Camille Corot

Huseyin Yildiz
 unknown
the oldest living tree in the world (4849 years old) in INYO National Park / Photographer
Corey Arnold
 what
kind of
future
will my
daughter
have?

Extinction Rebellion
11:eleven Photography
Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images
Camilo Farías
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 Alexandre Durand

EDS
Editor in chief Kal
le Lasn
senior Editor John
Bucher
Writer/EDitor Tre
vor Clarke
contributing Editor
s
Deborah Campbell
Clive Hamilton
James MacKinnon
Andy Merrifield
Joseph Moore
Lela Vujnić
At its start, the internet was still relatively scarce, in the sense that we
generally wanted more of it everywhere. iPhones were new; we were still
excited about carrying portals to that utopia in our pockets and finding new
ways to integrate two domains that were previously separate. Ten years
ago, I could sit in a bar and wish that it better reflected the future I was
experiencing. Today, a growing number of people understand the internet
as something more akin to an all-encompassing miasma, one that seeps into
every available corner of the world to watch us, listen to us, commodify us,
and manipulate us — a condition from which the only true relief is physically
walling ourselves off.
— Drew Austin
 In October, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reported that after a stable period from 2000
to 2007, the rate of suicide among those ages 10 to 24
increased significantly — by 56 percent — between 2007
and 2017, making suicide the second-leading cause of
death in this age group, after accidents like car crashes.
“We’re in the middle of a full-blown mental health crisis
for adolescents and young adults,” said Jean M. Twenge,
a research psychologist at San Diego State University and
the author of the book “iGen,” about mental health trends
among those born since 1995. “The evidence is strong and
consistent both for symptoms and behavior.”
Along with suicides, since 2011, there’s been nearly a
400 percent increase nationally in suicide attempts by self-
poisoning among young people. “Suicide attempts by the
young have quadrupled over six years, and that is likely an
undercount,” said Henry A. Spiller, director of the Central
Ohio Poison Center, who called the trend “devastating.”
“These are just the ones that show up in the E.R.”
— from Time to Sound the Alarm Over Youth Suicides,
by Jane E. Brody, The New York Times
 web
Web Wiz Dobby
web magician E.M.
data daddy J.M.
Web Consultant Hawson Shi

Le.BLUE
 To allow others to think about us in whatever way they feel
like — perhaps to laugh at us, perhaps to dismiss us — is
a huge loss of control. So why do we allow it? What is the
attraction of it? I think that it’s the increase in control we get
in return. Social media has enabled the Great Control Swap.
And it is happening right now, beneath our notice.

The first baby step toward the Great Swap was the shift from
phone calls to texts. A phone interaction requires participants
to be “on the same time,” which entails negotiations over
entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the
time we spend first on, “Is this a bad time to call? Can you
talk?” And then later on, “O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see
you later, good talking to you . . .” (It’s only in the movies that
you can just hang up on someone.) Everyone has been in a
phone conversation that ended much later than they wanted
it to; the form subjects us to the will of another.
A text or email interaction, by contrast, liberates the parties
so that each may operate on their own time. But the cost
comes in another form of control: data. Homer’s “winged
words” fly from the mouth of one directly to the ear of another,
but text-based communication requires stationary words: One
person puts them down, so the other can come along and read
them at their leisure. And that means they leave a trail.
Imagine a man conducting a romantic affair exclusively by
email. He needn’t lie to his wife about fake “business trips,”
since he can pursue his shenanigans right under her nose.
Likewise, he avoids undesirable entanglements with his
mistress: He doesn’t even need to buy her dinner! Email allows
him the control to steer the two women out of the way of one
another — but the price he pays is a very robust data trail. His
affair has a text archive. If his mistress decides to write a book
about it, she can be scientific. She needn’t rely on memory
or vague impressions. She can systematically analyze their
interactions and quote his exact words.
— from Agnes Callard, The Real Cost of Tweeting About My
Kids, The New York Times
 Tallie Baram, a neurologist at the University of
California, devised an experiment with baby rats. She
wondered how it would affect them down the line if
their mothers were constantly distracted.
One group of rats was raised in a cage without
enough nesting material — so the moms were
constantly running around looking for more bits of
soft stuff instead of paying attention to their children.
The control group got enough material in their cage to
create a comfortable home — so those mother rats did
attend properly for their pups.
The researchers monitored both groups of baby rats
as they grew up.
By adolescence, a clear trend had emerged.
Something had happened to the rats raised by
distracted mothers. They showed less interest in food,
explored less, played less, and were more listless than
the control-group rats. (The results were published in
Transactional Psychiatry.)
In a similar human experiment, psychologist Sarah
Myruski and her team looked at the development of
babies of moms who were constantly on the phone.
The results, published in Developmental Science,
confirmed the worst. Those neglected kids were
distressed, less curious, and slower to recover their
spark after mom tuned back in from cyberspace. Baram,
the neurologist, just received a $15 million grant to do
a massive study of the consequences of fragmented
parenting caused by epidemic cellphone addiction.
But one question won’t be answered, because it’s
one of philosophy, not science:
What does it mean when your Instagram feed is more
interesting to you than your own child?
— Harry Flood
 Edward Snowden, late in the pages of
his memoir, Permanent Record, describes
his sensa tion at being perso nally
introd uced to XKEY SCOR E, the NSA’s
ultima te tool of intima te, indivi dual
electr onic surve illanc e. Amon g the
NSA’s techn ologic al tools (some of
which Snowd en aided in perfec ting),
XKEYSCORE was, according to Snowden,
“the most invasive . . . if only because
[the NSA agents are] closest to the user
— that is, the closest to the person being
surveilled.” For nearly three hundred
pages , the memo ir has built to this
scene, foreshadowed in the preface, in
which the whistleblower-in-the-making
sees behind the curtain:

I sat at a terminal from which I had

practically unlimited access to the
communications of nearly every man,
woman, and child on Earth who’d ever
dialed a phone or touched a computer.
Among those people were about 320
million of my fellow American citizens,
who in the regular conduct of their
everyday lives were being surveilled
in gross contravention of not just the
Constitution of the United States, but
the basic values of any free society.
The steady approach to Snowden’s come-
to-Jesus encounter with XKEYSCORE is as
meticulous as the incremental unveiling of
the terror of Cthulhu in an H. P. Lovecraft tale.
Snowden himself alludes to this parallel:
It was, simply put, the closest thing to
science fiction I’ve ever seen in science
fact: an interface that allows you to
type in pretty much anyone’s address,
telephone number, or IP address, and
then basically go through the recent
history of their online activity. In
some cases you could even play back
recordings of their online sessions, so
that the screen you’d be looking at was
their screen, whatever was on their
desktop.
And: “It was like watching an autocomplete,
as letters and words flashed across the
screen. But the intelligence behind that
typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a
humancomplete.” And:
One thing you come to understand
very quickly while using XKEYSCORE
is that nearly everyone in the world
who’s online has at least two things
in common: they have all watched
porn at one time or another, and they
all store photos and videos of their
family. This was true for virtually
everyone of every gender, ethnicity,
race, and age — from the meanest
terrorist to the nicest senior citizen.
— f rom Snowden in the Labyrinth,
Jonathan Lethem, New York Review
of Books
 The drones above us can be understood as harbingers of
a total digital colonization that is already being undertaken
by Silicon Valley through the ‘internet of things’ (a phrase
connoting the absolute integration of our homes, vehicles, and
infrastructure of our lives into one single network); ‘smart cities’
(the privatization of our cities’ infrastructure by Silicon Valley);
social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram); Google transport
innovations (drones, Tesla Motors), Big Data, total surveillance,
AI, VR, and last but not least, ‘immortality’ (Silicon Valley’s dream
that we will upload our brains and live for ever). All these fields
of massive investment and radical innovation are transforming
our reality in such a profound way that every aspect of our lives
will soon be integrated into a big global digital Circle.
— Srecko Horvat, Poetry from the Future
 Since the early 20th century we
have seen how the metaphysical
twilight of the gods, which has
preoccupied philosophers and theologians,
has been accompanied by an earthly twilight
of the souls. The emergence of psychoanalysis,
and more recently the development of the neuro-
cognitive sciences, have secularized the old Indo-
European concept of the soul and transferred
accomplishments of the human mind to
computerized machines. What remains of the
eternal light of the soul after the artificial
lights have been turned on?
— Peter Sloterdijk, After God
 Billions of us now have the most
revolutionary tool ever invented in
the palms of our hands . . .
suddenly we have unprecedented
power . . . we can:

— Launch a metamemetic,
‘big ideas’ insurrection in
the ECO realm and bring
global warming to a halt.

— Unleash a Mental Liberation

Front in the PSYCHO realm and
stop surveillance capitalism in
its tracks!

