Oliver Ösmark – Pike & Hurricane

The Precariat – The Loss of Job Security and What To Do About It

Oliver Ösmark — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 20:00:07 +0000

Khalil Gibran’s book “The Prophet” begins with the protagonist Almustafa spotting on the horizon the ship that will take him back to the isle of his birth, and he prepares himself to leave the city of Orphalese which he has called home for 12 years. But he is struck by melancholy as his thoughts turn to the hurt he will cause the people of the city with his passing. Being a popular fellow, he is beseeched by men, women, elders, and clergy to speak to them of the truths he has learned in his time: “Now therefore, disclose us to ourselves, and tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death.” Almustafa obliges and shares his wisdom in 26 dainty morsels on the topics of love, good and evil, crime and punishment, joy and sorrow, friendship, laws, time, talking, trade, work, and so on. The word “meaning” is not used a single time in the whole book.

At this stage one might feel as though the omission of “meaning” in this context is of no significance as the narrative itself is heavily flecked with the mysticisms, superstitions, dogmas, and all the loose scales shed from the scalp of theism. After all, the ultimate meaning of religion is faith, and faith is servitude to the idea of God and all that entails; or “the gods, sprits and idols,” if you are the kind of person to diversify your spiritual portfolio. One would be forgiven for thinking so. Gibran was a Maronite flirting with Islam, Sufi mysticism, and the Bahá’í Faith. But his eclecticism also spanned into the artistic enclaves of Romanticism, and modern (at the time) symbolism and surrealism. The point here being that it is not far-fetched to claim that any artist engaging in honest dissemination of the human condition does not regard close-mindedness a virtue. “Meaning” is not God’s decree. It is a consortium of disciplines. Disciplines represented with poetic precision by Gibran in his book.

The Prophet Almustafa says of work:

“You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth […]

You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge.

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.”

Love for one’s trade is the flower borne from the seed of urge. Yet, the realities of the day—underemployment, redundancies, glass ceilings, manufactured impediments to accessing education, etc.—leave many scrambling in for options. Any options. And even though a small—plausibly non-existent—minority of people would make the claim that their gig as a human billboard brings them closer to God, work satisfaction falls by the wayside with little or no long-term job security. Darkness abounds, and this is the precarious circumstance a growing portion of the labor force find themselves in. But before we explore this phenomenon any further, first we must address some common suppositions.

The usual suspects

Economic inequality is a prompt for social mobilization on the regular. “The 1%” have been the punching bags of the discontent and disempowered since the invention of value itself. These days that practice is perfectly understandable. In 2018, the 26 richest people in the world held as much wealth as half of the global population (3.8 billion at the time), a change from 43 people the preceding year. Yet, it is a mistake to think that inequality is rising everywhere. It is not all-pervasive, nor an inescapable symptom of globalization. Neither has the average level of inequality changed much. In countries like China, India, Indonesia, and the U.S., which together account for 45% of the world population, the Gini index—the go-to barometer of wealth inequality—saw an increase of about 4 points. Hence, while the average country saw little variation of the Gini index, the average person lived in a country that saw rising income inequality.

Unemployment numbers do not tell the whole story either. These have more or less followed a stable flat trend within the 3-7% range, alongside with a steady increase in GDP per capita, since the ILO began recording unemployment data per state. Extreme outliers like Spain and Greece in 2013—which peaked at 27% and 25% respectively—led to much civil unrest as austerity measures inflamed an already volatile situation. Youth unemployment in these countries was more than twice as high as the country average, as is often the case in most countries on average. High rates of underemployment compound this issue. Underemployed workers may be able to find work, but their income may not be sufficient for meeting basic needs. Youths are overrepresented in this category. Hence, unemployment rates alone are inadequate measures of labor market slack.

Indeed, labor underutilization affects 473 million workers worldwide, which is more than double the number of unemployed people considered separately, and 61% of workers worldwide are in informal employment. Significant inequalities in access to decent work opportunities has become an increasing trend and feature of current labor markets.

The precariat

Guy Standing is an economist and professor at the University of London who has worked extensively on economic inequality and written two book on a new social class dubbed the “precariat”; the word itself is a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”. Unlike the latter characterized as exchanging labor for livelihood yet deprived of the “means of production”—raw material, facilities, machines, capital—the precariat are only partially involved in labor and must take on extensive amounts of uncompensated “work”—e.g. updating CV’s and sending out job applications, attending job interviews, being “on call” for “gig” work—to have access to decent earnings. Emblematic of this class is a lack of job security, benefits, or union protection. The precariat also spans the income and education spectrums: from illegal migrant work to highly educated but freelance-dependent industries.

Workers of a Mexican textile plant or “maquila”. Most workers work 11 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week, for less than the legal minimum wage. Industries in the US and elsewhere make heavy use of Mexico’s and other Central American countries’ low-cost labor.

Standing says that this phenomenon really took off after 2008 in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In his book “A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens” he outlines 29 “demands” aimed at providing the precariat both economic stability and empowerment to live in comfort and participate in society—these range from rehauling unions, reforming migration policies, ending means testing. A central demand is the establishment of a universal basic income, an idea that has been courted by the international labor and economic mammoths ILO, OECD, the World Bank—especially in the wake of the Great Recession—but never consummated.

But won’t basic income dissuade people from working and bleed government of tax revenue? Cool your boots, prolepsis. Let us entertain the side of the argument where one aspires for universal access to opportunity and decent standards of living. Take the Swedish unemployment fund (arbetslöshetskassa or “a-kassa”) which, ideally, pays up to 80% of your salary—though there are many fine print provisos to resign the newly dispossessed to feeling more fleeced than golden. To retain unemployment benefits, one must be active in looking for jobs; you must be able to prove that you are active in looking for jobs (the specifics of this are ad hoc and negotiated with the Swedish Public Employment Service); and you cannot decline any job offers—even ones that offer unstable hours and temporary employment. Receiving a limited yet regular amount in benefits from the government makes far more sense than sporadic and unreliable employment. As Standing says: “In effect, the system for the precariat has a huge disincentive for people taking low-wage jobs and punishes them for doing so. That is thoroughly unfair.”

So foul a sky clears not without a storm

Universal basic income is not a new idea. The social philosopher/lawyer/humanist Thomas More wrote about it in 1516, followed by corsetmaker/journalist/revolutionary Thomas Paine in 1719. Still, what the two Thomases were suggesting has never sifted into the mainstream of real-world policy. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed that every American adult receive a monthly check of $1,000 as a solution to structural unemployment caused by automation. This “Freedom Dividend” only got him 2.8% of the votes in the primaries and he subsequently dropped out of the race. Then came the pandemic, which revealed the degree to which unemployment insurance had come up short in keeping up with the labor market. The welfare systems were overwhelmed, and people were desperate. Suddenly government started experimenting with forms of basic income.

Libertarians, austerity buffs, and Ayn Rand fans have long touted that welfare programs are much too expensive to fund and complicated to manage, but this was not the case. For example, Canada’s response program covered not only those who lost their jobs, or suffered reduced hours, but also those unable to work due to quarantine and childcare. The gig-workers and self-employed qualified. It was easy to apply for and payments were received within days. But the programs employed around the world were not true systems for basic income. They were expedient and temporary. Real universal basic income is a permanent program with consistent payments.

