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Kang, associate professor @ Warwick. “Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms.” Law and Critique (2024) 35:281–311 AS

The individual submissions for the Architecture Biennale were invited ‘to negate this top-down and closed system. … The Institute of Patent Infringement thus invites submissions from students, industrial designers, architects, urban planners, artists, programmers and the wider public to merge, reimagine, infringe, and hack existing Amazon patents’ (2018). With this proposition, the project aimed to reclaim patents as public information in an original and subversive way, by purposefully disconnecting the invention from its original stated use towards other functions. Somewhat paradoxically, in doing so, the central cultural connector of all these hacked imaginary inventions remains the patent holder or applicant, Amazon, as well as the legal format of patent document. Stewart and Chew were intrigued by the Amazon patents because, distinct from other technology companies, Amazon’s operations involved physical and algorithmic spatial organization and infrastructures. Their call specified: ‘Since 2010, Amazon Technologies Inc. has filed 5,860 patents that range from the seemingly banal to the resolutely absurd. Illustrated by dry line drawings these patents provide a glimpse and representation of the automated future Amazon aim to create’ (2018). The ‘banal’ to ‘the resolutely absurd’ aspects reflect the popular fascination with patents as gimmicks, as the previous section has analyzed. In contrast to the future-making and -restricting power of legal patent documents, the submissions resemble the format of a patent document and aesthetics of the patent drawings, but the lack of specificity and capacity to reproduce to invention (due to lack of technical infrastructure, know-how, financial resource) points to the limitations of the ‘public’ nature and understanding of patent information. Although they are as zany as authentic patent drawings, situated uneasily between play and inventive labor, the mimicry lacks legal materiality (Kang & Kendall 2019) and act as cultural signs. The proposed hacked inventions alternate between gimmick, science fiction, and technoscientific geekery. Their primary difference to the original Amazon patent documents seems to lie in the different political or social function for which the hacked inventions would be employed (Fig. 13 depicts the original Amazon patent drawing on the left, and the reimagined patent drawing on the right side). In that sense, the project was a creative re-enactment of potentiality against technological over-determination). As Covid-19 hit, the idea of a patent hack required inventing around a patent, like Decathlon’s snorkel mask in times when oxygen masks were in short supply in the first year of the pandemic, and people desperately resorted to DIY efforts to make oxygen masks. The tweet below (Fig. 15) engages in its own subversion of the arbitrary European Patent Office’s #patentfact tweets which puts forward a random association between the languages of European patent bureaucracy and ergonomic keyboards (Fig. 14). It suggests that Decathlon’s patent stands in the way of people to modify it, and indeed, it is not the first contestation of the effects of Decathlon’s snorkel mask patent (Fig. 16), which has gone through multiple opposition proceedings at the European Patent Office.12 What is striking here is that none of the depicted patent drawings circulated by the European Patent Office (Figs. 14 and 15) relate to the content of the accompanying text, as if they are exemplary instances of Barthes’ observation that the ‘worn out state of a myth can be recognized by the arbitrariness of its signification’ (1972, p. 127). The Institute of Patent Infringement’s project and motivation are different from the mobilization of patent drawings into an aesthetic, cultural artefact, which I had previously described in the previous section. Even though the aim of the project is subversive, it also has the strange effect of objectifying patent drawings as real inventions through aesthetic reproductions, regardless of how different the hacks may be from the original purpose. The project presumes the accuracy of patent documents and their drawings and does not contest the narrative of futureshaping effect of patents. But many of patented inventions in fact are never realized or used (European Commission 2005). There is often a tendency to overestimate patents for different reasons. Patented inventions are taken as inherently innovative and valuable, as if patent documents, or even applications, signify legal tokens of credit of technological and scientific achievements (Kang 2015). With little scrutiny over inventive substance, patents are overhyped as both incentives and outcomes of innovation in a circular manner. Also there is sometimes an undifferentiated condemnation of patents as creating monopolies, whereas a bulk of patents turn out to be useless and not valuable. There is a lack of distinction between patents as legal monopoly rights and monopoly market structures that they may enable, but do not necessarily always result in. The Institute for Patent Infringement also attributes a central role to patent drawings as if they depict scenarios from a projected future, on the basis of which there is then a creative invitation to subvert them away from the vision of a dominant multinational corporation, such as Amazon. This results in the curious effect that the act of subversion itself results in the solidification of a patent’s speculative legalist potentiality, which raises the question if the act of subversion results in co-option. The threat of the future that the patents depict is imminent, yet also it is highly speculative and fantastical. It is easy to see both the Amazon patents and their hacks as occupying the same place as the patent gimmicks of WIPO’s Weird and Wonderful selection. Yet what if the creative patent hacks could be really made? Would they not be useful, although they would not fulfil the patentability requirement of industrial application? What are the possibilities and limits of reimagining patent drawings as aesthetic, non-industrial, non-commoditized artefacts? The Institute for Patent Infringement project poses valuable questions about the strategic uses of patents by powerful corporations, as well as giving an indication of their imagined futurities for which they think it is worth to go through the patent prosecution process. It reveals an uneasy oscillation between precaution, critique of monopoly rights, and patent speculations by re-imagining patent drawings as aesthetic forms to be hacked.

When US President Donald Trump and his hawkish advisers singled out Beijing and Moscow as “revisionist powers” and Washington’s biggest threat over a year ago, they may not have foreseen an alliance developing between the two countries against a common foe. During his visit to Russia this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and “best friend” and counterpart Vladimir Putin ushered in a new era for bilateral ties between the two countries that were communist rivals during the cold war. According to former diplomats and analysts, the “bromance” between the two leaders that has been splashed across both countries’ state-controlled media is not just a show of resentment at Trump’s big-stick diplomacy, but of the geostrategic implications on the shifting global political and economic order. Xi’s three-day tour, his eighth official visit to Russia since taking power in 2012, comes amid worsening tensions between China and the United States over trade and technology. It has so far seen two joint statements – including one denouncing Trump’s unilateral, disruptive foreign policy – and a raft of deals on natural gas, security and technology worth more than US$20 billion. “This year marks the 70th anniversary of our diplomatic ties and China’s ties with Russia are deepening at a time of profound change in the global geopolitical landscape,” said Ma Zhengang, a former Chinese ambassador to Britain. Ma, also former president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, said the so-called new era of China-Russia ties was apparently a reference to the US’ changing role in world affairs. “It has steadily withdrawn from the global leadership role and waged an offensive against China after years of hostility towards Russia. That has given us new impetus to develop closer ties with Moscow,” he said. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, also said China’s efforts to edge closer to Russia underlined changes in their relations with the US. “The context has changed. The restart of the trade war, the US measures against Huawei as well as China’s responses suggest that China and the US are entering a process of decoupling, not only in the economic relationship but more generally,” Tsang said. “This implies a structural change in the global strategic line-up. As this progresses, China under Xi will need to strengthen its capacity to face the US and its allies. Putin’s Russia comes in handy in this context.” In a series of meetings with Putin in Moscow and St Petersburg, Xi repeatedly said both countries stood at a historical juncture in their pursuit of development and national rejuvenation. As nuclear-armed powers, Xi said China and Russia should boost cooperation, forge a stronger strategic partnership and fight against “illicit moves to curb the development of emerging economies” at a time of greater uncertainty. “Under the current circumstances, the two sides should deepen strategic coordination, not only to safeguard the interests of China and Russia, but also to defend basic international norms and justice as well as world peace, security and stability,” the Chinese president said on Thursday. Xi described Putin, who he has met nearly 30 times, as “my best and bosom friend”, which according to Katie Stallard-Blanchette, a fellow at the Wilson Centre in Washington, was “unusually effusive”. In a lengthy statement after talks between the two leaders in Moscow on Wednesday, hailing a new era for bilateral ties, both praised their frequent exchanges and upgraded relations. Apart from listing 16 potential areas for future cooperation – ranging from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative to joint space and Arctic explorations – almost half of the 10,000-word document focuses on their shared approach to international crises and issues such as Iran, Syria and North Korea. In a second joint statement on countering threats and challenges to international security, Xi and Putin were much less restrained, naming the US directly about 10 times. They criticised Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a key cold war-era arms control pact, saying it would “undermine strategic stability”. Xi and Putin also raised concern about the growing threat of an arms race in space, calling for a legally binding international agreement banning weapons in orbit. “A ban on deployment of any weapons in space would avert a serious threat to global peace and security,” the statement said. Huawei signs deal to develop 5G in Russia, on sidelines of Xi-Putin meeting Shi Ze, a former Chinese diplomat in Russia and a senior fellow at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, said the statements set the tone for bilateral ties in the years to come against the backdrop of Washington’s deteriorating ties with both China and Russia. “The strongly worded statement lashing out at the US is fairly unusual and shows the urgency for Beijing to join hands with Moscow on global issues that are considered their core national interests,” he said. “For China’s part, it also underlines the Chinese government’s willingness and readiness to play a leading role to counter efforts that will undermine the existing global security structure.” Russia’s ties with the US are at a low point, with Putin concerned about more sanctions from the US and its allies over the crisis in Ukraine, the war in Syria and allegations the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 US presidential elections.

The COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the continuing menace to humanity of global health issues that had been suppressed and considered under control, at least in the Global North. The massive warfare activities in Ukraine in the third year of the pandemic have reawakened the sense of threat particularly in Europe. Both the pandemic and the war, as well as the escalating climate crisis, have made global insecurity more tangible. The existing and likely crises caused by these unfortunate occurrences – mass displacement, increasing prices for products of basic needs such as food and energy, and the overall severe impact on global economy—will burden people in low-income countries most but not at all exclusively [1]. Especially the fatal effects on future generations [2] understandably reinforce the desire for a safer world. Enhanced security is needed in times of growing uncertainty, threatened ancestral rights and dwindling opportunities for a large part of mankind. The current global order has therefore been aptly described as a world risk society [3]. Even if this need for security is comprehensible, the nature of the security discourse in global health and beyond raises fundamental questions and concerns. Instead of pursuing common objectives, such as social stability, global public goods, equity or social justice, and recognizing shared responsibilities by governments across national boundaries, security policies predominantly envisage biomedical threats such as infectious diseases, more or less openly admitting that the focus is on the autonomy of nation states and safeguarding the existing status quo in international relations, however unfair they may be [4]. The utopian exuberance that led to the founding of the WHO and other United Nations (UN) organizations is thus giving way to a pragmatic, predominantly biomedical realism that undermines rather than promotes people’s rights and legal entitlements, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the WHO constitution [5]. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the extent to which global and public health has become dominated by biomedical approaches. Politicians, policymakers and the media provided virologists and epidemiologists a paramount role in dealing with the pandemic. For a considerable time, they provided the main evidence base for partly far-reaching measures and restrictions. The strong, near-exclusive focus on biomedical sciences and their assessment of the pandemic situation led to the initial ignorance of the non-medical, social determination of health. In Germany, for example, it took the dominant COVID-19 experts and political decisionmakers 14 months to even notice the pronounced socioeconomic differences in the burden of the coronavirus infection [6]. The ongoing debate about the COVID-19 pandemic and its interrelation with health security does not sufficiently put the spotlight on the structural causes of global health crises. Despite overwhelming evidence of the social determination of health, political leaders, the media and an influential part of global health actors have focused first and foremost on biomedical approaches [7], while often underestimating or even ignoring the close relationship between socioeconomic status, living conditions and unhealthy lifestyles on the one hand, and both the burden of non-communicable diseases and the severity and lethality of COVID-19 infections on the other [8, 9]. A narrative, iterative review of the available literature on health security indicates an increasing biomedicalization of public health that has contributed significantly to making the linkage between health and security the priority discourse in global health and its governance. Security aspects and considerations have gained both acceptance and importance in the last decades. The quest for security is understandable in an increasingly inequitable, unstable and disjointed world, particularly vis-à-vis the militarization of conflicts and international relations. But a closer look at the concept of health security makes things appear more complicated. It often remains unclear what is meant by this form of security, who defines it and who is being targeted by security policies as well as how health security is to be generated [10]. Health security remains centered on the security of nation states and defence against international threats, rather than prioritizing people’s health and its determination [11]. Policymakers in high-income countries tend to emphasise protection of their populations particularly against external threats, for example bioterrorism, zoonoses and pandemics, whereas many—but not all—global health professionals understand the term in a broader context of social health protection, population health and its determination [12]. Over the last two decades, global health security has often become virtually and almost interchangeably synonymous with global health [13]. However, this perspective rather exhibits a conceptual narrowing than epistemic clarity. Global health security is actually but one area of the global health domain, as it primarily addresses cross-border health threats but not the whole span of global health policy [14, 15]. Meanwhile, a universal definition of global health security is still lacking, despite the abundance of available literature on human and (global) health security. The recent attempt of the WHO, as the United Nations (UN) agency specialised on health, to define global health security falls short as it focuses predominantly on the international spread of acute infectious threats [16]. The fact that the use of the term “health security” by different actors is as widespread as it is inconsistent is by no means attributable to the difficulty of achieving conceptual clarification, but rather to the widely divergent perceptions, interests, priorities, politics, and power relations that exist in the broader field of global health [17]. Despite its widespread use, the World Health Assembly has not yet agreed on a resolution on the concept of ‘health security’, indicating that its scope is contested among member states [18]. Health security in international foreign policy Already before the COVID-19 outbreak, global health was high on the international political agenda and played an important role at summit meetings of international fora of high-income and emerging countries such as the “Group of 7” (G7), and the “Group of 20” (G20) [19]. However, the prevailing global health security approach tends to be insufficient for adequately catering to the complexity of challenges. There is a need to harmonize the contemporary security debate with other fundamental health-policy challenges from an equity perspective [20, 21]. Current global health programs often fail to fulfill the claim to universalism implicitly associated with the term “global” and tend to neglect the requirements of a comprehensive transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding of health security policies. There is still a large discrepancy between the current state of knowledge on improving health security, equity and actual global health politics and practices [22]. This trend is partly attributable to the unexpected resurgence of epidemic risks that were considered defeated or at least controllable in high-income countries in recent years. Since the last two decades, a rapid (re)-emergence of pathogenic infectious diseases has been seen in several regions of the world, including, but not restricted to, diseases such as SARS, avian influenza, Ebola, Zika, and most recently, COVID-19. These outbreaks have each led to the application of control measures around the world and strongly influenced the global health debate in which securitization has become a prevalent and common theme among global health scholars and practitioners [23]. At the same time, other health threats such as tuberculosis, malaria, or chronic conditions like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes mellitus persisted. However, neither poverty-related infections nor the growing prevalence of non-communicable diseases have ever received the attention they deserve due to the continuous upward trend, particularly in countries in transition [24]. Notwithstanding this alarming global burden of disease trend both in the Global North and South[25], it is not the major killers, but the rapid succession of transnational ‘health crises’ caused by viral infections that repeatedly provoke a state of alert and make the headlines. However, public interest in the general health related challenges of other countries and continents is usually short-lived and transient. In low-income countries the situation is fundamentally different. Certain health hazards persist and the risk of ‘endemic’ diseases and their underlying ‘syndemics’ is part of everyday life [26]. In the course of epidemiological transition, the disease spectrum is increasingly expanding or even shifting from infectious to non-communicable, chronic diseases. During the last decades, societies in the Global South and elsewhere have been facing a double burden of disease caused by bacterial, viral or other pathogens on the one hand, and health problems commonly referred to as non-communicable diseases (NCD’s) on the other [27]. The simultaneous coexistence of undernourishment, malnutrition or dietary overweight exacerbates the situation [28]. Securitization of global health Global health has become an important area of foreign and security policy and hence of international diplomacy [29]. In fact, the UN Security Council has addressed health beyond the issue of epidemics and pandemics and taken the role of a forum to debate and negotiate global health issues; this reflects primarily the political interests of the permanent five, particularly the USA [30]. Health security often shapes the global health debate more than other health issues. Security is frequently encountered as a contextual framework in political health and foreign policy documents, and the securitization of health has for some time now been considered a key feature in global health governance [31]. Security practices and medical knowledge share a common evolutionary history; to consider and analyse them as independent of each other would be to ignore the historical formation of nation states and also the colonial roots of global health [32]. Security is one of several global health “frames” that are by no means exclusive, but have been driven in recent decades by a deep core of neoliberal values [33]. This implies that in contemporary global health governance there is an overemphasis on agency, while deeper structures, including its embedded ideas and configurations of powers, are neglected [31]. As such, neoliberalism has become the globally “hegemonic paradigm” during the frst two decades of the twenty-first century [34]. Covid-19 and viral neoliberalism must be understood as co-pathogeneses whereby the corona-virus pandemic has disclosed and reinforced global health insecurities due in large part to market-driven policies and neoliberal practices; the combination of societal inequalities, weakened response capacity by marketized health systems and biomedicine-oriented global health governance have created vectors of vulnerability [35]. The health security paradigm has its roots in concepts of risk mitigation and adaptation [3]. The Ebola outbreak in Western Africa in 2014–2015 has been important for the paradigm shift in global health policy. Since then, experts and politicians have been discussing the establishment of heath emergency funds, the formation of rapid reaction medical forces (‘white helmets’), as well as the creation of robust care structures and resilient health systems [36]. The 2015 Johannesburg Summit on China Africa Cooperation identified Public Health as one of the cornerstones for foreign policy action in the China Africa cooperation [37]. During their 2017 Berlin meeting the health ministers of the G20 countries simulated the necessary measures for combating future pandemics [38]. However, the prevailing reasoning does not aim to address the structural causes of potential threats [39], but serves as “a form of immunization to have societies and systems become more resilient in dealing with future risks” [40]. In this light, one should also analyse the process for establishing an international pandemic treaty, under WHO auspices, as a global normative framework for the preparedness and response to future pandemics [41]. This pandemic agreement, which at the time of writing is under negotiation by WHO member states, deserves critical scrutiny as its focus ought to be on people’s health, not merely national security. Creating genuine global health solidarity focused on human security requires a new pandemic agreement that mandates the sharing of technologies, scientific capacities and finance in future pandemics [42]. Wenham and colleagues argue that the key tension of the pandemic treaty is rooted in globalist ideals of what the perfect pandemic governance should look like, yet “that it seems to have little regard for the realities of the statist, securitized landscape that exists for responding to pandemic threats… Even something as big as a major global pandemic is not sufficient to get governments to think beyond national interests” [43].