We fight a dual-track guerrilla war

against the old world order and put
our failing experiment on Planet Earth
onto a sane, sustainable path.
 Why do Facebook,
Google, Twitter
and Instagram keep
the inner workings
of their algorithms
hidden from us?
Time to crack open
the secret code
of surveillance
capitalism.
Scott Masear
 Why are so many bots
and fake accounts
lurking around the
internet?

Why don’t we get rid

of them ... require
everyone to open up
to who they are.

Make our democracy work again.

Scott Masear
Big Tech is making hundreds of billions
of dollars a year off our personal data …
so how come we get nothing?

Time to renegotiate the relationship:

tell Zuck, Brin, Sergey, Bezos
that from now on, if you want to
harvest my personal data, you’ll
have to pay me for it.

We start charging royalties:

a ‘psycho tax,’ on surveillance
capitalism.
We know so little of the worlds
beneath our feet.

Look up on a cloudless night and

you might see the light from a
star thousands of trillions of miles
away, or pick out the craters left by
asteroid strikes on the moon’s face.
Look down and your sight stops at
topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt
as far from the human realm as when
only ten yards below it, caught in the
shining jaws of a limestone bedding
plane first formed on the floor of an
ancient sea. >>

TIM GAINEY
Paolo Neo
 The underland keeps its
secrets well. Only in the
last twenty years have
ecologists succeeded
in tracing the fungal
networks that lace
woodland soil, joining
individual trees into
intercommunicating
forests — as fungi have
been doing for hundreds
of millions of years. >>
Marc Pell / unsplash
We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense
and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not
as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence
experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of
joint — and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up
unbidden. When confronted by such surfacings it can be hard to look away,
seized by the obscenity of the intrusion.  >>
In his book Vertical, Stephen Graham describes the dominance of what
he calls the ‘flat tradition’ of geography and cartography, and the ‘largely
horizontal worldview’ that has resulted. We find it hard to escape the
‘resolutely flat perspectives’ to which we have become habituated, Graham
argues — and he finds this to be a political failure as well as a perceptual
one, for it disinclines us to attend to the sunken networks of extraction,
exploitation, and disposal that support the surface world.
Yes, for many reasons we tend to turn away from what lies beneath. But now more
than ever we need to understand the underland. ‘Force yourself to see more flatly,’
orders Georges Perec in Species of Spaces. ‘Force yourself to see more deeply,’ I
would counter. The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary
existence, as well as to our memories, myths, and metaphors. It is a terrain with
which we daily reckon and by which we are daily shaped. Yet we are disinclined to
recognize the underland’s presence in our lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to
our imaginations. Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep
worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving.
— Robert Macfarlane, Underland

crimethink
 tumblr

A global movement is
gaining momentum that grants legal
personhood to rivers, lakes, forests,
and mountains. It is just one element
of a controversial new animism by
which writers, scholars, lawyers, and
politicians are radically reassessing
our place in the natural world.
— Robert Macfarlane
On 26 February 2019, a lake became human. For
years, Lake Erie — the southernmost of the Great
Lakes — has been in ecological crisis. Invasive
species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing. Each
summer, blue-green algae blooms in volumes visible
from space, creating toxic “dead zones”; the algae
is nourished by fertiliser and slurry pollution from
surrounding farms. In August 2014, phosphorus run-
off so fouled Erie that the city of Toledo, at the
lake’s western tip in Ohio, lost drinking water for
three days in the hottest part of the year.

Appalled by the lake’s degradation, and exhausted by state

and federal failures to improve Erie’s health, in December
2018 Toledo City councillors drew up an extraordinary
document: an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Erie. At
the bill’s heart was a radical proposition: that the “Lake
Erie ecosystem” should be granted legal personhood, and
accorded the consequent rights in law — including the
right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”.

— from Ness, by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood

It is essential that we change the way we think and
talk when considering these legal fictions which Thomas
Hobbes once called “worms in the body politic,” when
nate
trying to figure out what to do with these subordi
bodies. We need to encour age people to see how logical
and rational it is to aspire to dismantle giant
corporations, and to use the assets they have seized
us
from us to create the institutions we need to help
do our work, repair our communities, meet our wants.

— Richard L. Grossman
 Monsanto planned a series of “actions” to
attack a book written by Carey Gillam prior
to its release, including writing “talking
points” for “third parties” to criticise
Monsanto paid Google to promote
the book and directing “industry and
search results for “Monsanto
farmer customers” on how to post
Glyphosate Carey Gillam” that
negative reviews.
criticised her work. Monsanto PR
staff also internally discussed placing
sustained pressure on Reuters,
saying they “continue to push back on
Monsanto “fusion center” officials [Gillam’s] editors very strongly every
wrote a lengthy report about singer chance we get”, and that they were
Neil Young’s anti-Monsanto advo cacy , hoping “she gets reassigned”.
monitoring his impact on social media,
and at one point considering “legal
monitored
action”. The fusion center also edly
US Right to Know (USRTK), a
not-for- Monsanto officials were repeat
cuments
profit producing weekly report
s on the worried about the release of do
with
organization’s online activity. on their financial relationships
scientists that could supp ort the
allegations they were “covering up
unflattering research”.

— from Revealed: How Monsanto’s ‘Intelligence Center’ Targeted

Journalists and Activists, by Sam Levin, The Guardian
blight of
the roundtable
Adam Smith never meant for his hairy and much-
abused “invisible hand” to be invoked as a defense
of free markets. The famed eighteenth-century Scot
merely meant it to illustrate the “hidden” or unwitting
benefit, for all society, of individuals’ supporting
the industry of their countrymen, in contrast to their
buying imported goods. He uses the metaphor (now
cliché) but once in the heaping pages of The Wealth
of Nations, and only twice in his other writings, neither
of which have anything to do with economics. He was
barely cold before his classical-school begets began
to warp his words, assigning to them meanings he
never intended.
In the same storied tome, Smith warns of the dan-
gers of encroaching monopolies. “Merchants and
manufacturers are not contented with the monopoly
of the home market, but desire likewise the most
extensive foreign sale for their goods.” (Remember
that unseen appendage.) American companies today
sit atop the globe like an all-eclipsing octopus, their
dread tentacles reaching every corner, blotting out all
competition. And with a degree of dishonesty similar
to Smith’s perverters, today’s corporate gentry shouts
the words “responsibility ” and “virtue” as if they had
no prior meaning. Betraying the fact that they hear
axes grinding and tumbrils jostling from atop their
gilt balconies, C-suites have begun to make nervous
overtures to the paying public. For example, in a
statement issued in August, the Business Roundtable,
a lobbying group comprised exclusively of top-shelf
CEOs — among them those of Apple, Amazon, and
Walmart — announced that it is “modernizing its
principles on the role of a corporation.”
The statement is prefaced with the comforting
reminder that “America’s economic model, which is
based on freedom, liberty and other enduring prin-
ciples” — it’s up to you to recall them — “has raised
standards of living for generations.” In case you were
to look, there’s no indication of whose standards,
exactly, are under discussion. Nor is there any word on
corporations’ penchant for environmental degradation,
nor on their longstanding tradition of legal evasion.
Nor on their habitual exploitation of workers, whether
domestic or abroad. Nor on their characteristic
practice of anti-democratic political meddling.
The Roundtable then moistly declares that its con-
stituent billionaires “know that many Americans are
struggling.” (Congratulations to them on leaving the
gates of their châteaux.) “Too often hard work is not
rewarded, and not enough is being done for work-
ers” — an insulting, patronizing sentiment, implying
Let them
eat stakes!
workers are either whining malcontents or infantile
dependents. And no word on the grotesque propor-
tions of salaries for CEOs — for the top one hun-
dred, now over two hundred and fifty times greater
than the median pay of their own workers. It goes
on. “If companies fail to recognize that the success
of our system is dependent on inclusive long-term
growth, many will raise legitimate questions about
the role of large employers in our society.” Names
such as Sanders and Warren, let alone Marx and
Engels, seem never to have reached the ears of
these aloof high-flyers.
But the propagandistic crux of the statement rests
with its sunny emphasis on “stakeholders” — those
affected by, but not necessarily invested in, a com-
pany’s activities — over the privileged old category
of “shareholders.” Since 1997, according to the
Roundtable, its Principles of Corporate Governance
have stated “that corporations exist principally to
serve their shareholders.” (Their version of “greed
is good.”) But the blight of the Roundtable is ready
to repent. “It has become clear that this language
on corporate purpose does not accurately describe
the ways in which we and our fellow CEOs endeavor
every day to create value for all our stakeholders.”
Now wait a moment. If read carefully, that last sen-
tence will reveal at once the Roundtable’s perfidy.
Its meaning, subtly construed, is not that it feels
that it must do more to address interests beyond
sheer greed. Rather, it is that it already does so, but,
due to its own misleading choice of words, merely
did itself a disservice by not making that sterling lie
plain enough to the groaning masses.
No further discussion is necessary. The rest is
cynical drivel of the same sort, to be taken seriously
by no one. “We foster diversity and inclusion,
dignity and respect.” “We respect the people in
our communities and protect the environment.”
“We are committed to transparency and effective
engagement with shareholders.” And there it is
again, that funny old word. Meanwhile, the teeming,
seething rabble gathers. You can be sure to find a
few stakeholders in its midst.
— Trevor Clarke
This is the way the world ends, this
is the way the world ends, this is the
way the world ends — not with a
bang but with a visitors’ center.

