After a prolonged buildup of forces, the total reaching 120,000 soldiers and National Guard troops, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided on February 24 to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The decision has revived a sharp-elbowed debate in the United States. One side consists mainly, though not exclusively, of those belonging to the realist school of thought. This side insists that Putin’s move can only be understood by taking account of the friction that NATO’s eastward expansion created between Russia and the United States. The other side, primarily comprised of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, retorts that Putin’s protests against NATO’s enlargement are bogus. They contend that Putin’s animosity toward democracy—particularly the fear that its success in Ukraine would rub off on Russia and bring down the state that he has built since 2000—was the sole reason for the war. Both sides have succumbed to the single factor fallacy. Given the complexities of history and politics, why should we assume that Putin has only one aim, only one apprehension? In consequence their exchanges have been inconclusive, producing more heat than light. On occasion, there have been simpleminded portrayals of realism in newspaper columns and magazines, and worse, ugly ad hominem attacks. There has been little meaningful debate. Social media has enabled much sound and fury, proving about as productive as a dog’s attempt to chase its tail, albeit much less amusing. Opposition to Putin’s war against Ukraine must not prevent efforts to understand the circumstances that led to it. This distinction bears emphasizing because emotions about the war have run high and analyses of Russia’s actions have sometimes been conflated with endorsement—and in ways that have exposed realists, in particular, to attack. We must examine the larger context and a deeper view of the role of NATO, and think about the European security order we might hope for in the future. The Context The outrage in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects the widespread belief that it cannot reasonably be seen as a necessary war of self-defense against an aggressor. Indeed, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a preventive war: its justification was that a designated enemy might, at some point in the future, pose a serious threat. Preventative wars do more than just violate international humanitarian law; when powerful countries claim the right to invade other countries and topple their governments based on imagined scenarios that they declare unacceptable, they make the world an even more dangerous place. Whatever Putin’s apprehensions about NATO, they do not justify his unprovoked assault on Ukraine, to say nothing of the Russian army’s wanton attacks on civilians. Yet, even though Putin bears primary responsibility for the unjust war in Ukraine, NATO cannot accurately present itself as blameless. As the temperature rose in the runup to the war, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and President Joe Biden repeated the alliance’s statement at its 2008 Bucharest summit—that its doors were open to Ukraine (and Georgia)—stood, and that Putin’s demand that the country pledge to be a neutral state was not up for negotiation. In truth there was no chance that Ukraine would be admitted to NATO anytime soon: NATO’s April 1949 founding treaty requires a unanimous vote before new members can join, and everyone knew that Ukraine wouldn’t clear that bar. Ukraine was thus left to knock on the alliance’s door for nearly fourteen years. Still, the possibility that it might be allowed in was enough to stoke Russian fears, and that increasingly exposed Ukraine to danger. Meanwhile, NATO had no serious intention of guaranteeing Ukraine security through membership. In short, Kyiv was left in limbo. That (non-)decision was a mixture of cowardice and strategic irresponsibility, one for which Ukraine has paid a terrible price, while NATO has paid none at all. Seen this way, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s anger at the alliance, reflected in his speech at the February 2022 Munich Security Conference, becomes understandable. Realists are right to say that Putin’s complaints about NATO expansion have been blithely dismissed by the defenders of that policy as a red herring. Anne Applebaum, for instance, waves away Putin’s complaints as nothing more than camouflage for his real fear, namely that a successful democracy in Ukraine could inspire Russians and threaten the Russian state. Stephen Kotkin, a preeminent historian of Russia, reaches a similar conclusion through a different route. Expansionism and authoritarianism have always marked Russian history and are ineradicable, he says. So, NATO expansion cannot account for anything Russia says or does; indeed, it’s an essential counterweight to an innately aggressive country. Russia, in short, is portrayed as irredeemable. Its past explains its present and future actions. Ergo, Western policy toward it deserves no scrutiny. Putin certainly does preside over an authoritarian political system and abhors U.S. campaigns to spread democracy and promote “color revolutions” in countries near Russia. But Ukraine has been a democracy—i.e., a country with regular elections, numerous civic organizations, and a free press—since the end of 1991, when it became independent. (Some have likened it to a “failed state,” but that label brings to mind Somalia- or Libya-like anarchy, fragmentation, and pervasive violence, conditions that don’t accurately describe Ukraine, no matter the flaws of its democracy.) Putin made no effort to annex parts of Ukraine before 2014, not even during the overtly pro-Western 2004–2005 Orange Revolution. Therefore, his aversion to democracy does not, by itself, explain his objections to NATO’s enlargement. What’s more, Russian opposition to NATO enlargement long preceded Putin’s presidency. In fact, it dates back to the 1990s, when, under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia was cheered in the West as both a democracy and a partner. Besides, it is not just democracies that are entitled to worry about their security. Democratic states are obliged, if only in sheer self-interest, to take the security interests of non-democratic states into account. Were this not true, the protracted negotiations that have been held with North Korea, for example, would be inexplicable. The argument of Applebaum, and others of like mind—including Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Michael McFaul, President Obama’s ambassador to Russia—is self-serving. It absolves dogged proponents of NATO expansion like them from having to engage in any introspection: Putin bears all the blame for the deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations and NATO expansion has had nothing to do with it. Case closed. If only things were that simple and easily reducible to moral certitudes.

