the temporary misunderstanding of mild autism as Aspergers Syndrome, we wouldn’t have had the stepping stone it provided to reach our current understanding of the disorder.

The history, indeed, the continuing narrative of Autism research is simply the narrative of a revealing of the natural functions and mutations that occur in our environment. In the same way, one understands physics as an unfinished puzzle, one should consider psychology in a similar manner. We did not (and may very well still not) fully understand Autism just as we may be currently misinterpreting a multitude of mental afflictions.

So now the question is raised regarding Autistic children and their involvement in class. Senator Hanson’s argument subordinates the rights of the disabled, to the rights of the fully able in order to gain a greater outcome for a majority. It would be a tragedy for this to be enacted, for the rights of both parties are not mutually exclusive, and if we go into the details, we find that respectfully including children on the spectrum into mainstream classrooms offers society more than Hanson’s first glance suggests.

Firstly, an enquiry on minimising harm to children with autism. Much of the research suggests that children with autism are highly malleable in their infantile and pre-adolescent stages of development. Each stimulus they receive affects them as they grow; which is the same for neurotypical children, but the effects here, in conjunction with the disorders mental strain upon the child result in compounding effects.

Aspect (A research and advisory branch of Autism Spectrum Australia) shows that health issues in autistic children, physiological or neurological remain for a very long time. The oldest studies, when revisited with updated health records, show that these conditions, such as Anxiety, Depression, Sleeping Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders can still recur up to 25 years later (and maybe for longer, we have no way of knowing until we can revisit the tests later on).

Furthermore, in more severe cases, there is a disconnect with the child and the outside world, a bridge that needs to be attempted to gap. Autistic children often rely on their parents as visual and auditory translators, and this need for translation continues in the developmental stage. Humans need communication to be understood, being deprived of that is an agonising experience. The abilities of the child cannot be assumed though, and must constantly be pushed and tested. Some research in the field shows that parents, well within their rights, withhold the discussion of topics and exposure to ideas like sexuality, privacy, and relationships; cornerstones of the human experience. Parents should be empowered to feel it appropriate to discuss this with their children, and within reason, challenge their children with these complex topics to at best prepare them for the world that awaits them, and at the very least attempt to break ground in understanding more complex ideas and forming social understandings.

The spectrum yields mysteries still. We have no idea how autistic children process experiences like pain or joy. Often, severely impaired children are unable to communicate their sensations, and provide details like the degree of pain which they are experiencing, and if they’ve ever felt this way before. Some studies show that certain children are extremely sensitive to pain, and display unusual responses to pain; Aspect reported that some children “may be experiencing a physiological pain similar to neuropathic pain associated with immune or inflammatory responses”.

The positive news is that therapy and personal development yield excellent, durable results for children with autism. As the disorder amplifies the developmental changes children experience, it has been shown that early intervention can have long term benefits. Studies situated in preschools have shown that autistic children that attended weekly therapy in their mainstream preschools over the course of the year developed significantly positive results that were still seen six years later.

The current discourse in Australia regarding the schooling of autistic children follows these studies and recommends to parents the appropriate solutions. Because the spectrum defies classification, each case is treated individually, the severity of the case, the symptoms and their level of disruptiveness are weighed, and the appropriate provisions for the child are discussed.

The Australian Advisory Boards on Autism Spectrum Disorders follows eight core principles (They can be viewed here ) these principles are based on the right for every parent to decide what they believe their children need. Should they be denied that right?

At iitscore, the inclusion of children into mainstream schooling is an act of sacrifice so that we may mutually flourish. Exposing neurotypical children to peers with impairment teaches patience and tolerance, cooperation, custodianship and mutual aid. These are the wonderful traits we love to teach children, and we mourn their loss when we see how cruel the process of growing up can make us become.

Autism is more than a disorder; it is a democratic issue as well. The lives people with autism lead is contingent on what the public know about it and how it is perceived. Which makes Senator Hanson’s claims, and their fallibility, very important.

Perhaps Senator Hanson’s comments were simply an ill informed mistake, albeit one amongst many in such a case. But for the public to support her rhetoric is a shame upon Australia, we are at an opportune moment where the forum is open for all to learn about the Autism Spectrum and its effects on our society. Ultimately we are the ones who empower the government to allocate resources to enrich our children’s future. In the case of Autism, we can document centuries of what is now considered cruelty and malpractice due to past misunderstandings. We owe it to our future generations that we learn from this and begin to take a more nuanced approach in interacting with our fellow humans and our children.

Wikipedia & the Commons

Wikipedia is a strange success story. Rarely does a giant function without excessive remuneration in today’s society. But given the sites function, the dissemination of knowledge, Wikipedia paradoxically presents itself as a pariah of the internet, and a microcosm of society. It is the 5th most visited site in the world, and regarding sites that provide information about our world, Wikipedia has established itself as the source of factual consensus in a world of competing perspectives, using peer-reviewed sources from as many competing perspectives as possible to create sophisticated overviews of the issues we face.

Briefly, Wikipedia uses a unique business strategy to exist, its’ target market is as broad as possible, incorporating everyone it can. This mass exposure leads to mass interaction whether it be anything from web traffic to contributing to articles, the wider the population, the richer the site. (A simple video explaining how this works can be found here, I also wrote a paper on Wikipedia’s innovation model which you can access here).

The Wikipedia model has been adapted by behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and countless other online hotspots. Free content, ultra-accessibility, and degrees of user autonomy result in ample user created content. Wikipedia stands alone amongst its contemporaries. The ‘free knowledge project’ alongside Project Gutenberg (the oldest online library) and many other open-source organisations lack several features that are integral to their contemporaries business models.
Firstly, they are not-for-profit, and furthermore do not accept advertising, opting to rely on donations for funding. Their deliberate omission of advertising revenue as a possible income stream is representative of their desire for transparency and neutrality, issues that lie at the heart of discourse on the ethics of internet. Instead of the gargantuan privately owned apparatus of Facebook, Wikipedia’s non-profit, state size presence is uniquely public. But Wikipedia’s open platform belongs to no singular government or sovereign; it exists in the domain of the commons.

