The Isocracy Network

by Jon Hillström. There is a lot of incoherence many communists when it comes to the invasion and war in Ukraine. People will claim to be "anti-war", that they support neither Russia nor Ukraine then try to frame it as an inter-imperialist proxy war despite the fact that it was directly caused by Russia's unilateral decision to invade. Often enough the same people will (1) oppose any and all sanctions on trade with Russia and (2) oppose supplying any arms or equipment to Ukraine.

Such a position leads to the situation where Western capitalists selling electronic/computer components to the Russian military-industrial complex (comparable to the US, making up >20% of global arms exports and 20% of all manufacturing jobs in Russia) which turn up in cruise missiles and drones that end up hitting shopping malls, apartment blocks, maternity hospitals etc. is apparently acceptable but sending missile defence systems that actually prevent such weapons systems from killing civilians is not?

The monopolistic aspect of the land, where income is derived without a contribution to production, was a cause of great criticism from even pro-capitalist class economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Henry George, who (along with the socialists, obviously) would argue for rents to be public property. In more modern times attention has been drawn to the monopolistic profits derived from the various and increasingly important intellectual property rights, part of the trajectory identified in Daniel Bell's "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society" in 1974. A rather neat distinction has been drawn by Joseph Schumpeter who recognised that there was a type of monopoly rent that does depend on additional production (innovation patents) that can become a traditional Ricardian rent, like land rent if it continues beyond that period. This can be further elaborated to the economic interest in monopolistic network effects as the means of distribution, from which industrialists such as AT&T's Theodore Vail, the co-inventor of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, and former ICANN president, Rod Beckstrom, as major contributors.

Presentation to the Melbourne Agnostics Group, May 13, 2023
By way of introduction, I must mention the International Society for Philosophers, founded by the late Dr Geoffrey Klempner in 2000, with some two-thousand members across ninety-three countries, and open to all who are interested. This particular presentation follows a tangent in the discussion that followed a presentation to SoFiA in February this year entitled "The Soul of the Machines? - The Current State of Advanced Artificial Intelligence". As a person who has worn more than a few hats in their life, it may not surprise those present that I have given presentations concerning both transhumanism and political economy in the past, dating back to an address in 2004 to the Melbourne Unitarian Church entitled "The Future of the Human Species". As for political economy, David Miller may recall a presentation I gave to the Existentialist Society in 2007 entitled "Towards An Existentialist Political Economy". Combining the two, there was also a presentation to the Australian Singularity Summit, in 2010 entitled "Social Formations in A Transhumanist World". In this presentation I will begin by describing what I mean by "neotopia", before moving on to describing the features and debates over political economy, then exploring the application of these debates to technological trajectories and especially those that relate to transhumanism on one hand and the wider environment.

Let us begin with this term "neotopia". Almost trivial to mention, the prefix comes from the ancient Greek prefix νεο- (neo-), itself from νέος (néos, “new, young”) with the suffix also from the old Helleni τόπια (tópia), itself from Greek τόπος (tópos, “place”). Almost everyone here would be familiar with similar well-known terms such as utopia and dystopia. The former refers to an imaginary place with excellent qualities. "Utopia", of course, with a "u" derived from the Greek "oὐ (ou) which is a negation. In other words, "no place". Thomas More, who coined the term "Utopia" in his well-known book of the title 1516 was well aware of the distinction between this "nowhere" (which would be followed centuries later "News from Nowhere" by William Morris in 1892) and "Eutopia" with an "eu", that is a "good place" which at least is used in medicine. "Utopia" is a curious publication, deliberately written to provoke, both idealised and idealistic, critical of his contemporary society, but also often satirical with many impractical or utterly implausible suggestions; a personal favourite is how children would wait for their supper with "great silence".