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AI Substance › Security › 1NC Russia Link-Alliances

The affirmative transforms alliances from being a cold war economic competition into an ideological one. US leadership/democracy/the LIO paper over western imperialism

Diesen, PhD, 1-22-21

(Glenn, Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University and an affiliate at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow https://www.rt.com/russia/513315-aggressive-biden-foreign-policy/)

Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce the ideologically driven base of US foreign policy fuelled great resentment among those who believed it betrayed Washington’s leadership position in the so-called “liberal international order.” Now that power has changed, will the pendulum swing in the opposite direction, with Joe Biden’s administration applying a radical ideological foreign policy? A recent article by Michael McFaul, once Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and a noted ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theorist, indicates what such an ideological foreign policy would look like. McFaul’s article, ‘How to Contain Putin’s Russia’, makes a case for a containment policy. Containment: learning from the past or living in the past? To advance his argument, McFaul quotes George Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and architect of erstwhile US containment policy against the Soviet Union. McFaul suggests that Kennan’s advocacy for a “patient but firm and vigilant containment” against the revolutionary Bolshevik regime 75 years ago remains as valid as ever. It would have made more sense to quote Kennan when he condemned NATO expansionism and predicted it would trigger another Cold War. As Kennan noted: “there was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.” Kennan continued to express disbelief over the rhetoric by the misinformed US leadership, presenting “Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.” Kennan then went on to correctly predict that, when Russia would eventually react to US provocations, the NATO expanders would wrongfully blame Russia. Ideologues often have nostalgia for the Cold War, when the bipolar power distribution was supported by a clear and comfortable ideological divide. The Western bloc represented capitalism, Christianity, and democracy, while the Eastern bloc represented communism, atheism, and authoritarianism. This ideological divide supported internal cohesion within the Western bloc and drew clear borders with the adversary. The liberal international order has attempted to recast the former capitalist-communist divide with a liberal-authoritarian divide. However, the ideological incompatibility between American liberalism and Russian conservatism is less convincing. For example, McFaul cautions against Putin’s nefarious conservative ideology committed to “Christian, traditional family values” that threatens the liberal international order. The new ideological divide nonetheless advances neo-McCarthyism in the West. McFaul presents a list of European conservatives and populists that should be treated as American conservatives, purged from political life as enemies of the liberal international order and thus possible agents of Russia. Hillary Clinton even suggested that the Capitol Hill riots were possibly coordinated by Trump and Putin – yes, Russiagate is here to stay. The solution, for McFaul, is for American tech oligarchs to manipulate algorithms to protect populations from Russian-friendly media. An American ideological project McFaul cautions against what he refers to as “Putin’s ideological project” as a threat to the liberal international order. Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the liberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War era. After the Cold War, liberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition – suggesting that liberal democracy should be at the center of security strategies. However, by linking liberal norms to US leadership, liberalism became both a constitutional principle and an international hegemonic norm. NATO is presented as a community of liberal values – without mentioning that its second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative and authoritarian than Russia – and Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility to revert to its original mission as a military bloc containing Russia. Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until the West supported the coup in Ukraine. Yet, as Western “fact checkers” and McFaul inform us, there was a “democratic revolution” and not a coup. Committed to his ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its borders, as it would give hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul’s ideological lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails to explain why Russia does not mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good relations. Defending the peoples States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that endow them with the right to defend other peoples. The French National Convention declared in 1792 that France would “come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to recover their liberty,” and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 “the duty to render assistance, armed, if necessary, to the fighting proletariat of the other countries.” The American liberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the world with “democracy promotion” and “humanitarian interventionism” when it conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that democracy is advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack if Russia interferes in the domestic affairs of US. The liberal international system is one of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy. McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are merely motivated by the objective of liberating Russians from their government, which is why he advocates that Biden “distinguish between Russia and Russians – between Putin and the Russian people.” This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the Cold War – the US supposedly does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc. McFaul and other liberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a “defensive alliance,” which does not make much sense after the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011. However, under the auspices of liberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as it defends the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn’t have rational reasons for opposing the liberal international order. McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US, before outlining his strategies for interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American “non-governmental organizations” that are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He goes on to explain that the US government must counter this by establishing new “non-government organizations” to educate the Russian public about the evils of their government. The dangerous appeal of ideologues Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom tend to promise perpetual peace. Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed defender of the ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world and utopia can be bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power politics. Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for “revisionism.” Raymond Aaron once wrote: “Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes.”

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AI Substance › Security › 1NC Heg- Threat Inflation

US leadership kills more people than withdrawal- aff investment in primacy is a product of threat inflation not objective analysis of security

Narine, PhD, 7-9-23

(Shaun Narine Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada) https://theconversation.com/u-s-allies-should-rethink-their-allegiance-to-an-aggressive-but-declining-superpower-207786)

In its pursuit of permanent global domination, the United States has pushed the world towards unnecessary conflict, especially via its two-decade “war on terror.” American allies could dissuade the U.S. from its tendency to take a dangerous and divisive path, but their own weaknesses and commitment to the status quo are making them complicit. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the conflicts connected to the war on terror have killed about 4.6 million people since 2001. About a million have died in direct violence but the others — disproportionately women and children — have been casualties of political, economic and social instability in numerous countries that have been the target of the war on terror. That conflict defines 21st century world politics, far more than the war in Ukraine. It was driven by former U.S. president George W. Bush’s messianic impulses and neoconservative ideologues who aspired to reshape the Middle East in the American image using military force. U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to support the Bush wars. The war in Iraq, an unprovoked and illegal invasion of a sovereign state, demonstrated the danger of unchecked American power and hubris. The Watson Institute report explains why states targeted by the U.S. have reasons to fear American violence and interference. International law doesn’t necessarily constrain the U.S. — it’s often willing to abuse its power and privileges for political, economic and strategic advantage. This reality partly explains Russia’s reaction to the expansion of NATO and its invasion of Ukraine. Concerns about U.S. overreach also influences China’s policies in the South China Sea, as the Chinese worry about being economically strangled by an American naval blockade. China has done little to the U.S. except to grow to an economic size and a level of technological innovation that challenges American global domination. In response, the U.S. is attacking China’s economic and technological development. It is creating economic and military alliances against China. American leaders apparently believe a country four times the population of the U.S. must remain forever subordinate to American power. It’s true that China has threatened Taiwan and behaved aggressively in the South China Sea. Even so, compared to the U.S., Chinese foreign policy has been restrained. Much of the world has refused to back western sanctions against Russia because, in part, the West’s hypocrisy around issues of global violence and interference has undermined western credibility. Instead, many countries are pursuing “non-alignment” — choosing to avoid getting caught in the middle of any future battles between the U.S. and China. Rallying allies Nonetheless, the U.S. has rallied its established allies against China. Canada has become an American vassal, meaning it’s essentially dominated by the U.S. Japan has increased its military spending. The European Union has taken a harder line on economic and technological engagement with China. There are some indications that France and Germany recognize their interests may not align with those of the U.S., but they have not confronted American officials on these issues. Why do American allies refuse to discuss U.S. global violence, despite its horrific consequences and the fact that it clearly affects the world view of America’s rivals and the non-western world? Why are they so tolerant of American militarism — often even complicit in it — while condemning the militarism of others? It’s likely because American allies have benefited enormously from the U.S.-backed status quo, even if they’ve had to deal with the fallout of western militarism — particularly in Europe, where the influx of refugees has coarsened regional politics. They’re accustomed to following the U.S. Many have willingly accepted, parroted and even amplified American propaganda. Politics of fear This attitude is understandable for narrowly self-interested, amoral states, but it’s short-sighted. American allies are wilfully ignoring the extent of the profound social, political and economic divisions within the U.S. and their implications for reliable and coherent American leadership and policy. Domestic political instability in the U.S. may eventually motivate even more aggressive American foreign policy. The U.S. has never shied away from the politics of fear and the exaggeration of threat. Its escalating demonization and provocation of China is especially dangerous. China is a country of 1.4 billion people with an ancient culture and a massive economy. It cannot be locked in a box, as the U.S. is trying to do, without consequences. China gains a great deal from the current international system. It has reasons to support much of the existing economic order. Accommodating China will require adjustments on the part of status quo states. That means abandoning the world view that so many western democracies have embraced as part of western triumphalism since the end of the Cold War. Is preserving the privileged global position of the U.S. really so important to the rest of the world? Is maintaining such an imbalanced world order possible or, given its results, truly desirable? U.S. allies need to learn the lessons of the war on terror and the 4.6 million people it’s killed. A leader needs followers. American allies could make their support of the U.S. conditional on a pledge to ease up on militarism and focus on greater global co-operation.