This means that Wikipedia is a political force, albeit subtle. Its status as an apparatus of the digital commons, one that (quoting Kropotkin) “strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist”, Wikipedia’s precious kernel is the dissemination of knowledge to the world. This humanist betterment of desire harkens back to the praxis of Thomas Edison, and Otis Boykin, in which research resulted in technologies that revolutionised societies capacity to care for its people.

Wikipedia as a commons allows for international cooperation in a space uninterested in monetary influence; this is a powerful thing. Individual agents on the internet exist as digito-ontological nomads, and Wikipedia presents itself as a Multitude of autonomous actors engaged in grand scale international mutual-aid. Wikipedia exists as one of the single greatest existing examples of ‘positive anarchism’ the world has ever seen, proving humanity’s capacity to cooperate without financial incentive.
However, the commons exist in a fragile state. By its’ very definition, what is common is accessible to anyone, and this opens it up to exploitation. The ‘tragedy of the commons’, the outcome of over-exploitation of shared resources, exists in the digital space as much as the physical. Where in our physical world excessive pollution by private actors results in problems that affect everybody that must coexist within a shared common space, the digital space is susceptible to its own tragedies.

Wikipedia’s biggest criticism is its factual uncertainty, which is an entirely valid criticism. Its articles are comprised of peer-reviewed sources, yet when compiled can still result in errors. However both Nature and Epic (in partnership with Oxford University) have published papers testifying to Wikipedia’s near mirror accuracy to Britannica in multiple languages, Wikipedia attempts to disseminate information to the public like our rigorous empirical knowledge production system.
Knowledge, information; these are the heart of the digital space, and there is fierce debate over it. Our contemporary context presents a tragedy for the Commons: ideological influence in the domain of truth.

Truth is a peculiar word, at first, it seems self-contained and easy to define, but it appears this is becoming increasingly difficult as societies, global integration and competing subjective interests cast doubt on the concept of truth. It’s all too easy to forget that Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year was Post-Truth and that scepticism is in vogue.

The result of this is a site called Infogalactic. Created by Vox Day (a pseudonym) in 2016, very much in the spirit of Post-Truth, Infogalactic mirrors the Wikipedia model exactly; it is a copy of the site. However, this version has very different fundamentals.

Firstly it rejects the need for peer reviewed articles, to quote the site: “Infogalactic is not Wikipedia, it is a dynamic knowledge core designed to be a useful, up-to-date reference for the user consulting it. Only the user can define his perspective; no one else can define what is true for him or force him to accept their subjective interpretation of reality, no matter how reliable their sources might be.”

Here we have an attempt to establish a hub for the world’s information, based on subjectivity. The site’s founder was interviewed by Wired magazine, in which he stated that it was created in opposition to Wikipedia which is run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it”. We can see that it’s very inception is fuelled by subjectivity, despite what peer reviewed evidence says. Regardless of the reader’s political view, this statement reveals a purely political drive behind the site’s existence.

However, there is some confusion in the fundamental code (what it calls the 7 Canons) of Infogalactic. Despite it’s first and most defining dedication to subjectivity, regardless of validity; it states its goal is to uphold the truth. Canon 2 states that “Infogalactic is non-ideological and seeks to present objective points of view.” Which contradicts its former goals.

The most confounding of its Canons is the 7th and final, encapsulating all of the contemporary confusion regarding the subject of truth: Facts are facts: Facts are not context, they are not logical conclusions, and they are not justifiable opinions. Only externally verifiable facts belong on the Factual level of a page… personal experiences, interpretations, or subjective opinions are welcome, but only on the appropriate level. That is not the Fact level. If there is any doubt, put it in Context.” Here we are given no formal definition of what a fact entails, facts are subject to manipulation (for here they exist outside of the boundaries of empiricism) as long as they fit the bill of the site’s moderators. The very thought policing the site states it is dedicated against.

Here is a world where words are altered, and meanings are changed, where Alex Jones appears on Wikipedia as an “American far-right radio show host, filmmaker, writer, and conspiracy theorist” he appears on Infogalactic as an “American radio show host, conspiracy analyst, documentary filmmaker, and writer.” Regardless of the many logical potholes that riddle the site’s philosophy, it gains traction, people contribute (this time without statements necessitating empirical evidence), and the model that works so well for Wikipedia succeeds here; albeit on a smaller scale.

The commons are a fragile domain, and susceptible to tragedy. Our digital commons are young, and we have yet to fully understand the ethics surrounding them, let alone create the policy to regulate our use of them. Wikipedia shows that success without compromise can push the boundaries of the commons, widen them and allow humanity to experience itself in new ways. Recent developments like Infogalactic are a reminder that the commons must are vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.

Wikipedia & Innovation

Introduction – Where Did the Edisons go?

It is out of place in contemporary society that an organisation thrives without profit margins, production goals and brutal market strategies. The success of Wikipedia shows a radically different portrayal of innovation to its contemporaries, one that trusts in its ability to advance society. By placing innovation at the core of its business model, Wikipedia succeeds at internationally distributing its core business service through mutual co-operation with its’ stakeholders.

This radical approach to an old medium: the encyclopaedia, and it’s revolutionary results place it’s founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in the same echelon as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. Public genius for the betterment of society is a notion waning out of fashion as companies like Monsanto create genuinely revolutionary technology only to be caged by intellectual property laws, to the detriment of everyone. Not only is Wikipedia a case study for business success, it is a beacon of humanism in an economic climate dominated by numbers, and as a platform for human collaboration, it offers a glimmer of hope for the future.

Innovation – Wikipedia, A Singularity

Wikipedia, A Different Kind of Success…

Two interesting strategic insights come from Wikipedia’s approach to innovation: Firstly that their unique product allows them to pursue a very unique target market, and that this target market bolsters the value of their service.