Imperialism is an age-old phenomenon. In one form or another, it is likely to continue. There is insight in Thucydides’s suggestion that the “weak” will always be “subject to the strong,” and that the powerful seldom turn down “the opportunities of aggrandizement offered by superior strength.”20 But one problem with such venerable claims is that they tend to absolve the strong for exploiting the weak. Another problem is the danger of near banality passing for ancient wisdom: if there will always be rich and poor, then should we not worry about inequality? If some citizens will always commit crimes, then should we not try to find ways to mitigate the harm of such behavior? A commitment to a better world suggests that we seek to right the wrongs of the past. In a world of states, then, it is important to strengthen arrangements that discourage powerful states from imposing their will on weaker ones. It may well be the case that institutions cannot readily restrain the powerful in an “anarchic world.”21 If so, it is at least important to dissect the self-serving claims of the powerful; at minimum, the mighty should not to be allowed to define what is right. Throughout this volume I have interrogated several interrelated claims made by hegemonic states of the modern era: we really do not run an empire; if we do, it is only because it was offered to us; even when it was not offered to us, we had to take it, not for greed, but for the sake of our own security; and, in any case, the impact of our empire was, on balance, benign. My analysis has underscored the ways in which each of these claims is deeply misleading. With this core analysis in mind, I have a few final, speculative thoughts on the future of imperialism. Extrapolating from the recent past, two sets of comments are especially pertinent. First, what is the likely trajectory of American interventions in the developing world in the near future? Second, will emerging powers like China follow the expansionist patterns analyzed in this book? Is China also moving toward building an informal empire? As I turn to discuss these questions, an obvious but important caveat ought to be borne in mind: peering into the future is hazardous. Nevertheless, if the analysis of the past is correct, it ought to have some bearing on future projections. The United States has never really needed an empire. The analysis in this volume has suggested instead that unlike Britain, which really needed an empire to sustain prosperity in the nineteenth century, the United States in the twentieth century had merely wanted one. The tentativeness in the American imperial project is a function of this difference between need and want. American gains from imperial interventions in the global periphery have also been uneven. A case can be made that during the post–World War II period, the United States has been more successful in achieving its goals—at least short- to medium-term goals—via covert (or indirect) rather than overt, military interventions. For example, the former suggestion is supported by American interventions in Iran and Chile and by the most recent imposition of the Washington Consensus on Latin American countries. By contrast, US intervention in Vietnam was a heroic failure. The most recent military intervention in Iraq is still unfolding. But it is unlikely that the partial success in Iraq in deposing a despot and opening the oil wells of that country to foreign capital will ever be judged worth the cost in treasure, loss of life, and the unstable polity that the United States has left behind. The relative failures of US military interventions in the developing world are also comprehensible. Of course, the United States is a military giant and, if it so chose, it could readily defeat and occupy any (or most) developing countries. But that is not the American goal. The United States does not want colonies. What it wants instead are stable-but-subservient regimes in the global periphery. And these are increasingly hard to construct via military interventions. As I argue throughout this book, the building blocks of old-fashioned nineteenth century imperialism—ready collaborators in the periphery who benefited from maintaining commodity-exporting economies and clientelistic polities—have dissolved in the global periphery. Mass politics has replaced clientelism nearly everywhere. Plebiscitarian politics, in turn, encourages a variety of nationalists to the fore. Imperial efforts to overtly shape and control the politics of a developing country then readily run up against developing-country nationalism. Diem and others in South Vietnam, for example, could thus never be considered legitimate rulers of a sovereign South Vietnam; they were in fact puppets and were seen as such by the Vietnamese, no match for a Ho Chi Minh. The same is true elsewhere, such as in contemporary Iraq. This does not mean that modern-day imperialists cannot find ready collaborators in the developing world, or that commodity-producing elites and their political representatives do not have much to gain from quiet collaboration with industrialized countries, especially the United States. But as democracy spreads in peripheral countries, subservient rulers face power challenges from a variety of nationalists. The American preference for democracy, on the one hand, but for promotion of stable-but-subservient regimes in the developing world, on the other, are thus inherently in tension. When economic stakes are high, as in the case of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the United States quietly sets aside the goal of democracy in favor of supporting the power of a stable-but-subservient regime. What is the likely shape of US interventions in the developing world in the near future? Enormous power disparities and the prospect of economic gain will tempt the United States to intervene in one developing country or another. Global norms of noninterference in the affairs of sovereign nations may put some brakes on imperial ambitions. American citizens’ awareness that US interventions in the developing world often bring misery to the lives of those who are already destitute may also retard the imperial urge. However, neither global norms nor public opinion is likely to make imperialism a relic of the past. The post–World War II record examined here sharply supports this projection. The more pertinent issue is what form American imperialism will take in the near future. Again, the record examined here suggests that the United States does economic imperialism better than military imperialism. To the extent that imperialism is rational, one should expect the United States to eschew military interventions but continue to seek economic advantage in the global periphery via the use of covert and indirect interventions. As this book goes to press, Iran and Venezuela, which both possess enormous oil resources, are the focus of American angst. Will the United States intervene militarily in these countries? A cost-benefit analysis of the past suggests that the United States ought not to pursue a military option in these countries. But what complicates this rational suggestion is the enormous power surplus that the United States enjoys in the world. This power surplus, in turn, enables American leaders to periodically ignore the costs of interventions, which, in any case, are borne largely by American taxpayers and soldiers, and to indulge their whims and hubris.

Another aspect of the American military-industrial complex is the extent to which it arms the rest of the world. This could be due to unstated hegemonic policies or an extension of “American imperialism” as a government-coordinated strategy but given the influence of the military-industrial complex has with policymakers, it appears simply to be good business. A Congressional Research Service report in 2008 showed that $55.2 billion (US) in weapons deals were concluded globally in that year; and of that, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion (US), or 68%.41The closest competitor was Italy, with $3.7 billion (US), or 6.7%. Export laws that can slow or block the sale of military technology have been under attack from lobbyists and willing government officials. In 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to see “‘wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports’ in the name of ‘competitiveness.’”42By taking advantage of the intimate relationship they have with the US government, American defense contractors are influencing policy to grow their business abroad. Coupled with this, in some cases the sale of arms to other nations promotes destabilization which is compatible with the spreading of neoliberalism.43The US-led coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 stands out as clear evidence of the forced propagation of the neoliberal agenda. Efforts to find legitimate reasons to invade Iraq, such as the (fallacious) existence of a secret Iraqi program to develop and use weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s). This project failed, so President G. W. Bush sold the invasion as a mandate for freedom, announcing that “‘freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world “and “as the greatest power on earth (the US has) an obligation to help the spread of freedom”.44What followed was a lightning-quick invasion of Iraq that penetrated Baghdad and toppled the government of Saddam Hussein. On September 19, 2003, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that replaced the Iraqi government, issued orders that included the following: full privatization of public enterprises; full ownership by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses; full repatriation of foreign profits; the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control; national treatment for foreign companies; and the elimination of nearly all trade barriers.45The orders applied to all areas of the economy except oil, which was exempted.46Further, a regressive “flat tax” was established, the right to strike was outlawed, and unions were banned in key sectors. The Iraqi interim government appointed in June 2004 was given no power to write new laws or change old ones; they could only work within the laws laid down by the Coalition Provisional Authority.47“What the US evidently sought to impose upon Iraq was a full-fledged neoliberal state apparatus whose fundamental mission was and is to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation for all newcomers, Iraqi and foreigners alike.”48In Iraq and Afghanistan, the American military-industrial complex dramatically expanded the role of on-the-ground contractors to the point that in 2010, there were 262,681 contractors and assistance staff in these two countries,49which is greater than the number of US uniformed soldiers (154,000 as of December 2010)50deployed at the time. Of these employees, 47,282 (18%) were performing security functions.51It was estimated by the 2011 Commission on Wartime Contracting that at least $117 billion (US) was spent on or obligated to contractors between October 2001 and 2011.52One of the advantages of contractor manpower on the ground is that there is less political cost associated with them; the Secretary of Defense can say truthfully that they are drawing down troops in Iraq,53while leaving unsaid the number of contractors remaining in-country. In terms of headcount, contractors were the largest coalition contingent deployed. The American military-industrial complex not only provided the technical means to assure swift (initial) victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also provided much of the manpower needed and has profited greatly from doing so, while facilitating an overt takeover of a wealthy nation and its transformation into a neoliberal state.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Taking Back the Internet.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 60-64. /LJS

Couldry and Mejias (2019) have placed capital’s push for ever more data in the darkest light by arguing that capitalism is entering a new frontier of value extraction, where every aspect of life, no matter how mundane, becomes a resource to be mined and then used to exploit the very people who are the source of this information. This emerging ‘data colonialism’ is not presented as simply a matter of privacy; the issue is much deeper and insidious. It is the vision of a new societal order in which the enormous amount of data being produced and collected is used to mould an ever more malleable populace that can be categorized, controlled, and shaped to be maximally aligned with the needs of capital. In the extreme, the creation of a perfectly curated environment for capital would leave practically no room for reflective, autonomous thought, as such autonomy can only come about when our minds have multiple and conflicting sources of information and stimuli to work with. In sum, given the way cyber estate has been developed and put to use, we see that the internet, which was devised as a decentralized network with the explicit intent of sharing information, is increasingly giving way to assemblages/apparatuses working to engineer scarcity, exploit prosumer and gig labour, establish monopolistic/oligopolistic powers, and achieve ever-greater degrees of manipulative control over the consumer and citizen. At the same time, however, the underlying technology on which these arrangements depend is not predetermined. Indeed, there are numerous abstract hacktivist efforts underway today seeking to redirect and reshape the internet and big data in more commons-oriented ways. Looking ahead, there are two related compeerist imperatives linked to decapitalizing cyberspace and harnessing it for the good of the commons: one focuses on expanding commons-based platforms and the other centres on reclaiming control over data. We can start with platforms. A compeerist organization of the internet There are several avenues through which platform capitalism can be challenged. The simplest form is micro-level sabotage, as can be found, for instance, in actively seeking to block ads. The adoption of ad-blocking software has already reached up to 25 per cent in some countries and is estimated to cost online publishers tens of billions of dollars in yearly lost revenue, resulting in a veritable code-based arms-race between ad-blockers and tech-based capital (Davies, 2016). While ad blocking is likely more related to people’s disdain for ads than it is to an internalized commitment to overcoming capital, it shows a notable level of frustration with one of platform capitalism’s favourite revenue models: advertising. More conscious efforts to exit the current exploitative/extractive nature of the internet can be found in active decisions to stop supporting the major big tech corporations that dominate it, for instance by not shopping through Amazon or seeking alternative ways to connect with friends online. As has been well documented, however, actually quitting the Big Five (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft) is extremely difficult due to the ubiquity of their control over a broad range of the digital economy and beyond (Hill, 2021). Thus, while these immediate efforts to exit capital in the realm of cyber estate are valiant, to truly make a difference they would need to be backed by a massive groundswell of intentional resistance and, equally critical, the establishment of viable alternatives. This need for alternatives is animating a compeerist-aligned push to become more engaged in the service side of the internet. With the tech economy’s exploitation of workers and prosumers, it is an effort that has come to be significantly shaped by the established thinking and experience of the cooperative movement, grounded in the mission to establish functional enterprises that actively circumvent capital and its rationales. Trebor Scholz (2017), a pioneer in rejuvenating the cooperative model for the digital age, has thus proposed challenging capital-centred platforms, apps, and algorithms by replacing these with ones emphasizing the wellbeing of workers, the community, and the environment. This idea has been termed platform cooperativism. Some iterations of platform cooperatives entail traditional, union-oriented organizations seeking to protect the increasingly precarious labour of gig workers, as for instance through the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the California App-Based Drivers Association. Others take the form of producer collaboratives seeking to circumvent middleman platforms. Stocksy, for instance, is a stock-photo enterprise based on co-ownership and profit sharing, while Resonate is a community and artist owned music streaming cooperative. Fairmondo, in turn, is a German user-owned e-commerce site seeking to offer an alternative to Amazon. Commons-oriented labour facilitation platforms are also emerging, such as localized taxi apps or the more expansive Loconomics, a worker-owned platform used by freelancers to find jobs without mediation fees. Along similar lines, and probably the best-known capital-circumventing mediation service was the original Couchsurfing platform, which linked travellers to hosts offering free places to stay. In the realm of social media, despite the particular difficulty of entry due to Metcalf’s law, there are also a number of commons-oriented platforms to point to. Diaspora and Mastodon, for example, aim to be alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, respectively. Both are non-profit initiatives with the mission to create decentralized, cooperatively run platforms to help people connect and organize. An even more ambitious platform cooperative initiative is the French-based Framasoft, which is committed to a wholesale reinvention of the internet’s function by fostering free open-source culture and software, while offering a wide range of commons-based services, including search engines, office management systems, and even social media sites. Platform cooperatives, as the ones just noted, represent a promising effort to establish more just, democratic, and community-oriented digitally mediated services, yet, in the final analysis, they are also faced with daunting obstacles related to the difficulty of competing in a cyber estate environment in which capital has all the advantages. This is especially true if the goal is to actually offer viable alternatives to capital-based platforms, seeing that such an effort would be reliant on significant start-up funds, continuing revenue streams, and, of course, the ingenuity to establish the ‘killer apps’ that people want. While ingenuity is generally not in short supply within commons-based initiatives, the issue of accessing needed funds is more problematic. Given that the use of rents/fees, advertising, and data mining run counter to the ideals of the commons and commoning, many online alternatives to the big-capital platforms fall back to a non-profit model dependent on donor-support and volunteer labour. This is the approach taken, for instance, by the alternative social media sites Diaspora and Mastodon, as well as in many of the commons-oriented mediation services, including the original Couchsurfing platform. As we have seen with digital commons production more generally, however, garnering the needed labour and revenue in this way over a prolonged period has significant limits, not to mention that these donated resources are still predominately linked to capitalist sources. Hence, in the Couchsurfing case, for instance, the lack of a reliable income stream ultimately became untenable as the service boomed in popularity and use. Much to the dismay of its early supporters, the decision was then made to make Couchsurfing a for-profit entity with significant investor buy in. Acknowledging the frustrating dynamics involved in such cases, compeerism, as we know, prefers a commons-centred tactic that actively engages markets in order to circumvent any compromising resource challenges from the outset. Such a strategy means that a more intentional pursuit of market-based income is called for, as is already being done in some commons-based, online services. In this way, the organization behind the Couchsurfing site could have been made into a member-based platform cooperative, staying true to its peer-topeer principles while managing to sustain itself by imposing limited fees, or pay-what-you-can requests, on those who successfully connect to a host. In the case of social media platform cooperatives, in turn, carefully controlled advertising and aggregated data mining could be adopted, for example by making these services only available to other compeerist-aligned actors. In other words, along the lines of peer property, it would be the establishment of an in- and out-group mechanism that determines with whom business can be done, where efforts would be made to establish compeerist-based alliances within an ever expanding yet vetted in-group. Building on this line of reasoning, we can note here that while platform cooperatives certainly have their share of challenges in going head-to-head with capital, they also maintain some inherent advantages. First and foremost is the ability to pursue price competitiveness by not needing to reap big profits for investors. Scholz (2017, p 173) argues that platform cooperatives focused on fair remuneration can achieve business viability by garnering a relatively modest 10 per cent profitability rate, as opposed to the standard 30 per cent espoused by their capitalist counterparts. There are a number of boundary-commoning options that can then be initiated to help achieve this profit target. We will return to the essential area of mutual financial support within the commons-centred economy more broadly in Chapter 7. What we should highlight here, however, is the importance for platform cooperatives to foster and harness the free, open-access resources of the digital commons. Indeed, Bauwens and Kostakis (2014) specifically call for the pursuit and expansion of what they term ‘open cooperativism’, where the burgeoning cooperative and solidarity economy synergizes with the peer-production movement linked to the digital commons. The use of free, open-source code for platform cooperatives is particularly pertinent here as relevant code is often the most fundamental and expensive aspect of platform operations. Yet, to truly leverage the benefits of this resource would, as explained in the previous chapter, ultimately require the institution of a broadly embraced peer-property regime, where profit-focused platforms were forced to work only with their own, internalized, and closed-off capabilities. With time, this arrangement could create a significant market disadvantage for these capitaloriented entities because, as research has shown, environments characterized by collaboration and sharing, especially in areas like code writing and design, are often far superior in generating innovative breakthroughs than those where actors are isolated and information is guarded (Benkler, 2002; 2006). Taking advantage of this protected but internally open digital-commons realm is a strategic imperative for compeerists that we will continue to see highlighted throughout this book.