While it would be inaccurate to describe the past six months of the war in Ukraine as devolving into a total stalemate, what is undeniable is that the front lines have become very much fixed. It would be accurate though, to describe the present moment as one of abeyance. Russia's winter offensive, its attempt to seize all of the Donbas, has demonstrably failed. President Vladimir Putin and Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin have exchanged thousands of Russian lives for a few worthless square kilometres around Bakhmut, and whatever the final outcome there, have created another Ukrainian legend of heroic defence. Yet one of the main causes of this relative stasis does not find its origin in the key decision-making centres in either Kyiv or Moscow, but rather in Berlin.

The decisive moment of both 2023 and likely the entire war, will be Ukraine's coming major counteroffensive operation, of which only a literal handful of people are involved in the planning (which hasn't stopped experts, both credentialed and armchair, from prognosticating on its timing and location). Most of the world stands with Ukraine, as the international community can see brave people sacrificing so much to fight for the freedom of their homeland. However time and money are not infinite, and no matter how unjust it might be, the truth is global support for maintaining the current supply of arms to Kyiv is contingent on there being a prospect of victory. Were this to become a true stalemate then the current levels of material and financial support would, sooner or later, be declared unsustainable, and there would be immense pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to allow peace negotiations to begin.

The Australian government has made the wrong decision to commit to purchasing up to eight nuclear-powered submarines as part of AUKUS, forecast to cost up to $368bn between now and the mid-2050s. Criticism against the decision can be expressed on three main points. Firstly, there's the matter of opportunity costs. This expense is far in excess of the benefits gained (or costs prevented). Secondly, the submarines are not actually designed to defend Australia, but rather they are an aggressive purchase that does not bode well for international peace and cooperation. Finally, as nuclear submarines, the purchase runs a real risk of weakening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in which Australia is a signatory.

The question of opportunity costs is something that was evocatively illustrated in Dwight D. Eisenhower in his famous 1953 speech, "A Chance for Peace". Eisenhower was no pacifist by any stretch of the imagination; during World War II, he was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and became a five-star General. He was responsible for supervising the liberation of North Africa from Nazi and fascist control and the successful liberation of Normandy. Yet, he would also say several years later:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

This article is part of keeping up with the humanitarian and political consequences of the devastating earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey at the dawn of February 6th. I am writing this content more than three weeks after the earthquake in Syria and Turkey. Throughout these weeks, whenever I begged myself to sleep, a series of images, scenes, and moments I experienced during the earthquake in Turkey flashed through my head. Sometimes, they all overlap in my head at once, so I can't separate them, or suddenly one of them jumps out without the other, repeating itself dozens of times. In some of them, faces and people are absent and their voice remains, or their voice is absent and their images remain, and in others, voices and faces are cut off. And in miserable times I tried to deceive the cruelest of them to beautify it, to banish it, to make it only a nightmare, and I failed, got up, and had a severe headache.

Will I die today?

The place: a small room in an old house consisting of three floors in the Mazrlik neighborhood in Antakya. The time: at dawn on Monday, February 6, 2023, at 4.17 am.

My bed shakes, and I wake up, it's not a fleeting little shake that Antakya is used to from time to time, I tell myself. The tremor intensifies, it's an earthquake, I get it. I quickly stand under (the door lintel ) the door of my room, knowing in advance that standing under the doors is a safe place during an earthquake. The earth does not stop shaking and becomes more intense, so I rush out of my room towards (the yard) of the house in front of it, I fall, swaying right and left, with difficulty getting up, and the shaking becomes more violent, will I die today? I talk to myself, and my neighbor Fatima and her husband, who live on the first floor of the house, come to my mind. I scream" Fatima Fatima" I see her and her husband go out to the (yard) of the house, without covering her head screaming like crazy, then I see my neighbor, his wife, and two daughters who live on the second floor, and the young daughter of the owner of the Turkish house “Dilay” who lives on the third floor, they all go down to the yard of the house, all of us Fine, we hold each other and go out into the street, the ground is still shaking, we all stand up and I embrace Dilay.