A guaranteed minimum income does not stop people from working and makes for a healthier and less unequal society. In Finland and the Netherlands, evidence found that basic income helped people who had been chronically unemployed for years. In both scenarios, recipients were more likely to find full-time jobs than control groups stuck with the traditional approach of mandated job searches, job-readiness programs, and regular contact case workers. Rather than having to settle for temporary gigs, people had more time to look for better jobs without bureaucratic trials and tribulations in the way. Studies in Canada and Malawi showed similar positive effects.

Taken at face value, the costs for universal basic income are colossal. The price tag for Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” was estimated at $2.8 trillion. Yet, this initiative would significantly reduce poverty and inequality and according to a study by the Roosevelt institute the economy would “grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs” generating around $800–900 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity. Such a strategy coupled with more progressive tax systems more than make up for the expenses. Costs are minimized by returns in taxes, targeted to low-income recipients, and is likely lower than what governments spend on pensions.

However, thinking about universal basic income only in monetary terms is an error of judgement. Universal basic income is an investment in society, not a cost. It is not an expenditure, but the means of which communities that value health, education, and security are made manifest. The returns come in terms of higher standards of living as well as from taking the pressure of other social programs treating symptoms of poverty, like poor health.

For long, implementing universal basic income has been considered unconventional, even outright inconceivable. But, as the pandemic has revealed the glaring holes in the safety net, it is a humane alternative to the classical model. It allows for purpose to be rediscovered. To “keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth” and a decent life disposed of darkness. And yes, even encourage love for one’s work. Let the solid surfaces deal with the billboards.

Related articles:

Nowhere to Stay Home

An Insecure Future

Who brings the food to your table?

Photo credits:

Job Satisfaction, by It’s No Game on flickr, CC BY 2.0

Maquiladora, Free for commercial use, DMCA

Home is Where the Fun Is. The Irony, by Andreea Popa on Unsplash

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The Swedish COVID-19 pandemic strategy or: The Comeback of the “Ättestupa”

Oliver Ösmark — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 17:08:06 +0000

A saying attributed to the ever-chipper Joseph Stalin goes: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Seeing death and knowing death are two very different experiences. And it can be argued whether those in charge, untouched by the pain suffered by people who have known and loved the lives of those prematurely stolen by tragedy, can fully grasp the terrible weight and burden of their duties. Logic level-headedness and ardent stoicism are admirable qualities in leaders where others might crack under pressure, but where the person becomes translated into “1”, there is room for indulgence in terrible calculus. While, at times, there is little alternative not to employ statistical methods, the impact of the moral hazard afforded to government officials dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden has been difficult to process.

In the case of Sweden’s response to handling the COVID-19 pandemic, models and wishful thinking have cost the lives of over 7,000 people, most of which, due to their old age, were denied access to treatment in favor of palliative measures to help avoid hospitals becoming overwhelmed. During the first wave, the virus wreaked havoc in nursing homes, where nearly 1,000 people died in a matter of weeks. Early in March, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) sent a directive to Stockholm hospitals stating that any patients over 80 or with a body mass index above 40 should not be admitted to intensive care because they were less likely to recover. Other reports describe sick care home residents being administered a palliative cocktail of morphine and benzos, because the homes were not equipped to administer oxygen, something some doctors have described as “active euthanasia.”

People in nursing homes were triaged out of healthcare and given “No Hospital” notes on their journals even before they got sick. But these interventions were not only reserved for patients who were suspected of having COVID-19. A person with a urinary tract infection in need of hospitalization would not get much needed care either. They received palliative medicine instead. The number of patients in need of intensive care no doubt increased, but as did the number of hospital beds. In early April there were over 300 intensive care units and on the 9th of April 79 of them were vacant. Thus, there was no reason to comply with the tough priorities recommended by the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Critics of the Swedish government’s approach, made up of doctors like Andrew Ewing, a professor at the University of Gothenburg, have given damning appraisals of Sweden’s response to the pandemic. Ewing is a member of a 200-strong scientific collective in Sweden who call themselves the Science Forum COVID-19. Since March they have been outspoken critics of Sweden’s unique approach to the pandemic, which has been notably out of sync with the rest of the globe. After his criticisms were published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet he received wave after wave of hate mail from members of the public unhappy with his remarks. “Some of us even got death threats, for ‘damaging the reputation of Sweden,’” says Nele Brusselaers, another member of the Science Forum.

Cloud cuckoo land

Chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist and the architect of the national response, has described the decision to keep society open as a holistic approach to public health, aiming to balance the risk of the virus with avoiding the long-term consequences of closing schools and businesses—a popular view among many Swedes. The government controversially refused restrictions early on and this approach was even lauded by none other than the World Health Organization back in April as a “model” for battling the coronavirus. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said then there are “lessons to be learned” from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. “I think there’s a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread. Nothing can be further from the truth,” Ryan told reporters.

It is dangerous to have such strong convictions about an approach that over 2,000 medical doctors, professors, and researchers objected to as lacking credible data to support it. They’ve called on the government to introduce more stringent containment measures. Dr. Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér—professor of immunology at the Karoliska Institute—said: “It is almost a tradition in Sweden to trust the authorities and trust their experts. But I am a scientist, and I don’t trust the authorities, I trust data. The problem with herd immunity is that we do not have any data on it yet, and I don’t think that we should be the first ones to test it. It is an experiment that I did not give my informed consent to and many with me have not done that either. The data that we do have access to and the developments in other countries just say that this is not a safe path to take. Nothing is safe here because many people are going to suffer […] We must establish control over the situation, we cannot head into a situation where we get complete chaos. No one has tried this route, so why should we test it first in Sweden, without informed consent?”

Herd immunity is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go. Individuals can become immune by recovering from an earlier infection or through vaccination. As vaccines have yet to be readily distributed to the public, one has had to rely on exposure—allowing enough members of a population to be infected, recover and then develop an immune system response to the virus. But herd immunity must be achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it haphazardly. Especially when the extent of the harm done by the pathogen is not yet fully understood.

This is because a lot of people die under the scenario of herd immunity. The Swedish experiment has shown as much. More than seven out of ten of all those who died because of COVID-19 in Sweden have had some form of elderly care. 3,002 of the dead have lived in nursing homes and 1,696 have had home care. As of December 6, Sweden’s per capita death rate from the coronavirus is 21st place in the world, at 637.31 deaths per million. Compared to other Scandinavian countries, Denmark has almost 5 times less deaths than Sweden; Finland 9 times; and Norway almost 11 times less. As of December 6, 7,067 people in Sweden have died.

Although Sweden’s Public Health Service and Tegnell insist on the opposite, the core of Sweden’s strategy is generally understood to have been about building natural herd immunity. Both the agency and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven have characterized their approach as “common sense” (“folkvätt”) trust-based recommendations rather than strict measures, such as lockdowns, which they say are unsustainable for a long time—herd immunity was only a desirable side effect. Internal communications, however, say otherwise.