Cybersecurity the way we like to think of it is actually impossible to achieve. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try hard to achieve it. Nor is it the same thing as saying that our costly efforts to date have been wasted. Instead, if our aim is to make our interactions in cyberspace more secure, we need to recognize two things. First, part of our troubles has to do with a culture that defines things like success, victory, and security as dichotomous rather than continuous variables. Think of a switch that’s either on or off. Second, speed is hurting us, and calls to replace humans with much faster and “objective” machines will continue to gain momentum, putting us at extreme risk without increasing either our security or prosperity. Let me explain. [Cyber]security is Not a Switch In my time in Norway a few years ago, I had the great fortune to be hosted by the Norwegian Institute for Defense. As I toiled to recover the history of Norway’s experience under occupation by the Third Reich, I was able most days to join my Norwegian colleagues for a communal lunch. My colleagues did me the great courtesy of carrying on most conversations in flawless English. As an American academic accustomed to research abroad, I anticipated that sooner or later I’d encounter a classic opening sentence of the form, “You know, the trouble with you Americans is…” And after a month or so my unfailingly polite and generous colleagues obliged. But what ended that sentence has stuck with me since then; and underlines a core value of study abroad at the same time: “You know, the trouble with you Americans is, you think every policy problem has a solution; whereas we Europeans understand that some problems you just have to learn to live with.” The idea that part of our mission was research intended to support policies that solved problems was never something I’d thought of as varying by culture. But as I reflected more and more on the idea, I realized that insecurity—and by extension cyber-insecurity—would be something we Americans would have to learn to live with. This “switch” problem is mainly due to the relentless infiltration of market capitalist logic into problem framing and solving. For example, corporations hire cybersecurity consultants to ensure that corporate profit-making operations are secure from hacking, theft, disruption, and so on. When corporations pay money to someone to solve a problem, they expect a “deliverable”: some empirical evidence that corporate operations are now “secure.” It should go without saying that this same corporate logic infiltration—the largely North American idea that governance would be more “effective” if run via corporate profit-making logic—has seriously degraded effective governance as well. Cybersecurity is not a switch. It isn’t something that’s either “on” or “off,” but something that we can approach if we have a sound strategy. And progress toward our shared ideal itself is what we should be counting as success. Even if we could agree to moderate our cultural insistence on measuring success or failure in terms of decisively “solving” policy problems, we’d be left with another set of problems caused mainly by the assertion that humans are too slow and emotional as compared to computers, which are imagined as fast (absolutely) and objective (absolutely not). We need to challenge these ideas, because together they make up a kind of binary weapon which leads us into very dangerous territory while at the same time doing little to advance us toward our ideal of “cybersecurity in our time.” So, a first critical question is, under what conditions is speed a necessary advantage? That’s where computers come in. Few Americans will be aware, for example, that the first-ever presidential directive on cybersecurity—NSDD-145 (1984)—was issued by President Ronald Reagan in reaction to his viewing of John Badham’s WarGames (1983). After viewing the film, which imagines a nascent artificial intelligence called the WOPR hijacking U.S. nuclear missile defense and threatening to start a global thermonuclear war, Reagan asked his national security team whether the events in the film could happen in real life. When his question was later answered in the affirmative, the Reagan administration issued the NSDD. Here’s a key bit of dialogue from Badham’s film, which starts after a simulated nuclear attack resulted in 22 percent of Air Force officers refusing to launch their missiles when commanded to do so: Mr. McKittrick: I think we ought to take the men out of the loop. GEN Berringer: Mr. McKittrick, you’re out of line sir! McKittrick: Why am I out of line? Cabot: Wait. Excuse me. What are you talking about? I'm sorry. What do you mean, take them ‘out of the loop’? GEN Berringer: Gentlemen, we've had men in these silos since before any of you were watching Howdy Doody. For myself, I sleep pretty well at night knowing those boys are down there. McKittrick: General, we all know they're fine men. But in a nuclear war, we can't afford to have our missiles lying dormant in those silos because those men refuse to turn the keys when the computers tell ‘em to! Watson: You mean, when the president orders them to. McKittrick: The president will probably follow the computer war plan. Now that’s a fact! Watson: Well, I imagine the joint chiefs will have some input? GEN Berringer: You’re damned tootin’! Cabot: Well hell, if the Soviets launch a surprise attack there's no time… Healy: Twenty-three minutes from warning to impact. Six minutes, if it’s sub-launched. McKittrick: Six minutes! Six minutes. That's barely enough time for the president to make a decision. Now once he makes that decision, the computers should take over. This discussion brackets two critical components of any discussion of contemporary cybersecurity. The first is the “humans are too slow” theme, and by slow, we mean slow as compared to computers. Second, humans have consciousness and morals and computers don’t. Computers have some version of whatever their programmers give them. Recent advances in deep learning and artificial neural networks—in particular foundation models—have created the impression that machine consciousness and independent creativity are here or very near, but they are not; and moreover—and this is key—whatever these machines come up with will always be tethered to their programmers which, to be blunt, remain mostly young, upper-middle-class males from the northern hemisphere. This impossibility of algorithmic objectivity is the second half of the “binary weapon” I referenced earlier: along with speed, algorithms, code, and the like promise to be objective—but they cannot be. So as mathematician Cathy McNeill or computer scientist (and activist) Joy Buolamwini remind us, when you get turned down for a loan or a job and an algorithm is involved, it remains almost certain that far from being “objective” in the sense we usually mean, some unintended but profitable bias has very likely been introduced. Ask an AI to show you a photo of an “attractive person,” for example, and what the “objective” algorithm is likely to supply is the image of a thin blond woman with large breasts. Imagine deploying biased algorithms in military or cybersecurity applications, but then also imagine that your reservations about bias cause you to hesitate. You’d be terrified that an economic or security rival less principled or cautious than you would deploy and gain a terminal advantage over you. It’s straight out of philosopher Carl von Clausewitz’s discussion of the limitations of restraint in war: As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the cooperation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigor in its application. The former then dictates the law to the latter, and both proceed to extremities to which the only limitations are those imposed by the amount of counteracting force on each side. Having weaponized cyberspace, and corporate strategy having appropriated military metaphors, the message is clear: restraint makes you a sucker. In terms of policy, this leaves us with a classic dilemma: we get gored either way. If we don’t deploy AI and our competitors do, we may lose everything. But if we do deploy AI, not fully understanding how it arrives at its conclusions but having unreasonable faith that “it must be right, because it’s math; it’s objective,” we may lose everything as well. So, the WarGames scene should also remind us that the particular domain in which speed is being claimed as a necessary virtue is armed conflict. Note that Watson’s objection to the idea that “computers are in charge” implies there should be checks and balances between decision and action; an anagram of democracy itself, with its emphasis on deliberation and consensus. But Cabot counters by asserting, reasonably, that in war, checks and balances are a liability: “there’s no time” (contemporary hypersonic missile technology compresses time still further). In the United States, the idea that we’re always at war—and its destructive impact on democracy worldwide—emerged from the impact of a shattering moment in U.S. history: 9/11. Since then, we’ve never had the feeling we can “go back” to making washing machines and babies as we did after World War II. We are permanently mobilized, always on alert, always at war. And in war, speed above all else seems to make sense (think Blitzkrieg). Being “always at war” also biases politics in favor of the world’s political Right, with its claim that checks and balances, deliberation, and popular sovereignty put citizens of democracies at too much risk. What’s needed, then, is an unfettered executive who can act fast. Of course, we are not at war and, as a result, speed at any cost is just as likely to lead to disaster as it did in the summer of 1914, when all the major combatants believed whoever struck first was assured of victory, while waiting to be attacked made you a sucker. Cybersecurity suffers from all the same associations. Once we insist that cyberspace is an arena of conflict, speed at any cost seems a necessity. Automating computer network defense is no longer thought of as a policy choice but is reduced to a question of how and when. I should add that if computer network defense can be automated, so can computer network offense, including espionage, crime, and systems compromise. In sum, the cybersecurity we aspire to is impossible. Cybersecurity is not a switch, and automating our defenses—computer network defense, national defense—is as likely to destroy us as save us. We live in a world now, by choice, in which “sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can also hurt us.” As the mass shooting at Uvalde Texas and so many others have highlighted, in this new world there is no armor, no fortress walls, no police or army that can protect us. Along with increasingly extreme weather events, we will have to learn to live with cyber intrusions ranging from election interference, disinformation, cybercrime, and threats to our critical infrastructure. We will have to learn to be more self-sufficient and resilient.

Market Bureaucracy Neoliberalism, Competition, and EU State Aid Policy, Lund University, DOCTORAL DISSERTATION,

Reading Foucault’s lectures on Governmentality from the end of the 1970’s, there appears to be a parallel between state aid policy and what he described as a neoliberal rationality of government. In his lectures, Foucault talked about different ways of reasoning about the limits to government that have been dominant in different historical periods. For example, government has been limited with reference to the divine order of things, the natural and inalienable rights of human beings, or the sovereignty of other nation states. According to Foucault, neoliberalism can be defined as a rationality that relies on competition as a principle for determining the proper limits to government. Building on the assumption that free competition leads to economic growth, neoliberal thinkers argued that responsible governments would do what is good for competition in order to increase the well-being of their subjects. In this way, neoliberalism appears to promise a less intrusive government that will “leave things to the market” by respecting the selfregulating process of competition. My interest in this book is not with the historical development of ways of thinking about government but to think with Foucault in order to understand the way we reason about the proper limits to government today. State aid policy can be seen as an expression of a neoliberal rationality of government in that it seeks to limit government intervention on the market with reference to free competition. At the same time, state aid policy could be seen as giving rise to a paradox where the will to protect competition from government intervention has led to a surprising amount of government intervention. In order to keep the member states from distributing state aid, a whole range of government activities have been put into place. There has been an explosion in the number of regulations, case law, communications and guidelines from the EU institutions, aimed at making sure that governments do not distort competition. State aid policy has grown from a few articles in the EU treaties to an intricate system of rules covering a broad spectrum of policy sectors and different types government measures. New administrative procedures have been introduced in which the member states must notify the Commission about their plans to grant state aid and wait for approval before implementing them. National competition agencies have been organised in a European Competition Network where they engage in the exchange of information and best practices. The need to know how to interpret the rules has led to a demand for new courses that provides training in EU law, leading to the creation of a new kind of expertise. This situation, where the creation of “free competition” and the expansion of government intervention go hand in hand, will only appear paradoxical if we believe that markets will regulate themselves, as by an “invisible hand”, if only governments can be kept from interfering. This is a notion that has been refuted time and again but which appears curiously difficult to shake (see Harcourt 2011). As argued by Polanyi, the capitalist market order was not the result of a spontaneous process or laissez-faire, but the “outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organisation on society” (1944/2001, p. 258). He claimed that rather than doing away with the need for control and regulation, the introduction of “free markets” have increased their range (Ibid., p.140). In a similar vein, David Graeber’s frustration with the bureaucratic nature of contemporary government led him to formulate an “iron law of liberalism” according to which “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs” (Graeber, 2015, p. 9). Markets do not regulate themselves, they are regulated by governments (see Vogel, 1996). Even though most people would probably agree that markets are (to some extent) dependent on government intervention, we still tend to speak about the relationship between state and market as if it was a zero-sum game, where more of one thing leads to less of the other. This is not surprising considering the way we are trapped in a language that constantly reifies the impression of state and market as two separate spheres. Terms such as free competition, liberalisation, and deregulation are constantly opposed to government intervention, planning and regulation. As argued by Harcourt (2011, p. 32) these kinds of conceptual tropes hinder rather than help by projecting the image of the market as a “natural order” rather than a political one, thus shielding what happens in this sphere from political and moral debates. It is clear that we cannot understand how we are governed by thinking within the framework of a state-market dichotomy. If we only think in terms of either/or, more or less, we will fail to see how policies which claim to “leave things to the market” are not resulting in less government, but in a particular kind of government. This dissertation sets out to investigate how a particular way of reasoning about the limits to government with reference to competition is shaping the practices of government. I want to understand how the EU, through its state aid policy, is shaping national governments into particular kinds of subjects that will reflect on their own behaviour in terms of its effects on competition.