Wikipedia is a free to use, international, web-based encyclopaedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs the site calls it “a free knowledge project” (Wikimedia, 2017). Its proportions are gargantuan with “the combined Wikipedias for all other [and including English] languages greatly exceed the English Wikipedia in size, giving more than 27 billion words in 40 million articles in 293 languages” (Zachte, 2017) In the spirit of its name, each article is open for editing to anyone (the word Wiki denotes an online collaborative space). This is its current service, which it goes to great measure to remain free and open. Once a user sets up an account with Wikipedia, they are free to begin contributing to the site. It is these contributions, almost entirely sourced from the site’s users, create the fabric of Wikipedia.

From this logic, we can see that a wider user base creates a better, more detailed, diversified site. The nature of its service: an easily accessible online encyclopaedia that is consistently updated, pairs well with its business model. Users act like nodes spread across the world to discover and maintain information. The value of the service hangs on the quantity and variation of users willing to contribute, and only through attempting to cater to everyone, could Wikipedia gain the critical mass needed to cater to everyone, which it succeeded in doing. Their business model is designed to target the widest market possible: any customer from anywhere in the globe in pursuit of information regarding anything. Strategically, this is clearly shown through the deliberate removal of all major consumer barriers to entry, with service being free, in nearly 300 languages. This is also evidence that Wikipedia actively encourages users to create content for the site, with user sign up also being free, granting immediate autonomy to contributors. Their marketing funnel is as wide as it gets.

The universal need to learn and adapt to life and society’s collective desire to categorise and produce knowledge ground Wikipedia’s broad value proposition. The desire to understand the world has lied at the top of humanities concern, all from Plato, to Russell agree it is the key component in what we know as self-actualization (Maslow, 1943). Wikipedia’s service, with its low barriers to entry, provides a high-value solution to this universal need.

Its competitive environment consists of one direct competitor: Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is also an online encyclopaedia. It charges a fee for its service, which it justifies through an emphasis on its accuracy of information and credibility as citation material; however both Nature and Epic (in partnership with Oxford University) have published papers testifying to Wikipedia’s near mirror accuracy to Britannica in multiple languages (Taraborelli, 2012). Wikipedia’s substitute competitors consist of academic journals and libraries which have high barriers to entry like costs and memberships in exchange for advantages like further reliability, primary research and citation value. All of these competitors somewhat exercise closed innovation models which use expert-centric hierarchies produce content, placing rigour and quality over the efficiency of Wikipedia’s decentralised model (Gerybadze, et al., 2010)

In the Business of Knowledge

The competitive ecosystem of online knowledge is vast but size-asymmetrical, with the majority of the market share at Wikipedia’s disposal, gaining the 5th highest internet traffic of any website in 2017 (World Economic Forum, 2017.). Its competitive advantage over its closest competitor is orders above a normal competitive relation. As mentioned above, the business model Wikipedia employs is respectively different to their competitors in size, cost, dynamism and resources.

While knowledge production is a market flooded by many smaller decentralised actors: university faculties, R&D departments and individual agents, its dissemination and publication is a market which, hitherto Wikipedia, functioned in a strictly hierarchical manner. Knowledge would be submitted to journals which ensure each article is peer reviewed, journal articles are reported on by the news and books are written. Britannica would also act as a channel for distribution.

Wikipedia’s success is quite unique, it has taken a service which has a universal demand and large potential for utility, a business model based on the open-source modelling of the time (Linux and Firefox are both open-source alumni’s), and combined it with mass user adoption (Muller-Seitze & Reger, 2010). The result is a sprawling mass of user contributions, anarchically borne of mutual aid and cooperation. The size of Wikipedia acts in the same manner as a black hole, pulling in more leads as it grows bigger, absorbing the information of those who encounter it, therefore reifying the value creation process. In this manner, it is similar to the ancient Hellenic Library of Alexandria (Quattrocelli, 2012).

For many organisations, despite its’ benefits, a large market share can be burdensome. Powerful actors become targets for legal investigation, political pressure and have more rigid standards placed on them by the public and their stakeholders (Schein & Greiner, 1988).  Wikipedia takes market share dominance to another level, and so theoretically exposes itself to disproportionately higher risks, which led Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University to state that it “works well in practice, but not in theory” (BigThink, 2016). Two reasons allow for this model to work: firstly, lower costs and continued innovation lower the risks involved; and secondly, the nearest competitors have resource pools so small in comparison to Wikipedia that they pose little threat. In short, Wikipedia’s size, Innovative capacity, cost advantage, and resource advantage lever the risks they take on as a size-asymmetrical competitor (Bloom & Kotler, 1975).

If You Build It, They Will Come

Wikipedia’s master-play was creating a business model for knowledge distribution based on what exists already for knowledge production. Many actors, each contributing based on autonomous impulse. At the time of conception in 2001, the technological world was capitalising on developments in open source technology, which allowed users to modify the program itself; organisations like Mozilla and Unreal followed the footsteps of Linux, which saw great open-source success and released Firefox (2002) and Unreal Engine (1998) respectively.

Open-source can be messy, and for organisations that want a recognisable service, the endless modifications of open-source work against them. What Wikipedia adopted was an Open Innovation method, incorporated into the business model with user value co-creation at its core. The scale they achieve this at is orders above anything else a non-profit organisation.

The model for contributions is Anarchic, based on non-hierarchical free associations (Suissa, 2006), the technical term for this is non-pecuniary outbound innovation (Gabison & Pesole, 2014) which is marked by freely shared resources without financial incentive. Most of these contributions are filtered through several layers of automatic moderating, fact checking and source-checking before deemed publishable. Unfortunately, this process isn’t perfect, latest estimates state that Wikipedia displays an average of 3 errors per article, however, the 2012 paper published by Epic shows that this is similar to Encyclopedia Britannica’s error rate (Casebourne, et al., 2012).

User contributions are sorted and reviewed, particularly if Wikipedia intends to promote any particular article. For example every day, Wikipedia hosts a different article on its front page as their ‘featured article’ (at the time of writing this, Saturday the 27th of may’s featured article was on the 2015 Indian comedy-drama “Waiting”). For an article to be placed on the front page it has to go through rigorous peer review before it can be accepted (Viegas, et al., 2007). The Minimal centralised framework is complemented by the enfranchisement of autonomous agents under Wikipedia’s system.