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AI Substance › Security › --2NC Harari Link

Harari mis-states facts to support his state= peace argument

Narayanan, PhD, 22

(Darshana Narayanan, Neuroscience@Princeton, , 7-6)

My scientific colleagues take issue with Harari as well. Biologist Hjalmar Turesson points out that Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees “hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees” cannot be true because cheetahs and chimpanzees don’t live in the same parts of Africa. “Harari is possibly confusing cheetahs with leopards,” Turesson says. Maybe, as details go, knowing the distinction between cheetahs and leopards is not that important. Harari is after all writing the story of humans. But his errors unfortunately extend to our species as well. In the Sapiens chapter titled “Peace in our Time,” Harari uses the example of the Waorani people of Ecuador to argue that historically, “the decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.” He tells us the Waorani are violent because they “live in the depths of the Amazon forest, without army, police or prisons.” It is true that the Waorani once had some of the highest homicide rates in the world, but they have lived in relative peace since the early 1970s. I spoke to Anders Smolka, a plant geneticist, who happens to have spent time with the Waorani in 2015. Smolka reported that Ecuadorian law is not enforced out in the forest, and the Waorani have no police or prisons of their own. “If spearings had still been of concern, I’m absolutely sure I would have heard about it,” he says. “I was there volunteering for an eco-tourism project, so the safety of our guests was a pretty big deal.” Here Harari uses an exceedingly weak example to justify the need for our famously racist and violent police state. These details could seem inconsequential, but each is a crumbling block in what Harari falsely presents as an inviolable foundation. If a cursory reading shows this litany of basic errors, I believe a more thorough examination will lead to wholesale repudiations.1

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AI Substance › Security › --2NC Harari Link

Lack of scientific rigor directly impacts Harari’s claims about war and conflict

Narayanan, PhD, 22

(Darshana Narayanan, Neuroscience@Princeton, , 7-6)

This may be surprising, but the factual validity of Yuval Harari’s work has received little evaluation from scholars or major publications. Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford—who guided Harari’s research on “Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450-1600”—has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. In the New Yorker’s 2020 profile of Harari, Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book Sapiens—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.” Still, I tried my hand at fact-checking Sapiens—the book that started it all. I consulted colleagues in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology community and found that Harari’s errors are numerous and substantial, and cannot be dismissed as nit-picking. Though sold as nonfiction, some of his narratives hue closer to fiction than fact—all signs of a science populist. Consider “Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution,” where Harari writes about our species’ jump to the top of the food chain, vaulting over, for example, lions. “Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.” Harari concludes that, “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.” As an evolutionary biologist, I have to say: this passage sets my teeth on edge. What exactly makes for a self-confident lion? A loud roar? A bevy of lionesses? A firm pawshake? Is Harari’s conclusion based on field observations or experiments in a laboratory? (The text contains no clue about his sources.) Does anxiety really make humans cruel? Is he implying that, had we taken our time getting to the top of the food chain, this planet would not have war or man-made climate change? The passage evokes scenes from The Lion King —majestic Mufasa looking out into the horizon and telling Simba that everything the light touches is his kingdom. Harari’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, but it is empty of science.

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AI Substance › Security › 1NC Harari LIO Link

Harari is an academic populist- his evidence should be viewed with extreme skepticism, its persuasiveness is a trick not science

Narayanan, PhD, 22

(Darshana Narayanan, Neuroscience@Princeton, , 7-6)

