medium.com
cernovich susan rice BS escalator
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wendy s medium
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Psy-Group
- Psy-Group is an Israeli-based company headquartered in Cyprus, that describes itself in a marketing brochure as “Leaders in Intelligence and Infuence” and “proprietary methods of intelligence collection form the cornerstone to all of our operational activities.” The firm is “managed by an elite group of high-ranking officers from one of the world’s most renowned intelligence agencies.”
- In August 2016 Erik Prince arranged a meeting to introduce Psy-Group founder Joel Zamel to Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. George Nader, who had once worked for Prince at Blackwater, attended the meeting along with Stephen Miller. Nader told Don Jr that “the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president.” Joel Zamel presented a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help Trump, and after the election a source said Nader paid Zamel up to $2 million.
- Psy-Group formed a partnership with Cambridge Analytica after the 2016 election to try to win business from the U.S. government and other clients. In February 2018 Special Counsel Mueller subpoenaed bank records for payments made to the Psy-Group’s Cyprus bank accounts. Shortly afterwards, Psy-Group informed employees that it was closing down.
- WhiteKnight: the New York Times reported that Joel Zamel was affiliated with an internet company based in the Philippines called WhiteKnight, whichGeorge Nader worked with to purchase a presentation that showed the impact of social media campaigns on Trump’s electoral victory.
Psy-Group and Black Cube
- Psy-Group and Black Cube are both defendants in a Canadian lawsuit that is exposing some of the tactics used by both firms. West Face Capital alleged that business rival Catalyst Capital Group hired Psy-Group and Black Cube to defame West Face using shady methods, including sting operations and online disinformation campaigns, after West Face won a 2014 bid for telecomm company Wind Mobile. Black Cube and Psy-Group were accused of targeting a judge who had ruled against Catalyst in a dispute with West Face. It is not clear if Black Cube and Psy-Group worked together or if they worked separately on behalf of Catalyst.
- On a side note, in the 2014 deal which triggered the lawsuit, Wind Mobile was sold to West Face by a subsidiary of VimpleCom, which was sued unsuccessfully by Catalyst for Canadian $1.3 billion. VimpleCom, renamed Veon, is owned by Mikhail Fridman, the co-founder of Alfa Bank in Russia.
Wikistrat
- The WSJ reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s team was investigating Wikistrat, a company founded in Israel in 2010 described as a “crowdsourced consulting firm,” and its co-founders Joel Zamel and Daniel Green. Wikistrat had been contracted by the UAE in 2015 to conduct war game scenarios on Islamist political movements in Yemen. According to a source Zamel had met with Mueller who asked about George Nader, a former employee of Erik Prince at Blackwater, and recently an adviser to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
- Attorney Marc Mukasey (a former partner of Giuliani)said that his clients Zamel and Green were not a focus of the probe. Mueller also asked Zamel “questions about his work, including for certain clients.” Per reporting on Psy-Group’s August 2016 meeting arranged by Erik Prince with Donald Trump Jr., one of Joel Zamel’s prospective clients was Donald Trump.
- According to a June 2018 *Daily Beas*t article, Joel Zamel “wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynnto be a member of the firm’s (Wikistrat’s) advisory board.” Adam Lovinger, a Pentagon strategist who had been named to the National Security Council by Flynn and wasreportedly associated with Flynn Intel Group, introduced Joel Zamel to various Pentagon officials. Per a source Zamel had been introduced to Flynn by Bijan Kian, Flynn Intel Group’s former vice chairman of its board of directors, however Zamel’s attorney Mukasey denied Zamel and Flynn met. It appeared in 2017 that Wikistrat had ceased operations.
Inspiration
- An article in Haaretz describes how Ben Carson personally presented Trump with a plan from Israeli-based company Inspiration, run by former IDF intelligence officers. The plan was for voter manipulation in swing states using information Inspiration collected from a Super PAC, “which it then used to compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”
- The original report from Walla describes Ronen Cohen, a former Central Command intelligence officer who founded Inspiration in 2012. The article says Inspiration was not directly hired by the Trump campaign but was introduced by Ben Carson and funded by a PAC and hired three months prior to the election. Inspiration received voter data from the PAC and analyzed the data with another unnamed Israeli company. The messaging created by Inspiration was then passed to an American counterpart for review, revision, or distribution.