Max, associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. “1 Great Transition – or Fortress Eco-Nationalism?” A People’s Green New Deal. Pp 23-26. LS

A CLIMATE OF EMERGENCY AND RISING RISK How we describe a problem helps mold how we will address it. Notions of rising emergency and climate-related risk hide something pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”7 Lawlessness, disorder, threat, human insecurity, privation, deprivation, and suffering are the rule for most of humanity. Endless war, primitive accumulation, colonial genocide, neo-colonial depopulation and state-shattering are permanent emergency. The rhetoric of risk is not a recognition of the emergencies that batter the lives of the world’s majority population. The newly noticed threats, about which the core’s governments have blithely done nothing for decades, are to long-term accumulation: social stress in the South leading to drought and mass migrations, and now a chance of runaway warming. The World Economic Forum, for example, slots risks into “physical,” “regulatory and legal,” “market,” and “reputational”: perils to business. Such parochialism is risk and emergency from the very particular viewpoint of Western monopolies.8 If open and democratic debate about the distribution of wealth can be muffled under the smothering blanket of emergency, those who own the blanket and insist on asphyxiating discussion can preserve existing distributions of wealth. Other uses of emergency are the canary in the coalmine for an acceleration of the worst of current fortress nationalist regimes, those countries which are increasingly militarizing their littorals and southern borders to stem immigration from countries which they have often made unlivable. Worry about mass migrations is worry about whether the cloistered settler-states and the European capitalist heartland will remain safe. What will Australia do if Indonesia is inundated and monsoons fail across rural India? Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Central American isthmus are even closer to the US, and large-scale Central American migration is already taking place, as hurricanes and brutal heat smash vulnerable farmers in a strip of land long concussed by US interventions.9 Emergency and panic about amorphous threats to life in the Third World have always justified illegal US aggression, much as neo-colonial environmentalists fretted about the forests of the Bolivian Amazon in 2019, to try to blacken the globally unparalleled ecological advocacy of the Indigenous-led left political party MAS.10 Furthermore, the war always boomerangs back to where it started through settler-colonial frontier wars.11 Suspending law, civil liberties, democratic deliberation, and struggles for liberation amidst warnings of a falling sky or “terror” have been common in a post-9/11 world, the pretexts for deepening hierarchies of class and nation.12 Against a renewed imperialist urge to generalize the “state of exception” through new regimes of state–private accumulation, greened and global, we can process the sudden cacophonous concern for climate change amongst the planet’s wealthy and their court intellectuals. Take some examples. A recent Brookings Institute report discusses rising “droughts, fire” and natural disasters. These plagues translate to “risks to economies and livelihoods.” Furthermore, the “current growth path” pressures water, land, and biodiversity, causing “accelerated loss of natural capital.”13 Words like economies and livelihoods are kaleidoscopic. They hint at human needs for food, shelter, and the good life and conflate them with the well-being of the economy. In this discourse, it is simply assumed that the health of “the economy” leads to the health of concrete individual human beings. Their history is important: the blurry notion of livelihoods emerged in force at the Rio+20 Summit, which marked 20 years after the original Rio Earth Summit which set in motion world climate negotiations. At Rio+20, mandates for “sustainable development” of the world’s resources bloomed, alongside sterile calls for a “green economy,” and were adopted by consensus at the United Nations General Assembly.14 Yet in an imperialist world, that which all states agree upon as a program cannot have any emancipatory content. Neither economy nor livelihoods implies any particular distributional pattern: “Class, not as an institutional context variable, but as a relational concept, is absent from the discourse of livelihoods” argues sociologist Bridget O’Laughlin, which is why it studs such reports so frequently.15 They do not wish to question the existing maldistribution of wealth. Take another example: the Australian Breakthrough Institute, in a May 2019 report, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, offers a perspective from David Spratt, the institute’s in-house research director, alongside Ian Dunlop, a former international coal, oil, and gas industry executive, and the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.16 The foreword by Admiral Chris Barrie calls for “strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities” to combat the cataclysm of climate change (akin to kindred blurring devices like economies and livelihoods, “communities” fuses interests of the rich and poor within nations and is silent on diverging interests between nations). The report warns of “existential risk,” and urges “we must take every possible step to avoid it.” How? Under a scenario better than the current emissions trajectory, with an emissions peak at 2030 and an 80 percent decline by 2050, “Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia,” displacing one billion people. Water availability would decrease in the dry tropics and subtropics, parching two billion. Agriculture would become “nonviable in the dry subtropics.” As watersheds and temperature bands within which humans millennially flourished drift north, social structures erected on a more or less stable climactic bedrock would shudder. We could “see class warfare” as the wealthiest “pull away from the rest,” shattered international trade flows, a retreat into autarky, collapses in economic interchange, and the inability of governments to govern. Such national security bureaucrats and military-defense intellectuals know climactic shifts threaten to shift the planetary ecology sufficiently severely to evaporate the gossamer logistical flows and political scaffoldings of global capitalism. They write, think, and plan accordingly. These reports are not the handicraft of melioristic humanitarians, but diamond-hearted strategists dumbfounded at the sluggishness with which most of their fellow ruling-class and governments have acted. To avoid the massive human migrations such a scenario would entail, the report calls for “a zero-emissions industrial system [to] set in train the restoration of a safe climate.” The predictable analogy they draw upon is World War II, the crucible of military Keynesianism and worldwide neo-colonialism. The report highlights the “national security sector’[s]” potential role in a vast mobilization of resources. The role of the military in a peacetime transition is unclear, although one chapter of World War II less discussed by its refurbishers, right and left, is the role of the military in suppression of labor unrest, or union agreements to avoid independent labor action.17 Furthermore, they propose enlisting the national security sector to assist resource and labor mobilization. Such help could mean anything, but gestures at forced labor recruitment. To carry out this program, they imagine a new social consensus, based on a triangular relationship between Parliament and “corporate leaders,” and community. The former will provide wisdom and “leadership,” the latter will provide support and internalize and normalize in “everyday discussion” the logical conclusions of emergency planning. What does that look like? A wholesale renovation of the technological and institutional infrastructure and architecture of fossil capitalism, the new product a lot of the same old capitalism but covered with honeyed rhetoric of sustainability, community, livelihoods, and resilience, so it can be smoothly swallowed by those who might balk at climate crisis as an occasion to socialize risk and privatize profit. There is a logical and political correspondence between the language and strategies they use to address the worsening emergency for humanity, and their positions in society: elite management, links to the most polluting forms of fossil capitalism, and the national security state. We would expect them to frame the problem, identify stakeholders, and propose solutions in ways that do not disturb the patterns of power and powerlessness from which they speak, and which they wish to preserve.

Alami and Dixon (2021) emphasise that contemporary state capitalism is best conceptualised systemically: as a world-historical, variegated and mutually reinforcing dynamic of proliferating state economic interventions aimed at fulfilling economic and (geo)political goals. The intensifying rivalry between the United States and China crucially connects state capitalism with geopolitics. China's party-state has deepened its expansive reach across its political economy as competition has intensified, both through the growing share of SOEs in the economy and in deepening control over the private sector (Liu and Tsai, 2021, Pearson et al., 2021). Meanwhile, the United States has moved in a similar direction, albeit within pre-existing ideological constraints of its political system. Starrs and Germann (2021) observe sweeping changes in (1) the US tariff regime, designed to target Chinese imports in particular; (2) the inward investment regime, aimed restricting Chinese firms’ access to high-tech US companies; and (3) export regulations, through the use of technology export bans to target Chinese firms like ZTE and Huawei. Baltz (2022) similarly discerns heightened local procurement requirements enacted through the reformed implementation of the Buy American Act, alongside evidence for a growing consensus on the value of state-led investments in strategic technology development and mission-oriented development projects in areas such as supply-chain reshoring and 5G provision. Despite these profound shifts, the depth of Sino-US economic integration renders the cost of complete decoupling prohibitive for both the United States and China (and for third countries, many of which conduct a majority of trade with China but rely upon US security guarantees) (Rosen and Gloudeman, 2021). The geopolitical economy of the ‘new state capitalism’, then, far from generating autarchy, is instead ‘characterized by geopolitical-economic competition to integrate territory’ into respective spheres of influence via connective infrastructure and logistics networks (Schindler et al. (2021: 2) and to exert greater control over cross-border economic integration (Liu and Dixon, 2021, Liu and Lim, 2022). The most significant project in this regard is China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has extended China's reach across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America through a sweeping range of state-backed infrastructural investment and development financing (Gallagher, 2016, Jepson, 2020, Lampton et al., 2020). The BRI has in turn prompted the entry of the US government directly into the infrastructure financing space with its Development Finance Corporation (Schindler and Kanai, 2021) and the nascent US-led G7 ‘Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment’ (PGII) infrastructure financing partnership. In this way, the Sino-US conflict generates state capitalist imperatives far beyond the borders of its two protagonists. A critical component of the BRI is the ‘Digital Silk Road’, the objective of which is to expand the influence of Chinese hardware and software platform firms overseas through the provision and financing of digital infrastructures. The DSR has completed projects valued at US$79bn as of 2019, a mixture of the Chinese state capital and investment from its private platform firms (Cheney, 2021: 89). American commentators have begun to raise the alarm at the speed of China's technological catch-up, asserting that Silicon Valley's global leadership in digital technologies is under direct threat. In language that echoes the hyperbole surrounding the Cold War's supposed ‘missile gap’ and the space race, Hillman's (2021: 9) analysis is illustrative: While American leaders were busy singing the praises of connectivity, the United States was not investing enough in actually connecting the world, including rural and lower-income communities at home… But as Western firms raced to roll out high-speed internet, they focused primarily on larger, richer markets, creating digital divides… China turned these fault lines into runways for its tech giants. Now they are cleared for takeoff. Until recently, Hillman's notion that this competition represents a ‘network war’ that the United States may lose would have been met with scepticism, given the global reach and dominance of the United States ‘digital empire’ (Nieborg et al., 2020). But recognising the growing presence and prowess of Chinese platforms, the United States has rapidly entered into direct competition with these firms to secure the dominance of its own national stack in third countries. Understanding the significance of the ‘network war’, however, requires close attention to the novel business form at its centre: the platform. Platforms In this section, we demonstrate empirically how platforms have become increasingly important to the US–China rivalry and argue that they should be at the center of analyses of the ‘new state capitalism’. For Alami et al. (2022), state capitalist practices are driven at the most fundamental level by state responses to technological upheavals in the context of long-run macroeconomic and geographical shifts in the world economy. Expansive state interventions are effectively necessitated by the demands of ‘competing in sectors at the technological and productivity frontier (5G technology, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and robotics)… [and] ensuring the favourable participation of firms in global value chains’ (Alami and Dixon, 2021: 18). Expanding on this insight, we assert that state capitalism is animated not only by the rise of frontier technologies which compel more intensive forms of state economic activity but also that this technology-state relationship is (as it has historically been) mediated by changing forms of business organisation (Bodrožić and Adler, 2022). Crucial in this regard is the emergence of the platform as a novel form of business organisation (Davis, 2016, Vergne, 2020). Platform studies have largely – and erroneously, in our view – conceived of platforms as effectively beyond the reach of, and oppositional to, states. By contrast, we argue that platforms are amenable to state oversight, that they possess distinctive affordances that make them geopolitical agents, and that both China and the United States do indeed seek to instrumentalise and mobilise platforms for geopolitical–economic ends. We refer to this growing fusion between states and platforms in the context of geopolitical rivalry as state platform capitalism (SPC).

Relating outcomes to competences, which are then optimised through machine learning, and the rise of ‘use sovereignty’ are ways in which learning is displaced from the individual worker and increasingly from work-based learning in terms of collectives of workers. Paradoxically, learning seems to be occurring everywhere in the contemporary factory but it is not happening at a human level as epistemologically CBET and machine learning are distinct from what we would understand by learning. This displacement of learning might occur not in terms of a single computational or organisational ‘mind’ co-ordinating activities but rather as a system of AIs and machine intelligences that collectively seek to optimise profit and cost functions determined by the employer who ‘wireheads’ these into the organisation. In terms of human outcomes, AIs work to build up a ‘grammar’ of outcomes, behaviours and combinations. This is the new ‘scientific management’ where humans are ‘chopped up’ into outcome entities, either individually or collectively, foreshadowed by Marx in Grundrisse: The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. (Marx, 1993, p. 693, my italics) What is relevant in the above quote is not just how machinery colonises labour (the ‘acting upon’ of machinery) but also how labour unity both between and within the individual labourer is ‘scattered’ among the individual workers. As the British philosopher Nick Land describes the process of AI takeover in industry: [Page 647]Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. Industrial machines dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and re the plasalizingticity of labour power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body sophisticates at the interface, dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences, from pedals, levers and vocal commands through the synchronization of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artificial environments, capturing minutely adaptive behavior for capital. Autocybernating market control guides the labour-process into immersion. (Land, 2018, p. 435, my italics) Here, Land takes further Marx's 19th-century considerations of what is happening to labour in the process of industrial production. Labour in all its forms (mental and physical) becomes ‘dismantled’ into discrete components through AI realising the myriad ways in which it can be combined (its plasticity) where human behaviour is captured. In each of these quotes, the idea is that labour is consistently pushed to the limits of human embodiment as it becomes captured by machinery into a ‘grammar’ of human labour far surpassing the ideas of scientific management. In these scenarios learning at work does not exist within human entities but in ‘chopped up’ human assemblages that would be integrated with machines and data in many different forms. The learning takes places within various AIs in terms of a ‘skill bank’ whereby various entities would be charged with ‘producing’ types of behaviour. As stated above, this would be an impoverished conception of human learning where learning would become reconceptualised as pure outcome. In the field of consumption, AI is already building up data on our behavioural patterns through platform capitalist tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Reactions and behaviours are quantified and used to build up a profile not only of our individual behaviour but of a model of human behaviour. Existent disciplines such as Psychology and Sociology in universities appear to be rather insignificant compared to how accurately social media giants can predict (and modify) attitudes and behaviours based on the predictions of ‘Big Data'. In the workplace, quantification also gathers and uses data on how workers behave and respond. As considered above, in many ways this is an extension of scientific management whereby the movements of workers were laboriously logged and tested in a series of scientific experiments. Photography was used to map and chart each human movement as part of a production process so that each factory worker was subject to optimisation and eventually computer technology developed more complex techniques of process and production management which were used to record and simulate worker behaviour. As technology improves, modes of quantification have become increasingly extensive (Moore et al., 2017). High performance digital cameras and sensors are used to record worker movements at sub-perceptual levels. Smartwatches can record worker biometrics and allow instant feedback on worker attitudes. Worker interactions and vocalisations can be measured by using Alexa-type devices in the workplace. Employee sentiment can be measured by conducting text analysis of their social media posts. Such devices can also be used to measure worker resistance (including union organisation) and the worker's capacity for disruptive activity. These are all forms of worker surveillance. Through these means, labour power production is becoming even more extensive to reflect not only a wider variety of physical and mental attitudes and behaviours, but also worker attitudes and emotions. Compliance and satisfaction can be measured not only through a periodic worker satisfaction survey but constantly and [Page 648]consistently during every moment of an employee's day. This is not just a process of quantifying each individual worker, it also involves building up a model of human behaviour in general. Zuboff (2019) argues that ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ is not just a method of increasing productivity in certain circumstances but also a method for producing a residue, or surplus, from these surveillance activities in which workers are dispossessed of skills. Zuboff refers to this activity as ‘behavioural surplus': Surveillance capitalism begins with the discovery of behavioral surplus. More behavioral data are rendered than required for service improvements. This surplus feeds machine intelligence – the new means of production – that fabricates predictions of user behavior. These products are sold to business customers in new behavioral futures markets. The Behavioral Value Reinvestment Cycle is subordinated to this new logic. (Zuboff, 2019, p. 97) Zuboff primarily considers the realm of consumption in her analysis of Surveillance Capitalism, but it is also possible to apply this work to the behavioural surplus acquired in the workplace. Surveillance produces streams of data which can be combined with other data pools and resources to produce (through machine learning) insights into aspects of human labour that could not be gained by a single observation alone. Owners of this data (who might not be the employer who uses the technology) can create new ways of understanding the mechanisms of worker productivity and the ‘nudges’ by which the labour power of workers can be enhanced. These can be combined with AI knowledge of other entities in the production process to specify minute interactions between those entities to optimise production. This is what Zuboff (2019, p. 97) refers to as the ‘Behavioural Reinvestment Cycle', whereby behaviour is used to build platforms that are reintegrated into the production process to further optimise worker behaviour. One existing example of this is the use of so-called ‘fatigue functions’ to optimise human performance in production. A ‘fatigue function’ is a mathematical equation derived from empirical observation which shows when a human worker is reaching the point of ‘failure’ in terms of being unable to carry on with their task successfully. At present fatigue functions are usually determined by using existing data on worker fatigue so that a production process can be optimised. Studies which have tested worker fatigue in real manufacturing environments under experimentally controlled conditions can be used to specify how workers should behave in reality. With the advent of consistently gathered biometric and behavioural data on workers in real time, fatigue can be measured consistently, and the worker is consistently experimented on by AI that can ‘nudge’ workers towards better performance. The accumulation of intelligence through surveillance on each individual worker is reinvested constantly into a superior system. It must be noted that the idea of an intelligence that can catalogue and build a grammar of individual skills and capacities to be used in the workplace is not a new one. The early years of the Soviet Union produced a number of experiments in creating a catalogue of human skills and abilities, with their origins in the work of Alexi Gastev. Gastev sought to record and catalogue all manifestations of physical labour (Ings, 2016, p. 79) which could be combined in a ‘performance'. Through this manual cataloguing performances could be choreographed, and workers would learn through rehearsal to prepare for factory work. In the 1980s there were similar attempts in terms of CBET to create a universal database of competences that could be used for any occupation. Plans were made for a vast lexicon of computerised records which could be used to select exactly the right set of competences for a particular work task (Preston, 2017, p. 34). These early experiments foreshadow the contemporary situation where individual behaviours are under surveillance and disaggregated, but the essential difference is that learning is transferred from the worker to the AI, and that the real learning that takes place in the workplace [Page 649]is occurring at the level of machines rather than at the level of humans. This evolution and confluence of workplace learning with AI and machine learning is increasingly making the prospect of ‘cloud-based’ services for skills more likely. Rather than individuals possessing knowledge of discrete skills, the organisation uses ‘Behavioural Value Reinvestment’ to create a consistently evolving learning platform regarding worker behaviour. However, there is no reason why this evolving knowledge of skills and abilities should remain at the level of the individual organisation. As is the case with other services which can be accessed by a digital organisation, there are plans for ‘skills clouds’ whereby employers of various types could ‘draw down’ the particular skills components that they require in their workplace. For example, Workday, a NASDAQ-listed company with a market capitalisation of $40 billion, has produced a ‘skills cloud’ system that uses machine learning to categorise skills between organisations in order to form a common ‘skills language': Cristina Goldt, vice president, HCM products, Workday commented: ‘Nearly every organization wants to develop and reskill their workforce to grow their people and their business, but they lack a fundamental understanding of the skills they have and the skills they need. Our skills cloud tackles this issue head on with machine learning algorithms that bring calm to the chaotic language of skills. This will ultimately help customers connect skills to people in a more meaningful way to improve how they get work done, develop existing workers, and allocate talent to better meet evolving business needs. (Source: www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2018/10/03/workday-unveil-skills-cloud/) The capacity for ‘skills clouds’ to grow is not only premised on technology but also on the growth of new forms of precarious employment. Recruitment agencies, who often act to ‘sift’ employees to large employers make use of skills tests, using AI and machine learning, to filter workers into job positions and in doing so gain wider behavioural knowledge of worker skills and abilities. Similarly, the growth of ‘platform capitalism’ in terms of employers who use mobile applications to track and reward workers (such as Uber or Deliveroo) gain constant data on employee behaviour and skills. This leads to a number of separate ‘skills clouds', with the possibility of amalgamation at a higher level. The implication of this for learning at work is clear in that learning is disappearing not just from workers, but potentially also from employers as it is integrated into the ‘skills cloud’ by multinational companies.