Harari’s manner is soft spoken, even shy, in these encounters. On occasion, he good-naturedly says that he doesn’t possess the powers of divination, then briskly moves on to answer the question with an authority that makes you wonder if indeed he does. A hundred years from now it is quite likely that humans will disappear, and the earth will be populated by very different beings like cyborgs and A.I., Harari said to Paikin, asserting that it is difficult to predict “what kind of emotional or mental life such entities will have.” Diversify, he advised the university student, because the job market of 2040 will be very volatile. We should “want to want to know the truth,” he announced at the TED Conference. “I practice Vipassana meditation to see reality more clearly,” Harari said to the India Today Conclave, without so much as cracking a smile at the absurdity of the question. Moments later, he elaborated: “If I can’t observe the reality of my own breath for 10 seconds, how can I hope to observe the reality of the geopolitical system?” If you are not yet disquieted, consider: among Harari’s flock are some of the most powerful people in the world, and they come to him much like the ancient kings to their oracles. Mark Zuckerberg asked Harari if humanity is becoming more unified or fragmented by technology. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund asked him if doctors will depend on Universal Basic Income in the future. The CEO of Axel Springer, one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, asked Harari what publishers should do to succeed in the digital world. An interviewer with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked him what effect COVID would have on international scientific cooperation. In favor of Harari’s half-formed edicts, each subverted their own authority. And they did it not for an expert in any one of their fields, but for a historian who, in many ways, is a fraud—most of all, about science. Times are tough, and we are—all of us—looking for answers to literal questions of life and death. Will humans survive the coming waves of pandemics and climate change? Do our genes contain the key to understanding everything about us? Will technology save us, or will it destroy us? The desire for a wise guide—a sort of prophet who boldly leaps across multiple disciplines to provide simple, readable, confident answers, tying it all together in page-turning stories—is understandable. But is it realistic? It scares me that, to many, this question appears to be irrelevant. Harari’s blockbuster, Sapiens, is a sweeping saga of the human species—from our humble beginnings as apes to a future where we will sire the algorithms that will dethrone and dominate us. Sapiens was published in English in 2014, and by 2019, it had been translated into more than 50 languages, selling over 13 million copies. Recommending the book on CNN in 2016, president Barack Obama said that Sapiens, like the Pyramids of Giza, gave him “a sense of perspective” on our extraordinary civilization. Harari has published two subsequent bestsellers—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). All told, his books have sold over 23 million copies worldwide. He might have a claim to be the most sought-after intellectual in the world, gracing stages far and wide, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking appearance. We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru Jordan Peterson is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence. In this day and age, good storytelling is more necessary, but riskier, than ever before, particularly when it comes to science. Science informs medical, environmental, legal, and many other public decisions, as well as our personal opinions on what to be wary about and how to lead our lives. Important societal and individual actions depend on our best understanding of the world around us—now more than ever, with the plague in all our houses, and the worst yet to come with climate change. It is time to subject our Populist Prophet, and others like him, to serious scrutiny.

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AI Substance › Security › --2NC Bostrom/Existential risk

We can think long term without being long termists- fixation on the future justifies unlimited genocide in the present

Torres, PhD Candidate, 21

(Phil, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. ,)

What I find most unsettling about the longtermist ideology isn’t just that it contains all the ingredients necessary for a genocidal catastrophe in the name of realizing astronomical amounts of far-future “value.” Nor is it that this religious ideology has already infiltrated the consciousness of powerful actors who could, for example, “save 41 [million] people at risk of starvation” but instead use their wealth to fly themselves to space. Even more chilling is that many people in the community believe that their mission to “protect” and “preserve” humanity’s “longterm potential” is so important that they have little tolerance for dissenters. These include critics who might suggest that longtermism is dangerous, or that it supports what Frances Lee Ansley calls white supremacy (given the implication, outlined and defended by Beckstead, that we should prioritize the lives of people in rich countries). When one believes that existential risk is the most important concept ever invented, as someone at the Future of Humanity Institute once told me, and that failing to realize “our potential” would not merely be wrong but a moral catastrophe of literally cosmic proportions, one will naturally be inclined to react strongly against those who criticize this sacred dogma. When you believe the stakes are that high, you may be quite willing to use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way. In fact, numerous people have come forward, both publicly and privately, over the past few years with stories of being intimidated, silenced, or “canceled.” (Yes, “cancel culture” is a real problem here.) I personally have had three colleagues back out of collaborations with me after I self-published a short critique of longtermism, not because they wanted to, but because they were pressured to do so from longtermists in the community. Others have expressed worries about the personal repercussions of openly criticizing Effective Altruism or the longtermist ideology. For example, the moral philosopher Simon Knutsson wrote a critique several years ago in which he notes, among other things, that Bostrom appears to have repeatedly misrepresented his academic achievements in claiming that, as he wrote on his website in 2006, “my performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden.” (There is no evidence that this is true.) The point is that, after doing this, Knutsson reports that he became “concerned about his safety” given past efforts to censure certain ideas by longtermists with clout in the community. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s consistent with a pattern of questionable behavior from leaders in the Effective Altruism movement more generally. For example, one of the first people to become an Effective Altruist after the movement was born circa 2009, Simon Jenkins, reports an incident in which he criticized an idea within Effective Altruism on a Facebook group run by the community. Within an hour, not only had his post been deleted but someone who works for the Centre for Effective Altruism actually called his personal phone to instruct him not to question the movement. “We can’t have people posting anything that suggests that Giving What We Can [an organization founded by Ord] is bad,” as Jenkins recalls. These are just a few of several dozen stories that people have shared with me after I went public with some of my own unnerving experiences. All of this is to say that I’m not especially optimistic about convincing longtermists that their obsession with our “vast and glorious” potential (quoting Ord again) could have profoundly harmful consequences if it were to guide actual policy in the world. As the Swedish scholar Olle Häggström has disquietingly noted, if political leaders were to take seriously the claim that saving billions of living, breathing, actual people today is morally equivalent to negligible reductions in existential risk, who knows what atrocities this might excuse? If the ends justify the means, and the “end” in this case is a veritable techno-Utopian playground full of 1058 simulated posthumans awash in “the pulsing ecstasy of love,” as Bostrom writes in his grandiloquent “Letter from Utopia,” would any means be off-limits? While some longtermists have recently suggested that there should be constraints on which actions we can take for the far future, others like Bostrom have literally argued that preemptive violence and even a global surveillance system should remain options for ensuring the realization of “our potential.” It’s not difficult to see how this way of thinking could have genocidally catastrophic consequences if political actors were to “[take] Bostrom’s argument to heart,” in Häggström’s words. I should emphasize that rejecting longtermism does not mean that one must reject long-term thinking. You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth. If we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their spatial distance from us, we shouldn’t discriminate against them based on their temporal distance, either. Many of the problems we face today, such as climate change, will have devastating consequences for future generations hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That should matter. We should be willing to make sacrifices for their wellbeing, just as we make sacrifices for those alive today by donating to charities that fight global poverty. But this does not mean that one must genuflect before the altar of “future value” or “our potential,” understood in techno-Utopian terms of colonizing space, becoming posthuman, subjugating the natural world, maximizing economic productivity, and creating massive computer simulations stuffed with 1045 digital beings (on Greaves and MacAskill’s estimate if we were to colonize the Milky Way). Care about the long term, I like to say, but don’t be a longtermist. Superintelligent machines aren’t going to save us, and climate change really should be one of our top global priorities, whether or not it prevents us from becoming simulated posthumans in cosmic computers.