Russia Entities...
Michael Flynn-related entities
Michael Flynn has barely been in the news recently, especially since he pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI at the end of 2017. However, as one of the earliest members of Trump’s campaign, and one of the most senior members of Trump’s administration for a short time, Flynn was involved with many people and companies that did social media and influence work on behalf of Trump.
- In August 2017 Flynn amended his financial disclosure form to show he had agreed to work with SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, to help win new US government contracts. However, a source reported that Flynn did not receive compensation or perform any work.
- In the US, Cambridge Analytica hired Josh Weerasinghe, who had worked at defense companyBAESystems and had previously worked with Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to focus on winning US government contracts.
- In April 2018, Senator Bob Menendez on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent two letters to the State Department and SCL Group requesting information on the $490K State Department contract awarded to SCL “when Michael Flynn was serving as an advisor for the company and on President Trump’s transition team.” The letters requested a detailed description of the work that Michael Flynn performed as an advisor for SCL Group.
- As reported earlier, Flynn allegedly had interactions with Joel Zamel, the founder of Psy-Group and Wikistrat, who wanted Flynn to join the advisory board of Wikistrat.
Flynn Intel Group
- Flynn started his company, Flynn Intel Group, in 2014 and closed it at the end of 2016 before he joined the Trump administration. Flynn partnered with Bijan Kian and Philip Oakley,and according to company records, Flynn Intel Group was “a premier private intelligence and cybersecurity advisory firm.” Flynn received small payments from Russian firms Kaspersky Labsand Volga-Dnepr Airlines. And according to the *NYT* Flynn joined the advisory board of OSY Technologies, part of the NSO Group, a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials.
- Bijan Kian introduced Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin to Flynn Intel Group to do PR and lobbying work against Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric and someone Erdogan considered an enemy, who was living in Pennsylvania. Alptekin paid Flynn Intel Group $530K through his Netherlands-based company Inovo BV and Alptekin said funding also came from Ratio Oil Exploration, an Israeli natural gas company — although the firm denied any connection to Alptekin.
- FIG Cyber: Tim Newberry, who co-founded White Canvas and VizSense with Jon Iadonisis, listed on his LinkedIn profile that in August 2016 he was chief executive of FIG Cyber, a unit of Flynn Intel Group.
White Canvas and VizSense
- White Canvas was founded by Jon Iadonisi, a former Navy SEAL, and Tim Newberry, and is described as a technology company with expertise in cyber operations, digital influence, social media, and other areas. Iadonisi was close to Michael Flynn and had served with him in Iraq,and reportedly Flynn Intel Group had rented office space from White Canvas. White Canvas received $150,000 in 2016 from the Navy for “deep and dark web capability and gap analysis.”
- VizSense was created by Jon Iadonisi and Tim Newberry as a spinoff from White Canvas. Michael Flynn’s companies as well as those run by Iadonisi and Newberry overlap in many ways. For example, in Flynn’s contract with Inovo BV, it appeared that Tim Newberry worked for Flynn Intel group as the head of their “Special Operations Cyber Force.”
- In May 2017 the Washington Post reported that Flynn’s friend and business associate Jon Iadonisi was doing work to help Flynn on behalf of the Turkish government and Ioadonisi was also doing social media work on behalf of Trump. FEC filings showed that the Trump campaign paid $200,000 for “data management services” to Colt Ventures, which was an investor in Iadonisi’s social media company VizSense. The payment was for “a social-media project that involved video-content creation and “millennial engagement” in the campaign’s final month.”
Colt Ventures
- Colt Ventures was founded by Darren Blanton who served as an adviser to Trump’s transition. Blanton met frequently with Steve Bannon and reported to him on work done for the campaign, according to a source.
- A May 2018 *Bloomberg* story described efforts to win Black voters for Trump, and how a Breitbart writer, along with Steve Bannon, recruited Bruce Carter to target three areas, Florida, Philadelphia, and North Carolina. Bannon introduced Carter to Darren Blanton and Jon Iadonisi to help provide funding and social media support for Carter’s efforts, although it’s not clear if funding was provided. In October 2016, during the final presidential debate in Las Vegas,Blanton introduced Carter to Erik Prince and Michael Flynn, and then later to Rebekah Mercer.