— Robert Macfarlane, Underland

Drew Angerer/Getty Images
 Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman
wrote a powerful book, The Hidden
Wealth of Nations (2015), which
supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich
people in tax havens. According to
calculations that Zucman himself says
are conservative, the missing money
amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant
fraction of all planetary wealth. It is
as if, when it comes to the question
of paying their taxes, the rich have
seceded from the rest of humanity.

A crackdown on international evasion is difficult

because it requires international co-ordination,
but common sense tells us this would be by no
means impossible. Effective legal instruments
to prevent offshore tax evasion are incredibly
simple and could be enacted overnight, as
the United States has just shown with its
crackdown on olgiarchs linked to Putin’s regim
e.
All you have to do is make it illegal for banks
to enact transactions with territories that don’t
comply with rules on tax transparency. That
closes them down instantly.

— John Lanchester, After the Fall, London Review of Books

 roam the financial ecosystem looking for quick kills.
Using sophisticated computer algorithms, traders
place thousands of orders per second, only to
reverse them a few moments later. Sometimes these
forays are not designed to actually buy shares, but
only to test the market and glean information about
rivals. Traders scramble to gain the advantage by
moving their computers next to the stock exchange’s
own servers, thus cutting transaction times down to
millionths of a second. More than
70 percent of equity trading in America is of this
hyper variety, with other nations quickly catching
on. High Frequency Trading (HFT) escalates the
obsessive impulses of capitalism to an entirely
new level of abstraction. Today HFT stands as one
of the most ingenious schemes yet devised for
getting money to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money

to beget money

to beget money
reuters
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money

to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget mo
ney
to beget mone
y
to beget m
oney
to beget m
oney
to beget mone
y
to beget m
oney
to beget m
oney
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money

to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money

to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
to beget money
WITHOUT END
 Behind the shiny glass doors
of your not-so-friendly, not-so-
neighborhood bank,
everything they know
about you is for sale: your
account numbers, bank
balance, loan history, home
address, credit history,
Social Security number.
The checks you write and recieve,
the invoices you pay, and the
investments you make reveal as
much about you as a personal
diary; but instead of banks keeping
your information under lock and
key, they collect it, cross-reference
it, collate it, and sell it — mostly to
companies determined to sell you
something else.
— Jim Hightower, The End of Privacy
 Mishka Henner, Zero Dollars (2014). From the artist’s collection.
Acrylic and Poster paint on acid-free mountboard, 6.7x5.9 inches.

Over

to zero.
the world
the next few
years, we can

Esther Duflo
reduce extreme
poverty around

Nobel prize winning Professor

Human beings are in a state of denial about the calamity of calamities our
economy is actively engineering. Unfortunately, we needn’t look far to
find one of its major sources, namely, the modern study of economics (in
particular, Economics 101). Each year, millions of students have their noses
forced into textbooks that investigate or illuminate no causal connection
extending from the economy to the ecosphere. (In this formulation, the
environment provides fuel for industry, but suffers no return impact from it.)
We’ve known for centuries, of course, that some environmental costs attend
economic advance, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that we saw the size
of industrial appetites—or impacts. What happened? When the global
economy moved away from muscle energy, it began to acquire the means to
cause lethal damage to the ecosphere.
It has now been half a century since the
natural sciences began to articulate the
irreversible harm the economy can do the
ecosphere. While the focus of economics
remains narrow—it is, simply, the study of
the economy—has it shown any capacity for
widening the jurisdiction of its inquiry?
In these 50 years, the answer is no. There
have been brilliant and intellectually brave
economists, of course, like the creators of
“ecological economics.” (In fact, some have
contributed to this special issue.) But their
work goes ignored by nine in 10 economists,
and nearly all professors. In the academy,
it’s 19th-century theory that continues to
hold sway. And students, catastrophically,
go on studying a model of the economy that
obscures fundamental facts about it uncovered
by natural science. Let’s take a look at how this
censorship is achieved.
Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is
the world’s most popular economics textbook,
and the prototype for nearly all others. It is a
huge volume. The index of its fourth edition
comprises 18 pages, and some 2,500 entries;
it also illustrates the near-total shutout of
environmental consideration from economics
tuition. Take these 11 common terms for
describing the relationship between the
economy and our life-support system:
biosphere, climate change, climate science,
climatology, ecosphere, ecosystem,
emissions, global warming, greenhouse gas,
threshold, tipping point
How many of them appear in Mankiw’s 2,500
entries? None. Nor are any found among the
book’s 13 section titles, 36 chapter titles, or
700 sub-chapter titles. Why?
Because the basic theoretical structure
of economics will not accommodate
the bidirectional causal link between
the economy and the ecosphere. In the
19th century, when today’s mainstream
economics was invented, the global economy
was too small to create observable effects on
the ecosphere—and none were anticipated.
(Even then, of course, economies damaged
their immediate environment, but the effects
were small enough to reasonably ignore.)
This is how it came to be that economists
dumped an economy’s ill outcomes
into a broad conceptual category called
“externalities”—and why, in Economics 101,
you find them there still.
“Negative externalities,” according to Mankiw,
are the not so nice things that happen when
“market equilibrium fails to maximize the
total benefit to society as a whole”—in other
words, when unforeseen problems arise.
He offers two examples:
• “The exhaust from automobiles . . .
because it creates smog that other
people have to breathe.”
• “Barking dogs . . . because neighbours
are disturbed by the noise.”
Further on, Mankiw argues that today’s
“environmental degradation” is analogous
to the problem of overgrazing in the
Middle Ages.
Climatologists see the problem of
externalities as more serious than barking
dogs and overgrazing.
The eminent climatologist Will Steffen
sums it up this way:

“It’s clear the economic

system is driving us towards
an unsustainable future and
people of my daughter’s
generation will find it
increasingly hard to survive.”
And: “History has shown that civilizations
have risen, stuck to their core values,
and then collapsed because they didn’t
change. That’s where we are today.”

Humanity has been hoodwinked by a

central delusion of Economics 101—that
the ecosphere and the economy are
connected in one direction only. This is
one reason we stand now at the precipice.
As John Maynard Keynes noted, “The
ideas of economists, both when they
are right and when they are wrong,
are more powerful than is commonly
understood.” And no economists’ ideas
have proven more wrong, or more adept
at doing wrong, than those force-fed the
economics students of today. Thanks to
natural scientists, we now understand
that the longer a mass indoctrination into
this fantasy world persists, the likelier
looms the ultimate disaster. It is not only
with bombs and gas that crimes against
humanity are committed. It is with also
with ideas. Everyone connected with
economics, most of all the students,
needs to ask what he or she can do to
help correct course. Our hope is that this
special issue of Real-World Economics
Review assists in that questioning.

— adapted from Economics 101: Dogs

barking, overgrazing and ecological
collapse, by Edward Fullbrook, in Real-
World Economics Review, issue no. 87
The time has come to question the kind of economics you are
taught . . . to ask if mainstream economics has any value . . . maybe
even to question if economics is a science.

Here are five ways you can help re-establish credence and trust:

Stop pretending that we have exact and rigorous answers on

everything. Because we don’t. We build models and theories and
tell people that we can calculate and foresee the future. But we do
this based on mathematical and statistical assumptions that often
have little or nothing to do with reality. By pretending that there is no
really important difference between model and reality we lull people
into thinking that we have things under control. We haven’t! This
false feeling of security was one of the factors that contributed to the
financial crisis of 2008.

Stop the childish and exaggerated belief in mathematics giving

answers to important economic questions. Mathematics gives
exact answers to exact questions. But the relevant and interesting
questions we face in the economic realm are rarely of that kind.
Questions like “Is 2 + 2 = 4?” are never posed in real economies.
Instead of a fundamentally misplaced reliance on abstract
mathematical-deductive-axiomatic models having anything of
substance to contribute to our knowledge of real economies, it
would be far better if we pursued “thicker” models and relevant
empirical studies and observations.

Stop pretending that there are laws in economics. There are no

universal laws in economics. Economies are not like planetary
systems or physics labs. The most we can aspire to in real
economies is establishing possible tendencies with varying degrees
of generalizability.

