economies: from market values to human values
8.3 Humanizing the digital world
Figures
1.1 The connective spiral of humanity
2.1 Global inequality regimes, 2018
3.1 Circles of connective humanity
6.1 The Inglehart–Welzel World Cultural Map
Acknowledgements
My special thanks to Jonathan Skerrett, who has been my advising editor for the past three books. I have had some really good editors over quite some time, starting with Peter Hopkins at Routledge one very drunken lunch back in 1972; Jonathan has been wonderfully supportive, critically shrewd and very patient. I also thank Karina Jákupsdóttir for always being there to help bring this book into fruition. Sarah Dancy revised a very messy text into a much clearer one and I am very grateful. Thanks too to Evie Deavall (production) and Michael Solomons (index).
Nowadays, most of my intellectual debts go back a long way and most of my teachers, sadly, are dead. My earliest tutors (and colleagues), Stanley Cohen, Mary McIntosh and Jock Young, among others, taught me not only a passion for doing academic things that personally matter, but also showed me that intellectual life can be fun and enjoyable. John Gagnon and Bill Simon were dear friends as well as extraordinary thinkers. Michael Schofield was there with my very earliest worries. I remember them all with deep fondness.
A few people have been regular supports and I thank them dearly: Molly Andrews, Neli Demireva, Carlos Gigoux, Miriam Glucksmann, Mark Harvey, Phil Jakes, George Kolanckiewicz, Travis Kong, Harvey Molotch, Ewa Morawaska, Lydia Morris, Peter Nardi, David Paternotte, Colin Samson, Steve Smith, Arlene Stein, Jeremy Tambling, Pauline Tambling, Paul Thompson, Jeffrey Weeks and Glenn Wharton. I especially thank Rob Stones for years of engaged discussion and for a critical but sympathetic early reading of this work. And I thank Daniel Nehring for all his detailed, critical and generous comments on a final draft of the book. This has not been an easy book to write, but I hope it can make a small and timely contribution to a never-ending debate.
Sadly, although my Gay Liberation Front days were a critical turning point in my life, I have never been quite the activist I would have liked to have been. But I have always admired those who are. Any proceeds from this book will be donated to Amnesty International.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my dear brother Geoff, who died as I was completing it, after many years of cheerful illness. I am very thankful for my family of ‘Plummers’: Ethel, Len, Steph, Jon and Tony, Chris and Lorraine, Abigail and Emily. Most of all, I fear I could do very little without the perpetual kindness, support and love of my life-long partner and ‘bestest friend’, Everard Longland. We have had a long and wonderful journey together.
Wivenhoe, November 2020
Imaginations: Only Connect
Only Connect. Tell the Stories.
Connect the machine to the action
And the action to the person.
Connect the person to the other,
And the other to the self.
Connect the self to the body,
And the body to the mind.
Connect the mind to the senses,
And the senses to the community.
Connect the community to the country,
And the country to the world.
Connect the world to the earth,
And the earth to the sky.
Connect the sky to the cosmos,
And the cosmos back to humanity.
Connect the particular to the general,
And the unique to the universal.
Connect the public to the personal,
And the personal to the political.
Connect the present to the past,
And the past to the future.
Connect the media to the reality,
And the reality to the truth.
Connect the knowing to the doing,
And the doing to the values.
Connect the generations to our dreams:
Of love and kindness and care.
Connect creativity to dignity and hope,
To a politics of better worlds for all.
Connect to rights and justice and flourishing.
Hear the Stories. Only Connect.
Introduction
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
The year was 2007. I had been ‘born again’: a new human person, reconnected, full of life, energy and joy. I now had a new liver placed gently inside my body – donated by a seventeen-year-old girl, killed tragically in an accident. At any other time in history my life would have surely come to a fatal end. But in 2007, I was able to have a liver transplant. Over many years, I had developed chronic, fatal liver disease. The only way out now was full-blown transplant surgery. This saved my life. Recently invented, the transplant process brought together the altruism of the donor, the skills of the surgeon, the care of the nurses, the practical endeavours of hospital staff, the love of friends, partner and family, the intellectual brilliance of scientists – a full assemblage of humanity at work. Balancing on the edge of death for three and a half years and experiencing a successful transplant most surely wants to make you celebrate the wonders of being uniquely alive, connected to the world and being complexly human.1
And yet. Even as I was slowly being returned to my fragile wider planetary home, this very world looked like it could do with its own transplant! It was 2008: just seven years after the atrocity of the 9/11 New York twin tower slaughtering, we now had to face the enormous greed and corruption of the financial crash – casino capitalism – and its dishonest aftermath. Today as I write, in 2020, we confront a quite different order of crisis: a twenty-first-century plague, Covid-19, which has shaken everybody’s life and the very social structures in which we live.2 A new generational world experience is happening all around, like it or not.
Even as I recognize much of the extraordinary progress made in some parts of the world, I can also clearly see a world in woe, a much-mutilated humanity. We live in the chaotic flow of liquid modernity, a time of extraordinary volatility and change where life and the future have been rendered unsafe, insecure and at risk.3 The recent dominance of the West is now firmly in decline, and a new pluriversal world order is in the making.4 This is also an order with a tangible sense of the extreme harm we are doing to our environment. We build megacities of pollution in the middle of deserts. We cut down large swathes of forests all round the world, destroying both wildlife and the air we breathe. We elect leaders full of self-pride and little concern for global humanity. We fail to prepare ourselves adequately for a world in which a long line of anticipated catastrophes and disasters (the Anthropocene and the Precipice) is lining up for us. We tip endless muck into the oceans and rivers, so life cannot survive. We turn all of human sensitivity and life into a deluge of digital dehumanization. And wherever we look – if we do look – we can see a morass of inequality: the rich and their unqualified ‘greediness’ doing so much more damage than the poor, who are forced to suffer so much. The deep structural