These markings: open access to resources, the enfranchisement of agents, no-cost service, ubiquitous accessibility, are the markings of exceptional treatment of stakeholders, which is further incentive for agents to cooperate under a model of non-pecuniary outbound innovation. Wikipedia’s greatest resource lies in its stakeholders; responding to this, Wikipedia successfully observes and improves the stakeholder space: building a rich community for contributors and providing an immense platform for readers. This is a clear sign of attention being paid to “critical stakeholders with a potential to contribute to the organisational resources” (Sharma & Starik, 2004) (See Appendix 3).

A Victory of the Commons…

The Wikipedia model has been adapted by behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and countless other online hotspots. Free content, ultra-accessibility, and degrees of user autonomy result in ample user created content. Yet Wikipedia stands alone amongst its contemporaries. The ‘free knowledge project’ alongside Project Gutenberg (the oldest online library), and many other open-source organisations lack several features that are integral to their contemporaries business models.

Firstly, they are not-for-profit, and furthermore do not accept advertising, opting to rely on donations for funding (Wikimedia, 2017). Their deliberate omission of advertising revenue as a possible income stream is representative of their desire for transparency and neutrality, issues that lie at the heart of discourse on the ethics of internet (Quail & Larabie, 2010). Instead of the gargantuan privately owned apparatus of Facebook, Wikipedia’s non-profit, state size presence is uniquely public. But Wikipedia’s public platform belongs to no singular government or sovereign, it exists in the domain of the commons (Fuster-Morral, 2010).

This means that Wikipedia is a political force, albeit subtle. Its status as an apparatus of the digital commons, one that “strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist” (Kropotkin, 1898), Wikipedia’s precious kernel is the dissemination of knowledge to the world. This humanist betterment of desire harkens back to the praxis of Thomas Edison, and Otis Boykin, in which research resulted in technologies that revolutionised societies capacity to care for its people.

Wikipedia as a commons allows for international cooperation in a space uninterested in monetary influence; this is a powerful thing. Individual agents on the internet exist as digito-ontological nomads, and Wikipedia presents itself as a Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2000) of autonomous actors engaged in grand scale international mutual-aid. Wikipedia exists as one of the single greatest existing examples of ‘positive anarchism’ the world has ever seen, proving humanity’s capacity to cooperate without financial incentive.

Beyond this its historical significance must be noted: Wikipedia is an anthropological artefact. Many markers of what anthropologists call “The Anthropocene” (Edwards, 2015): the human epoch, are in reality disastrous negative externalities of human activity (see Appendix 4); the extinction of species, environmental degradation, and so on. Wikipedia, a key player in the information revolution, provides humanity with the richest documentation of our global culture, with both objective, empirical accounts and subjective, hermeneutic accounts of our history. Not only does Wikipedia contain what humanity has accomplished, but also the subjective desires behind these accomplishments. In short, Wikipedia, through its unique model of open innovation, captures the very historicity of the human species.

 

Conclusion – Wikisociety?

Wiki (adj) – Hawaiian: Fast, Quick. Ward Cunningham’s proliferation of the loanword ‘Wiki’ stems from Hawaiian roots. Yet its contemporary meaning is strictly without borders. The digital commons are a better place thanks to the success of Wikipedia. Globalisation is still a process in motion, and alongside its benefits society must experience growing pains. We know have a model, albeit limited, for successful global cooperation, and its main ingredients are transparency, enfranchisement of individuals and mutual aid, all stemming from it’s unique innovation methods.

How this will affect the historical process is unknown, but meanwhile, Wikipedia stands testament to the positive effects of effective innovation; it can benefit the world, but its spoils must be accessible to all for it to be truly revolutionary.

 

Resource List

Bloom, P., & Kotler, P., (1975) Risk Management: Strategies for High Market Share Companies, Harvard Business Review, Accessed at https://hbr.org/1975/11/strategies-for-high-market-share-companies on 30/05/2017

Casebourne, I., Davies, C., Fernandes, M., Norman, N. (2012) Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Encyclopedias, Epic, Oxford

The Economist, (2011), A Man Made World, found at http://www.economist.com/node/18741749?story_id=18741749 accessed on 30/05/17

Edwards, L. E., (2015). “What is the Anthropocene?”. Eos. 96

Franke, N., & Shah, S. (2003). How communities support innovative activities: an exploration of assistance and sharing among end-users. Research policy, 32(1), 157-178.

Gabison, G., & Pesole, A., (2014) An Overview of Models of Distributed Innovation, European Commission, JRC Science & Policy, Luxembourg

Gerybadze, A., Hommel, U., Reiners, H. W., & Tomaschewski, D., (2010) Innovation and International Corporate Growth. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A., (2000), “Empire”, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press

Kropotkin, P., 1898, “Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal” Free Society, San Francisco

Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review. 50 (4): 370–96. doi:10.1037/h0054346 – via psychclassics.yorku.ca.

Muller-Seitz, G. & Reger, G. (2010), “‘Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia’ as a role model? Lessons for open innovation from an exploratory examination of the supposedly democratic-anarchic nature of Wikipedia”, International Journal of Technology Management, vol. 52, no. 3-4, pp. 457-476.

Quail, C., & Larabie, C., (2010) Net Neutrality: Media Discourses and Public Perception, Global Media Journal, Vol.3  Iss. 1, pp 31-50

Quattrocelli, L. (2012). Library of Alexandria. The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. John Wiley & Sons

Schein, L. E., Greiner, V. E., (1988). Power and organization development : mobilizing power to implement change (Repr. with corrections. ed.). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

Shah, S. K., Smith, S. W., & Reedy, E. J. (2012). Who are user entrepreneurs? Findings on innovation, founder characteristics, and firm characteristics. Kauffman Firm Survey, Kauffman Foundation, February.