Stop treating other social sciences as poor relatives. Economics

has long suffered from hubris. A more broad-minded and
multifarious science would enrich economics.

Stop building models and making forecasts of the future based on

totally unreal micro-founded macromodels with intertemporally
optimizing robot-like representative actors equipped with rational
expectations. This is pure nonsense. We have to build our models
on assumptions that are not blatantly in contradiction to reality.
Assuming that people are ‘lightning calculators of pleasures and
pains’ is not a good — not even as a ‘successive approximation’ —
modelling strategy.

— from Lars Syll, How to re-establish​​trust in economics as a science

I have a love/hate relationship with Esther
Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, two of the three
economists who won the 2019 Nobel Prize
for economics. Their new book, Good
Economics For Hard Times, takes a hard,
honest stare at inequality, globalization,
techno disruption and accelerating climate
change. It’s a good read. For sure it’s more
down-to-earth than books by earlier Nobel
Prize winners like Amartya Sen and Joseph
Stiglitz. It builds the case for an intelligent
path towards a society built on compassion
and respect. And Duflo and Abhijit make
message of their book is that the best strat-
the stunning claim that extreme poverty
egy for poor people is to row harder and not
around the world can be reduced to zero in
rock the boat. Don’t question the system.
just a few years.
As a blueprint for the future, that’s
But something doesn’t feel right.
almost criminal.
The problem is this:
How can any truly progressive thought
You can change the way we play Monopoly leaders, in good conscience, not question
– slap a carbon tax on the railroads, a system that is categorically corrupt, that
incentivize the utilities, make everyone splashes trillions of dollars a day through
say namaste when they push their little cyberspace (with almost all the spillage
hat or thimble past Go — but we’re still … caught in the buckets of rich), the whole thing
playing Monopoly. dependent on perpetual “growth” that’s driv-
ing us toward ecocide, war, and a future not
No truly radical economists could ever even billionaires with a Doomsday Escape
win the Nobel Prize for Economics, Plan can outrun.
because what’s really needed is some-
thing way beyond the pale for judges in There are real things that can be done that
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: would make a difference. We can ban deriva-
A total rethink of the basic assumptions tives and flash trading. Hit market speculators
of the game. with a Robin Hood Tax. Take steps to usher
in a true-cost global market regime in which
Duflo and Banerjee take conventional the price of every product tells the ecological
development theory and practice for truth. Learn how to measure real economic
granted. Their approach is to help the progress beyond GDP.
poor help themselves within the current
system. Be more entrepreneurial. Spend But these kinds of actions require a genuine
less and save more. The authors show evolutionary leap in economic thinking — a
how well-crafted interventions can gener- paradigm shift in the science of economics.
ate positive results at the micro-level, but
We need not Good Economics for Hard Times
they give a pass to the economic system
but Hard Economics for Hard Times.
that produces poverty in the first place.
They never challenge the structures that Who has the stones to write that one?
legitimize the flow of Third World wealth
into the pockets of the rich. The disturbing Anyone?

— Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars – The Creative Destruction

of Neoclassical Economics
 Once we pull off a
paradigm shift in the
science of economics,
everything will fall
magically into place
 Long Live
the Barefoot Economist
Manfred Max-Neef earned his nickname "the barefoot
economist" for his work with people who live below the
radar, outside the purview of the dominant economic
paradigm. He recognised that although these people
were financially and materially poor, they were rich
in many other ways. Hence he began a critique of
mainstream economics and a journey of searching for
a new language that could truly articulate people’s
quality of life.

He described his first book, From the Outside Looking In:

Experiences of a Barefoot Economist as a "book about life,
where human facts and feelings have replaced abstract
statistics." In it, he argued that population figures were
less important than environmental resource-use and
proposed a new measure: the ecoson — the fair amount
of resource-use for a human to live sustainably — a
forerunner of the now well-established ecological-
footprint methodology.

He later built on these ideas with what many consider

his seminal work, Human Scale Development, in which he
suggested that the only way to build a sustainable future
was through active participation from the bottom up. He
argued that sustainable ways of life can be found which
Ask your professor: are just as satisfying as the current, materially intensive
ways, if not more so.

Manfred was my mentor for several decades and I will

Is economics a remember him as an intellectually generous man who
cold, theoretical was always willing to exchange ideas and who never
game lost his revolutionary spirit. His third and final book,
or . . . Economics Unmasked, was almost a "rage against the
dying of the light," reminding us all that the battles
a profoundly with the dominant economic paradigm are very far
personal from being won.
discipline that
goes to the heart He died, aged 86, at his home in Valdivia, Chile. He is
survived by Gaby, his wife of over 50 years, and their
of who we are daughter Magdalena.
as human beings?
 — Nic Marks
First published in Resurgence & Ecologist, Issue 317

Stick on professor’s doors

 Lost
Homeland
— Trevor Clarke

Matt Bonner
JOEY L.
Place yourself in the Middle East. Amid dusty desert
and snow-touched highlands live a people many times
more numerous than the population of Palestine. They
share distinct traditions, customs, a language, and a
history, altogether constituting a culture particular to
themselves. Their lands know no borders but those
of nations overlaid, which cleave and carve their own,
making them a minority within each. They have strug-
gled under empires and Great Powers; against over-
bearing governments and warring armies. Once abet-
tors, they are the victims of persecution and genocide.
As an aptly dejected saying of theirs goes, they have
“no friends but the mountains.” They are the Kurds,
outsiders everywhere and to all.

The Kurds should be familiar to most due to their
prominence in international news. They make up the
legendary, feared militias allied with the U.S. against
ISIL, that most hateful of modern terror groups. They
themselves have been deemed terrorists, and are
hunted for it. But how they came to their present
condition rarely receives much mention. To truly
understand the Kurds, who at roughly thirty million
are the world’s largest ethnic group without a proper
state, and to understand their plight, one must listen
for the reverberations of the past.
Like an unpropitious blot of ink spilled on a map, the
home claimed by the Kurds bleeds outwards from
the unforgiving neighbourhood where Iran, Turkey,
Syria, and Iraq meet. And though their history spans
centuries, the contest for an independent Kurdish
nation took shape among these abutting states
only as their own bounds were drawn, and the old
imperial world roiled in its last violent convulsions. It
was not until then that an emerging consciousness
of a distinct Kurdish ethnicity mingled with the rising
allure of nationalism, begetting the battle for Kurdish
statehood which today remains unwon.
begin with the Kurds’ utter rout at the hands of the invading
Mongols in the thirteenth century, nor after Tamerlane’s
sacking of many Kurdish strongholds a century and a half
later, nor even as they found themselves caught between
ascending Ottoman and Safavid (Persian) empires. It had a
promising but false start in the late nineteenth century with
the much-mythologized rebellion of Sheikh Ubeydullah, an
early hero to many nationalists, whose abortive invasion
of Qajar Persia on the pretense of uniting Kurdistan was
more a tribal scuffle made large than an uprising in ear-
nest. Rather, it took the fall of a failing empire, and a world
redrawn by war, for ambitions of national independence to
take hold of Kurdistan.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire
was undergoing a crisis. The technological prowess, military
might, and political will of contending powers in Europe and
Russia threatened to unravel its frayed and far-flung tapestry.
Kurds were among the earliest to push for modernizing (read:

The Kurds have long enjoyed a reputation as an

indomitable people. From the time of the early
Muslim conquests, begun under the generalship of
the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, the
pastoral Kurdish tribes of Mesopotamia fell into a
pattern of rebellion against the invader. Along with
repression, their recalcitrance occasionally brought
them independence, or partial independence. And
where it did not, they were often able to command
authority as influential members of power-wielding
classes. During the Crusades, for example, Kurds (by
then, largely Sunni Muslims) were commonly found
among the highest ranks of the Islamic army.

Though much may have been prefigured by this

ancient past, the modern fight for Kurdish sover-
eignty was born hundreds of years later. It did not
alberto hugo rojas
European-style) reforms but, at least at first, as loyal Ottomans
above all. Many Kurds living or educated in metropolitan
Istanbul identified more naturally as imperial subjects — partic-
ipants in a “greater and more sophisticated political culture,” as
David McDowall puts it, in his Modern History of the Kurds —
and were averse to the parochial connotations of ethnic nation-
alism. Others feared alienating the disparate groups on whom
they depended economically or socially, instead holding fast
to their membership within an assorted community united, by
and large, by a common Muslim faith. Yet others, dreading the
prospect of political change in and of itself, felt the impulse to
cling to “the old verities of caliph and sultan.”