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Security › 1NC Bostrom/Existential Risk

Existential risk framing PRODUCES existential threats by reifying capitalist control over the universe. Attempts to “manage” existential risk backfire and justify endless atrocity

Torres, PhD Candidate, 10-19-21

(Phil Torresis a PhD candidate in philosophy at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo)

Yet the implications of longtermism are far more worrisome. If our top four priorities are to avoid an existential catastrophe – ie, to fulfil ‘our potential’ – then what’s not on the table for making this happen? Consider Thomas Nagel’s comment about how the notion of what we might call the ‘greater good’ has been used to ‘justify’ certain atrocities (eg, during war). If the ends ‘justify’ the means, he argues, and the ends are thought to be sufficiently large (eg, national security), then this ‘can be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies’. Now imagine what might be ‘justified’ if the ‘greater good’ isn’t national security but the cosmic potential of Earth-originating intelligent life over the coming trillions of years? During the Second World War, 40 million civilians perished, but compare this number to the 1054 or more people (in Bostrom’s estimate) who could come to exist if we can avoid an existential catastrophe. What shouldn’t we do to ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ this potential? To ensure that these unborn people come to exist? What means can’t be ‘justified’ by this cosmically significant moral end? Bostrom himself argued that we should seriously consider establishing a global, invasive surveillance system that monitors every person on the planet in realtime, to amplify the ‘capacities for preventive policing’ (eg, to prevent omnicidal terrorist attacks that could devastate civilisation). Elsewhere, he’s written that states should use preemptive violence/war to avoid existential catastrophes, and argued that saving billions of actual people is the moral equivalent of reducing existential risk by utterly minuscule amounts. In his words, even if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 1054 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives.’ Such fanaticism – a word that some longtermists embrace – has led a growing number of critics to worry about what might happen if political leaders in the real world were to take Bostrom’s view seriously. To quote the mathematical statistician Olle Häggström, who – perplexingly – tends otherwise to speak favourably of longtermism: I feel extremely uneasy about the prospect that [the calculations above] might become recognised among politicians and decision-makers as a guide to policy worth taking literally. It is simply too reminiscent of the old saying ‘If you want to make an omelette, you must be willing to break a few eggs,’ which has typically been used to explain that a bit of genocide or so might be a good thing, if it can contribute to the goal of creating a future utopia. Imagine a situation where the head of the CIA explains to the US president that they have credible evidence that somewhere in Germany, there is a lunatic who is working on a doomsday weapon and intends to use it to wipe out humanity, and that this lunatic has a one-in-a-million chance of succeeding. They have no further information on the identity or whereabouts of this lunatic. If the president has taken Bostrom’s argument to heart, and if he knows how to do the arithmetic, he may conclude that it is worthwhile conducting a full-scale nuclear assault on Germany to kill every single person within its borders. Here, then, are a few reasons I find longtermism to be profoundly dangerous. Yet there are additional, fundamental problems with this worldview that no one, to my knowledge, has previously noted in writing. For example, there’s a good case to make that the underlying commitments of longtermism are a major reason why humanity faces so many unprecedented risks to its survival in the first place. Longtermism might, in other words, be incompatible with the attainment of ‘existential security’, meaning that the only way to genuinely reduce the probability of extinction or collapse in the future might be to abandon the longtermist ideology entirely. To Bostrom and Ord, failing to become posthuman would prevent us from realising our vast, glorious potential To understand the argument, let’s first unpack what longtermists mean by our ‘longterm potential’, an expression that I have so far used without defining. We can analyse this concept into three main components: transhumanism, space expansionism, and a moral view closely associated with what philosophers call ‘total utilitarianism’. The first refers to the idea that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer our bodies and brains to create a ‘superior’ race of radically enhanced posthumans (which, confusingly, longtermists place within the category of ‘humanity’). Although Bostrom is perhaps the most prominent transhumanist today, longtermists have shied away from using the term ‘transhumanism’, probably because of its negative associations. Susan Levin, for example, points out that contemporary transhumanism has its roots in the Anglo-American eugenics movement, and transhumanists such as Julian Savulescu, who co-edited the book Human Enhancement (2009) with Bostrom, have literally argued for the consumption of ‘morality-boosting’ chemicals such as oxytocin to avoid an existential catastrophe (which he calls ‘ultimate harm’). As Savulescu writes with a colleague, ‘it is a matter of such urgency to improve humanity morally … that we should seek whatever means there are to effect this.’ Such claims are not only controversial but for many quite disturbing, and hence longtermists have attempted to distance themselves from such ideas, while nonetheless championing the ideology. Transhumanism claims that there are various ‘posthuman modes of being’ that are far better than our current human mode. We could, for instance, genetically alter ourselves to gain perfect control over our emotions, or access the internet via neural implants, or maybe even upload our minds to computer hardware to achieve ‘digital immortality’. As Ord urges in The Precipice, think of how awesome it would be to perceive the world via echolocation, like bats and dolphins, or magnetoreception, like red foxes and homing pigeons. ‘Such uncharted experiences,’ Ord writes, ‘exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own. What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater?’ Bostrom’s most fantastical exploration of these possibilities comes from his evocative ‘Letter from Utopia’ (2008), which depicts a techno-Utopian world full of superintelligent posthumans awash in so much ‘pleasure’ that, as the letter’s fictional posthuman writes, ‘we sprinkle it in our tea.’ The connection with longtermism is that, according to Bostrom and Ord, failing to become posthuman would seemingly prevent us from realising our vast and glorious potential, which would be existentially catastrophic. As Bostrom put it in 2012, ‘the permanent foreclosure of any possibility of this kind of transformative change of human biological nature may itself constitute an existential catastrophe.’ Similarly, Ord asserts that ‘forever preserving humanity as it is now may also squander our legacy, relinquishing the greater part of our potential.’ The second component of our potential – space expansionism – refers to the idea that we must colonise as much of our future light cone as possible: that is, the region of spacetime that is theoretically accessible to us. According to longtermists, our future light cone contains a huge quantity of exploitable resources, which they refer to as our ‘cosmic endowment’ of negentropy (or reverse entropy). The Milky Way alone, Ord writes, is ‘150,000 light years across, encompassing more than 100 billion stars, most with their own planets.’ Attaining humanity’s longterm potential, he continues, ‘requires only that [we] eventually travel to a nearby star and establish enough of a foothold to create a new flourishing society from which we could venture further.’ By spreading ‘just six light years at a time’, our posthuman descendants could make ‘almost all the stars of our galaxy … reachable’ since ‘each star system, including our own, would need to settle just the few nearest stars [for] the entire galaxy [to] eventually fill with life.’ The process could be exponential, resulting in ever-more ‘flourishing’ societies with each additional second our descendants hop from star to star. But why exactly would we want to do this? What’s so important about flooding the Universe with new posthuman civilisations? This leads to the third component: total utilitarianism, which I will refer to as ‘utilitarianism’ for short. Although some longtermists insist that they aren’t utilitarians, we should right away note that this is mostly a smoke-and-mirrors act to deflect criticisms that longtermism – and, more generally, the effective altruism (EA) movement from which it emerged – is nothing more than utilitarianism repackaged. The fact is that the EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practice, and indeed, before it decided upon a name, the movement’s early members, including Ord, seriously considered calling it the ‘effective utilitarian community’. This being said, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that specifies our sole moral obligation as being to maximise the total amount of ‘intrinsic value’ in the world, as tallied up from a disembodied, impartial, cosmic vantage point called ‘the point of view of the Universe’. From this view, it doesn’t matter how value – which utilitarian hedonists equate with pleasure – is distributed among people across space and time. All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!) Beckstead argued that we should prioritise the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries The underlying reasoning here is based on the idea that people – you and I – are nothing more than means to an end. We don’t matter in ourselves; we have no inherent value of our own. Instead, people are understood as the ‘containers’ of value, and hence we matter only insofar as we ‘contain’ value, and therefore contribute to the overall net amount of value in the Universe between the Big Bang and the heat death. Since utilitarianism tells us to maximise value, it follows that the more people (value containers) who exist with net-positive amounts of value (pleasure), the better the Universe will become, morally speaking. In a phrase: people exist for the sake of maximising value, rather than value existing for the sake of benefitting people. This is why longtermists are obsessed with calculating how many people could exist in the future if we were to colonise space and create vast computer simulations around stars in which unfathomably huge numbers of people live net-positive lives in virtual-reality environments. I already mentioned Bostrom’s estimate of 1054 future people, which includes many of these ‘digital people’, but in his bestseller Superintelligence (2014) he puts the number even higher at 1058 people, nearly all of whom would ‘live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments’. Greaves and MacAskill are similarly excited about this possibility, estimating that some 1045 conscious beings in computer simulations could exist within the Milky Way alone. That is what our ‘vast and glorious’ potential consists of: massive numbers of technologically enhanced digital posthumans inside huge computer simulations spread throughout our future light cone. It is for this goal that, in Häggström’s scenario, a longtermist politician would annihilate Germany. It is for this goal that we must not ‘fritter … away’ our resources on such things as solving global poverty. It is for this goal that we should consider implementing a global surveillance system, keep pre-emptive war on the table, and focus more on superintelligent machines than saving people in the Global South from the devastating effects of climate change (mostly caused by the Global North). In fact, Beckstead has even argued that, for the sake of attaining this goal, we should actually prioritise the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, since influencing the long-term future is of ‘overwhelming importance’, and the former are more likely to influence the long-term future than the latter. To quote a passage from Beckstead’s 2013 PhD dissertation, which Ord enthusiastically praises as one of the most important contributions to the longtermist literature: Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. [Consequently,] it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the implications of this conception of ‘our potential’ for the development of technology and creation of new risks. Since realising our potential is the ultimate moral goal for humanity, and since our descendants cannot become posthuman, colonise space and create ~1058 people in computer simulations without technologies far more advanced than those around today, failing to develop more technology would itself constitute an existential catastrophe – a failure mode (comparable to Ramsey neglecting his talents by spending his days playing pool and drinking) that Bostrom calls ‘plateauing’. Indeed, Bostrom places this idea front-and-centre in his canonical definition of ‘existential risk’, which denotes any future event that would prevent humanity from reaching and/or sustaining a state of ‘technological maturity’, meaning ‘the attainment of capabilities affording a level of economic productivity and control over nature close to the maximum that could feasibly be achieved.’ Technological maturity is the linchpin here because controlling nature and increasing economic productivity to the absolute physical limits are ostensibly necessary for creating the maximum quantity of ‘value’ within our future light cone. But reflect for a moment on how humanity got itself into the current climatic and ecological crisis. Behind the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, decimation of ecosystems and extermination of species has been the notion that nature is something to be controlled, subjugated, exploited, vanquished, plundered, transformed, reconfigured and manipulated. As the technology theorist Langdon Winner writes in Autonomous Technology (1977), since the time of Francis Bacon our view of technology has been ‘inextricably bound to a single conception of the manner in which power is used – the style of absolute mastery, the despotic, one-way control of the master over the slave.’ He adds: There are seldom any reservations about man’s rightful role in conquering, vanquishing, and subjugating everything natural. This is his power and his glory. What would in other situations seem [to be] rather tawdry and despicable intentions are here the most honourable of virtues. Nature is the universal prey, to manipulate as humans see fit. This is precisely what we find in Bostrom’s account of existential risks and its associated normative futurology: nature, the entire Universe, our ‘cosmic endowment’ is there for the plundering, to be manipulated, transformed and converted into ‘value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives’ in vast computer simulations, quoting Bostrom’s essay ‘Astronomical Waste’ (2003). Yet this Baconian, capitalist view is one of the most fundamental root causes of the unprecedented environmental crisis that now threatens to destroy large regions of the biosphere, Indigenous communities around the world, and perhaps even Western technological civilisation itself. While other longtermists have not been as explicit as Bostrom, there is a clear tendency to see the natural world the way utilitarianism sees people: as means to some abstract, impersonal end, and nothing more. MacAskill and a colleague, for example, write that the EA movement, and by implication longtermism, is ‘tentatively welfarist in that its tentative aim in doing good concerns promoting wellbeing only and not, say, protecting biodiversity or conserving natural beauty for their own sakes.’