E-mails obtained between national and regional authorities, including the Public Health Agency, as well as those received by other journalists, suggest that the goal was indeed to develop herd immunity—documents of these communications are readily available online. An example that clearly shows that government officials had considered herd immunity early on is an e-mail sent from a retired doctor on March 15 to Tegnell, which he passed on to his Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen. In it, the retired doctor recommended that healthy people be infected in controlled environments to fight the epidemic. “One point would be to keep the schools open to reach herd immunity faster,” Tegnell noted at the top of the email. Salminen replied that the Finnish Health Agency had considered this but decided against it, because “over time, children will still spread the infection to other age groups.” In addition, the Finnish model showed that closing schools would reduce the “attack’s share of the disease in the elderly” by 10%. Tegnell replied: “10 percent can be worth it?”

Three men make a tiger

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven

The majority of the rest of Sweden’s political decision-makers seemed to have agreed: the country never closed daycare centers or schools for children under 16 and school visits remain mandatory under Swedish law without the possibility of distance education or home tuition—not even for children with family members in high-risk groups. They effectively decided to use children and schools as participants in an experiment to see if herd immunity to a deadly disease could be achieved. Several outbreaks in schools occurred in both spring and autumn.

Löfven, his government, and the Public Health Service all say that the high death rate due to COVID-19 in Sweden can be attributed to the fact that a large proportion of these deaths occurred in nursing homes due to shortcomings in elderly care. But it was the high degree of infection throughout the country that was the underlying factor leading to many infections in nursing homes. As previously stated, many sick elderly people were not seen by a doctor because the country’s hospital implemented a triage system which included age and predicted prognosis. According to a study this was likely implemented to “reduce the burden on [the intensive care unit] at the expense of more high-risk patients—such as the elderly with confirmed infection—who die outside the ICU […] Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 in the spring received hospital care, according to preliminary statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare, which was released in August.”

During the first eight months of the pandemic, Sweden did not quarantine infected households. Sweden’s official policy was that those without obvious symptoms are very unlikely to spread the virus even though evidence pointed to the risk of asymptomatic spreaders. Other countries rushed to obtain masks and personal protective equipment for care staff and providers in nursing homes, but Swedish authorities discouraged their use claiming that they give people a false sense of security and that social distancing is more important. But these two in conjunction are surely more effective than one measure on its own. There have been many reports that care personnel have been reprimanded or even fired for using facemasks at work, as it was considered to spread panic.

Statistics show that on May 24, Sweden conducted only 23.64 tests per 1,000 people, one of the lowest rates in Europe. When more tests were finally obtained in the summer, many were of poor quality. “Everyone wanted to test more, but there were no tests,” says Jonas Ludvigsson, an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute. “We did not make the equipment ourselves, and other nations had banned any export to keep all the equipment in their own countries. When Sweden finally got hold of test equipment from abroad, the quality was so poor that the tests could not be trusted.”

Still, the architects in the Swedish approach sell it as a success to the rest of the world. And officials in other countries, including at the top level of the US government, are discussing the strategy as one to emulate—even though in reality it will almost certainly increase the death toll and suffering.

Despite the relatively high deaths, reports of medical negligence in nursing homes, and test errors, Sweden’s COVID-19 strategy still has a relatively high degree of support among citizens. An opinion poll in September reported that 63 percent of those polled maintained confidence in Tegnell’s approach, although this was a slight decrease from a figure of 69 percent in April—support in the government’s response has sunk from 49 percent in May to 34 percent in September.

Yes, we can’t!

The Swedish government has not been entirely passive. On March 12, the government limited public gatherings to 500 people and the next day, the public health service published a press release telling people with possible COVID-19 symptoms to stay at home. On March 17, the Swedish Public Health Agency asked employers in the Stockholm area to let employees work from home if they could. The government limited further public gatherings to 50 people on March 29. Still, there were no recommendations for private events and the limit of 50 people did not apply to schools, libraries, corporate events, swimming pools, shopping malls or many other situations.

Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren

As of April 1, the government restricted visits to nursing homes (which were reopened to visitors on October 1 without masks recommended for visitors or staff). Meanwhile, institutions were forced to make their own decisions: Some colleges and universities switched to online tuition, restaurants and bars spaced out tables and seats, and some companies introduced rules about wearing masks on site and encouraged employees to work from home. But the rules imposed by the temporary “crisis law” only lasted for three months until June 30 and, despite the fact that the spread of infection is now increasing at a rapid pace, there is no attempt being made by the government to renew the temporary law.

Why? Politics. The Swedish Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren says that the government’s powers were limited and therefore did not become useful: “It was a big problem, because then it was a big job that had to be done. We wanted a mandate from the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) to be able to make decisions quickly. We did not get that mandate from the Riksdag. I think the Riksdag told us that they do not want us to have such a large mandate.” This is patently untrue.

The regulations announced by the government were to be presented “immediately” afterwards in the form of a bill for review in the Riksdag—”immediately” meaning a few days. But, as commented by a spokesperson for the main opposition party in the parliament, Tobias Billström, the government was given exactly the powers it asked for back in April when the Riksdag voted, almost unanimously, in favor of the government’s proposal. It was a government agency—the Council on Legislation—that wanted the government’s regulations on shutdown measures in retrospect to be quickly submitted to the Riksdag for review. According to Billström, writing such a bill in such a short time would not have been a big problem. The issue here is a lacking work effort by the government.

“The government has made it an art to blame everyone but itself.”

Indeed, the approval process was simple and efficient in the spring. In practice, it would have been enough for the government to send an A4 page with the reasons on their action plan to the Riksdag. This is something that the Government offices with its 4,500 employees should be expected to handle. Nothing is preventing the government from acting, but the government is choosing not to pursue another temporary law. Instead, Hallenberg began to develop a new and more elaborate pandemic law, which is planned to enter into force next summer.

The government has made it an art to blame everyone but itself. When their crisis management fails, it is the fault of the municipalities, the regions, authorities, the Swedish management model. The list goes on. The prime minister even gave a speech to the nation where he scolded the Swedish people for not following the Public Health Agency’s advice and recommendations without any hint of self-criticism. And now it is the Riksdag’s turn to be on the receiving end of Löfven and team’s finger wagging.

The experiment is over

Crisis laws are a sensitive issue because they affect citizens’ fundamental freedoms and rights—the freedom of movement in Sweden being guaranteed by constitutional law. “The government will continue to make all the necessary decisions to reduce the spread of infection,” said Prime Minister Stefan Löfven at a press conference on November 19. Clearly, the government has not been able to get the public to voluntarily limit themselves to staying at home. They are also still squabbling about whether or whether not face masks are effective protection against the virus (they are) which is going to waste more time, in turn straining more resources, putting more pressure on an already exhausted health care workforce.

However, the rise in infections has prompted the country to take more forceful action in recent weeks. The country has moved to ban the sale of alcohol in pubs and bars after 22.00 and Tegnell told Swedes this week that the government may be forced to impose travel restrictions across the country “just before Christmas”. The Swedish experiment may be over, but the pandemic is not. Only time will tell if what was not done was made right by what was. At the time of writing, much seems very wrong and much will need to be answered for.