But for others, only independence was enough. The rift

between those who called for autonomy within a larger
state-apparatus and those who would settle for nothing short
of secession, undoubtedly hindered the nationalist cause
then, as does a similar disunity today. (To say nothing of those
who stressed obeisance to religious authority.) However,
both camps, despite their divisions, contributed to a growing
sense of ethnic kinship and political awareness among Kurds.
Newspapers, for the first time published in Kurdish and catered
to Kurdish interests, cropped up, fostering conversations on
both sides of the debate. A smattering of political societies
was set up by the Kurdish intelligentsia of major cities. Two of
twelve founders of the subversive Committee for Union and
Progress (CUP), Abdullah Cevdet and İshak Sükuti, were Kurds.
Meanwhile, sociologist Ziya Gökalp, though a Kurd, contributed
greatly to the hardening of Turkish nationalism, which caught
on within the radical wings of the CUP and its infamous affiliate,
the Young Turks.

In 1908, after more than a decade of suppression, the Young

Turks successfully revolted against Sultan Abdul Hamid II,
establishing the Second Constitutional Era. That the Turks had
mobilized their own ethno-national movement to revolution-
ary ends made it all the more urgent for others to catch up.
Minorities besides the Kurds began to organize (such as the
Greeks and especially the Bulgarians, who declared inde-
pendence months after the Young Turk Revolution), partly of
their own accord but also partly in response to the coup. Any
pretensions of tolerance the Young Turks may have feigned
were quickly demasked, and in the capital Kurdish political
activity was forced underground. In the hinterland, sheikhs and
sayyids, representing a network of religious influence, closed
ranks with civilian aghas in opposition to the new government.
Disquiet spread and foredoomed plots, including a botched
countercoup in 1909, were hatched.

Then the Great War broke out. During a foray into the north of
Kurdistan at the close of 1914, Russian and Armenian troops
(united by their Christianity) ravaged that area’s Kurdish
population, purportedly leaving fewer than one in ten alive.
Within Ottoman borders as in nominally neutral Iran, Kurdish
leaders called for jihad, pitting Muslim against Christian,
neighbour against neighbour. Amid the tides of war, villagers
and peasants routinely died of exposure as well as atrocity.
Kurdish tribesmen were reported to have committed unthink-
able crimes against women and children. Massacres became
commonplace, and ethnic cleansing rampant. In exile, Kurdish
intellectual Sherif Pasha published claims of the Young
Turks’ having planned the “extermination” of the Armenians.
The Kurds are the largest
ethnic group without
a proper state.
In the fateful year of 1915, no fewer than one million
Armenians perished at the hands of Turks and Kurds.

The Kurds’ complicity in the Armenian genocide proved

to be a brutal irony, however, for the Young Turks had
plans for them, too. Turkish supremacy decreed exter-
mination for Armenians, but forced assimilation for
Kurds. They were to be resettled throughout western
Anatolia, “not to exceed five per cent of the population.”
Some seven hundred thousand were removed, though
they needed little additional motivation as they fled
Russian and Armenian forces. Half survived to accom-
plish the Young Turk’s designs for relocation.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution spelled the end of

Russian involvement in Kurdistan. The war’s conclu-
sion the following year spelled the end of the Ottoman
Empire itself. In the aftermath, Kurdistan was left devas-
tated. Soldiers passing through had razed the country-
side, leaving it barren. “The villages had been gutted,”
horrified British troops reported, “the roof beams and
all wooden fittings torn out and used as fuel, and the
rain and snow of winter had completed the destruction
of unprotected mud walls. The fields lay untilled, and
if any of the husbandmen remained, it was because
they were too greatly extenuated by hunger to flee.” In
Sulaymaniyah, decimated to one tenth its prior popula-
tion, Kurdish mothers were reported to have eaten their
children to survive. McDowall counts the Kurdish war-
dead, civilians and soldiers, at eight hundred thousand.

Nor did the unburdening of the Ottoman yoke relieve

Kurdistan of foreign meddling. In November 1917,
the Bolsheviks exposed the clandestine Sykes–Picot
Agreement, wherein French and British diplomats,
counting on an Allied victory, had conspired the pre-
vious year to partition Ottoman territories among the
Triple Entente. This summoned the moralizing incli-
nations of American President Woodrow Wilson, who,
among his storied “Fourteen Points” for postwar peace,
declared that “Turkish portions of the present Ottoman
Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but
other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule
should be assured … an absolutely unmolested oppor-
tunity of autonomous development.” The Kurds may
have been tempted to heed this hopeful rhetoric. But
its practicability was made uncertain by the standing of
Sykes–Picot, which threatened to hack apart the Middle
East and share the spoils among its European signato-
ries. For the following century, the unfulfilled promise of
“an absolutely unmolested opportunity of development”
remained a haunting remembrance of what might have
become of Kurdistan.
 The Allies twice convened to discuss terms alternative
to Sykes–Picot. The first convention, in 1920, resulted in
the Treaty of Sèvres. The Kurds were allocated autonomy
within northern Kurdistan, the possibility of complete
independence one year later should the League of
Nations see it fit, and the chance to make a case for the
adhesion of southern Kurdistan (to be made a Turkish
territory, meantime) at some future date. Though a
sore compromise, it represented the best chance for
even a semblance of sovereignty the Kurds had come
by in centuries.

But owing to the Kemalist uprising, the allies were forced

to convene once more. Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk),
who had roused Turks to arms in the name of self-rule,
had established the rogue capital of Ankara and mounted
a full-scale war of independence against the occupying
Allies. As terms for its attendance at new peace talks
late in 1922, his Grand National Assembly demanded
the abolition of the sultanate in Istanbul. In Lausanne,
Switzerland, where the talks took place, Ankara tri-
umphed as the sole and legitimate capital of the now-Re-
public of Turkey. Negotiations with the irredentist Kemal,
who had mollified Britain by dangling its strategic and
economic interests in the oil-rich Mosul vilayet (to be
annexed to British-controlled Iraq), led to the Treaty of
Lausanne’s including none of the provisions of Sèvres for
Kurdish statehood. Nor did it ensure the Kurds’ safe-
guarding as a minority, save the use of their language in
official settings. In fact, it contained no mention by name
of the Kurds or of Kurdistan whatsoever.

For the Kurds, the maximal concessions afforded Turkey

in Lausanne proved to be deadly augurs of what was to
come. Atatürk was explicit in emphasising the unity, that
is the non-plurality, of the Turkish nation. Regardless of
whatever any treaty stipulated, minorities were to sur-
render their culture, language, and religion in favour of
a civic-nationalist identity as citizens of the Republic. In
practice, this meant the violent suppression of non-Turks
and anything that made them such. Despite denial and
deflection, it has remained Turkey’s constant habit, fore-
told by the drawing of maps little less than one hundred
years ago, to repress its Kurdish population.

What happened in the course of those hundred years? To

the Kurds of Turkey, as well as Iraq, Syria, and Iran, much
in the way of suffering. The fall of empires and the rise of
nation-states meant a change merely in the name of their
plight, not in its nature or severity. Nor did they long man-
age to find a patch of rock or dust to call their own, their
sovereign homeland. Consequently, they were made the
perpetual victims of others vying for their divided lands,
where they lived as pests, hunted and friendless.