- Based on the Bloomberg story, it appears that Darren Blanton, who ran Colt Ventures which was a part owner of Jon Iodonisi and Tim Newberry’s firm VizSense, also knew Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, and Rebekah Mercer. This raises a bigger question about whether or not the companies Flynn was indirectly connected to — VizSense, White Canvas, and Colt Ventures — had any business involvement with SCL or Cambridge Analytica?
Additional Entities Not Included in Chart
Data sources reportedly affiliated with campaign:
- RNC
- Palantir
- Experian
- Acxiom
- InfoGroup
Others:
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wiki
Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, and launched in August 2012. It is legally owned by A Medium Corporation.[2] The platform is an example of evolved social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium[3] and is regularly regarded as a blog host.
Williams developed Medium as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character maximum. It eventually grew into a separate platform independent of Twitter's brand.
Medium also has its own publications, including the online music magazine Cuepoint, edited by Jonathan Shecter; NewCo Shift, led by entrepreneur, author, and journalist John Battelle; and the technology publication, Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.
Contents
[hide]
- :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Background:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{User information and features:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2.1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Platform:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2.2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Tag system:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2.3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Publications:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Reception:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Censorship:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
Background
Williams created Medium from the ground up, with the idea of encouraging users to create longer posts than the 140-character standard of Twitter. When it launched in 2012, Williams stated, "There's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced."[4] By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform,[5]including a vacancy for a "Storyteller" role,[6] and that it was taking "98 percent" of his time.[5] By August, Williams reported that the site was still small, though he was still optimistic about it, saying "We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say".[7]
Medium has been focusing on optimizing the time visitors spend reading the site (1.5 million hours in March 2015), as opposed to maximizing the size of its audience.[8][9] In 2015, Williams criticized the standard web traffic metric of unique visitors as "a highly volatile and meaningless number for what we’re trying to do".[9]
In 2016, Medium introduced advertising, and gained several publishers as customers to host their content on the platform.[10]
In January 2017, Williams announced that Medium was cutting its staff by 50 employees (around one third, "mostly in sales, support, and other business functions"), and closing its offices in New York and Washington D.C.[11] He explained that "we had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model", but that Medium was instead aiming for a "new [business] model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people".[11] At that time, the company had raised $134 million in investment from venture capital firms and Willliams himself.[10]
In March 2017, Medium announced a membership program for $5/month offering access to "well-researched explainers, insightful perspectives, and useful knowledge with a longer shelf life", with authors being paid a flat fee per article.[12]
User information and features
Platform
The platform software provides a full WYSIWYG user interface when editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format.
Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter.[6] Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr.
Users can create a new account using an email address or a Twitter, Facebook, or Google account.[13]
Tag system
A specific difference from Williams' earlier service Blogger is that posts are sorted by topic rather than writer.[14] The platform uses the system of recommendations, similar to "likes" on Facebook, to up vote the best articles and stories, called the Tag system, and divides the stories into different categories to let the audiences choose.
Publications
"Publications" on Medium are distributing hosts that carry articles and blog posts, like a newspaper or magazine. The articles published or saved on can be assigned editors, and can be saved as drafts.