Max, associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. “1 Great Transition – or Fortress Eco-Nationalism?” A People’s Green New Deal. Pp 35-39. LS

GREAT TRANSITIONS AND LAND CLIF and the Rifkin GND are largely silent on agriculture. But land use is key for their plans, as large capital wants to alchemize arenas now simply poisoned and pulverized with “externalities” into new assets and new use-values, from organic CO2 pumps to capitalized nature. To put a green spin on such world-scale ecological-financial engineering, hand-of-god fantasies about Half Earth are gaining ground, imagining half of “Nature” immured from hordes of polluting souls – the annoying human components of the “Anthropocene” – through wide-scale conversion of human-inhabited areas to CO 2 -drawdown farms and fortress conservation in which the wealthy world can luxuriate through luxe safaris, while clustering humans into the other half.51 This would be a bad idea even were it to be carried out by liberal humanists who carry in their intellectual satchel endless unseen and unexamined colonial baggage. But big finance and meta-social engineers are not letting melioristic if slightly misanthropic liberal biologists decide what should be done with land which is not remotely “empty” but filled with biodiversity preserving Indigenous people, pastoralists, and peasants. They have their own ideas and bankroll their own platforms upon which to publish them. Mark Lynas, for example, on the website of the Gates-funded Cornell Alliance for Science, demands that “we” intensify agriculture, and corral off half of Earth to stave off starvation.52 As we shall see, food production is not an issue and will not be an issue, so arguing for further industrialization of agriculture might be the Gates agenda, but has no humanist-scientific grounding – nor does fortress conservation itself.53 Elsewhere, the Nature Conservancy and its partners posit a “financing gap” of close to a trillion dollars to put an appropriate value on ecosystem services, including biodiversity – a new arena of commodification for capital currently sitting in low or negative return bonds, and another state “crowding in” of investment.54 Another use of nature is biofuels. The means to empty out such lands are Half-Earth fantasies and primitive accumulation of pastoral and grazing lands. By now, it has become faddish to focus on the merits of vegetarianism and veganism for climate change and health alike. Tellingly, then, when it comes to agriculture, these ruling-class institutions reduce the ecological and nutritional Armageddon of industrialized agriculture to methane and other CO2 and CO2-equivalent emissions from large ungulates. As with all colonial atrocity, this civilizing mission is said to be for love of humanity. They hide behind the scientific parapet of the EAT-Lancet report, and demand “plant or culture-based meats,” which now rely on tremendous inputs of energy, and according to lifecycle assessments, may be more carbon-intensive than cows.55 Such Frankensteinian lab-meats, grown in mammoth vats or bio-reactors, do have the merit of something rustic and landrace cows, goats, bison, and sheep do not: they are patented, the property of private corporations, and have big venture capital behind them clamoring to enclose and commodify what is now primarily a petty commodity or peasant-based form of production and turn it into a new high-tech monopoly. They also claim the newly liberated land could be reserved for “increased forest cover and biodiver sity or if needed to bioenergy production.” However, as shown below, the technology is hardly neutral. If the problem is industrial animal agriculture, why not simply produce meat using non-industrial methods? And if the problem is we can’t produce enough, we ought to match up consumption with capacity for metabolically restorative forms of animal husbandry, rather than imagine that US leftists can simply “nationalize” venture capitalist enterprises, which will gobble up ever more energy at a moment when the crucial issue is suppressing, not boosting, aggregate energy use. Furthermore, EAT-Lancet calls for potential “afforestation”: putting forests where they have historically not existed. Or reforestation, referring to restoration of felled forests.56 They sidestep that, historically, afforestation has been the green veil behind colonial advance.57 Even now, planting trash-tree monocrops that may rampage over existing ecologies, severely damaging water tables, is a mechanism of colonial destruction of ecosystems, as in Palestine.58 Additionally, the Edenic vistas of the past which justify such massive socio-ecological engineering may be largely imaginary.59 Europe may never have been the land of blanket forests that lurks behind ideas of large-scale reforestation to put landscapes back to their “natural” state. Finally, these damages are not at all hypothetical: converting grazed grasslands into monoculture timber plantations has pushed the alabaster Indian Gaolao cattle breed close to extinction, destroying gossamer ecosystems and starving households of incomes.60 Once again, we should consider where bad ideas come from. They are not just the fruit of bad thinking. We should follow the money. The report was backstopped by EAT, a non-profit founded by the Stordalen Foundation, funded by Norwegian hotel billionaires, and the Wellcome Trust, on whose Board of Governors sit inter alia Eliza Manningham-Buller, president of the imperial think-tank Chatham House, and Richard Gillingwater, the chair of the renewables conglomerate SEE.61 Others like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development are jumping on the regenerative-agriculture and “vegan” tractor, ensuring it does not enter red-marked domains such as agrarian reform on a global scale. That group, in its own words, is a global, CEO-led organization of over “200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world,” including Unilever, Nestle, and Royal Dutch Shell.62 Alongside the Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, they published a report behind the veil of the innocuous Food and Land Use Coalition, calling for “the right kind of investment in alternative proteins,” alongside REDD+ and carbon pricing.63 And indeed, the EAT-Lancet report makes many reasonable suggestions for dietary shifts. But within the Trojan Horse of erasing hunger through healthier food is a call for “a Half Earth strategy for biodiversity conservation,” and as they add, “In-vitro meat production from cultured animal stem cells is being developed as an alternative to traditional meat.” (Agrarian reform as an “alternative” to increase access to food in poor countries is not on the Lancet menu).64 Furthermore, the IPCC, merely mandated with supposedly non-normative technical evaluations, puts great stock in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage for many of its transition plans. Such plans are purportedly speculative. But they sketch out and in turn make reasonable or even thinkable certain futures.65 This is so even though the IPCC always assiduously notes biofuels enter direct contradiction with people’s need for food, the reason they have attracted the scorn of Third World peasant and popular movements. The Energy Transitions Commission, an industry future-sketching outfit committed to green growth, draws up similar plans for forests, fields, and grasslands. On the ETC sit a pantheon of those most invested in fossil capitalism: Dominic Emery, the Chief of Staff of BP, John Holland-Kaye, the CEO of Heathrow Airport, and Chad Holliday, the Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, the sectors most enthralled and in thrall to a permanent growth model, given gargantuan assets stored in the energetic source of future destructive growth. They do indeed gesture at how biofuels can compete with food, carbon drawdown, and biodiversity – a mandatory homage to the IPCC report, and a customary force field of caveats erected around any discussion of biofuels. But their program pointedly states, “Sustainable biofuels or synthetic fuels will need to scale up from today’s trivial levels to play a major role in aviation and perhaps shipping,” a slippage from cautionary notes to full-throttle embrace, inevitable if these programs are implemented. Likewise, the ETC national manifesto for the Australian leap to sustainability states, “Full decarbonisation for industries such as steel, cement and chemicals require the use of electrification, hydrogen, bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (CCS).”66 The EU’s energy transitions plan calls for massively increasing the biofuel mix in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like maritime and airborne transport.67 The plan from the US Senate’s Special Committee does too, alongside calling for afforestation.68 For India, where farmland for food has been dragooned into use for tropical export crops while Indian peasants starve, biomass is blocked out as a possible input into Indian metallurgy.69 Using land for growing biofuels and planting trees for the express purpose of pulling in CO2 from the atmosphere means not using such land for crops. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, shifting all of the world’s hydrocarbon use to biofuels would cut savagely into agricultural production and water use. Furthermore, the slippage is not hypothetical. One quarter of the bio-based industry (BBI) projects are based on agricultural biomass, while a huge portion of the money from EU projects goes to agriculture-based biomass initiatives. Just 10 percent of biomass-based industries paid coordinators have anticipated positive results from biodiversity, and just a hair more than a quarter anticipate more sustainable management of planetary natural resources.70 The ETC also leans hard on carbon capture and storage: grabbing the CO 2 as carbon sources are incinerated or otherwise deployed and injecting it into huge caves underground. More ambitious yet is deploying capture and storage sky-vacuums as carbon scrubbers, pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere. In its big scope sketches, the ETC calls for capturing and storing “6 to 9.5 Gt of CO2 per year by 2050.” That would require building 20 Mt of capacity monthly for 360 months. In total, carbon capture and storage (CCS) now captures just 33 Mt carbon annually.71 A small hiccough: roll-out of CCS has stalled since it seems neither environmentally nor technologically prudent nor feasible. No less than BNP Paribas’s investment counselor warns the great majority of CSS projects reinject the gas into oil wells in order to enhance recovery, a kind of Ouroboros of fossil capitalism.72 But then, the ETC is helmed by the oil industry. Big money making more bad ideas. CSS apostles run cover for the fossil fuel industry’s desire to wring every last bit of profit from its petroleum holdings and infrastructure. Yet the broader buy-in relates to broader eagerness to maintain the physicalindustrial infrastructure of modern capitalism, and to justify massive state investment in CCS with an eye towards preservation corporate valuations. And the emerging use for the physical land bases of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as carbon farms and for biofuels will allow for CO 2 offsets of whatever cannot be decarbonized and may allow for the continuation of a fuel-based modern and hierarchical order, at least for a few of the planet’s people.

Kang, associate professor @ Warwick. “Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms.” Law and Critique (2024) 35:281–311 AS

