Another One
With another year ending, it seems like it has passed by way faster than previous ones. Could it be because I started this year with another visit to China? Anyone who is familiar with China knows that it runs at 3x faster than anywhere else. That visit was so invigorating (to see how China is still striving to build and evolve for the better) it brought me out of the funk I was in for most of 2024. What followed from then was a year full of blessings.
Another many more meals shared with old and new friends. Even the most mediocre of dishes can be turned into Michelin starred quality in the company of loved ones.
Another plenty more swims. Only the wild, chilly and dramatic beauty of the Atlantic Ocean could make me abandon my decades long devotion to swimming in a heated pool. There is something seductive about walking towards the sea dreading the chill that awaits, and then discovering that it is way colder than you had remembered from your last swim a day or two ago. You tell yourself as your body screams “Get out! Why are you doing this to me?”, that you just need to stick it out for the first minute and then you will be rewarded with the sight of starfish, and other types of fish as the waves wash away the aches of life.
Another best present received! My little present, Xiao Liwu, continues to be the gift that keeps giving. I have found joy in his fluffy paws, in his bouncy walk, in the pleasure he takes in eating, and in how he sprawls comfortably right in front of the open freezer door (he is a Siberian after all!). I have admired how he can sleep so deeply and still be beautiful. Even his tiny snores could have been composed by Mozart.
Another language perfected. Well sort of. My Portuguese teacher can’t get me to do any verb conjugation homework (Portuguese has many verb conjugations!!!). But thanks to consuming hours of TV in Brazilian Portuguese I can spend our entire class opining to my teacher, and even act as a translator during BJJ class.
Another pile of books read. Through one of them I (re)learnt that “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”. And that,
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.(El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (p. 77)).
The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act (El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (p. 25))
One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness… One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence… (El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (p. 184))
Another reality that I’ve been trying to come to terms with, is the death of Capitalism. Yanis Varoufakis asserts Capitalism self-mutilated into Technofeudalism with the creation and ascent of tech overlords such as Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg. How is this different from Capitalism?
Capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits… What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent.
As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.” (Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (p. xiii))
I will end here while I continue to ponder Technofeudalism…