Suchergebnisse

The text "From Dark Roots to Shared Routes" is part of the anthology "twentyforty – Utopias for a Digital Society" that consisting out of visionary stories written by researchers, addressing the opportunities and challenges that digital technologies present for society in the future of 2040. This particular story Emma Beauxis-Aussalet explores a future in which Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, formerly used to manipulate people through commercial and political campaigns, are being repurposed for the greater good.

It sometimes appears that alternative organizations are doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform, as efforts to avoid co-optation entail retreat from the very engagement social change requires. Scholars then face a dilemma: do we reveal these degenerative processes in existing alternative organizations and reinforce disillusionment, or avoid such critique and endorse ineffectual strategies? To address this question I draw on Erik Olin Wright's identification of two broad strategies of social transformation adopted by alternative organizations. Symbiotic strategies are those that aim to change the existing system via incremental reform, such as trade unions' collective bargaining. Interstitial strategies, by contrast, are those more radical approaches that seek to prefigure emancipatory alternative systems, such as mutual aid networks. The first contribution this paper proposes is a mapping of these social transformation strategies to distinct forms of degeneration, understood as inadvertent reproduction of the hegemonic system. Organizations adopting the symbiotic strategy are particularly vulnerable to the more well-studied forms of degeneration that result from partial alignment with the hegemonic system—what I call exposure degeneration. Organizations adopting the interstitial strategy are instead vulnerable to less well-studied forms of degeneration resulting from insufficient engagement with the hegemonic system—what I call insulation degeneration. Although this model may appear to place alternative organizations in a catch-22, I draw a more hopeful perspective from theories of performativity that highlight the relationship between socially transformative agency and social reproduction. Unpacking the necessary impurity of performativity leads to the paper's second contribution: while both practitioners and scholars of alternative organizations can pursue social transformation only via impure critical performativity, awareness of this constraint can foster reflexivity regarding the agential scope that remains.

This period in our history is characterized by the growth of democracy in all areas of the world. There is understandable resistance to that trend on the part of those political, religious, and tribal forces whose power is thereby undermined. Terrorism is an extension of that resistance. The United States is a symbol of that democratic trend and the United Nations is the forum in which the political competition is taking place. To strengthen our resolve, our defenses, and our democratic commitment, the author calls for the American and international leadership to eliminate all nuclear weapons in the world and for a national resolve to establish a national voluntary Civilian Conservation Corps for 18- to 21-year-old men and women coupled with a new education incentive along the line of the Roosevelt GI Bill of Rights.