The definition of when a person becomes an adult varies according to culture, history, and discipline. In the English language a sequence is derived from etymology; "adult", from the French "adulte", from the Latin "adultus" ("grown up"), the perfect passive participle of adolescō ("I grow up"), itself from "adolescentem", the accusative form of "adolescens", present participle of "adolēscere" ("to become adult, grow up"), from ad- ("to") + alēscere ("to grow or become nourished"). With the subjectivity of individual differences it should be an uncontroversial point that individuals mature physically and cognitively at different ages.

A cultural or religious marker are various "coming of age" ceremonies which fit into the anthropological concept of "liminality", a transition from a pre-ritual status to a post-ritual status (Turner, 1974). Religous-cultural ceremonies are also a foundation in traditional law. For example, in the Christian tradition the Rite of Confirmation or anabaptism is usually at early adolesence, similar to the Judiac Bar and Bat mitzvah, and even in the secular form in Germany's secular "Jugendweihe". This can be compared to the provision of a courtesy name in East Asia, typically for men at aged twenty, and sometimes women typically at marriage (Wikinson, 2018).

Numerous cultural, legal, and historical examples are readily available which illustrate a wide divergence of the definition of when a person becomes an adult. Rather than engage in an extensive ethnological listing this essay will outline the methodological approach of formal pragmatics, conduct a literature review of some competing definitions, and apply a critical evaluation, before offering some useful conclusions.

Jiang Zemin, who died in late November, was arguably the most consequential Chinese leader of the post-Mao era. And at what feels like a pivotal moment for the People's Republic, it is worth considering why so many Chinese are looking back fondly on the Jiang era. And also what his rise and rule can reveal about power politics in China.

Under Jiang's stewardship as general secretary the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rebuilt itself after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he helped China navigate uncertain global politics after the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, join the World Trade Organisation and be awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics. Most importantly he oversaw consistent strong economic growth, with GDP quadrupling during his tenure, which has constituted the Party's major response to the Tiananmen challenge. Since then the CCP's unspoken, but clearly understood, social contract with the Chinese people has been “Do not ask for freedom and democracy and we will allow you to become rich”.

Michael Haines has spent over 50 years working at senior levels across construction, manufacturing, and logistics. In 2011, he set up a not-for-profit to work with major companies across the property, construction, and facilities management sector, along with global technology providers, to develop a governance framework for the emerging Digital Built Environment. Its purpose is to reduce complexity, while maintaining privacy and security, to deliver better outcomes more quickly, at less cost, and with less risk.

Since his retirement in 2019, he's been working with an advocacy group Basic Income Australia. The group's aim is to have a Universal Basic Income fully implemented in Australia by 2030, to eliminate systemic poverty, and to provide a new tool to help balance the labour market, as automation, virtualization, and AI change the job landscape.

Reading the 2000 edition of James Lovelock’s book "Gaia, the practical science of planetary medicine" (Lovelock, 2000) one find they adopt and retain many of Lovelock's perspectives. The term "Gaia" is emotively loaded, and Lovelock had received some very biased coverage on when interviewed and when he was advocating for nuclear energy. The term "Gaia" itself can inspire mistaken impressions in many - myself included initially - as they might envisage a Greek goddess from which the name comes and dismiss it as a "New Age" delusion but it is not. Lovelock's Gaia is the most utilitarian description of our dynamic living Earth from a top-down perspective, a biogeophysical self-regulating super organism, not necessarily sentient or intelligent but the same could be said for the deluded species destroying it. "Delusion" is the nicest explanations for our idiotic (Parker, 2005) ecocidal actions.

In any case, I highly recommend Lovelock's book, as he covers the human shortcomings of reductionist individuals and the institutions they form. He defines the nature of "Gaia" as he meant it to be used in a way that should satisfy any intelligent scientist or logical mind. One must also acknowledge in this context another visionary author; Fritjof Capra and his book "The web of Life" (1996). In summary, Lovelock outlines ecological interactions that possibly underlie the evolution of individual organisms, ecosystems and the emergent non anthropocentric nonsexual Gaia – an amazingly complex, resilient self-regulating emergent system of biogeophysical systems.