Sharma, S., Sterik, M., (2004) Stakeholders, the Environment and Society, Edward Elgar Publishing

Suissa, J., (2006) Anarchism and Education: a Philosophical Perspective. Routledge. New York. p. 7

Taraborelli, D., (2012) Seven years after Nature, pilot study compares Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias in three languages, Wikimedia Reports

Viégas F.B., Wattenberg M., McKeon M.M. (2007) The Hidden Order of Wikipedia. In: Schuler D. (eds) Online Communities and Social Computing. OCSC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

Wikimedia, (2017), Frequently asked questions,  found at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en, Accessed 30/05/17

Zachte, E., (2017) Wikimedia Statistics, Accessed at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm 29/05/2017, Wikimedia

Zittrain, J., (2016) Why Wikipedia Works Really Well in Practice, Just Not in Theory, BigThink, Accessed at http://bigthink.com/videos/the-model-for-wikipedia-is-truly-unique on 30/05/17

 

A Brief History Of Violence (Dear America)

America.

You were raised in a house of violence. Your primal father, the British Empire, disregarded you as a child, spat on you and beat you before you were aware of what was going on. Growing pains resulted in a polite split from his clutches, but the schism left scars.

You ached to fill his shoes, enslaving foreigners to bolster power. This proved contentious; you knew how it was to be captive to another Nation. Your adolescence saw bloodshed as you forged a new identity through civil war, the world was about to meet you.

I wasn’t there when you, like a shark in the womb, tore apart the Spaniards, their ships and men sent to the depths. Your people flourished during the great war, Mr Wilson ensured that: it was corporate, the way in which you ran the greatest shock the world had ever seen so efficiently, everyone needed guns, and you were excellent at making them. The gears kept turning, and 19 years later Hitler emerged, you couldn’t sit on the sidelines, and everyone backed you. When he shot himself in that bunker, and you stormed the camps in the name of liberation one can only assume the joy under the surface, with the knowledge that violence could make money and prestige.

The other humble nation states understood you were the alpha male of the pack, beneath the conventions, multilateral agreements, and the alliances laid the naked barbarism of dominance, which you were always the best at.

The Iron curtain fell owing to your persistence; we now know there is no other way than yours. The soft touch you gave during the cold war was honourable, but we hid under the covers while you argued out your divorce terms with Soviet Russia. Of course, every bitter marriage results in a messy residuum, but the lawyers were on your side, and when the desert storm occurred, you got every penny you wanted. You’ve been scarred, you’re confused; you can’t stand the sight of a Kalashnikov; how can a man who bought that gun for $100 from the Afghan black market possibly own the right to take another’s life? That right is yours and yours alone.

All you’ve ever known is war. You like war, so much that the war on drugs wasn’t a metaphor. Now your County Police force can exercise their rights, given by God, and in style, one might add: armoured cars, body armour, fully automatic justice. Your fully loaded magazines, Mise en place for the forthcoming children of your cities.

People like to exercise their rights, your people find the most peculiar time and place to do so, and their timing and placement grow more peculiar every day. Your people found their passion for murder in the Civil War, and continue that legacy now in schools all over your country. It’s a shame this had to happen, for now, your situation calls for more.

People learn quickly, and your people were taught by the best. As long as you pay a buck, you have the right to free speech, and your people love to pay, and they love to exercise their rights. The combination is potent, particularly when you throw terrorism into the mix, which your people now seem to be extraordinary at. While your Patriots parade around in glossy leather boots, scalp exposed, oddly reminiscent of the villain so disdained by history that catapulted you to the top of the western world, and yet you say nothing; they have the right to do and say what they want.

And it is such a shame when two men on a train in Portland are stabbed and bludgeoned to death for defending women; perhaps your chivalry was just an illusion all along. But rights are rights, and America must have them for its people love to exercise their God given rights.

On Wednesday you achieved what the big other: The Mujahideen, Hezbollah, The Taliban, ISIS, never could do, the shooting of an American top dog. The Senator was shot in public by another American; I’m sure Raqqa is blushing with embarrassment for missing out on that one. It appears that America is still the best at violence, and while that big other sets Paris alight, or rapes Berlin (whatever the tabloids say), your children will grow to be the most prolific terrorists the world has ever seen, only towards each other. It’s only just getting started, they’ve been taught the method, given the means and now the seal has broken. Progressives will continue to be stabbed by skinheads, and conservatives will be shot because Americans must have their rights.

If history shows us anything, it’s that your children will only get better at it, and as the armoured cars roll out, and civilians buy the entire stock of AR-15’s; each for the same price as a new phone, America will continue to profit. Indeed their favourite child, the NRA will flourish, ensuring that every American, even the mentally disabled, can get in on the fun.

From the Antipodes, the view of your future is dim, but what do we know? Lapdogs are rarely insightful, and we’ve been told to sit and stay, what else can we do? It would seem that the master of the free world has a bad temperament, best not to anger him. Biting the hand that feeds you, whether you are foreign or American, can only end badly. There is a queue of people waiting to exercise their rights.

I wasn’t there to watch you grow America, it’s a shame that you were so tormented as a child in a violent household, but now that you’ve grown to have a house of your own, it shows that this entire time your only friend has been the gun. You know no other warmth than that of blood.

The world weeps knowing your story, and how disturbed you grew to be. I wish I had been there earlier. But now you’re scaring us; you scare everybody. We see the signs of what’s to come. We shouldn’t be so confused the next time a Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech or Columbine occurs because we know the narrative: it’s yours.

So before the levee breaks, and America’s people begin to tear each other apart. I beg you, talk to us, listen. You are not alone, and you needn’t be angry anymore, and we must work together from now on, but things need to change.

Product Review – MASTERS LVXKOONS

In teaming up with Jeff Koons, Louis Vuitton (LV) has cemented itself as the essential brand for the economically stupid and the socially disabled. Their ambitious new series of handbags combines the classic Veblen Good with the newer trend of commodifying art to spectacular effect.  Its status within society, combined with its clever marketing disarm its target market to significant effect.