Related articles

Back from the borderlands: taming and framing COVID-19

The quarantine phenomenon

Photo credits

Anders Tegnell in 2020 (11 av 15), by Frankie Fouganthin, CC BY-SA 4.0

Stefan Löfven EM1B1409 by Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0

Socialdemokrat.Lena Hallengren 1c301 5973, by Janwikiphoto, CC BY-SA 3.0

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The Other Pandemic

Oliver Ösmark — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 22:06:45 +0000

***Trigger warning: Contains explicit language on the subject of child sexual abuse***

At times one stands before a great abyss. A great expanse ordained by dark materials to which one has to decide to gaze into or turn away from. Why should we feel the urge to brand ourselves with the horrors emanating from worst of what is distressingly familiar: the human condition. “If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.” The slime dredged from the ugliest depths of human depravity invokes literal and spiritual trauma, and corrupts hope for redemption.

The doctrines of good versus evil are riddled with complacency and glib intellectuals would claim that the problem of evil is that we are inextricably bound by it. We are either bound to evil’s mast, driven momentarily insane by its song, or we shut it out, plug our ears and go about staying our course. But the problem of evil runs deeper.

Preachers provide no satisfactory answer for evil’s prevalence. Theodicies sideline evil’s sinister human face, yet ones that embed it chime like sermons of a sententious apologist. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Yes, but the real and visceral evil disfigures the heart with a thousand cuts. It is the narcosis of which a deep spiritual disorientation follows. Some will never find their way out of its depths. Some don’t want to. Others belong there.

The Damned

Meet Benjamin Faulkner. Born in 1991 in North Bay, Ontario in Canada—approximately 350 kilometers north of Toronto. According to his parents, he was well-liked and not a “partier by any means” but more of a gamer and obsessed with computers. He worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the local YMCA and held a merit of distinction at his post—praised and appreciated by colleagues and the children he instructed alike. In his mid-twenties he’d shared an apartment with a roommate who described him as pleasant to live with. Not noisy and kept to himself. Mainly because he was on his laptop all the time. In 2016, he was arrested and charged with the rape of a four-year-old girl and for hosting the largest website on the darknet for child sexual abuse content: Childs play.

At Faulkner’s sentencing hearing he delivers a grand speech: “For the first time in my life I am speaking in front of the people that I love about the wrongs I’ve committed. Living with pedophilic disorder is a life of perpetual anxiety, fear, and debilitating depression. […] I know that people were hurt and I am sincerely sorry. I’m sorry for who I’ve hurt and I’m sorry for the lives I’ve altered. I’m sorry for how things turned out. If I could go back, things would be different.” The sentencing proceeds with rather benign testimonies from his parents attesting to the character—”patient and kind”—of Faulkner.

Later, a chief investigator is called on to lay out the facts. Faulkner had built and run Childs Play, administrated another major child exploitation site The GiftBox Exchange, as well as a site called Private Pedo Club with access reserved strictly for content creators with access to minors. He has been the “tech guy” for Peter Scully’s international child sexual abuse ring offering pay-per-view video streams of the most heinous content imaginable—content where minors are abused, tortured, and killed.

While the investigator reads out the list of Faulkner’s activities on the darknet, Faulkner’s hand is covering his face, his shoulders shaking… but he’s not crying. He’s chuckling. Laughing quietly to himself. The grin takes a while to fade from his face.

Faulkner ran what was most likely the largest online network of child abuse material in the world. Yet, at the time of the arrest, none of this got much attention in the media.

The Problem

The awful truth about child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, is that it covers everything. The abuse of babies, even newborn babies. Toddlers. Schoolchildren through to teenagers up to the age of 18. It includes children being raped by adults, or adults directing a child to be abused in another country. It also covers grooming—which involves an adult establishing an emotional connection with a child, sometimes the child’s family, to lower the child’s inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse—and live streaming of abuse. About one-third of this material is so-called self-generated material, involving either children believing that they are sharing a private moment unaware that they are being recorded and that material being shared, or even children being frightened or coerced to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam.

The scale of CSAM online is enormous, and it appears to be growing. Approximately 132,000 webpages were removed in 2019 by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) which accounts for millions of images and videos. Of them around 95% were girls. And 47% were images of children aged under 10. 1%, a large amount in terms of absolute numbers, of children aged under two. Simon Bailey of the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigations notes that the worse level of abuse happens the younger the child. “So naught to two is generally the worst level of abuse.”

The Damage

Calling this abuse child pornography is misleading and conceals the scope of the crime being committed. Pornography is commonly associated with the adult industry where consent is given and the actors know what they are engaging in. In no way can that be applied in the case of a child. A child cannot consent to being raped. Nobody can consent to being raped. What you’re seeing in an image with a child is a child being sexually abused. Using the word “pornography” gives a sense of legitimacy to a criminal act. Child sexual abuse is a serious crime and it is important not to minimize the effect that this has on the child.

Because child sexual abuse is extremely harmful. Especially if you look at the long-term consequences. A survey by the Canadian Center for Child Protection shows that 70% of people whose abuse had been shared over the internet lived in constant fear of being recognized. For good reason. 30% of them had been recognized by someone who had seen images of their abuse. In addition to high rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, problems sleeping, relationship issues, 60% of respondents had attempted suicide.

The Abusers

Abusers come in kinds. The worst of these are the ones who don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with engaging in child sexual abuse. These people can be impossible to treat. According to Michael Bourke of the U.S. Marshals, the task with these people is to motivate them and get them to the place where they can at least recognize that what they’ve done was potentially harmful and had negative consequences. Most sex offenders that come in through the prison system are eventually going to leave—85-90% will eventually serve their sentences and return to communities.

Bourke likens the behavior to substance abuse. There’s no cure for alcoholism or opioid addiction. There’s no cure for sex offenders either. No way to change their fantasies. “We never take anything away in psychology without replacing it with something healthy. Their crimes are how offenders got their needs met. They were the means through which they coped with stress, sadness, anger, and all the other negative emotions. If you are to take away this coping mechanism—maladaptive and harmful as it is—what do we replace that with?” If there are no readily available ways to assuage the offender’s response when confronted with stressors, they will go back to their tried and true means of relief—the website, playground, water park, whatever it may be.

By conservative measures, about 1% of the adult population has some form of pedophilic attraction—representing mostly males. Against the total global male population that makes 35 million people. It may be that a small fraction of these are going to act against a real child, but even when excluding the non-participants, this encompasses an enormous amount of people across the world who might find pleasure in viewing child sexual abuse content. Arresting and consigning all these people to life behind bars is a naïve initiative if investments and labor are wholly delegated to essentially chasing the horizon. So, what can be done?

The Platforms

In 2018, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)—more than double what they found the previous year. In 2019, it had reached 70 million, and for the first time there were more videos of abuse than photos. And this year, child abuse reports have spiked during COVID-19.

“For the last 10-20 years the industry has been saying that it’s been doing everything they can to combat the proliferation of CSAM online. They clearly aren’t. If tens of millions of pieces of content are going through your services every year, there’s clearly a problem with the way you are approaching this problem,” says Hany Farid, a professor of Electrical engineering and computer science at University of California in Berkley a leading expert in the analysis of digital images.

At Microsoft, Farid helped develop PhotoDNA which has been widely successful in combating CSAM made freely available for other tech companies. It is used to create a digital fingerprint of known images of CSA which is then used to find duplicates and stop them being shared. Google has also used analytics to introduce a ban on certain search terms—a list that is constantly changing in response to how offenders are trying to keep ahead. Facebook were one of the earliest adapters of PhotoDNA and they use it across all their platforms: Instagram, Facebook, and the unencrypted spaces of WhatsApp.