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Innovation › 2NC Perm

The perm is Hilary 2016- innovation discourse can’t be “tamed” in the policy process, it will takeover/crush the alt

Lehman 16

(Chris, Editor@Baffler , 1-27)

Toward the end of his 250-page hymn to digital-age innovation, The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross pauses to offer a rare cautionary note. Silicon Valley may have incubated all the wonders and conveniences one can imagine — and oh, so many more! But for the international business elites looking to remake their emerging market economies in the Valley’s gleaming, khaki-clad image, there’s some bad news: It can no longer be done. A “decades-long head start” has granted too great a competitive advantage to the charmed peninsula along the Northern California coast. Not to worry, though! On-the-make tech globalists can still make a go of it, provided they’re prepared to embrace “specific cultural and labor market characteristics that can contradict both a society’s norms and the more controlling impulses of government leaders.” Stripped of the vague and glowing techno-babble, this is a prescription for good old-fashioned neoliberal market discipline. Everywhere Ross looks across the radically transformed world of digital commerce, the benign logic of market triumphalism wins the day. When Terry Gou — the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, the vast Chinese electronics sweatshop that doubles as an incubator for worker suicides — plans to eliminate the headache of supervising an unstable human workforce by replacing it with “the first fully automated plant” in manufacturing history, why, he’s simply “responding to pure market forces”: i.e., an increase in Chinese wages that cuts into Foxconn’s ridiculously broad profit margins. And you and I might see the so-called sharing economy as a means to casualize service workers into nonunion, benefit-free gigs that transfer economic value on a massive scale to a rentier class of Silicon Valley app marketers. But bouncy New Economy cheerleaders like Ross see “a way of making a market out of anything, and a microentrepreneur out of anyone.” When confronted with the spiraling of income inequality in the digital age, Ross, like countless other prophets of better living through software, sagely counsels that “rapid progress often comes with greater instability.” Sure, the “wealthy generally benefit over the short term,” but remember, kids: “Innovations have the potential to become cheaper over time and spread throughout the greater population.” Ross first stormed into political prominence as an architect of Barack Obama’s “technology and innovation plan” during his 2008 presidential campaign, and he has spent four years captaining his own charmed, closed circle of tech triumphalism as the White House’s “senior advisor for innovation” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This renders The Industries of the Future something more than another breathless, Tom Friedman-style tour of the wonderments being hatched in startups, trade confabs and gadget factories. Ross’ book is also a tech-policy playbook for the likely Democratic presidential nominee, who has spared no effort in soliciting the policy input — and landing the campaign donations — of the Silicon Valley mogul set. As such, it should give any Hillary-curious supporter of economic justice considerable pause. To be sure, Ross raises some vague concerns about how, for example, the runaway growth of the sharing economy drains workers of job security, healthcare benefits, pensions and the like. He avers that “as the sharing economy grows … the safety net needs to grow with it,” but, much like his politically savvy boss, he offers nothing in the way of policy specifics besides the inarguable yet unactionable truism that if the sharing economy “generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.” The larger point for Ross, in any event, is that the innovative megafirms of tomorrow will come to spontaneously serve the public good. Not to mention that many IPO investors “are pension funds,” Ross coos, which “manage the retirement funds for people in the working class like teachers, police officers, and other civil servants.” Never mind, of course, that the neoliberal logic of the Uber model means that we’re creating a workforce that’s unlikely ever to come within shouting distance of a pension benefit again. This kind of terminal Silicon Valley myopia also accounts for the vast economic and political blindspots that continually undermine Ross’ relentlessly chipper TED patter. To take just one instructive instance, in a book that devotes considerable real estate to the innovations of “fintech” (the streamlining of global digital currency exchanges and investment transactions) nowhere does the author acknowledge the pivotal role that tech-savvy Wall Street analysts — the “quants” as they’re known in Street argot — played in stoking the early-aughts housing bubble that led to the near-meltdown of the global economy. That’s because it’s an axiomatic faith for this brand of techno-prophecy that innovation can never actually make anything worse — in just the same fashion that the quants were insisting, right up until the end, that there could never be a downturn in the national housing market. If this is the kind of wisdom Hillary Clinton relied on to promote her global innovation agenda at the State Department, one shudders to think of how it might run riot through the White House come next January.

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Innovation › 2NC Perm

The permutation confines ethics to the production stage

Lennerfors and Murata, PhDs, 23

(Thomas Taro Lennerfors, IndustrialEngineering@Uppsala and Kiyoshi Murata, BusinessEthics@Meiji, Innovation Ethics In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

In most of the frameworks surveyed and within discussions about innovation ethics, the phases of research and development of technology and putting it into a product/service are seen as the most important for tech nological innovation to be ethical—and this is what we mean by the focus on invention ethics. However, invention ethics runs the risk of underestimating responsibility in the rest of the technology lifecycle, and how innovators and others can be involved in innovation processes beyond design. We need to consider not only the values embedded in the process of developing innovative technologies, but the values emerging from or proposed by technologies during use as well as the rest of the lifecycle. Innovation ethics should also concern long-term ethical impacts of innovation and how societies monitor the ethics of innovations that are being implemented in society. Given the unpredictability of the inno vation process, ethical reflection needs to be iterative and processual, not only in the early stages.

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Innovation › 2NC Perm

The permutation is an attempt to “blind” conflict theories of innovation- this papers over the hegemonic position of innovation studies

Knudsen, PhD, 23

(Jon P., WorkingLifeAndInnovation@Agder, Creative Continuation: An Alternative Perspective on Innovation and Society In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