Widely recognised as one of the original masters of the Veblen Good, LV again displays their prowess in marketing and capitalising on the rich, weak and stupid. LV’s strategy has always been bold, encourage conspicuous consumption, that is to encourage sociopaths with lots of money to buy their goods in order to show off their economic prowess. They invest heavily on emphasising the surplus value of their products. Because in reality, all they are selling is a handbag made from unnecessarily expensive materials, they have worked tirelessly to ensure that they communicate the exaggerated (and often questionable) benefits of their product: status, quality, beauty.

While there’s no empirical way of measuring any of these surplus value benefits, society’s obsessive focus on fetishising goods into statements of identity, has it covered. While most consumers are aware that the finished products they buy aren’t worth what businesses charge for them, LV have bypassed this by specifically targeting wealthy idiots. Economically this is represented as the Veblen good demand curve. Where demand usually goes down as the price of a good goes up, LV and other companies produce products that display a reversed form of this, where demand coincides with price, high or low. Proof that having money doesn’t guarantee any economic prowess.

The LVXKOONS Montaigne, $5,350AUD

What makes purchasing a bag from LV so ethically wrong? Money can be spent on far more effective things, the magic of LV is that they are brilliant at convincing their target market that their money is meant to be spent on their products. Here’s an example: Givewell, one of the leading charity review organisations, estimate that preventing the death of a child under 5 costs around $900 of donations towards the Deworm The World Program. The Against Malaria Foundation estimates that it costs only $5 in donations to purchase and distribute anti-mosquito nets (which have proven to be effective) around the world. LV brilliantly entices its customers to forget that with the $5,350 they plan to spend on a Montaigne MM LVXKOONS Handbag they could have saved the lives of almost six poor, sickly children, or gifted the world with 1,070 life saving anti-mosquito nets. Marketing at it’s most effective.

 

Koons’ Gazing Ball rendition of Ruben’s “Tiger Hunt”

Perhaps the newest series adds enough value to make this justifiable, after all, they have collaborated with a world class artist in designing their new masters series. Surely this imbues the series with real value? The collaboration uses Koons’ newest ‘Gazing Ball’ Series of works and places the images (which are copies of historic paintings by classic and modern masters) onto the bags, which then overlays the original artist’s name in large reflective letters, alongside some additional reflective buttons.

In an interview with Koons featured on LV’s website, he explicitly states “I believe these bags are art”. While being renowned for widening the discourse around the central question “what is art?”, Koons has always been boundary pushing. The boundaries he aims to push, primarily the boundary between the public and private sphere, are questionable to many. The primary argument, that art should be accessible to all humans, as it is the product of human expression is one that LV artfully dodge. Koons states that the reflective text on each bag performs the same function as his gazing ball does: to encourage introspection and reflect on the value of our shared artistic heritage. LV do a brilliant job of hiding the hypocrisy in relegating this to the private sphere of those able to afford $5000 handbags or $1000 iPhone cases.

But perhaps the gazing ball that is the new line of Louis Vuitton products are not supposed to engage the owner of the product, but the passer-by that gazes upon it. While some will undoubtedly see it as the whoring out of art for profit, spitting in the face of a world that needs to share its resources; their message is actually to promote a consciousness of art, and that one can support art by owning their handbag. In Koons’ words, he describes the bags as “a continuation of my effort to erase the hierarchy attached to fine art and old masters.” The choice to go with LV in pursuing this goal mustn’t have been hard; they were never renowned for supporting hierarchies of any kind.

It may be the case that Louis Vuitton’s latest collection: LVXKOONS, prays on the rich people of the world that have lots of money but no self-control, understanding of practicality or consequences, and make confident decisions based on ignorance (the three main foundations of stupidity according to cognitive scientists Balazs Aczel, Bence Palfi & Zoltan Kekecs). It may be that their products have no real, inherent value, and are by most aesthetic standards, crude and hideous (beauty is subjective though!). And it may be that their collaboration, in an act of bitter irony, stands for nothing more than the privatisation of our shared artistic heritage. But it must be said that Louis Vuitton’s latest series is nothing short of masterful, for, against all odds, people still buy it in spades.

 

Who Are The Party Lines Drawn For?

“The party lines are drawn”, left and rig, conservative and progressive. Knowledge of the human world is categorised and filed, and there are sciences devoted to this; sociologists, philosophers, political scientists; each field constructing boxes for knowledge to fit into. In the end, however, all of this is left up to our individual interpretation. Do you identify as red or blue? Perhaps you do, or perhaps it matters not.

Endless literature has been written about a dystopian world in which we live in a state of pure cooperation (or at times coercion) together in pursuit of the same ideal: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We” describes a state in which people live according to an algorithm designed for maximum societal utility. “Brave New World” shows a caste system supported by technocracy allowing for a strange kind of consumerist freedom. Something seems off about these tales; society is too docile, as we read these stories we learn that our potentiality for resistance, for passion and our desire to forge a unique identity are part of our humanity. It is our individualism, our refusal to fit into these boxes; which so paradoxically coincides with our desire to understand human knowledge in tightly categorised boxes; that allows us to push the boundaries of understanding.

This paradox is worth exploring: we are products of our exposure to knowledge, yet we seek to exist outside of the confines of it. For us to live authentically, we need to construct an identity (which we can only do through the medium of pre-existing ideas), yet for this identity to feel real, we must contribute our very own original ideas over time. This sets the context for our contemporary political scene. Remember: the party lines are drawn.

Ideology rules supreme in 2017, as the fierce public battle between conservatives and progressives playing out. This war is one of information and ideas; it is a war of subjectivity and ideas. As of now, it is accepted (though rightly lamented) that empirical evidence can be subordinated to an opinion, the President of the United States of America and his followers are proof of this. Climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines are but two examples of a modern disavowal of the objective truth. Polemics now rule supreme as the zeitgeist of the early 21st century, the dedication to political rhetoric is a virtue under the modern polemic system. If we look at the genealogy of the word ‘polemic’, stemming from the Greek word Polemos: War. Party lines have dissolved, battle lines taking their place.