There are incongruous representations of patents circulating today, both in the medium of text and of a pictorial image.1 On the one hand, there is an increase in the popular aestheticization of patent drawings. A patent drawing decontextualizes and simplifies an abstract legal monopoly right into a pictorial representation of an invention. But an isolated patent drawing removed from its original document context has no legal meaning or force in the sense of ascertaining, codifying or even understanding the contours of a patent as an intellectual property right. Patent drawings seem to be valued mainly for the aesthetic pleasure or familiar ‘novelty’ factor that they may generate (as seen in Fig. 3). On the other hand, in contrast to patent drawings’ popularity, efforts towards the full digitization of patent bureaucracy are continuing with networked distribution of patent documentation and examination practice (Kang 2019). Patent law drives and relies upon databases of digital documentation and networks. These have also engendered a tertiary service of information provision. These comprise private providers such as Clarivate, which merged the leading private IP ‘intelligence’ services, such as Derwent and CompuMark, as well as the free, publicly available databases of the World Intellectual Property Organization, European Patent Office, or the US Patents and Trademark Office.2 Such an international network of digital patent ‘information’ is the possibly the largest legal networked bureaucratic information infrastructure, and it remains below the public radar. In contrast to public imagination of patent with geeky inventions depicted in technical drawings, the legal system is not particularly concerned with patent drawings. Its primary mode of representation of an invention is that of a text. The main genre of a patent’s representation is that of a document. The document in turn serves as a medium in the form of an indexical file in the overall system of patents as data management (Kang 2012). Such a wide gap between the cultural representation of patents and their legal form remains underdiagnosed and underexplained. Analyzing IP’s effects on cultural signification and practices, Rosemary Coombe wrote her influential book, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law in the 1990s. The book’s analytical gaze was socio-legal by foregrounding the inquiry on law’s effect on society and culture, and not so much the other way around. The proliferation and adoption of patent drawings as cultural artefacts, however, indicates novel cultural imaginaries of patents, which shape the ways in which patent law is understood and legitimized. Furthermore, the realm of science, associated with patents in modern IP law’s subject matter division between arts and sciences, remained underexamined in Coombe’s treatment, perhaps because it was seen as being separate and/or extraneous to the cultural realm. The stipulated division between arts and sciences in modern intellectual property law runs along the legal divisions of copyright and patent laws. They conceal how sciences occupy a central role in contemporary cultural imaginaries of development and progress (Kim 2017). Sciences are not outside their cultural and social environments.3 University and industrial sciences, financial capitalism, and economic nationalism are closely intertwined with the privatization of sciences (Mirowski 2011). Close links between university technoscience, understood as interrelated scientific, business and cultural practices, and financial speculation underpin the Silicon Valley culture of venture capitalism and its adoption at a national(ist) scale by authorities through their ‘high tech’ and ‘start-up nation’ agendas (Daub 2020; see Stadler, Steuwer, Wulz 2021, for a historical contextualization of university policies and right-wing knowledge politics).4 In such a context of speculative, finance-driven capitalism, patent law has not only acted as techniques of commodification, but also of financial assetization: patents are not only used for raising capital, but also act as capital themselves (Kang 2015, 2020). Glossing over questions of causality, patents are associated with ‘innovation’ and are used as indicators of national ‘innovativeness’ in rankings, such as in the WIPO’s Global Innovation Index. There are many reasons why this is problematic (for an overview, see Biagioli 2019). But the notion of innovation and IP continue to be bundled and associated together. For example, the 2022 European Commission’s ‘A New European Innovation Agenda’ states as its aim ‘deep tech innovation’ and lists ‘cutting edge science, technology and engineering’, large scale venture capital financing, and intellectual property as some of its most necessary ingredients (European Commission 2022). Symptomatic of the conflation of meanings of innovation, patents and science, the Commission’s Agenda lists these three very distinct concepts—originally historical/sociological, legal, and academic—without a deeper understanding of the specificity of their relations. It also disregards the mixed effect of venture capitalist funding on ‘innovation’ (Lee 2022). If innovation was understood as an overall benefit to a notion of a global public, IP rights, especially patents held by biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, have arguably proven detrimental to it by creating monopoly rights in essential medicines and vaccines, as observed in the context of the TRIPS obligations during the Covid- 19 pandemic (Thambisetty, McMahon, MacDonough, Kang, Dutfield 2022) and the resulting vaccine nationalism (Kang 2021). Despite the 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS agreement and Public Health that specified the rights of the WTO member states to take appropriate measures to ‘protect public health’ and to ‘promote access to medicines for all’ (WTO 2001), IP law gives private monopoly rights to pharmaceutical companies not only in the form of the power of capital, but also what Max Weber diagnosed as ‘the purchase of privileges from the political authority’ (quoted in Schwartz 2022) that result in the corporate capture of the ‘public’ institutions and political actors. Weber wrote: ‘Capitalist interests are intent to pursue the continuous extension of the free market up and until some of them succeed, either through the purchase of privileges from the political authority [politischen Gewalt] or exclusively through the power exerted by their capital [kraft ihrer Kapitalmacht], in obtaining a monopoly for the sale of their products or the acquisition of their means of production and in this way close the market for themselves alone’ (1978, p. 108). Indeed, this is the narrative that the pharmaceutical lobby, International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) advanced: ‘the system that built a coronavirus vaccine in record time relies on robust intellectual property protections’ (Cueni 2020). Yet it has been well known that IP rights present significant barriers to vaccine development (Chandrasekharan et al. 2015). Vaccine development was also well-known as an example of ‘market failures’ because of the little monetary incentive that vaccines, especially for neglected tropical diseases, provided for pharmaceutical companies to invest in their research and development (Lezaun and Montgomery 2014). The vaccine makers, especially BioNTech, Pfizer, Moderna and Curevac, mobilized layers of intellectual property rights—patents, trade secret, and copyright—in order to prohibit the sharing of knowledge and know-how related to medicines and regulatory data about the vaccines. At the same time, they argued that the scarcity of vaccines was not caused by intellectual property rights, but by a plethora of other factors, such as supply chain issues and other logistical difficulties. When India and South Africa proposed to a waiver of the TRIPS obligations in Covid-19 related health technologies for the duration of the pandemic in October 2020, the pharmaceutical companies and their national governments, such as Germany, Switzerland, UK, as well as the European Union, pushed back intensely to maintain the status-quo. The battle around the Waiver was not only conducted at the WTO level but at multiple fronts, especially as political lobbying and public relations campaigns. Pfizer, a big lobbying spender and co-producer of BioNTech’s Cominarty Covid vaccine, intensified its lobbying expenditure in 2021 and 2022 against the TRIPS waiver initiative (Brennan 2022; Bragman 2023). Symptomatic of the perversion of meanings that could be observed in in the battle for public opinion around IP’s role in vaccine inequity, Pfizer co-opted the concept of ‘Equity’ and science. The campaign which was published across a full New York Times page is photographed in Fig. 4 and features a trademarked the sentence ‘Science will win™’. Pfizer registered the sentence and was granted the trademark after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.5 Pfizer’s invocation of ‘Equity.’—Equity with a full stop—resembles an admission of guilt by denial. Whereas the whole page ad does not mention patents or IP, its title, the defensive text, and the prominence of sheer space of a whole page in a leading U.S. national newspaper only gives an intimation of how acutely Pfizer must have been aware of the need to sway public opinion amidst the background of criticism of IP monopoly rights in a pandemic; and it did so by precisely invoking the opposite concept of what it was accused of. Pfizer’s PR campaign suggests that intellectual property, and in particular patents, do not only act as technocratic economic regulatory tools and trade instruments (Bowrey 2005; Sell 2003, 2011) but also as cultural and political hegemonic forms (Gramsci 1971) around which a battle in the court of public opinion is fought. These representations and discourses engender what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’ (1958), and they condition and promote a distinct set of affects and beliefs around intellectual property. Some of these feelings and beliefs – rather than legal or economic functions—may be contradictory in their logic, such as the broad brushstroke statements that are the opposite of each other: for example, ‘patents= death’ vs. ‘patents save lives through life science innovation’. In IP law itself, critique and its co-option can be found in the notions of ‘progress of arts and science’, ‘public domain’ as the opposite concepts of private monopoly rights, or most prominently in patent law’s justification of a ‘bargain’ in which private and public interests are supposedly balanced, without not being really clear what exactly is being balanced (Biagioli 2019). These tropes of ‘public’ could be understood as part and parcel of the IP hegemonic form, which absorb such logical and ethical contradictions by incorporating them internally as part of legal doctrine, and thereby have the effect of neutralizing dissent (Laclau & Mouffe 1985). Although hegemonic forms can harbor critical potentials, it remains unclear how much of democratic contestations from civil society would be needed for structural change at the legal and political economic level. The full politics of interplay between the legal technocratic patent form and popular representations and contestations of patents is something to be worked out at a finer level at a different time, but this article hopes to contribute by considering one part of such lattice that has so far been under the radar: patents’ power of affect as aesthetic capitalist forms. From the present vantagepoint after the TRIPS waiver battle of 2020–2, an optimistic reading of the critical debates of the Covid-19 pandemic could be that the TRIPS waiver discussion and the campaigns by the well-organized umbrella coalition of civil society groups, especially The Peoples’ Vaccine Movement or Feminists for Peoples’ Vaccines, introduced a crack in the façade of the hegemonic norms of IP monopoly rights. Another interpretation is that the legal TRIPS waiver discussion shifted the terrain and terms of the discourse by re-politicizing highly technical IP and trade law fields. A more sober reading of the debate, however, is that the overlap of Covid-19 pandemic with the political economy of IP reflected the normally under-the-radar status-quo of the contemporary “intangible economy” (Haskel and Westlake 2017) rather than representing an unprecedented event (Kang 2021). The legal enablement of the monopolistic nature of the material conditions of vaccine production, or more generally of much of pharmaceutical production, was laid bare in these discussions and prompted moral outrage and strategic acknowledgments of this being problematic, such as by the EU Commission. However, the preservation of the IP status-quo, despite the apparent unethical and appalling injustice of the pandemic handling at the level of vaccine distribution, equally demonstrated the stickiness and stability of the hegemonic norms of IP, as well as their ideological power. IP’s hegemonic ideology needs explanation beyond the political liberal deliberation of whether IP is good or bad for the ‘public’ overall.

Kang, associate professor @ Warwick. “Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms.” Law and Critique (2024) 35:281–311 AS

Stuart Hall wrote that ‘[o]ne always begins to grapple with and analyze difficult political situations using one’s experiences and understandings. But one draws upon theories to break into experience, to open to investigation the problematic nature that such political situations present to us to better understand what is going on and how to respond’ (2016, Preface). My intention when starting this paper was to find out what makes patents fascinating or even likeable to people who have little understanding of patent law.13 I was puzzled by the mythical power that the association of patents, or IP generally, with ‘innovation’ seemed to hold in the minds of people who could not see a problem with pharmaceutical monopolies that were exacerbating vaccine hoarding, inequitable distribution, and thus causing over a million deaths as a result of vaccine nationalism (Ledford 2022). Such a willingness to sacrifice present lives for an abstract, ill-defined idea of innovation for which IP rights are allegedly essential is what one might appropriately define as ‘IP fundamentalism’ (Dutfield 2006). Understanding how patents circulate as cultural signs via legally irrelevant images provides a beginning for a cultural economic analysis of patents. It gives clues about why the trope of ‘innovation’ persists so much and how ‘innovation theology’ (Godin 2019a, b) has mutated into IP fundamentalism and its acceptance by what seems to be broad parts of the public. For example, the proponents of an IP maximalist regime, such as the pharmaceutical lobby and their political and legal supporters (the European Commission and other national governments) have repeatedly invoked the under-defined concept of ‘innovation’ against attempts to limit IP rights for the duration of the pandemic (IFPMA 2022). They accused opponents of an IP maximalist legal regime and TRIPS waiver supporters of making an ‘ideological’ argument, thus effectively perverting the Marxist meaning of ideology which is grounded in material relations. Such mutations and fluid positions of ideology/ counter-ideology, even amounting to the invocation of ideology itself as a derogatory term, reveal patents not only as capitalist aesthetic forms, but as contemporary hegemonic forms (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Hall 1988) which blur the boundaries between legal, economic, and cultural spheres of signification. But how can such hegemonic discursive power co-exist with the circulation of patents as aesthetic forms that are represented as wacky gimmicks? Are they not too zany to be taken seriously? The analysis showed the contradictory dynamics of simultaneously understanding patents as both too legal-technical textual forms and also as aesthetically zany forms of techno-nostalgic, or dystopian projections. Patents appear to operate in two overlapping and ambiguous temporal modes: a linear future perfect in claims that associate ‘innovation’ with patents and the past of linear future perfects in depictions of patents as gimmicks. Although patents drawings as aesthetic artefacts have no legal force and are insignificant in the context of the legal form of patents, they circulate as both zany (the examples of patent office PR) and also threatening (the example of the Institute of Patent Infringement project) cultural signs. These contradictory meanings are figured by patents’ different aesthetic forms (image or text) and they reflects Toscano and Kinkle’s observation on the limits of observing capitalist society: ‘[a] social theory of capitalism as a totality, and the imaginations and aesthetics that strive toward it, could only be marked by an excess of coherence—as its opponents see it—to the extent that it papered over the incoherence (or contradictoriness, difference, unevenness) in its object’ (2015, quoted in Ngai 2020, p. 33). The political economic reality of patents as both monopoly rights and sources of monopoly profit exists side by side with circulation of patents as gimmicks, which give the viewer a pleasure of re-immersing into harmless, retro-modernist futures. Patents as cultural aesthetic forms signify ‘gimmicks’—commodities about which we are not certain ‘if they are working too hard or too little, if they are historically backwards or just as problematically advanced, if they are wonders or tricks’ (Ngai 2020, p. 49). But as legal signs, patents do not function as gimmicks, at all; they are legally sanctioned monopoly rights. Such a discrepancy between the substance of patent as a legal property and the cultural signification of patents as gimmicks as capitalist aesthetic forms points to a process which Guy Debord called as ‘the image as the final form of commodity reification’ (Jameson 1991, p. 277). This particular process of commodification differs from the recognition that a patent turns an invention (or knowledge) into a private or market commodity, which is the mainstream liberal critique of patent law. What Debord describes, in the context of this analysis, is that the abstract ‘patent’ itself has become a commodity through its re-materialization into an image.14 Such a shift in a patent’s aesthetic form and substance—from technical text to a zany image— transmutes patents into a myth. And as Benjamin wrote, a myth is ‘the objective character of the alienated commodity itself’ (Adorno, Benjamin 1935/2020, p. 125). As signs in contemporary capitalist economy, a patent has become an image of itself.

Kang, associate professor @ Warwick. “Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms.” Law and Critique (2024) 35:281–311 AS