But the Kurds did not submit easily to predation. In

Kurdistan, as in centuries prior, rebellion flared, result-
ing in frequent bloodshed. Twice, though but briefly,
Kurdish enclaves were declared self-governing states:
the Republic of Ararat, in 1927; and the Republic of
Mahabad, in 1946. The former, carved out of eastern
Turkey by members of Ottoman-era Kurdish societies,
unknown
was reincorporated in 1930. The latter, facilitated by Soviet
designs on northern Iran, lasted less than a year; its leader,
Qazi Muhammad, was hanged for treason. But the exit
of the Soviet Union from Iran did not signal the end of the
socialist allure in Kurdistan. Marxism and its outgrowths
provided novel alternatives to anti-Ottoman and anti-Ke-
malist varieties of nationalism. And it provided the ideolog-
ical basis for the Kurds’ most successful and well-known
(some might say notorious) effort at nationhood.
Today, whenever someone casually mentions Kurdistan,
they almost certainly mean Rojava. Otherwise known
(since 2018) as the Autonomous Administration of North
and East Syria, Rojava is a de facto pseudo-state estab-
lished in 2012, following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil
War. The confluence it apparently represents of secu-
larism, democracy, gender equality, and communalism,
however, is not quite so new. This it borrows from the
principles of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Kurdish: Partiya
Karkerên Kurdistanê, or PKK), the Marxist–Leninist move-
ment founded in 1978 by Turkish Kurd Abdullah “Apo”
Öcalan. A revolutionary answer to Turkish repression and
economic injustice, the secessionist PKK, with help from
regional allies, quickly developed a paramilitary wing
(within which exists the now-familiar women’s units) and
began to harry Turkey with guerilla attacks and assassi-
nations. For its use of suicide bombings and other violent
measures, the PKK has often been labelled a terrorist
group. The decades-long conflict between Turkey and the
PKK, which persists to this day, has so far claimed some
tens of thousands of lives.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
formed in 1946 out of the exiled remnants of the Republic
of Mahabad. Communism, under the banner of the Iraqi
Communist Party (ICP), also made inroads among local
Kurdish nationalists. Both the KDP and the ICP faced the
spectre of Arab nationalism, which threatened to eclipse
the Kurds with its popular (though never fulfilled) calls for
pan-Arab unity. Its most dangerous manifestation, wrest-
ing national power in 1963 after the bloody coup d’état
known as the Ramadan Revolution, came in the form of
the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. The Ba’athists were briefly driven
underground before rising anew in 1968, whence Kurdish
attempts at rebellion were brutally snuffed out. Their
barbarism culminated in 1988, during the presidency of
Saddam Hussein, with chemical attacks on civilians and
the Anfal genocide. Little known in the West, it saw some
fifty to one hundred thousand (or more) Kurds slain.
Following further nationalist uprisings and the Gulf War,
Kurds in Iraq won a tentative form of self-direction within
that country’s Kurdistan Region. There, the first elec-
tions were held in 1992, though a rivalry between armed
factions of the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) drew it into civil war. Both Turkey and the PKK
involved themselves, unsurprisingly on opposite sides.
The conflict ended in 1997, with the KDP declaring a
ceasefire. Eight years later, the new, post-invasion Iraqi
constitution officially recognized the (limited) autonomy of
Kurdistan Region.
Which finds us near the present. In its campaign to dec-
imate ISIL, the U.S. began to court the Kurdish militias of
northern Syria in 2014, proffering arms (later, both ground
and air support) to defend Rojava against the encroaching
genocidal Islamists. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
were assembled the following year at the behest of the
U.S., with the aim of recruiting beyond the Kurds to rout
ISIL while obscuring the appearance of American sym-
pathy towards the PKK (with which the Kurdish militias
leading the SDF are affiliated). They proved to be a deadly
and effective fighting force, by all accounts essential to the
curbing of ISIL.
But once finished its sortie, at the ill-guided whim of
the current president, the U.S. abruptly deserted the
Kurds, leaving them at Turkey’s mercy. In October, as the
American presence in northern Syria receded, Turkey
invaded. Kurdish militiamen and women fought and fled
for their lives. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were dis-
placed and hundreds died. Prisons managed by the SDF,
detaining some eleven thousand ISIL-pledged militants,
were left unguarded. Captured Kurdish lands are to be
resettled by Turkey’s unwanted civil-war refugees, mostly
Arabs, from elsewhere in Syria.
In the five years before the Turkish incursion, upwards
of eleven thousand Kurds perished while fighting ISIL
alongside Americans. In thanks, they have been left to
the wolves. “The consequences of such unreliability
from the Oval [Office] will reverberate well beyond Syria,”
tweeted Brett McGurk, former Special Presidential Envoy
for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, shortly after the
American withdrawal. “The value of an American hand-
shake is depreciating.” That is, if it had ever had much
value to depreciate in the first place. But in any case, a
void in the shape of the U.S. has been left in Syria, swiftly
to be filled by Turkey and Russia, a thoroughly unfortunate
couple. What remains of ISIL now sees fewer obstacles to
its resurgence. And Rojava, once a bulwark of stability as
well as a promising omen of Kurdish self-rule, risks folding
under the weight of the Turkish jackboot.
Betrayed by a Western ally, forcibly displaced by Turkey.
Cruel, mocking echoes of events dating from a century ago
seem to have been carried through time, sounding harshly
on the present. The present state of the Kurds can be only
poorly understood without knowledge especially of those
last hundred years, years which granted the Kurdish nation
little besides dim light in a valley of shadows. Those same
shadows, or descendent shadows, loom as ever. During
the next century, if the world treats the Kurds as it has, they
may all but hope the mountains give them refuge. From
there, it remains to be seen what luster or shade they may
then descend to. For their sake, for the region’s, and in the
spirit of elementary humanity, may they find some bright-
ness. It might do well to look where it shines today.
Trevor Clarke (not to be confused with Trevor P. Clarke, the celebrated
lepidopterist) writes scabrous screeds filled with half-truths and
exaggerations. After a brief career as an intelligence officer with the
C.I.A., he settled down to muckraking. His upcoming book, Waste of
Time, is a studiously modest description of some harrowing months
spent in the Patagonian Andes. He looks out at the world from the
Carpathian Mountains, where he lives hermetically among wolves.
Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via Shutterstock
Ethan Griffin-McCleary
 White House
Deceived Public
About Afghan War

‘Vietnam All Over Again’

This article is by Richard Parabay and Arnie Stokes

WASHINGTON — While releasing rosy accounts
of consistent progress, top-ranking U.S.
officials conspired to hide the U.S. military’s
troubled involvement in Afghanistan from
public view. A trove of documents recently
obtained by The Washington Post reveals
a campaign of misinformat ion. “We didn’t
have the foggiest notion of what we were
undertaking,” said Douglas Lute, a three-star
general turned public servant who aided in
overseeing the war effort under both the Bush
and Obama administrations. “We were devoid
of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan
— we didn’t know what we were doing.”
Roughly 2,000 pages of inter views
were obtained only after years of legal
negotiation s with the Special Inspector
General for Afghanistan Reconstruct ion
that followed a Freedom of Information
Act request, The Post repor ted. The
Inspector General’s office was established
in 2008 to evaluate the war’s progress,
releasing quarterly reports on its findings.
Another interviewed official, who worked
for National Security Council, spoke in 2016 of
pressure from both the White House and the
Pentagon to select data showing then-President
Obama’s “surge” in 2009 was achieving its
stated goals. “The metrics were always
manipulated for the duration of the war,”
the official said. “It was impossible to create
good metrics. We tried using troop numbers
trained, violence levels, control of territory,
and none of it painted an accurate picture.”
The documents are reminiscent of the
7,000-page government study known as the
Pentagon Papers, which detailed secrets of the
American embroilment in Vietnam from 1945 to
1967. Twenty-five years after it was published
in 1971, The New York Times commented
that the leaked papers showed “that the
Johnson Administration had systematically
lied, not only to the public but also to
Congress, about a subject of transcenden t
n a t i o n a l i n t e re s t a n d s i g n i f i c a n c e . ”
Since the Afghan war began in 2001, at least
2,200 American troops have been killed. By
comparison, since the Pentagon ended its 
 If World War 3 is going to start,
it will most likely start between
Pakistan and India.

Both countries have huge populations and survival will grow rougher and
rougher as climate mayhem kicks in. As the glaciers melt in the Himalayas,
water in the Ganges will stop flowing as it has for millennia, and an all-out
war over who gets what remains will become a scary possibility.
 ISRAEL DIMONA NUCLEAR FACILITY

Israel has always played a coy game with its nukes . . .

It doesn’t say yes, it doesn’t say no,
but everyone knows they have them.

Many years ago this didn’t feel too alarming, because

unlike Pakistan, India or, lord forbid, North Korea, Israel
was always seen as a responsible, democratic member
of the nuclear club. But during Benjamin Netanyahu’s
ten years in power, Israel has moved very far to the
right. He has kept building settlements, ignored United
Nations resolutions and international law, reinvented
apartheid in the West Bank, and recently, in an attempt
to neutralize the corruption charges against him, he has
blatantly tried to manipulate his country’s media and
legal systems in order to stay in power.
 Can we trust this man
with nuclear weapons?

Would he launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran to maintain

Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East?

Would he do it just to remain in power?

 We’re gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the
United States Space Command. It’s a big deal. As the newest
combatant command, SPACECOM will defend America’s vital
interests in space — the next warfighting domain.
— President Donald Trump, August 29, 2019

Capable of travelling at more than twenty times the speed of sound

and performing unpredictable evasive maneuvers, President Vladimir
Putin claims Russia’s new hypersonic maneuverable re-entry vehicle
(MARV) is a technological breakthrough on the order of Sputnik.
According to Mr. Putin, the new weapon — called Avangard — can
easily penetrate American missile defence systems, striking “like a
meteorite” while carrying a nuclear warhead of up to two megatons.
 Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in the early
1980s, there has been a general view of the West that the gradual encroachment
of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic government.

This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined

belief that capitalism and democracy are
interlinked. The collapse of the Soviet Union
confirmed the West’s victory; an equivalent
process would inevitably result in political change
coming to China. The ‘butchers of Beijing’,
as Bill Clinton described them in 1992, would
be swept away by history. The arrival of the
internet made this inevitability seem even more
This view has adherents in China too. Liu Xiaobo
— the first Nobel laureate to die in prison since
Carl von Ossietzky in Nazi Germany — said the
internet was ‘God’s gift’ to a democratic China.
The celebrity dissident artist Ai Weiwei says:
‘The internet cannot be controlled. And it if is
uncontrollable, freedom will win. It is that simple.’