Yet, it is important to note that the tools described are effective in unencrypted space. The groundwork for encrypting online services—implementing so-called DNS over HTTPS (DoH)—has already been lain. The aim is to increase privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of data by encrypting that data. “There are really good reasons to have end-to-end encryption, but we have to acknowledge it comes with trade-offs,” says Farid. Some consequences of encryption are that things like parental controls and filters used by the IWF and other internet block lists that allow the means of companies to block millions of images from ever reaching the public eye would be bypassed. As a result, potentially millions of internet users would be exposed to CSAM.

Among imagery reported from tech companies Facebook overshadows the rest. In 2019, Messenger was responsible for over 80% of all reports made. The numbers are, however, a reflection of companies that have put more effort into finding and removing the material from their platforms. In 2018, the company was responsible for more than 90% of reports that year according to law enforcement officials. Nevertheless, many people have expressed concerns over Facebook’s plan to encrypt its Messenger service which will mean that many of the detecting tools which have been so successful in finding CSAM and getting it removed won’t work.

Facebook says that it will provide better security and privacy for Facebook users. Antigone Davis, the Global Head of Safety at Facebook, says this, “One of the things that we really see on Facebook is that more people are using our services to have very personal and private conversations […] and one of the things that we want to do is to fundamentally ensure the data security and privacy for those kind of interactions. That’s where the market is headed and I think one thing to keep in mind is that 85% of the market—the messaging market—is already end-to-end encrypted.”

Fernando Ruiz Pérez, head of operations for cyber crimes at Europol, said Facebook was responsible for a “very high percentage” of reports to the European Union. He said that if Facebook moved to encrypt messaging, the “possibility to flag child sexual abuse content will disappear.”

Hany Farid argues that there are two options. “One such option is that we’re going to encrypt your messages so that we can’t see it, the government can’t see it, nobody can see it. The cost of that will be the hundreds of millions of pieces of sexual abuse of children, roughly from the age of two months old to 12 years old, can, without any possible chance of being caught, come through the services. Which one of those would you like?”

Encryption will create a blind spot. Baroness Joanna Shields, who served as the UK Minister for Internet Safety and Security and previously worked as EMEA VP & managing director at Facebook, says that she does not understand the decision to encrypt Messenger. “It doesn’t make any rational, logical, or business sense. The micro-targeting that is done on these platforms relies on information that people share and if you go to an encrypted message between two people then you can no longer leverage the business model of the companies. So, it makes you ask the question as to why? To me, the only answer […] is that the companies are [handling reports of child sexual abuse] and the problem is that once those are reported then it’s an acknowledgment that the problem is rampant on the platform. If you take away the ability to report it, then they can say that it’s increasing or decreasing and no one will know.”

The Way Forward

It seems as if the tech giants are each using their own services and not working together. Every company has its own engineering technology, business model, and intellectual property. There’s no one technical solution that you could build on that would work across every platform. Those are different technologies. You can set an outcome, a goal, for a company to remove or block the images we’re talking about but you can’t specify the technology that they should be using to deliver it because they are differently engineered companies. Part of that engineering is at the heart of that business model hence their business success. So, they can’t share the way they build their platform.

By insisting on total anonymity, we have created a platform through which total ideational anarchy thrives, and the taint this has wrought sometimes trickles through the cracks in society’s veneers. The rot runs deep and we are condemned to despair. This isn’t defeatist. In accepting despair, we resign ourselves to a promulgation of a welfare of antipathy. We must allow discourse that addresses the profusion of the worst crimes man can commit to enter the public sphere. The sewers are overflowing. How high will this pollution be allowed to rise before we save ourselves from drowning in it?

The internet is a technology. It doesn’t make people do anything. People do things. What the Internet contributed to was two things: One, it allowed pedophiles with an interest in sexual images of children to contact each other and find a sense of community which lets them normalize their behavior. It spurred them on, and emboldened them. Two, it made these images available with apparent anonymity. People who might in other cases never have bothered to try to find these images, all of a sudden, they’re readily available.

To achieve meaningful change, everyone has to play their part. Not just the tech industry. There are some things which there is no defense against and where privacy is not a kind of balancing factor. Child abuse is one of those things. We need to find a way where there is a mixture of technical standards and policy and legal work to make it very clear that as technology changes, we don’t accidentally undermine the sort of protection that has been put into place to try and protect children. Behind every report there are children crying for help and without those reports they go without help. They are out there on their own with no one to even know that they’re being harmed.

Engage:

Sign a petition to pressure social media companies to report the spread of CSAM on their platforms

Find out more:

CBC podcast Hunting Warhead

New York Times podcast The Daily – A Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse

IWF’s podcast – Pixels from a Crime Scene

Internet Watch Foundation’s website

WePROTECT Global Alliance’s website and Global Threat Assessment Report 2019

Photo credits:

When Kids Are Silent by Zhenya Oliinyk (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Child Sexual Exploitation by Alina Tauseef (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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Portrait of a female warlord

Oliver Ösmark — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:00:11 +0000

The Taliban are well-versed in crime. En masse, they’ve effectively run the gamut of all crimes founded on a total contempt for humanity, in all its forms, except for those that abide by the constrictive and unaccommodating codification of ethics only they have authorship of. As is common among terror organizations and their death-worship, they set those enthralled under their tyranny up to fail, and relish in imparting the brutal—many times fatal—penalties for noncompliance. Amorality and psychopathy are rewarded with the spoils of their “holy” war, and in a society which offers no commensurate glory for the person with little aspiration for the homicidal narcissism of the Taliban Jihadist, fear prevails.

With good reason. More than 10,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed or injured last year, of which 47% is attributed to Taliban actions. These numbers have been stable since 2014, from which they escalated at a worrying rate in 2009. The UN estimates that civilian casualties have exceeded 100,000 since the organization began documenting the impact of the Afghan war more than a decade ago. Much like ISIL’s genocidal murder and abductions of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children shortly after declaring themselves a state in June 2014, the Taliban have their own sins yet to be answered for.

In the mid-1990’s, the Taliban committed to a strategy of fear and bloodshed targeting civilians. UN officials stated that between 1996–2006 there had been as many as 15 massacres. One such was the attack on Mazar-e Sharif in August 1998, representing one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in the wars that have raged in the Afghan region since the Soviet invasion of 1979. In what is considered an act of ethnic cleansing, the Taliban launched an attack on the city and began killing an estimated 5,000-6,000 ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks indiscriminately. This society of dread and servility under threat of death will have shaped generations that have known little else but war.

Kaftar, the dove of war

In the mountains outside of the Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, an ex-commander with the mujahideen that fought the Soviet forces operates out of a compound with an alleged 150 fighters. Her name is Bibi Aisha Habibi and she is Afghanistan’s only known female warlord. She is referred to as Kaftar, or “dove” in Dari; a diminutive sobriquet—by one account—given to her by her father because she would quickly move from place to place as if she were a bird. She was born in 1953, in the village of Gawi in Baghlan province’s Nahrin District, the daughter of an important community leader, or arbob. She was one of the middle children of 10, and, being as she remembers it, her father’s favorite. She’d follow him around as he worked to settle disputes and give advice to villagers on matters of farming and family affairs.