By formulating it as a choice between two clear-cut options, I do of course simplify. Over the years, various strains of literature have attempted to attenuate these simple categories by pointing to social practices blending various aspects of innovational takes and procedures. Examples could be given as the often-repeated critique of “one size fits all-models” (Tödtling and Trippl 2005), the presentation of the CCI model of inno vation as a third way between STI and DUI practices (Isaksen and Karlsen 2013), and finally the fascination for “paths” as a concept for theorizing variety (Asheim et al. 2019; Tödtling and Trippl 2012). All these approaches may be understood as having meso-range theoretical ambition, meaning that they offer nuances to an overarching bifurcated theoretical framework, rather than challenging it systemically. From a more overarching perspective, the political science literature is filled with different models for dealing with the systemic challenges between various institutional heritages and the constant quest for innovation (Hall and Soskice 2001; Streeck and Thelen 2005). The problem is not the lack of alternatives to the present fascination for a one-dimensional take on innovation, the problem is the enduring hegemonic position of the one-dimensional way of thinking. The present turn to missions in the economic (and political) discourse only serves to rewrap the message. Mazzucato (2016), citing Polanyi’s ([1944]2001) pathbreaking analysis of the genesis of British capitalism, underlines that all economic systems are embedded in social structures. But she then refrains from offering a key to the further understanding of the anatomy and the following conditionalities and propensities of these structures. Tödtling and Trippl (2005) in their now classical paper stated that any uniform take on innovation would fail to deliver, as one size will not fit all. And Polanyi ([1944]2001, p. 147) himself seemed to fall prey to his eloquence having discovered that “…[l]aissez-faire was planned…” to elegantly continue “…planning was not.” Seen in hindsight, he was toying with the two competing modernist paradigms of the mid-twentieth century, market versus planning. And, admittedly, both were planned. It now seems appropriate to ask why Mazzucato’s preoccupation with embeddedness has not led her to take a U-turn and ask for more change-oriented policies to be tuned to place-based prerequisites, as one of the recognized problems with innovation policies in general—as to her mission-oriented economy—seems to be their lack of compliance with context (Brown 2021). Innovation is high on the political agendas, from the global to the local scenes. To those preoccupied with forging or promoting innovation policies, the analysis presented here has two important implications. First, it points to the importance of looking into a given region’s socio-cultural potential for innovation as a first step in any attempt at policy formation, as building on existing cultures and practices will most often be a legitimate and cheap way to establish working policy regimes. Second, these suggestions may imply the installation of less disruptive and more socially attentive policies than offered through (international) expert recommendations, often favoring economically and politically costly disruptive policy measures.

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Innovation › 2NC Perm

The perm “pretends” to reform innovation but leaves its linear core in tact

Laurent, PhD, 21

(Brice, Ideology, engine or regime. Styles of critique and theories of innovation.. Benoît Godin, Gérald Gaglio, Dominique Vinck. Handbook on Alternative Theories of Innovation 2021, Edward Elgar, pp.369-386, 2021. hal-03442298)

These considerations bring us back to the notion of critique. While the critique of the “religion” or the “myths” targets an overly simple discourse that misrepresents the reality of innovation processes and does not question the means and ends of innovation, the numerous approaches presented as alternatives show that this critique can stem from the actors of innovation and/or can be integrated in their theories or practices. This is an impetus for further critical works that adopt a similar style as that of the “myths” of innovation, as their purpose is to uncover the extent to which the self-proclaimed alternatives question the basic tenants of the dominant version of innovation. For instance, Joly identifies the persistence of the linear model behind alternatives models of innovation (Joly 2017), Edquist laments that “linearity still prevails” (Edquist 2014), and critics of the European program of “responsible research and innovation” question the eventual effects on the structural dominance of competitiveness objectives (de Saille 2015). These accounts can be read as further attempts at displaying a kind of “bluff” (Ellul 1988), whereby innovation would only pretend to be reformed. But these works can also lead to further reforms of innovation. One could then try to differentiate between authors according to the degree to which they are “reformists”, possibly in relation to their proximity with the actors of innovation in public bodies or private companies. One could possibly isolate “critics” from “reformers”, the former being more interested in challenging the current state of affairs and the latter more concerned with integrating alternative approaches from within. Such an attempt at sorting out reformers and critics is the approach undertaken in a recent collective volume that discusses the various processes through which innovators are actively made (Wisnioski et al. 2019). While there is a clear value in this distinction, it is also striking that the boundary that separates those groups is not always clear. Being a critic of innovation by pointing to its exclusion effects on people leads to calls to integrate these people as potential innovators (Cook 2019). In turn, self-proclaimed “reformists” seeking to include more women and people of color in innovation are also critics of current innovation discourses and practices (Sanders and Ashcraft 2019). Pointing to the need to making maintainers might lead others to rethink what it means to be an innovator, for example by introducing an “ethics of care” in the formal training of scientists and engineers (Russel and Vinsel 2019). The porosity of the line between critique and reform is at the heart of the style of critique of innovation that questions the ideology of innovation. One conclusion this can lead to is that this critique is meant to be continuously exercised: as proponents of innovation might be convinced that the simple version relies on myths, one should then question the calls for “democratization”, “openness” or “responsibility” and confront them with the reality of innovation practices. This is of course a continuation of a critique meant as an exercise in truth telling. But it also means that one delves ever further into innovation processes, and ultimately participates in refining them.

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2023 Michigan Counterplan

AI Substance › Innovation › 2NC Perm

The permutation incorporates critique into innovation studies as a “new innovation in the paradigm”

Laurent, PhD, 21

The pervasiveness of innovation in the contemporary public discourse manifests itself in the omnipresence of figures like the “start-up creator”, the “entrepreneur”, or the “investor” in current economic and political debates. But the inevitability of innovation is more and more accompanied by a distinctive atmosphere of skepticism regarding its benefits, and the worldview it encompasses. As the influence of the “tech sector” grows larger, global companies such as Google, Facebook or Amazon are both heralded as seemingly never-ended sources of innovation, and regularly criticized for the ever-growing extension of their power, their disregard of public concerns such as data privacy and the social environment they promote on their grounds. The start-up culture at the heart of current innovation discourses is targeted by journalists, professionals and academics worried about the “collateral damage”, as a Guardian journalist put it, of disruptive innovation.1 Eventually, the technological developments on which so many contemporary innovations rely, in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, renewable energy, or urban mobility, are themselves criticized for their ecological costs and their potential negative consequences in terms of labor structure or social justice. Scholars, activists and politicians have proposed critical evaluations of the current state of innovation. These critical movements have become integral to the current debates about the objectives and practices of innovation, to the point that they can be said to contribute to the dynamics of innovation itself. “New business models”, “inclusive innovation practices” or “new modes of thinking” are presented as answers to the perceived shortcomings of the current innovation environment. Like capitalism, innovation is prone to integrate its own critique to re-invent itself and further extend the perimeter of its actions (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005)

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