The CCP doesn’t agree. Its position is the diametric

inevitable. ‘Liberty will be spread by cell opposite of the Western received wisdom that the
phone and cable modem,’ Clinton said. internet is necessarily and in its essence a threat
‘We know how much the internet has to the authoritarian state. The Chinese government
changed America, and we are already an favors the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignity’, in which
open society. Imagine how much it could countries have control over their own versions of
change China. As James Griffiths tells us the inernet. Kai Strittmatter was for many years the
in The Great Firewall of China, his detailed Beijing correspondent for the Süddeusche Zeitung,
and compelling account of Chinese online and his excellent We Have Been Harmonized is an
censorship, this was an applause line for eye-opening account of this issue. (‘Harmonized’ is
Clinton in 2000. ‘Now there’s no question an euphemism for ‘censored’.)
China has been trying to crack down on
The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and
the internet,’ Clinton went on. ‘Good luck.
anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its
That’s sort of like trying to nail jello to the
fear; it has learned to love new technologies. The CCP
wall.’ This perspective on the internet sees
believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence
it as an informational form of manifest
to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its
destiny. In the words of the New York
economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-
Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the
proof. At the same time, it intends to create the most
internet is ‘a nutcracker to open societies.’
perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen.

— from John Lanchester, Document Number Nine, London

Review of Books
— Anonymous
 The free world is lurching toward a
polarized, post-truth reality that reminds
me of my life in the Soviet Union, where
the truth was whatever the regime said it
was that day. If the battle for a shared, fact-
based reality is not fought and won, 2030
will make all the outrages and demagogy of
2019 look like a golden age of comity.

— Gary Kasparov
 I am Glyph. I make glyphs.
A glyph is a sculptured symbol. These symbolic shapes depict dominance and war. These shapes
come together to create an aggressive entity. These entities or structures integrate religious
symbols with symbols that reflect weapons used in war and genocides. Shapes of holiness and hate
intertwine. Good and evil meld as heaven and hell become one chaotic form.
The internet has reversed a centuries-old power dynamic.
The street now has unprecedented power.
Over twenty revolutionary uprisings are currently raging
around the world.

“This is the infinity war,”

says Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong.

Who knows where it will all end.

tyrone siu / file photo / reuters
Lionel Charrier
Carlos Noriega / AP
 COVER DESIGN
PEDRO INOUE

COVER ILLUSTRATION
CRIS VECTOR is an illustrator
from São Paulo, Brazil and he
works in publishing, advertising
and ANTIFA activism.
www.crisvector.com
@crisvector

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Found ation’s past, prese nt, or future creative or
Media
s, spons ors, or
administrative staff, affiliates, contractor
the staff would like to disav ow
community. In this issue,
parts of the Sexua l Politic s sectio n.
 The second wave of the American feminist movement
produced a lot of books. The Feminine Mystique, Sexual
Politics, The Dialectic of Sex — best seller followed
best seller, each looking at how some combination
of custom, law, and centuries-old ideologies led
to the gendered divisions of labor and status that
obtained in the US in the Sixties and Seventies: women
concentrated in low-paying jobs or unpaid volunteer
work, responsible for housework and childcare, largely
absent from government and the upper and middle
ranks of most industries and professions, making
photocopies and coffee for radical men who made
speeches.
Every ten years or so, publishers re-issue these
books with new introductions, and critics recommend
them. But just try reading one. Some of their cultural
insights have so thoroughly entered the mainstream of
culture that they now seem obvious, while other claims
have been qualified and corrected by successive
generations. Either way, they seem trapped in their
time. “After a few chapters I began to find much of it
boring and dated,” writes historian Stephanie Coontz
of reading The Feminine Mystique (which had been very
important to her mother) for the first time as an adult.
— Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books
From suffrage to women’s lib, the third wave to #MeToo, women
have struggled for decades to win equal rights and freedoms.
Today, the fight for female dignity has swelled, spreading the
world over. Last year unprecedented numbers of demonstrators
marched in the streets of France, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Kenya,
and elsewhere. And a little over a year ago, millions of women in India
— the most dangerous country for women in 2018, according to the
Thomson Reuters Foundation — formed a 300-mile-long human chain in
protest of centuries if not millennia of oppression. What will it feel like to
live in this world when the battle for equality is finally won?
 Ads, Minus the Macho

Fathers who cry at their daughter’s weddings (Travelers)

Fathers who braid their daughter’s hair (Pantene)

Because we are all ingesting

chemicals that mess with human
hormones, sperm counts in men
around the world have dropped
by 50 per cent in the last four
decades — men today are half as
fertile as their grandfathers were.
If this downward trend continues,
as it seems to be doing, humanity
may be incapable of unassisted
reproduction within decades.

Men who apply eyeliner (Just for Men)

 Manboy
Softboys, fuckboys, and everything in between are
the new archetypes of masculinity. Gone are the
days of Humphrey Bogart, slick cigarette and steely
stare, smoke curling into greased back hair. The
new heirs to the throne of masculinity are more
suited to high chairs. As with most things these
days, toxic masculinity is to blame. Only this time,
it’s the push back against it that has led to these
softboys and fuckboys, and they are even more toxic
than what came before.
They may seem like a welcome diversion from more
classic, American masculinity, what we now think
of as toxic. A toxically masculine guy might call a
woman a sweetheart, mansplain, catcall, hold the
door for you, think you need help with luggage or
heavy packages. A softboy knows better than to
help women with anything, he knows that even the
offer is unwelcome.
Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemon, Robert Redford, and
even Dick Van Dyke were swashbuckling tough guys
with hearts of gold that represented the classic,
American male archetype.
They did the right thing for the right reasons, and
sometimes the wrong thing for the right reasons,
but they were guided by innate principles of not
fucking people over. Women and society at large
have pushed back against these classic male roles,
tearing them down for their chivalry and lack of
emotional expression.
The social justice-led pushback against toxic mas-
culinity has led to a decline in any kind of respect or
appreciation for the male archetype that came before.
What were we expecting from the new archetype of
manhood? A guy who is in touch with his emotions
and knows what his partner is feeling and has a good
job that he’s passionate about that doesn’t run on
fossil fuels and has him home in time to help with the
kids’ homework and cook dinner and make love with a
smile? That guy is as much a fantasy as the masculine
tough guy with a heart of gold. Or the strong but silent
type, or the distinguished gray, the hero, the joker.
These new manboys do not make good archetypes.
These are guys that do not take charge of their lives
or chart their own course. They sit back and let things
happen, they are not active participants. We need men
who are intentionally living their lives. Instead, culture
has pushed the aggression, straight-forward ambition,
and competitive spirit right out of what we expect from
masculinity.
What we have are a bunch
of boys too afraid to be
men, too unwilling to step
into the light and pursue
something, anything.
Toxic masculinity may have gotten a bad rap, but I
think we’d all rather see a guy own himself, and his
choices, a guy who assumes he’s got weight and
matter in the world, is confident that he’s more worth-
while, and let’s you know it. Masculinity being toxic
is problematic. Softboys and fuckboys do not present
a picture of hotness. Classic masculinity, with all it’s
brashness and bravado, is way hotter than a juggling
asshole with a Dr. Seuss collection.
— Libby Emmons
In an engrossing book published last
spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode:
Design and Pattern in Narrative, the
Australian writer Jane Alison makes
a trenchant observation about the
“dramatic arc” long considered the
foundation for plot. Swelling to a climax
and then deflating, it resembles nothing
so much as a phallus: “Bit masculo-
sexual, no?” Alison’s book offers
alternative possibilities for fiction based
on patterns found in nature, such as the
spirals of fiddlehead ferns, seashells, or
whirlpools; the meandering path of a
river; the radiating shape of a flower; the
self-replication of trees or clouds; or the
cells in a honeycomb. These structures
aren’t necessarily feminine—as it
happens, Alison’s investigation of them is
inspirted by her reading of W.G. Sebald’s
The Emigrants, a work of fiction written
by a man with predominantly male
characters. But if the dramatic arc has
often been associated with the “hero’s
journey” model of fiction writing (a lone
man goes off on a quest to conquer
something), it stands to reason that a
novel centered on the stories of women—
often communal, connected, operating on
many layers—might best be served by a
different narrative form.