She was engaged at the age of 12 to a man 10 year her senior. This was normal practice for most girls living in rural Afghanistan; where around 80% of the Afghan population live. Unlike other girls she wasn’t removed from public life and it was agreed—and consented to by her husband—that she’d continue to be allowed to act on her father’s behalf as an arbob. She took pleasure in working as an intermediary in marriage disputes; sometimes forcing families to allow women to choose whom they wanted to marry. Also, she implemented rules to reduce dowries, which was an obstacle for many couples not able to marry under previous conditions. In the wars to come, her husband would stay at home with their 7 children while she rode into battle.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded. A group of Soviet commandos swarmed her mountain and killed many villagers, including her son. She took to Jihad and against the Soviet forces for the next ten years. She lost family both to the Soviets as well as the Taliban which was in conflict with the mujahideen. After the Soviets, the Taliban would eventually take Kabul and control up to three-fourths of the country. In the years to follow, Kaftar would lose brothers, sons, nieces, and nephews to the Taliban.

She considers herself a collector of lost and exiled men. Her fighters consist of ex-Taliban, ex-mujahedeen, fighters of dejected ethnic minorities compelled to take up arms against the threat of bandits, brigands, and Taliban. Yet, she has herself lost family that swore allegiance to the Taliban and has, on numerous occasions, been a target of assassination attempts orchestrated by relatives. Regarding this she says, “It’s really painful when your own family members come to kill you, and then later it’s painful when you kill them.”

War all the time

With the U.S. invasion in 2001, she thought that peace would be imminent. The Taliban were routed to the south and east part of the country by coalition forces and trained Afghan security forces. Armed unaffiliated militia groups like Kaftar’s were seen as a destabilizing factor, and in 2006—convinced by the prospect of peace—she agreed to surrender most of her and her fighters’ weapons as a part of the UN’s Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups programme.

But disarmament hasn’t proved an effective strategy for peace in a culture already plagued by unresolved endemic conflicts. The Taliban were revived with a fresh dynamism. Troubled by family feuds of tit-for-tat violence and regular death threats made by the Taliban, Kaftar has experienced none of the peace promised to her by the UN and the “democratic transition of power” heralded by the war against the Taliban.

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, many fear the return of Taliban rule. This time, however, her fighters aren’t prepared for active revolt. The legitimacy granted to the Taliban by the current peace talks give them a political advantage over the poorly armed rural resistance fighters. In a 2014 interview, she says that she would like to seek asylum outside of Afghanistan, but has to ensure the passage of 30-40 of her family members first. Without help or enough weapons, she fears that the extremist militants will target her and her family. “I was proud of my career,” she says. “But since I have been getting threats and I’m struggling and suffering, now I think I should not have become a commander. I wish I would have been just a normal housewife. That no one would know me, no one would come to talk to me, and I would have been just a normal housewife. Now I am sitting awake at night, always on guard, with a gun, ready to protect myself.”

Blood can’t wash blood

While she has, in her own way, worked to moderate the divides between men and women, and has taken an unlikely role in her society as the leader of a community and armed fighters, she is not a respected woman among warring factions and squabbling relatives. The old Afghan proverb “Zar, zan, zamin”—gold, women, land—still motivates violence in a culture of guns and rivalries. Until the paradigm of fundamentalism and lawlessness is dismantled by means of education and stable government institutions, the rule of the sword will persist and those able to fight will give their lives to protect those they hold dearest.

Kaftar knows this life all too well, but doesn’t wish it on the generations to come. The life of a warrior is a precarious one, but if it comes to the choice between fighting and submission, the prospect of subservience under Taliban rule will always inspire bloody insurgency. Despite her hardships, she knows this: “It makes no difference if you are a man or a woman when you have the heart of a fighter.”

Photo credits:

Afghanistan Observes 2007 International Peace Day, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

High Moon over Nili, Afghanistan, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Afghanistan-1, Ekaterina Didkovskaya, CC BY-NC 2.0

100331-F-2616H-011, Kenny Holston, CC BY-ND 2.0

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Re-Metamorphoses: The Misogynistic Legacy of Western Mythology

Oliver Ösmark — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 17:18:07 +0000

All cultures throughout history have had their ways of coming to terms with existence and how humankind came to be. People used stories to provide a narrative for the creation of the world; from the oldest recorded stories of the Fertile Crescent, the primordial egg of the ancient kingdoms of the Nile river, the cycle of creation and destruction of the civilizations of the Indus valley, the “Dreamtime” of the aborigines. All stories are rich with complexities. All marked by idiosyncrasies and peculiarities which constitute a collective neural network from which culture flourishes.

Stories are tools used to proliferate ideas. They provide us with a sense of authorship, a way to gather and amass a kernel of meaning from the overwhelming silence of creation. They can shape societies for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to come. Small remnants of values reside in traditions passed on by customs and rites and are so hidden in plain sight that a terrific effort is necessary on our part to sensitize ourselves and acknowledge their influence in our daily lives.

The civilization of Greek antiquity is considered to be the precursor of modern Western civilization. However, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees in giving the Ancient Greek culture too much credit where it isn’t due. Greeks regularly interacted with cultures of the Mediterranean and beyond, bringing back the arts of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and inspiration for the makings of ideal government and laws. Though, by virtue of their susceptibility for innovation, Athens became the intellectual crucible from which ideas of government, literature, sciences, architecture, sports would proliferate and last for millennia to come.

Democracy is one of the most influential ideas handed down from the Greeks and is today the sine qua non of the modern liberal nation state. But this “rule by the people” begs the question: who are these people entrusted with the power to rule? Clearly, not everyone. It is known that slavery was an accepted practice in ancient Greece endorsed by writers of the day – notably Aristotle – as natural and necessary. J. G. A. Pocock, in the book “The Citizenship Debates”, notes that the Athenians claimed citizenship required being far-removed from the grind and toils of everyday life. And the Athenian males solved this problem by delegating those duties to slaves, immigrants, and women, effectively excluding them from the agora.

The subjugation of women in Classical Athens was overt. Women had no legal personhood and were assigned their place within the oikos; a word used to refer to the domestic trifecta of family, the family’s property, and the household. The legal term for a wife was “damar”, a word derived from the root verb “to tame” or “to subdue”. The average age for marriage was around 14, which was partly to ensure that the girls were still virgins when they were wed. The lasting boundary to achieve citizenship was gender, and to the extent of history no woman ever achieved full citizenship. It would take more than two thousand years for Greek women to get the vote; which they did in 1952.

The Roman statesman Cicero wrote in the fourth book “On emotional disturbances” of his Tusculan Disputations that the Greek philosophers considered misogyny a disease, one caused by a fear of women. Perhaps this fear can be traced back to their earliest stories, their mythos.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was only Chaos. A vast void of infinite darkness. Out of nothingness – to the relief of metaphysicians – sprang something. More notably, Gaia, or the earth; along with her siblings Nyx (night), Erebus (darkness), Tartarus (the abyss), and – by some accounts – Eros (the god of love and sex). Gaia eventually bore the Titans, setting about a chain of events that would eventually lead to the creation of modern human beings by the Titan Prometheus and his betrayal of Zeus, king of the ancient Greek pantheon.