In contrast to the promotion of IP as an ingredient of knowledge economy by governments, what has been interesting to observe is that much of popular cultural interest in patents does not seem to relate much to the political and economic effects of the legal monopoly right of a patent, but rather to the weirdness of patented inventions, especially the patent drawings. There are not many, if not any, other legal documents or formats that enjoy as much geeky popular appeal and are reproduced as decorative posters (Fig. 6 below).9 Such visual representations of ‘patents’ revolve around the images of inventions in the format of patent drawings, and they appear to be based on an aesthetic affect than legal relevance. The drawings are easy on the eye; they are orderly and uniform due to the exacting detailed drawing requirement which require draughtsmanship expertise. The enjoyment of patent drawings does not require special training for searching and reading the patent document as a diagrammatic text (Kang 2019). The aesthetic form of patents as images is impervious to the complex legal textual mediation and the digital infrastructure that I outlined in the previous section. This section explores the relations between the erasure of the patent text, the decontextualization of patent drawing from its documentary context, and the aesthetic forms of patents circulating in non-legal specialist discourses today. I think with Sianne Ngai’s work on capitalism and aesthetic theory, especially the aesthetic categories of ‘zany’ (2012) and a ‘gimmick’ (2020), which afford an analysis of patents as images and as particular capitalist aesthetic forms. The discrepancy between the digital format and information infrastructure sustaining patents and the stylization of patent drawings in what seem to be mostly nostalgic reproductions points to a particular entanglement of patents’ legal and economic functions in the broader context of post-industrial cultural economies. The popularization of analog, historical patent drawings as icons evoke technological nostalgia for analog times, such as the once-technological novelty of familiar household items like the Bialetti Mokka maker. Considering that patents as intellectual property rights were intimately connected to the rise of industrial mass production, these images embrace both the fetishization of technological, inventive essence as authentic, as well as the industrial mass commodification of authentic technicity.10 It is particularly in light of these parallel realities—analog technicity reproduced on paper as aesthetic objects in contrast to the reality of digitized patent practice— that the patent offices’ choice of what to promote in their public relations is interesting. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, official patent office communications avoided addressing, or even acknowledging the raging TRIPS waiver debate, as well as the human and social cost of pharmaceutical patents which have been at the center of patent policy debates for the last twenty years (Fig. 7). Choosing to ignore the elephant in the room, the patent offices jarringly continued to promote the narrative of patents as rewards for inventors and being indispensable incentives for ‘innovation’ (see Fig. 2: WIPO’s promotion ‘#NoTimeToDieForGlobalInnovators’). Many of their publicity (‘education’) campaigns stipulated an undefined association between the history of innovation and patents (for a detailed historical refutation, see Moser 2012). Symptomatic of the broad brush-stroke association of intellectual property with entrepreneurship, the UK Intellectual Property Office continued to publish its blog about the BBC reality TV show, Dragon’s Den, a variation of the UK and US television shows, The Apprentice, on its official gov. uk website. ‘Dragon’s Den: the Intellectual Property blog’ (Fig. 8) associates a patent grant with a start-up’s success, but does not spell out the fact that the patent is no guarantee for commercial success. During the pandemic years in which the lethal effects of patents were debated, patent offices also continued to promote historical patent drawings, which admittedly provided entertaining novelty factor from the past, as well as a light relief from having to engage with arguments that ‘patents kill people’ (Fig. 7). The annual list of WIPO’s ‘Patent Picks—Weird and Wonderful’ engages in the celebration of past wacky inventions and cajoles: ‘[i]f ever proof were needed that innovation knows no bounds, look no further than our list of out-of-the-ordinary patents’ (2021). I have found it difficult to describe the sensation of seeing silly patent drawing being reproduced into a poster or social media posts (Fig. 8) during the pandemic years, but Sianne Ngai’s categorization of zaniness as a post-Fordist aesthetic category comes closest to describing it. Ngai’s work on the specificity and transformation of aesthetic experience in modern and post-modern capitalism combines Marxist cultural and economic theory with aesthetic theory. By linking modern and post-modern aesthetic categories to the specific types of labor and methods of production in late capitalist political economy, her work allows us to reflect on the role of intellectual property law in contemporary capitalism. For example, zaniness, the feeling that the Dragon’s Den UK IP Office blog invoked, she defines as ‘an aesthetic [which is, my insertion] more explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performing under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new “connexionist” spirit of capitalism: the dominant ideology of a capitalism that has absorbed and adjusted to the “artistic critique” of the 1960s … there is something strained, desperate, and precarious about the zany that immediately activates spectator’s desire for distance.’ (Ngai 2012, pp. 7-8). An example of a zany film is Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. A contemporary example of the ambiguous zany person would be Clive Sinclair, or maybe also Elon Musk: ‘the zany object or person is one we can only enjoy—If we do in fact enjoy it or her—at a safe or comfortable distance.’ (Ngai 2012, p. 9). Similarly, many strange patent drawings invoke the feeling of fascination and unease because of their subsequent failure that we know about with hindsight, or because they are useless inventions that someone must have thought is useful, or at least interesting, to expend labor on it and undertake the effort of applying for a patent. Many inventions simply try too hard. As the above invention depicted from the WIPO’s ‘Patent Picks—Weird and Wonderful’ (Fig. 9) curated collection, patent drawings combine aspects of painstaking labor (technical draughtsmanship and inventive labor) with a doomed aspiration to a technical function (industrial application or utility). This combination precisely invokes a zany affect, a ‘performative aesthetics,’ which denotes the increasing blurring boundary between labor and play. It suggests a comical ability to flip between work to play, from seriousness to light heartedness. No matter how serious or silly the depicted invention may be, the aesthetic form of the patent drawing stays the same. The tightly regulated form of patent drawings highlights the mechanical nature of the depicted inventions according to highly normed aesthetic standards. In other words, the aesthetic quality of zaniness arises in the context of WIPO’s chosen patent drawings because the form is serious, but the contents are ridiculous. From a sociological point of view, patent drawings appeal to a geeky sensibility, with its appeal to technicity rather than artistic aesthetics. Both in their sociological and aesthetic forms, patent drawings provide a record of uniform, mechanical past—a sense of futurity in retrospect—in today’s networked, reversible, digital times. Despite the entertainment value that they provide, it is not clear why patent offices deploy zany patent drawings as examples of innovation. They are not exactly the socially important innovations that it claims to promote and be indispensable for. A patent drawing, especially if the invention depicted in it is comically useless, makes an intriguing gimmick (Fig. 10). This is perhaps because it is severed and alienated from its very textual context, when there are arguably very few other legal artefacts that are as formally and textually coded and its contents far removed from everyday language as a patent document. Reflective of contemporary capitalism in which paradoxes like planned obsolescence and routinized innovation exist simultaneously, Ngai defines a gimmick as a ‘temporally sensitive and fundamentally unstable form’ (2020, p. 6): ‘We call things gimmicks when it becomes radically uncertain if they are working too hard or too little, if they are historically backward or just as problematically advanced, if they are wonders or tricks’ (2020, p. 49). Whereas zany objects work too much and seem contrived, gimmicks exert a more ambiguous aesthetic effect. They hover between being ‘too easy’ and ‘too difficult’ (2020, p. 48). Gimmicks are examples of capitalist disenchantment equivalent of revealing magic’s know-how. Relatedly, patents as gimmicks are instances of capitalist disenchantment rather than enchantment. As Ngai points out, they are ‘a conjunction of transparency and opacity’ (2020, p. 84). In my analysis, I ought to be careful to distinguish gimmicky inventions (the object of patent right) from the transformation of the very legal form of patent into a gimmick. Many patented inventions fit the definition of gimmicks, but this is not a novel insight. The focus of the analysis has been rather on the cultural meaning of patents as aesthetic and cultural forms. The pressing question is then what the representation of legal monopoly rights - the very legal aesthetic form as gimmicks - effects. The discussion in the previous sections presented a constellation in which the textual and the image-based forms of patents yield a proliferation of contradictory meanings. The focus on images facilitates the dissemination of a technical field of law concerned with technology into popular culture. But the banality of patents as images keeps out of view the modes of production, the material and immaterial labor that produced the inventions, and as well as patent law’s complex digital network that enact legality. It distracts from patent’s legal force as an abstract monopoly right. It blends out the reality of patents as formal, stratified documents written in a highly legal internalist language that requires know-how of drafting and interpretation. Rather the patent drawings—which actually depict inventions rather than patents – have the effect of isolating patents as wacky artefacts of zany or gimmicky aesthetic qualities. They elicit fascination and uneasy sympathy for erroneous directions and valiant failures in the long road to progress. In sharp contrast to present political and legal debates that have fulminated over intellectual property rights and the monopolies that they enable, as cultural signs, patents circulate as playful gimmicks: ‘At the #USPTO, we think #patent protection is the cat’s meow’ (Fig. 11).

Kang, associate professor @ Warwick. “Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms.” Law and Critique (2024) 35:281–311 AS

Patents have acquired meanings that have little to do with their legal functions.6 One way of tracing how this may occur is by considering a patent’s form and its circulation. Forms act both as the substance and the vehicle of significance. Such an approach raises questions, such as, are patents text or an image? What kind of ‘images’ of patents circulate in different contexts? In this section, I focus on two aspects of patents as legal forms: first, the meaning and function of the patent document that is constituted by a rigid legal form; and second, the practice of circulation and administration of the patent document in a digitally mediated network. The analysis will help to contrast a patent’s legal mode of existence and non-legal ones. First, with respect to the substance of a patent document, its content is primarily legal and contains limited scientific information, when compared to a scientific journal article. Although Ouelette’s empirical analysis indicates that scientists do read them (2017), it is not entirely clear if her analysis distinguishes between different motivations and definitions of reading, such as whether scientists consult patent documents for legal reasons rather than scientific ones, and what the practice of reading entails in detail. It is well-known that a patent document contains unverified scientific and ‘prophetic’ inventive information which may not exist in physical reality.7 As many scholars have analyzed and observed, the quality of disclosure of inventive information in the written description section of the patent document is poor (Fromer 2009; Rai et al. 2009). The requirement that the specifications (the sections of written description and claims in a patent document) must enable a person skilled in the arts to make and use the claimed invention is notoriously lax in practice. A patent can be granted without the applicant having reduced the invention to practice (for a recent prominent example, see patents granted to Theranos: Carreyrou 2018). When scientists consult patent documents today, it may be for commercial and legal reason to see who has filed for an application and received grant, as well as to check for freedom to operate without infringing others’ patent rights, rather than for the purpose of seeking scientific information contained in the document. The rise of scientist-entrepreneurs in the non-commercial research and university settings makes it more difficult to separate scientific from legal and commercial motivations for reading a patent. In its original legal context, a patent document is not only a record of a property title, a deed, but also the central technique through which the property right itself arises. It is important to recognize the constitutive relationship between the peculiar form of the patent document and a patent’s substantive meaning. That is why a scientist had trouble recognizing his own invention in the patent document (Myers 1995). To know what is owned, the patent document outlines the object of the property right, the invention. The invention for which a patent is sought must be first described and then claimed as the property object. As in the rhetorical meaning of inventio as the capacity or material to create an argument, from a legal point of view, the patented invention comes into being through textual claims, a separate section within a patent document. Whilst it is understandable that the most accessible part of a patent document for a patent novice is the patent drawing, it does not form part of the property object. A patent document underlies rigid format and drafting requirements, and thus it needs to be read in a diagrammatic manner (Drucker 2013; Kang 2019). One cannot interpret and understand a patent without knowing the meaning and functions of the different documentary parts, as well as the specific legal-internal writing conventions. Second, the documentary function of patent documents is primarily for patent bureaucracy and administration. There is much historical evidence for the mundane bureaucratic and practical motivations that shaped the ways in which a patent document was designed and drafted (Pottage and Sherman 2010), administered once it arrived at the patent office, and finally filed for storage and retrieval (Kang 2012). The rigidity of the form that I’ve described above is connected to patent law’s substantive rationale and workings: its rationale is to ascertain priority of novelty now claimed against the background of novelties past. And in order to do so the patent documents need to be uniform in order to be comparable. In this specific context, the patent document functions as a Peircean icon of the patented invention, which becomes significant as an indexical representation in classificatory structures. The identification of a patent document’s primary legal administrative function does not mean that there aren’t other ones. Beyond its existence as a legal file, other kinds of para- (technological, economic, historical) or meta-information (commercial, second-order data analytics) can be extracted, isolated, and recombined from it. Such a large-scale datafication and the field of ‘patent information’ have become more possible since the digitization drive of patent offices since approximately 2000, and the development of a network between major patent offices’ bureaucracies. It is arguably through the recombinatory potential of patent documents’ data that the documents have started to resemble some sort of scientific information. Patent professionals primarily use the private providers’ databases, such as Derwent World Patent Index, in their work, but for a free overview of the patent offices’ internal filings and patent status, the Five IP Offices’ Global Dossier digital file wrappers are also useful.8 Patent drawings matter little in the daily workings of patent practice, and in the increasingly monetized patent analytics business, particularly because they cannot be easily analyzed and recombined as data and yield no meta data. Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén has interpreted the history of patent documents from the viewpoint of history of documentation and analyzed how the practices and knowledge of documentation have shaped the current understanding of patent as documents (2019). Such a non-legal focus on patents as documentation points to the differences and convergences between patent forms (textual and/or pictorial), their substantive contents (property right, indexical information, and/or data), and their aesthetics (bureaucratic, legalese, or retro-technofuturistic). The act of documentation makes information contained in a document mobile, but arguably it is not concerned with the substantive contents or quality of the documents (as seen in the making of a new patent class, Kang 2012). Such a difference in the explanatory function of what at first sight appears to be the same object—a patent—reflects diverse analytical perspectives and raises questions about what an analysis explains and why it would matter. Different contexts and uses of the same object may yield the conclusion that the resulting identity, or the substance of the analyzed object, may be not the same, despite sharing the same name and form. For example, from an epistemological point of view, a patent as a medium of documentation is a different object than a patent defined as a legal property right, or as a cultural sign, as I will discuss later on. It is not clear whether one talks about the same object, as the analyzed identities will vary considerably, depending on the contexts, practices of interpretation, and usage. Another way of interpreting such diverse levels of analysis would be to assign multiple identities to one object whilst asserting a core identity. Star and Griesemer’s concept of a boundary object (1989) posits that the substance of objects remains stable despite their different uses. Stipulating such a central stable identity to an object like a patent may be plausible if one took a material approach, but as a contemporary patent is abstract in triple sense (it is an abstract legal property right in intangibles, now immaterial in the sense of its physicality as a digital file), understanding patents as boundary objects may only make much sense if one adopted a definition of patent that is physicalist-materialist or historical materialist. Whatever the vantage point of analysis one may take, one should clarify one’s own understanding of patents as either fundamentally plural alterities or as boundary objects. In the analysis here, I would contend that the concept of the boundary object is stretched to a limit through patents’ circulating plural meanings. Understanding patents as malleable, multiple, or pluralistic objects may itself be a hegemonic ideological conceit.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Theorizing Capitalism and its Demise.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 20-22. // QUEERMAID

In terms of scarcity, controlling material supply, where this is competitively feasible and legal, has long been a capitalist strategy to boost prices, as in the production of oil. Yet, the pursuit of imposed, manufactured scarcity has become most critical in the realm of immaterial, and theoretically infinite, (digital) value, which now comprises the brunt of the post-industrial economy. Consider, for instance, that intangible assets, which include research and development, code, data, and other intellectual property are estimated to make up 90 per cent of the S&P 500’s value (Durden, 2020). These assets are intentionally kept scarce, mostly through the use of copyrights and patents, to preserve their profit value for the capitalist owner. In some instances, as with technical know-how, these protections are meant to keep certain competitive advantages secret, while in other cases, as in end-user products (consumer goods), the aim is to extract royalties and rents. The process of making scarce is also directly related to the strategy of enclosure. Here value is captured from currently non- or under-monetized assets within communities and nature with the intent to privatize and repackage them as something in short supply that needs to be purchased. Since the turn to neoliberalism, which entailed the ratcheting back of the state to allow capital greater control of the economy, this process has taken the form of a renewed ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2013). This is often done by disempowering targeted populations, largely through monetary and financial means, at which point capital swoops in to control and privatize critical resources and services. Examples include the continuous expansion of resource extraction into Indigenous lands, the privatization of essential services, and the copyrighting of biological genetic code. Now, digital technologies are being developed to expand this enclosure. For instance, blockchain-enabled smart-contracts, which are executed when if then conditionalities are met, can be used to commoditize urban resources that were previously considered ‘public’, such as establishing microcharges for the individual usage of roads, parks, bridges and other urban infrastructure (Garrod, 2016). Yet, the enclosure of resources goes beyond just the physical realm; it also encompasses social and cultural productions, interactions, and information/ knowledge, much of which is being facilitated and captured in digital form. This is essentially the general intellect that exists as commons. Here too capital is continuously on the march to capture and transform anything innovative or useful into profit (Hardt and Negri, 2009). This can include, for instance, copyrighting and patenting work that has been communally produced, or using commons-sourced labour and data on digital platforms to garner advertising revenue (Vercellone et al, 2019). Capital has also begun to incorporate and profit from commons-based forms of organization, such as crowdsourcing innovation and engaging in other peer-production methods (Papadimitropoulos, 2018; Birkinbine, 2021). In this sense, the digital commons serve as an increasingly important area of growth potential, offering a wellspring of value to be harnessed and enclosed in the form of carefully managed commodities. A final way in which capital has responded to its current predicament of mounting, yet difficult-to-achieve growth demands, has been the expansion of the finance and banking sector, which have evolved far beyond the role of simply greasing the wheels of productive capitalist endeavours. Going back to the work of Magdoff and Sweezy (1987), financialization is seen as the process of using banking/finance to counteract the diminishing rates of profit in production. One obvious opening for capital here pertains to the profitability of interest-bearing credit, the need for which increases as carefully managed scarcity pushes prices higher. Beyond banking, however, another key opening pertains to the widespread adoption of financial instruments, referred to by Marx (1993) as fictitious capital. What Marx meant is that these paper assets, such as stocks, are not productive, they are merely claims on the wealth of future production. In creating such financial instruments, then, opportunities are not only created to raise capital, but an entirely new financial realm of speculation and risk management is brought about with its own significant prospects for accruing profit without actually having to produce anything. Yet, an important development worth noting here has been that the claim to revenue generating future production, generally associated with fictitious capital, has itself been increasingly replaced by a claim on the ability of specific corporations to simply manage scarcity and manipulate demand to profitable ends (Gorz, 2010). This situation is well captured in the concept of an ‘asset-based economy’ where power and wealth are not measured in terms of actual productive capabilities, but on the capacity – denoted in financial assets – to garner profit through such extractive, yet ultimately nonproductive strategies (Adkins et al, 2020). Indeed, the growing disconnect between stock-market capitalization and GDP appears to be indicative of this trend (World Bank, 2021). Clearly, the establishment of such an asset-based economy represents the complete neglect of use-value in the economy. In other words, if the actual production of goods/services is not the path to greatest profit, it will not be pursued, even if these goods and services are needed. The ultimate consequence of this predicament is a massive misallocation of resources and the ossifying of wealth differentials within society (Adkins et al, 2020). Nonetheless, despite the increasingly abstract and ephemeral qualities that characterize contemporary capitalism, as just laid out, it is important that we do not completely dismiss the role being played by the traditional capitalist exploitation of labour in actual production. Indeed, the continued use of22 sweatshops in the Majority World and the rise of low-paying service-sector jobs in the Minority World; the related emergence of easily exploitable gig workers; and the enclosure of the general intellect via a highly skilled, white-collar workforce are all a testament to labour’s continuing importance, even if this importance is slowly eroding. More specifically, it is essential to acknowledge here that engineering scarcity and subsequently capturing higher prices, rents, fees, interest and royalties are still rooted in actual material things and services. The point being made, therefore, is not that traditional capitalism, and its foundational ability to exploit labour, has ceased to exist, rather it is that this capitalism, which has begun to reach certain internal limits, now depends on a massive superstructure of scarcity, enclosure, and finance to keep profits flowing.