Michel Foucault rose to fame in the late 20th century, and very quickly was hailed as a candidate to succeed Jean-Paul Sartre as the most important modern French intellectual. The shift from Sartre: a product of the second world war, militant communist and political polemicist; to Foucault: political chimaera; gives us a glimpse into remedying contemporary politics.

Firstly, a critique of Sartre, militant dedication to political fidelities and a closed mind. I want to posit these terms:
Referring to Georg W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger: in each of our temporal, subjective experiences of life (knowledge is categorised, yet ultimately, we each interpret it differently), two things unify our existence: they are reason and our capacity for logic, and our experience of the uncanny. Dialectically we can define these as knowledge and mystery, their synthesis: meaning and understanding.
Our capabilities for reasoning are what distinguish our ability to be free at this point in time. I rely heavily on Hegel’s interpretation of reason as the material which binds humanity to our freedom, of which much has been written. Each new understanding we gain of the world expands our potential to be free within it, each new linguistic term created represents a greater ability to articulate our freedom (or unfreedom). We are free insofar as our contextual circumstances allow that, and human reason is what generates a change in contextual circumstances.

A militant dedication to an ideological fidelity, the likes of which we see today exemplified by the extremes of both conservatives and progressives is a self-imposed limitation of our capacity to reason. The medium of knowledge and logic is subordinate to ideology under the polemic doctrine, and what arises is a dogmatic approach to praxis (our material attempts to affect change based on our understanding of the situation).

When political dogma is held to be more important than our logical reasoning, it is held to be more important than the pursuit of human freedom. Humanity can never gain a further understanding of the world when trapped in a gridlock of ideological polemics. This approach creates enemies, defines disagreement as heresy and dogmatically constructs an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. When Sartre stated “I swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred that would only die with me” he swore to a fidelity that would limit his ability to navigate the political problems he so passionately attempted to tackle. His pursuit of a political truth was sacrificed to party allegiances.

Fast forward to Foucault, who enigmatically rejected any form of categorisation, proudly flirting with a plethora of different political leanings: a little Marxist, a little progressive and at times even classically liberal. Rejecting the title of professor, rejecting the title of philosopher, Foucault presented himself as a nomad of thought, an ideological chimaera who saw things, not in isolation, but in relation to each other. It is this tendency to being aggressively open-minded that this article advocates, in resistance to the tightening of the polemic grip, our praxis must be grounded in individual reason, sceptical of categorisation and ideology. Our opinions must constantly be questioned and justified.

This in itself is not so radical a proposal, yet its consequences are the very foundation of radicality. To be outside the box and effectively so, as Foucault was, we must adapt to our contextual constraints by viciously questioning their justification. In Foucault’s praxis, each idea is systematically deconstructed, published works including critiques of critical human concepts: medical practice, sexuality, punishment, madness.

Foucault received criticism for basing his practice outside of socially constructed systems of thought, attempting to critique and understand each concept he tackled in a sort of isolation. By seeing each concept in a historical manner, rather than a contextual interpretation or effect on everyone, hypocrisy and fallibility were laid bare. Through revealing the inner workings of constructs like sexuality or language, outside of any contextual limitations, we now have a greater understanding of the mechanisms at play in our day to day life. As a consequence of that, our ability to navigate these conceptual realms without contextual influence (i.e., our freedom) is heightened.

Sartre, Foucault, and all those who follow are not in themselves momentous singularities outside of history, but rather stepping stones on the way to a better system of thought. In fact, this was Foucault’s view: his field of study was a history of systems of thought or ideas; his goal was to document the conditions for the possibility of human thought for any given time, he called this an archaeology of knowledge. Foucault is dead, and the conditions for our possibilities of thought are ever changing.

It is this very fluid nature of context that we must bear in mind when asserting our opinion, our context today differs from the conditions of possibility I would have experienced, say, before 9/11, or before the rise of the smartphone. It is because of this fluid nature that our reason must be exercised, for it exists free from the conditions of context based social construction; and it is the pre-condition for the furthering of our collective freedom.

Nihilo Ex Machina

Earlier this year I received a message from my mum asking me if I would be okay. This was in the wake of the news that the penalty rates for Australian workers in the hospitality and retail sectors had been cut. Amidst the announcement that Australian university funds would be slashed and the debt repayment process accelerated, I am now expecting another.

I doubt that the parliamentarians in Canberra had my Mum in mind when they decided that amidst all of the difficulties of starting a life outside from home, that protections such as penalty rates and (debatably) affordable tertiary education were not as valuable as we had all previously thought. What had proved more valuable to them lied in the economy, what every average Australian Dad wants for his country: more jobs, fewer taxes, a healthy economy.

Our parents ought to be happy, Australia has one of the healthiest economies in the world. In comparison to the rest, we sailed with ease through the storm of the Global Financial Crisis, we maintained an AAA credit rating, and our natural resources secured us safety for years to come.

Despite the economy’s health, we continue to face disappointment on the ground. Wages stagnate (or drop if you work in hospitality or retail), the cost of living continues to rise. To quote my local state MP Jo Haylen: “There is no suburb in Sydney where a single woman earning the average wage ($973) can afford to rent a one-bedroom property on her own”. These are but symptomatic of the problem, it is a problem Australia needs to grow out of; and the problem is basing our vote on the needs of the free market, for it is nothing more that a soulless fiction.

The free market dominates our perception of reality; we often aren’t aware of this, our ideologies distorting our field of vision, in the same way, water refracts light. Our parents and our teachers pass down the mantras they grew up with, evading any scepticism they form the practice of how things are done here in Australia, and for many Australian minds, it is how things will always be done. What Ludwig Wittgenstein called “forms of life”, the practices of the everyday life we grow up with exist neutrally, they offer no virtue nor any iniquity, and they most certainly are not infallible.