Out of the union of Gaia and the sea, a host of monstrous children would come about to be: Echidna, a half-woman, half-snake, and mate of the giant serpentine monster Typhon; the Gorgons, two immortal sisters Stheno, Euryale, and the mortal Medusa, with hair of made of living snakes, and eyes that turned anyone who beheld them to stone; the Graeae, three witches who shared one eye and one tooth between them; and the not-so-monstrous Hesperides, beautiful nymphs of evening light whose interchangeable names in the Greek sources is testament to their impersonality. The recurring motif of the characterization of the feminine in Greek myth could only be lost on the most zealous male chauvinist.

The Rape of Europa is a painting by the Italian artist Titian, painted ca. 1560–1562.

Stories of sexual and physical violence directed at women in the myths of the Greek Heroic age are abundant. One such being the fate of Medusa. In Ovid’s late account, she is described as originally having been a priestess of Athena. Being very beautiful, many suitors desired her. One of these was the sea god Poseidon who subsequently raped her in the Temple of Athena. The enraged Athena – goddess of wisdom, and a symbol of freedom and democracy since the Renaissance – transformed Medusa into a gorgon as a punishment for… well, what mortal could possibly hope to interpret divine judgement? Medusa was later beheaded by the more-than-willing Perseus on a wager made by a King on a cursory whim, and got all the aid he could hope for by the gods – including Athena.

Hand-me-downs

The rediscovery of Greek mythology in the Renaissance, through the poetry of Ovid, had an immense effect on the creative resources of artists and poets for hundreds of years to come: from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Titian’s “Rape of Europa”, Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” to Goethe’s “Prometheus”, Joyce’s “Ulysses” to O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms”. Greek mythology and its themes have endured in the Western cultural consciousness for centuries. As Mary Beard writes in her article “Women in Power”, mythology has nurtured a “real, cultural and imaginary” separation between women and power.

“Perseus with the Head of Medusa” by Benvenuto Cellini in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

Hillary Clinton experienced the brunt of this kind of antagonism full-force during her 2016 candidacy. A photo modelled after Cellini’s bronze “Perseus with the Head of Medusa”, with Clinton’s face superimposed onto the severed head failed to incite the same wave of hostility that a similar representation of Trump’s severed head did. Similarly aggressive rhetoric and crude allusions have been used against politicians such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-Prime Minister Theresa May, Brazilian ex-President Dilma Rousseff. While such discourse is rare in mainstream media in its unmitigated form, it has its own, more pernicious, effects. A study shows that anticipated gender discrimination decreases women’s leadership ambitions and that these expectations are often that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than men.

There are of course varying degrees of severity around issues of misogyny and sexism between countries. There is a disproportionate number of death threats made to women MPs in the UK, while in Finland the party leaders of all five parties in parliament are women. In Greece, as previously mentioned, women were first allowed to vote in 1952. Excerpts of parliamentary discourse within the Greek parliament reveals aggressive and derogatory forms of speech that directly attack the gender of the addressees.

The correlation between laggard societies and how women are received in positions of power is not fully established, however, there are countries with strong and lasting traditions of portraying women as inferior by direct subjugation or implicit cultural characterizations. And these stories are powerful and incidentally unifying. Unifying in the sense that having assigned roles is a comfort in a modern age of existential crises and erratic individualism. Nevertheless, these roles have been assigned in an age that predates the notion of universal human dignity by an immense time span and there’s nothing as dull as a constant rehashing of the same characters in different productions. If we are, each of us, the product of the stories we tell ourselves, then we could use some new ones.

Related articles:

German hip-hop: misogyny in rap music

Photo credits

Bustos filsofia aristotle, morhamedufmg, Free for commercial use

Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545-1554), Rodney, CC by 2.0

The Rape of Europa, Titian, Public Domain

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Food for Thought

Oliver Ösmark — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:09:43 +0000

“The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Salt of the Earth

Human activity has become a geological event. At present, some 12% of the world’s land surface is used in crop production, which is over one-third of the land estimated to be suitable for agriculture. Inefficient modern agricultural practices leave large swaths of land barren, and most of this is due to a misunderstanding of the relationship between how plants and herbivores evolved together.

An estimable 25 to 35 million bison once roamed the North American grasslands. They would migrate within an area that covered most of central North America and stretched from Mexico to Saskatchewan. Before their population was decimated to less than 100 back in the late 1880’s, the relationship between the bison and the grass on which they grazed was so beneficial for the soil, that the grass grew to 1.5–3 meters in height and the nutrient-rich soil that supported the grass was estimated to be several meters deep. Most herbivores and plants have coevolved together for the benefit of all species. However, human activity—considered to be the latest addition to the five previous global mass extinction events—has disrupted nature’s balance.

Today, much fertile soil is lost due to overexploitation and erosion. It takes approximately 500 years to replace 25 millimeters of “topsoil”, and, from this perspective, productive fertile soil can be considered a nonrenewable, endangered ecosystem. Topsoil is the upper layer of soil—the “skin” of the earth—that has the highest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms. Without it, little to no plant life is possible and the earth becomes infertile. Also, when soil—which contains three times more carbon than the atmosphere—is overworked and consequently erodes, its stores of carbon, trapped underground through chemical reactions with minerals, are exposed to the air and react with oxygen to create vast amounts of carbon dioxide gas. Soil carbon losses to the atmosphere may represent 10-20% of the total 450 billion tons of CO2 emitted by human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

Land of Milk and Honey

The methodology of modern industrial agriculture has been using up topsoil at an unsustainable rate for decades. Humans eat, on average, 450 kg of food per year, and it takes about 10 tons of soil to produce that amount of food; “10 kilos of topsoil, 800 liters of water, 1.3 liters of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that’s what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person.” With each person eating approximately 1,000 meals per year multiplied by a steadily increasing world population of 7.7 billion (as of October 2018), it becomes quite clear that food is fast becoming the challenge of our time.

Most of the crops grown are not reserved for human consumption. Worldwide, ca. 50% of grain produce is fed to farm animals and, in 2016, an estimated 74.1 billion animals (88% of which were chickens) were slaughtered—an average of 2,352 animals per second; not including male chicks and sea animals—in the global meat industry; an industry that is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all planes, cars and ships combined. It might not come as much of a surprise then, that the world’s biggest farms pollute more than any of the big oil companies.

The world currently loses 75 billion tons of soil per year, a UN report warns that global demand for water could exceed supply by 40% by the 2030’s, and, without intervention, problems will get worse. In “Surviving the 21st Century”, author Julian Cribb writes, “In coming decades, there will be a boom in local food production both in the cultivation of thousands of novel crops, in the recycling of water and nutrients in cities, in urban agriculture […] in the design of novel foods and diets. Food production will have to move indoors because of global climate disruption – heat waves, droughts, floods and fires. If key governments backslide on their climate commitments, global temperatures will hit 2.5 to 5 degrees Celsius above the levels that traditional farming can tolerate. With water and fertilizer running low, food production will have to shift back into the cities, to use recycled water and nutrients. Megacities that do not plan for this may starve. All this sounds like a big threat – and it is. But only if we are unprepared for it. Reinventing food will in fact create vast new industries, jobs and opportunities for communities around the world – and the smart ones will be leaders in this.”