On Sept, 2020, Kanye West opened up a conversation about the exploitive nature of record contracts. While Kanye is an imperfect messenger, he is the latest in a long line of recording artists who demonstrate the harmful effects of these contracts. My favorite example is the metaphor of recording artists as sharecroppers by Courtney Love because of the connection to medieval serfdom. In fact, my book Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society explores the way record contracts have similar effects to the British land enclosure acts that jump-started capitalism. In Capital Vol. I, Karl Marx described “primitive accumulation” as the process through which capitalism developed through the British land enclosure acts. The land enclosure acts created private property and kicked the serfs off the land, forcing them to work for capital. Similar to what Marx argued, record contracts create enclosure for musicians to foster the expropriation of their creative work to be sold on the market by record labels. Capitalism only works because workers do not own the means of production, and therefore have to sell their labor-power to someone else in order to earn money to meet their needs. While the means of musical production include musical instruments (and their accessories), sounds systems, mixers, microphones, computers, studio facilities, etc., the primary means of musical production are musical instruments. Since most musicians own their musical instruments, they own their means of musical production. This leaves capital very little room to exploit musicians. If the cost of the musical means of production are so low, why do musicians become laborers? How does the system of musical production encourage musicians to sell their labor-power? To exploit musicians, record labels use record contracts to entice musicians to sign over their copyrights. Two hundred years after the land enclosure acts created property, forced feudal peasants from the land, and helped change the economic mode of production to capitalism, the British government established an additional form of property enclosure: copyright. Passed by the British Parliament in 1709, the Statue of Anne granted two types of copyright. First, it gave authors a copyright for their books. Second, it reinforced existing copyright statutes that gave a printer exclusive rights to print copyrighted books.[1] By securing rights for the author, the Statute of Anne established the first legal justification that ideas could be considered a type of property. Primitive accumulation can help to explain how enclosure in other sectors changed the relations of production to bring other sites of production into the capitalist economy. For instance, Mark Andrejevic describes the recent “digital enclosure” as a process whereby we generate capital through surveillance by providing massive amounts of data about our online usage to companies.[2] When the Internet developed, no apparent form existed for companies to generate revenue from the Internet apart from charging for access to the network. However, Andrejevic argues that the Internet was enclosed through surveillance technologies that track our every move on the World Wide Web. Copyright enclosure is not entirely different from land enclosure. The first commonality is the thought that copyright is “intellectual property.” John Locke’s “‘labor theory’ of property, which conceived the fruits of one’s labor as one’s own property” established the idea that creators conduct labor and own the rights what they produce.[3] In other words, that which people create is their property. James Boyle discusses “an intellectual land grab” brought about by new technologies.[4] While Boyle explains that intellectual property is not a property right, the term remains useful for analyzing copyright. Furthermore, the analogy to property rights proves useful for thinking about copyright as enclosure. Rosemary Coombe alludes not only to the creation of private property, but also to the idea of “fertile fields.” These connections are not accidental, as property possesses this long tradition connected to labor in the fields. Second, copyright expropriates the labor of a group of people, and forces them into a market economy. Musicians, who want to earn a living performing music, need to participate in the economy through recording, performing, and publishing music. These three areas of activity in which musicians participate require musicians to have some relationship to copyright because copyright encloses the production of music. For musicians to perform or record a song, they must secure the right to perform a song. If the musician composed the song, then they can perform it, unless they have a publishing deal—in which case they still need permission from the publisher. Without this permission, musicians violate copyright law. Whether or not musicians want to participate in the copyright system, the law already establishes the order, so they music participate in it if they want to earn a living through music. Finally, there is not enough room for everyone who hopes to earn a living from producing music. If everyone could produce, record, distribute, promote and sell music, music would be overproduced driving the value of each recording down. Therefore, most people who produce copyrighted material will not be able to meet their needs through this system. Just like land enclosure, copyright enclosure creates a reserve army of labor because those who control the copyrights limit who they record, promote, and distribute. When landowners forced feudal serfs from the land, they flocked to towns and cities in England in search of work. However, there were not enough jobs for the emigrating masses to fill; this drove down the cost of labor. Musicians want to perform music to earn a living despite the lack of opportunities for them to work, and this creates a reserve army of labor. If one musician is not willing or able to take a gig, another musician can easily take their place. This has the general effect of driving down wages across the music industry. In a record contract, musicians exchange their copyrights for an advance. They must repay (i.e. recoup) the advance on their portion of the sales (i.e. royalties). Few recording artists ever come close to recouping their advances, let alone earning money from their albums. Frequently, artists receive advances, record albums, and the label shelves their albums. However, these artists can’t leave the label to produce and sell their music elsewhere. Kanye is upset he doesn’t own the master recordings of his album—his friend Taylor Swift is upset about this, too. Virtually all musicians lose the rights to their master recordings when they sign a contract. However, the situation of most recording artists is far more dire than the top selling artists. Copyright enclosure provides the mechanism on which labels exploit artists.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Compeerists of the World Unite!” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 175-177. /LJS

As explained at the outset of this book, the compeerist outlook is best understood as an amalgamation and sharpening of existing thought. Hence, while it embraces the P2P position that commons-centred, collaborative production has the potential to outcompete and ultimately replace our current mode of production, such a process is also seen, in line with most autonomous Marxists, as far from easy or straightforward given that capital currently infiltrates almost every aspect of our socio-economic reality. In thus seeking to answer how an evolutionary turn from capital to the commons could unfold, we can start by revisiting the insightful work of autonomists Massimo De Angelis and John Holloway. For Holloway, our reality within capitalism is seen as dominated by abstract labour, understood as work that is stripped of all meaning for the worker beyond its value as a commodity, what we have posited in this book as a consequence of the apparatus of capture (Holloway, 2010; 2012). Holloway goes on to point out that abstract labour, which has far-reaching material and psychological consequences, is largely inescapable as long as capitalist social relations dominate. For De Angelis, in turn, who broadly accepts Holloway’s starting point, alienated labour makes up an integral component of the broad ‘middle class’, defined as a ‘stratified field of subjectivity’ that is fundamentally formed by, and complicit in, capital’s ‘disciplinary markets, enclosures, governance and … profit seeking enterprises’ (De Angelis, 2010, p 960). Also naturally included in such a subjectivity, we should add, is the acceptance of ‘consumerism as a way of life that contains its own self-reproducing end values’ (Carroll, 2010, p 190). In other words, De Angelis’s specific understanding of the middle class encompasses the majority of the populace living by the dictates of capitalism. Given how entwined we are in capitalism’s logics and mechanisms, the imperative to have an ‘outside’ space (both mental and physical) from where resistance can be envisioned and pursued, takes centre stage. For both scholars such an ‘outside’ is hard to come by but not impossible. Importantly, for Holloway, it is not to be found by positioning ourselves in relation to socially constructed, reified ‘things’, like money, capital, or the state, as these simply lead us to become ‘entrapped within an organizational and conceptual prison that effectively strangles any aspirations for revolutionary change’ (Holloway, 2010, p 917). Instead, Holloway’s answer, which resonates with many other anarchist and autonomist approaches to the commons, is that the outside to capital is essentially achieved through a continuous, prefigurative act of often local or site-based ‘doing’, where work is reclaimed for the purpose of creating use-value. De Angelis similarly points to the need for Holloway’s ‘doing’, which he calls instantiations of ‘commoning’. Importantly, for De Angelis and many others, ‘commoning’ must here not be conflated with simply engaging in collective work organized from the top down. It is only in the pursuit of a commons that is democratically conceived and governed according to community-established values, such as fairness, charity, and sustainability, that actual ‘commoning’ is being conducted (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Dyer-Witheford, 2015; De Angelis, 2017b). De Angelis and Holloway, however, also recognize that such genuine, counter-capitalist efforts of ‘doing’ and commoning must achieve some form of critical mass to effect larger, systemic change, but details here are scarce. Holloway (2010; 2012) posits how the many acts of ‘doing’ must be multiplied to form the ‘millions of cracks’ needed to overcome capitalist domination. The accumulation of these prefigurative cracks, which align quite well with our lines of flight, is ultimately to be achieved via a ‘chaotic and fragmented … movement of movements’ (Holloway, 2010, p 918). Yet, beyond referencing the cracks that would comprise such a movement, there is little that Holloway is willing to say regarding its emergence, coalescing, and ultimate dynamics. De Angelis, in turn, offers a somewhat more specific proposal by suggesting the need to figuratively explode the ‘middle class’ mental framework to create a consciousness that can think beyond taken-for-granted capitalist assumptions (De Angelis, 2010). In his view, such rogue consciousness would entail the mental internalization of some key insights that are actively repressed by current middle class subjectivity. These include: 1. recognizing the increasing irrationality of our collective work in the service of capital (leading, for instance, to artificial scarcity and environmental meltdown); 2. understanding that this service to capital is leading to stagnant and even slipping wealth and wellbeing for most; and 3. realizing that the threatening ‘other’ we have been made to blame for our growing insecurity/unhappiness is, in fact, a myth spawned by the ulterior motivations of vested, powerful actors. De Angelis further explains that a full ‘explosion’ of the middle class would express itself in a ‘proper movement’, describing it as a ‘socio-cultural shockwave’ (De Angelis, 2010, p 968). At the same time, however, he also honestly concedes to not knowing how such an explosion would actually be triggered and sustained.

Abdul Rehman, research assistant at the Institute of Development and Economics Alternatives (IDEAS); Ali Asad, political economist and senior research assistant at IDEAS; 5-28-2023, "Profit over planet: capitalism's impact on climate crisis", T-Magazine, https://tribune.com.pk/story/2419022/profit-over-planet-capitalisms-impact-on-climate-crisis /AB

A World Bank study shows that climate change is already costing developing countries billions of dollars each year. The cost of climate change is expected to rise to $210 billion per year by 2050. Similarly, a report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that the industrial sector is responsible for 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This sector includes manufacturing, construction, and energy production. Multinational firms are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. The economic system values that profit and growth above everything else, leading to constant consumption, production, and resource extraction. The effects are disastrous, with natural habitats being destroyed, resources depleted, and greenhouse gas emissions skyrocketing. Multinational corporations are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to capitalism's impact on climate change. These companies prioritise profit over environmental sustainability, and their actions reflect this priority. For instance, oil and gas companies have been known to engage in practices such as fracking and offshore drilling, which release substantial amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The impact of climate change caused by capitalism is not limited to the environment. It also has a significant impact on communities around the world, particularly those in developing countries. Climate change has led to food and water scarcity, increased poverty, and more frequent natural disasters. These impacts disproportionately affect marginalized communities who have little access to resources and lack the means to adapt to a changing climate. Developing world bears the brunt Despite the overwhelming evidence of capitalism's impact on climate change, many governments and corporations continue to prioritise profit over the environment. The Paris Agreement, which was signed by 196 countries in 2015, aims to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. However, many of the world's largest emitters, including the United States and China, have failed to meet their commitments under the agreement. The devastating impact of industrialisation and capitalism on the environment and society, especially in developing countries, cannot be ignored. Developed nations have been exploiting the cheap labor and lax environmental regulations of these countries, using them as dumping sites for their hazardous waste and electronic garbage. While they have benefited from increased profit margins, developing countries are left to grapple with the environmental and health hazards caused by this unethical practice. Developed countries and multinational corporations have a dirty secret: they dump their waste and pollutants on developing countries. Electronic waste or e-waste is often shipped to these countries, and can contain toxic materials like lead, mercury, and cadmium. The impact of this waste on the soil, water, and air can be devastating. Unfortunately, countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and India have become dumping grounds for this waste, and workers there are forced to dismantle the electronics without proper protection from these harmful materials. The issue of e-waste Multinational corporations such as Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft have been accused of contributing to this problem by failing to properly dispose of their e-waste. In 2018, a study by the Basel Action Network found that electronic waste from these companies was being illegally exported to developing countries, where it was often dumped in landfills or burned, releasing toxic fumes into the air. Similarly, textile factories in developing countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Cambodia are contracted by multinational brands to produce clothing for the global market. However, these factories often release untreated wastewater into rivers and other bodies of water, contaminating the water supply and harming the health of local communities. In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 people, mostly garment workers who were producing clothing for multinational corporations such as Walmart and Benetton. The building's collapse was caused by poor safety standards and overcrowding, which were driven by the demand for cheap clothing produced in developing countries. The oil and gas industry could be another example, which often operates in developing countries with lax environmental regulations. Companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell have been accused of polluting water sources, releasing toxic fumes into the air, and causing soil contamination in countries such as Nigeria and Ecuador. In Nigeria, for example, oil spills have contaminated water sources and destroyed fishing communities, leading to food insecurity and health problems. In Ecuador, Chevron was found liable for causing widespread pollution in the Amazon rainforest, which has had devastating consequences for the health and livelihoods of Indigenous communities. The case of Pakistan According to the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over 70,000 used vehicles were imported into Pakistan in 2017, from Japan and South Korea. These vehicles often do not meet the emission standards set by the Pakistani government, leading to increased air pollution and negative health impacts for the population. The EPA report also highlights that most of these vehicles are not properly maintained, leading to increased emissions and further environmental degradation. Similarly, international fashion brands such as Nike, Adidas, and H&M have also been accused of using suppliers in Pakistan that engage in forced and child labor. Furthermore, Pakistan has become a dumping ground for electronic waste, with over 100,000 tons of e-waste imported into the country each year. This e-waste often contains hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, which can contaminate soil, water, and air. People feel the impacts of climate change all over the world, but the most vulnerable populations tend to be those living in developing countries. These populations often have less access to resources and infrastructure to adapt to the changing climate and are more likely to suffer from the negative effects of extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and storms. Furthermore, these vulnerable populations are often not responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. Developed countries, which have historically been responsible for most emissions, bear a significant responsibility for addressing the impacts of climate change. Who should pay for climate change? Deciding who should shoulder the costs of climate change has gained serious attention in academia. Wealthier nations must support poorer countries with money and technology since they are often the most vulnerable to its impacts. At the same time, developing nations should take action to reduce their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. Finding a fair balance between these responsibilities is crucial for a united global effort in tackling climate change head-on. Climate change is a global problem, and everyone must do their part to address it. Developed countries have a responsibility to help developing countries, which are often the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. However, developing countries also have a responsibility to take action to reduce their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. Developed countries have historically been the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and they have benefited the most from economic growth that has come at the expense of the environment. It is therefore only fair that they should take the lead in addressing climate change. This includes providing financial and technological support to developing countries so that they can also reduce their emissions and adapt to the changing climate. Capitalism can be held responsible for climate change due to its inherent focus on profit-driven growth and consumption. In a capitalist system, industries compete to maximize profits, often prioritizing short-term gains over long-term sustainability. This drive for endless economic expansion promotes resource extraction, overproduction, and excessive consumption, all of which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. Furthermore, capitalism's emphasis on individualism and free markets hinders collective action and regulation, impeding the implementation of effective climate policies. The relentless pursuit of profit, coupled with the lack of systemic checks and balances, makes capitalism a key driver of climate change.