— Ruth Franklin, in her review of Jokha

Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, The New York
Review of Books
 i’m just a
collection of
products and
broken body
parts
Twilight of the Bro Bibles?
Men’s glossies find themselves trapped in an identity crisis.
By BILL SWINTON
In the age of #MeToo and gender
fluidity, magazin es tradition ally
catering to a male audience are
finding their skirt-chasing, liquor-
sipping, smoke-steeped sensibility
in hostile waters. Amid fast-
changing cultural tides, you’d be
hard-pressed to find advice about
how to choose your cufflinks or
mount your taxidermy, let alone
anything more explicit, in the
pages of such venerable glossies
as Maxim or Esquire.
Instead, as the mere mentioning mag editors, to avoid seeming the
of masculinity comes increasingly print version of a gentleman’s club
with a tacit “toxic,” you’re more — much less Ernest Hemingway,
likely to read an issue of Playboy and much more RuPaul’s Drag Race.
(no longer “Enterta inment for Take GQ’s “New Masculin ity”
Men” but “Entertai nment for All”) issue, its cover graced by an
featurin g underwa ter shots of androgynous Pharrell Williams in
female activists, where the “water an oversized gown resembling an
is meant to represen t gender upturned, down-stuffed daffodil.
and sexual fluidity,” according to The issue features meditations on
its executiv e editor. Queer and privilege, gender non-conformity
nonbinar y subjects feature ever- and makeup for men. No longer
more promine ntly within what the swaggering, womanizing James
were, until recently, strictly hetero Bond of magazine s, GQ is “isn’t
publications. It’s all of a desperate really
effort, on the part of men’s-
Arts Creative director Pedro Inoue
Art DIRECTOR
WEB ART Kerem Dogurga
 When I see the austere kitchens and bare
shelves and elegant cement walls; the
dim colors and the skeletal furniture; the
monochrome devices, the white T-shirts,
the empty walls; the wide-open windows
looking out onto nothing in particular;
the rough reclaimed wood; when I see
minimalism as a meme on Instagram and
as an encouragement to get rid of as much
as possible in the name of imminently
consuming more— it’s that deep,
sinking shadow that I see, the anxiety of
nothingness and the simultaneous fear and
desire of capitulating to it.
—K  yle Chayka, The Longing for Less:
Living with Minimalism

Sarah Dorweiler / unsplash

Ethan Griffin-McCleary
 Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–
least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-
intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head,
instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of
me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay
alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant
monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now).
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to
understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think
is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning
how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over
how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough
to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct
meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of
choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché
about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface,
actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit
coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost
always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.
And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long
before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your
liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going
through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting
of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

 Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep
belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest,
most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think
about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so
socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It
is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think
about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the
absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front
of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or
YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings
have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so
immediate, urgent, real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about
compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This
is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the
work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired
default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and
to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

 This has been a golden age for brain research. We now have
amazing brain scans that show which networks in the brain ramp
up during different activities. But this emphasis on the brain has
subtly fed the illusion that thinking happens only from the neck up.
It’s fed the illusion that the advanced parts of our thinking are the
“rational” parts up top that try to control the more “primitive” parts
down below.
So it’s interesting how many scientists are now focusing on the
thinking that happens not in your brain but in your gut. You have
neurons spread through your innards, and there’s increasing attention
on the vagus nerve, which emerges from the brain stem and wanders
across the heart, lungs, kidney, and gut.
The vagus nerve is one of the pathways through which the body
and brain talk to each other in an unconscious conversation. Much
of this conversation is about how we are relating to others. Human
thinking is not primarily about individual calculation, but about social
engagement and cooperation.
— The Wisdom Your Body Knows, David Brooks, The New York Times
Dear Adbusters Editor,
I have your call for a brutalist new aesthetic, and
it’s inspired a few thoughts. Here are my answers
to the three questions you posed.
I have three poetic heroes. First is Percy Shelley:
lyrically brilliant, philosophically acute, and,
most important, a political visionary. Anyone
looking for a brutal new aesthetic, especially
at the crossroads of art, mysticism, and life,
should read Shelley’s revolutionary Prometheus
Unbound. Second is Jim Morrison, the only
modern artist to succeed in the poetical
kamikaze mission of thoroughly out-Rimbauding
Rimbaud. Morrison’s political vision wasn’t equal
to Shelley’s, but it towered over much of the
political and aesthetic hollowness of the 1960s.
“Sometimes it's like there’s a vast guerrilla war
going on for the mind of man,” he wrote in an
unpublished notebook. To me, time’s passage
has made plain the authenticity and vitality that
propelled Morrison in his meteoric flight across
pop culture. And third is the brilliant historical
poet Ed Sanders, of the psychedelic rock band
The Fugs. There may be no document that better
equips us to reverse this planetary endgame than
Sanders’s 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry.
Art, he counsels, is our most reliable weapon
in this psychic guerrilla war. And as “citizen
investigator poets” we must rise to combat the
pervasive smog of global dominator propaganda
with the power of beauty and truth.
Shelley, Morrison, Sanders: These are poets
who dared join the full charge of history then
surging violently about them. They were
uncompromising in their political and artistic
visions. And each — whether mocked or
slandered, ignored, sued, or harried to an early
grave — was made to pay the price for it. In
addition to courage and authenticity, these
artists demonstrated an admirable balance
between style and substance. The real danger,
they understood, lurks in extremes — in getting
pulled too far into the purity of either politics
or poetry. Truly great art inhabits both sizzle
and steak, binding aesthetic craft to a message
that urgently needs hearing. This has been the
abiding principle of my journey as an artist.
As far as art goes, this may just be the endgame.
These days the only works that inspire me are
documentaries — those that dare confront
the nefarious and subterranean drives behind
humans’ total domination of this world. The films
are often released only on networks like UFOTV;
they are nonetheless superbly researched works
that investigate such pressing topics as mind
control, social engineering, psyops, covert
warfare, propaganda, and clandestine coup
operations. That such subjects come out on only
platforms devoted to “science fiction” shows
how truly dire a crisis this is, the endgame we are
living in!
Best,
A. Scott Buch
AP PHoto/Rodrigo Abd
EHT Collaboration
There is a cosmic subway station at the center of our
own galaxy. That is where a supermassive black hole
— an invisible cosmic tombstone four million times
more massive than the sun — lurks, wreathed in
mystery and imagination behind the dusty clouds
of Sagittarius.
Lodiza LePore
 As is now obvious to all, we are living through
an era-defining ideological clash. We must
decide whether to allow a regressive alt-right,
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. . . a sure path to global catastrophe and
World War III . . . or whether a big-ideas march
toward a compassionate, all-inclusive new world
order will emerge on the Left. This is the Meme
War that will decide our fate. And to win this war,
we have to re-examine all assumptions, all rules,
all habits of mind that have delivered us to this
perilous moment.
In short, we have to rethink almost all of the
economic, political, and cultural precepts we’ve
taken for granted for generations. We must
breathe fresh life into progressivism, revive its
mojo, and return it to the visionary force for
change it once was.
Our strategy is to zero in on a new grand narrative,
a once-in-a-millennium mind shift, a set of big
ideas — metamemes — so fundamental, so
systemic, so profound that a sane and sustainable
future is unthinkable without them. This means
shining a light on the hidden coordinates of our
shared reality and unleashing a Metamemetic
Insurrection on seven critical fronts:
On the PSYCHOLOGICAL front: We forge a Digital
Bill of Rights, a document which articulates
undeniable, common-sense demands to wrest
back power from Big Tech.
On the ECOLOGICAL front: We unleash the
#TrueCost metameme — the idea that we can
deliver ourselves from the climate crisis by moving
resolutely toward a global true-cost market regime
in which the price of every product tells the
ecological truth.
and Canada: $55; International: $75.
On the CORPORATE front: We launch the mother
of all boycotts, with the aim of wiping ExxonMobil
off the face of the earth. Once the mightiest falls,
the rest will follow — and we will witness the birth
of a Corporate Charter Revocation Movement.
On the FINANCIAL front: We slow the ravages of
fast money by proposing an elegant idea: that you
must hold a stock for 24 hours after its purchase
before selling it. If instituted, this would kill off
flash trading and fundamentally change the way
stock markets operate and money flows.
On the ECONOMIC front: We spark student
mutinies in the economics departments of
universities around the world by disrupting
classes, plastering posters in the corridors, and
nailing manifestoes to professors’ doors. 2020
could be the year in which campus uprisings
provoke a revolution in economic thinking — a
paradigm shift in the science of economics.
On the POLITICAL front: We propose a
constitutional amendment for global adoption,
calling for national referendums requiring at least
50 percent of voters to formally assent to any war
before it can begin.
On the AESTHETIC front: We call on the artists,
designers, and creatives of the world to transform
the ambient tone of the world . . . the way it feels
to walk around our cities . . . the mood of watching
television . . . the knack and smack of navigating
the net . . . the emotional valence of money and
status . . . the way it feels to be alive today.
This may all seem idealistic, even far fetched.
But so did Occupy Wall Street when it was
just a glimmer in our eye. The future is not yet
written. And the planetary endgame currently
unfolding demands nothing less than the full
measure of systemic, fuck-it-all audacity and
visionary boldness.