Permaculture & Regenerative Farming

At Ridgedale farm in Värmland, Sweden, a new approach to farming is in practice. Richard Perkins (Director and Co-owner) founded the “Permaculture” farm to produce food locally and to serve as an education center for a new generation of farmers. Farming today is vastly different from what it was only a generation ago and most agriculture schools don’t include the importance of soil life and care, or how to work along with the ecosystem in their curricula.

While on most farms cattle that are bothered by flies and pests and are inoculated with drugs to alleviate symptoms, on Ridgedale they synchronize the hatching of fly larvae with allowing their chickens to peck and feed on the pastures for the insects. The small 10-hectare farm, which is expanding, runs like a well-oiled machine and is one of the most productive farms per square meter in Europe. Soil building is fundamental to regenerate and put nutrition back into the soil. They use special plows that don’t disturb the topsoil but blast the deeper ground open, and till in patterns likened to those of rice terraces for optimal groundwater distribution. They also plant perennial, rather than annual, crops that can live for many years and don’t require tilled soil to grow.

Their model works by allowing animals and ecosystems to express their true functions and behaviours according to the co-evolutionary properties of the animals and their environments; e.g. by rotational grazing, using pigs to effectively “recycle” organic material, etc. The rule of thumb is simple: if you’re doing something that is far-removed from how it is done in nature, then it is counterproductive. By allowing the processes of nature to work with them, Ridgedale farmers have automated much of their workload. It is all very efficient, and very profitable.

Eco-center Alôsnys near Curgy, France

“The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

Local and regenerative farming will be important for the future. Increased pressure is going to be placed on industry to feed an increasing population on less land. A functional model is needed. One that goes beyond sustainable and organic farming—farming that still subscribes to the modern industrial model of agriculture to alleviate symptoms rather than address the core disabilities of a failing system—and is economical, productive, and works with ecosystems rather than against them. History has shown that civilizations that failed to replenish and care for the soil of their arable lands became destabilized and suffered famines and wars. The world is changing and local farmers are going to be in high demand in the not too distant future. Innovation starts with the producers. The questions are whether we will have modified our habits of consumption before we’ll have to adapt by necessity, and whether or not the transition will be desperate.

Related Articles:

Vertical Farming – the Future of Agriculture?

Meat the Problem

Photo credits:

Wheat Harvest Wasco County, Jim Choate, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

JH-ZA070828_0172 World Bank, World Bank Photo Collection, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Jardin permaculture pédagogique, Alôsnys, CC BY-SA 4.0

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China and all things ungood

Oliver Ösmark — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:57:21 +0000

Something is amiss in China. It has become a place that is the proof every paranoiac dreams of. Flocks of robotic doves surveil, and concentrate over, regions home to suppressed minorities. One of China’s most prominent movie stars is missing since 1 July after allegations of tax evasion as well as earning a 0 out of 100 on an annual “Social Responsibility Report”. Abusive crackdowns on religious practices have intensified and declarations that religions in China need to be “Sinicized” and have their foreign influence purged have been put into action; Muslims are banned from letting their children attend religious activities and are being forced—an estimated 1 million people—into “reeducation” camps; Catholic churches have been forcibly vacated and leveled by bulldozers; authorities have put up QR codes on homes in minority communities and employ high-tech mass surveillance systems, such as biometrics, artificial intelligence, phone spy ware and big data, and encourage people to spy and report on each other.

Chinese democracy

In 2014, China’s State Council formulated a plan for the implementation of a Social Credit System. This system is set to be fully standardized by 2020. The system is set to assess citizens’ and businesses’ economic and social reputation, or “credit”, where the score is based on a combination of factors drawn from thousands of items of information collected from nearly 100 government agencies—among these are medical, financial and legal records.

Ant Financial, the finance arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, launched a product called Sesame Credit in 2015 that was China’s first effective credit scoring system functioning as a loyalty program but also as a social credit scheme. Scores are increased by so-called “positive acts”, such as paying bills on time, engaging in charities, separating and recycling rubbish, obeying traffic rules and, in some places, donating blood. A wide assortment of benefits can be reaped with a high Sesame Credit score—ranging from 350 to 950—such as no-deposit apartments, bicycle rentals, favorable rates on bank loans, free gym facilities, cheaper public transport, shorter wait times in hospitals, more matches on dating websites.

The government has clearly taken an interest in this. For example, the Chinese Supreme court shares a “blacklist” of debt defaulters and punishes them by lowering their Sesame credit scores. The courts can also introduce a recorded message on mobile phone numbers to strongarm them into paying their fines; when someone calls one of the debtors they first hear a recorded message telling them that the person they are calling has been put on a blacklist.

The harsh consequences of a low credit score are vast and serious. Millions of people have already been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights. People who have refused to carry out military service have been barred from enrolling in higher education. People who buy too many, and spend too much time playing, video games; engage in excessive splurging or posting on social media; or—unknowingly or deliberately—spread “fake news”, can all have their internet speeds throttled. Public shaming of blacklisted citizens is also a common practice online, with several provinces taking this to the next level by using TV and LCD screens in public places to expose people. This “IT-backed authoritarianism” is unlike anything seen before.

The stories we [they] tell ourselves

Today, access to inexhaustible amounts of information has made it difficult to know where to turn to for credible news. A survey conducted in 2017 showed that 67% of Americans reported that they get at least some of their news on social media; with 20% doing so often. Of these, 45% get their news from Facebook. Facebook is known for categorizing users by political preference. Such data has been used to manipulate people and tip the scales in elections and referendums by specifically targeting people with misinformation customized to fit their profile; Cambridge Analytica was reportedly involved with the pro-Brexit campaign and Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign. And it works.

Almost all aspects of people’s lives in China are monitored and recorded by the State. No one, who is a registered citizen, is anonymous and content is spun so that it falls in line with the sensibilities of the Communist Party. Much like how the news feeds of Facebook are personalized based on a person’s past clicks and like-behavior—effectively tailoring news stories to your biases and political leanings—China streamlines information by elimination, and this goes beyond online social media and into everyday life.

With the Chinese State’s monopoly on media distribution, it has become a case of where the exclusion of diverse sources of information and perspectives is the standard. Where liberty is concerned, disobedience and public dissent are constitutive. The freedom of the press and the state of a functioning free democracy are known to be strongly correlated. When dissidence and access to free, reliable media are heavily suppressed, the resulting vacuum becomes breeding ground for propaganda, falsehoods and hearsay.

The Agonist

George Orwell wrote in his essay “The Freedom of the Press” from 1945, “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.” If one doesn’t know, or can’t know, what one doesn’t know, how susceptible do we become to the whims of those who would abuse their power? The glaring and perhaps demoralizing response to this can be met with yet another question: Who, then, is best equipped to carry the burden of proof? With the proliferation of misleading or completely fabricated information disguised as news distributed and shared on a mass scale, the role of the independent news institutions becomes even more important. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Even if it’s dangerous.

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Photo Credits:

Surveillance Cameras, Jay Phagan (CC BY 2.0)

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