SOME RECENT LINKS

My hyperlinks have been piling up – indeed those for the full year already fill more than a hundred pages. I find them very useful as reminders of my daily finds. So time to identify what I have found useful in the last few weeks. It’s not all focused on texts – there have been some useful discussions on both video and podcast. I have huge respect for John Mearsheimer who engages here in discussion with Stephen Pinker about Reason and the Enlightenment

Cornel West is another who commands admiration and has a rather mutual-congratulary discussion here with Gabor Mate

“The Great Unravelling” is a term used increasingly to denote the “polycrises” which seem to be bedevilling the world and is explained in a useful report from the Post-Carbon Institute which is important background for this podcast exploration by David Runciman on whether the “anthropocene” is a useful term or whether “Leviacene” night not be a better term

Duncan Green is an Oxfam blogger I follow who frequently confronts the issue of power which is also the topic American academic Jeff Pfeffer writes about- this being a recent typical piece of his on the subject

Moses Naim wrote The End of Power (2013) about how powerful people in powerful roles are experiencing greater limits on their power. Naim notes how many people with fancy titles had confided in him about the perceived (or claimed) gaps between the power others attributed to them and both what they could get done and their own self-expressed perceptions of their power. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a book club, he named this book his first selection. I trust you appreciate the irony. As I write this, Zuckerberg is recentralizing his control over Facebook, and of course Facebook, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has a supermajority voting structure that assures that Zuckerberg cannot be fired regardless of what he does. Some people may face the end of power or limits on their power, but certainly not Zuckerberg; a lot fewer people have tenuous power than claim to.

In this same book, which I often hear about as an example of how theories and realities of power have fundamentally changed, Naim asks what globalization was doing to economic concentration. The presumption was that the globalization of business—and therefore, competition—would disperse economic power. He asked that question in 2013. By now the answer is clear, and it is not what many expected. Not only in the US but around the world, antitrust authorities are girding for battle because globalization has increased the concentration of power and wealth, particularly in technology multinationals but in other industries as well, such as telecommunications and even retail (perhaps you have heard of Amazon?). Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis, banks that were criticized as being too big to fail got—bigger. The story of nonexistent antitrust enforcement and increasing concentration of economic power is one often empirically told.

Then there are Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power (2018) Their thesis is that power wasn’t ending, but that power and its bases and use were being fundamentally transformed by things like the internet, social media, and new communication modalities. The result of this social and technological change was to be greater democratization, a word they use often, as the ideas of new power would make power less concentrated and available to more people. Their basic argument, expressed by numerous others, was that the ability of many individuals to readily acquire a communications platform (think blogs and accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and to easily access the world’s information (think Google) would lead to a proliferation of innovation and social movements. Much like the oft-discussed but ultimately unsuccessful Arab Spring, there would be, to take a phrase from the 1960s, more power to the people, including those lacking formal positions of power.

Unfortunately, reality intruded, and the most successful users of the new communication methods and social media platforms turned out to be those who already held political and economic power.

More to follow