Despite their persistence, the forms of life the generation before us grew up with, and now ram down the throat of Canberra lack any human quality. The kernel of the Neoliberal stance (what we see in the deregulation of the market, in the free reign form of capitalism that has been in effect since Thatcher and Reagan pushed for it in the 80’s) is the free market, but we must be sceptical of its dominance over human affairs.

The free market has no moral or social imperative, and its gears turn with or without the happiness of its constituents; George Monbiot describes it as “a neutral, natural force… like Darwin’s theory of evolution”. Casting a vote based on the whims of something that very clearly cares not for the well-being of human lives, particularly its most important stakeholders: the working class that keep the gears turning, is nothing short of a donkey vote.

Of course, practical complaints towards this claim are justified, jobs are a source of well-being, and an absolute necessity in any country wanting the Government to deliver more jobs is in no way an evil demand. Neither is the general want for a healthy economy a terrible thing, we were born into these conditions, and so we must make do with what we have until we can effect change. However, the tragedy of Australian democracy lies in the supremacy of these demands over structural improvements which could not only yield a material benefit, as well as an ideological affirmation of an Australia that cares for its people.

Australia’s public is wasting its passion and goodwill in supporting measures that promote the agenda of the free market, rather than of its people, current and future. We should seek to emancipate ourselves from its political restrictions as we can see other nations doing; our Scandinavian friends are a great example. For every vote that goes toward the blind support of the economy, is a vote that could’ve been used to show solidarity with our fellow countrymen, to take responsibility for the problems our nation faces and to ultimately increase the freedom of opportunity for each and every Australian.

An issue which has received recent outrage (and justly so) is the proposal for a federal loan to Adani, an Indian mining giant. For this to proceed would be a failure, ecologically (Adani are infamous for their failure to contain pollution), ideologically (the selling off of land and stubbornness against a continually improving renewables sector) and morally (a blatant disregard for the will of the majority of Australians). The tragedy of it would lie not in the corruption of individual politicians, rather the finger of blame points to a system which has steered our democratic society away from the values that define our humanity.

The free market is not a source of love or compassion, it is indifferent to Australia and all of its people, whether we thrive or die and in the long run, it will offer us no joy or fulfilment. There is no god in the machine of Neoliberalism, just a void; there is no love promised for us. I feel my Mum knows this, or will in time as she finds herself surrounded by reasons to ask if I will be okay the next time parliamentarians subordinate the lives of their constituents to the demands of the free market.

A Fidelity to What?

“It would make no sense for life to create cowards,” said Jacques Lacan, about our desire. Why when we feel the tug and pull of Love, of duty to a calling, of resistance to oppression, do we cave so easily? How is it that we can so quickly lose life’s rose tint and suffer mediocrity till death?

This is the central question of Alain Badiou’s Ethics, in which he proposes an alternative to our current understanding of how to live a good life. He claims that our current system of dealing with the evils of the world is reactionary: we wait until something awful happens, and then we must act ethically in response. Evil pre-exists good in this context, and unless there is a crisis, there is nothing prompting us toward action. We see this view reflected in many of the seminal works that have shaped our world, notably Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which man is conceived of as a brute with an unhealthy penchant for war, and little else.

To counter this Badiou envisions what he calls an Ethic of Truths. It makes no sense to sit and wait until tragedy rears its ugly head, we must dedicate ourselves to achieving an authentic good over the course of our life. This is outlined as a convocation to a truth (this is his way of saying a fidelity to a cause, whether it be love, politics, art or science). If we each dedicate ourselves to a cause higher than our mortal lives, we can not only live a fulfilling life but one that actively seeks to enrich the world far beyond the moment we leave it.

This ties into one of my recent articles on love (https://therestissilencesite.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/a-radical-conception-of-love/) where the imperative, ‘you are ready to suffer’ defines our dedication to a fidelity. We have all heard it: “I will get it done, even if it kills me”, the man saving up for his child’s education fees, the author embarking on his debut book, or like in the image above, Marie Curie striving to understand radioactivity, all struggle for these tasks accepting that they warrant their suffering. These causes all represent the good in life, which we should pro-actively dedicate ourselves to.

Somehow, all of the compassions and empathy required of us in the ethical decision is directed to the other, the faceless object of need, the victim, the homeless, those seeking asylum; all of which we are bizarrely demanded to love unconditionally, or at least relate to. Barbara Creed’s outlines the concept of ‘the stray’, an animal (human or other) that is disconnected from society: “The human stray is an outsider, an other, an exile”, comparable to the street dogs of India. Is this not the kernel of our innate psychological disconnect from one another? How can we possibly dedicate ourselves to another when we have no real relationship with them when en masse, the others appear to us as objects rather than human. The crux of this is the moment of fetishistic disavowal (I know very well, but still…), where the other is the object of our attentive dismissal.

To combat this, Badiou prescribes an internal system of ethics, directed at ourselves; where duties of care are a byproduct of striving for a truth (keeping in mind that subjective truths are innately egalitarian fidelities), where our dedication to the other is an act whose will is in and of itself. In theory, this approach dismisses the difference between us, you and I may be each other’s antithesis, but in the middle ground lies a cause worth joining as humans.

In dismissing the other and acting virtuously without the need for stimulus, for the sake of virtue, we attain a kind of freedom. The other can be a victim, but society is also comprised of those that would steer you away from truths towards an inauthentic mediocrity in which your life is spent on gaining little more than you started with. Self-contained determination to make a difference, to leave behind something larger than yourself must in its very nature interact with others, Badiou argues that we must harness this.

Of course, this very elementary review of one book in a series written is little more than vague and introductory. But what we have already is an imperative, an infinite demand to dedicate ourselves to a fidelity that asks of us what we can never truly give it in our lifetime. As a system of ethics, one could argue all day about loopholes, or it’s own rose tinted naiveté, but it reminds us of the question of how to live. When asked about the system of ethics for psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan simply answered: “never give up on your desire.” At first, this sounds hedonistic, but perhaps it is our potentiality to enact good that Lacan had in mind, just as his pupil Badiou has today.