Cuepoint, Medium's music publication, is edited by Jonathan Shecter, a music industry entrepreneur and co-founder of The Source magazine. It publishes essays on artists, trends, and releases, written by Medium community contributors, major record executives, and music journalists,[15] including Robert Christgau, who contributed his "Expert Witness" capsule review column.[16] Medium also publishes a technology publication called Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.[17]
On February 23, 2016, it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons website, "The Ringer".[18]
Reception
Reviewing the service, The Guardian enjoyed some of the collections that had been created, particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams.[19]TechCrunch's Drew Olanoff suggested the platform might have taken its name from being a "medium" sized platform in between Twitter and full-scale blogging platforms such as Blogger.[6]
Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content,[20] a feature demonstrated in a Medium project with The Public Domain Review—an interactive online edition of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, annotated by a dozen Carroll scholars, allowing free remixes of the public domain and Creative Commons licensed text and art resources with reader-supplied commentaries and artwork.[21][22]
However, the service has suffered criticism from writers, with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide.[23]
Censorship
Malaysia
In January 2016, Medium received a takedown notice from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission for one of the articles published by the Sarawak Report. The Sarawak Report had been hosting its articles on Medium since July 2015, when its own website was blocked by the Malaysian government.[24]
Medium's legal team responded to the commission with a request for a copy of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission's official statement that the post was untrue, for information on which parts of the article were found false, and for information on whether the dispute has been raised in court. The site declined to take the content down until directed to do so by an order from a court of competent jurisdiction.[25] In response, as of January 27, 2016, all content on Medium has been unavailable for Malaysian internet users.
What Is Medium? - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/what-is-medium/278965/
1.
Medium (website) - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)
2.
13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery ...
www.niemanlab.org/.../13-ways-of-looking-at-medium-the-new-bloggingsharingdisc...
2.
How social media has killed design reviews – Fran Rosa – Medium
https://medium.com/.../how-social-media-has-killed-design-reviews-cedcb9fc18cb
1.
Medium is not a publishing tool – 3 min read
https://blog.medium.com/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool-4c3c63fa41d2
1.
What Medium (and all social media platforms) can learn from ...
https://medium.com/.../what-medium-and-all-social-media-platforms-can-learn-from-...
1.
Inside a Design Critique with Facebook – Facebook Design – Medium
https://medium.com/facebook-design/a-design-critique-with-facebook-c2a910e84de9
1.
Just a Minute – Medium
https://medium.com/swlh/the-next-stage-of-civilization-is-coming-are-you-ready-93c20d893140
The Startup
Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story. For more info about the coronavirus, see cdc.gov.
The Next Stage of Civilization Is Coming. Are You Ready?
The coronavirus scare may be opening a very interesting door….
Steven Yates
Steven Yates
May 6 · 24 min read
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
“And in today, already walks tomorrow.” ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Imagine: a world of abundance, like something out of a dream, only it’s real. Pinch yourself. What you’re seeing is still there.
An abundance of clean water, clean air, healthy food, and a minimal need for health care (the costs of which have therefore dropped like a rock).
Housing — no McMansions — but comfortable and attractive living spaces showing how 3D-printing has evolved!
Lots of green in between….
Vertical farms rising…. Tended by robots requiring minimal human oversight. Robots don’t need or ask for wages, of course.
It’s a world filled with technology, but the technology serves us instead of addicts us.
Education is free, and people can pursue what gives their lives meaning instead of spending the bulk of their days at soul-deadening day jobs.
A lot of which disappeared anyway, when the novel coronavirus came to call . . .
Creating space and time to study and learn, to create and teach others, or just be an example.
Or just to explore the world on high-speed rail also controlled by robotics.
All designed for maximal energy efficiency. All abiding by a principle identified by British cyberneticist Stafford Beer, when he wrote in his magnificent Brain of the Firm (1973) of “riding on the dynamics of systems in the direction you want to go.”
As opposed to extracting from them until crucial resources are depleted and extraction is no longer profitable.
Now?
Abundance instead of scarcity….
Technology used to create abundance instead of maintaining systems based on a presumption of eternal scarcity.
Plenty of food from the many vertical farms, for example. In line with R. Buckminster Fuller’s claim, back around 1970, that we had the technology to feed the entire planet.
Which raised the obvious question —
Why weren’t we doing it?
Imagine us doing this, and more. A world grown more peaceful, even for people who believe radically different things, since we’re no longer fighting over scarce resources.
A world where loving our neighbors is more than a slogan.
An impossible dream???
Or the next Stage of Civilization???
—
What do we mean, Stages of Civilization?
And what does this vision have to do with the coronavirus scare? What doors have opened that might be worth peeking through to see what’s on the other side?
Let me take these questions up one at a time. My working assumption: however we understand the origins of the coronavirus or its effects, short or long term —
It’s a gamechanger. We can’t pretend things are going back to “normal.”
And what was so great about “normal,” anyway?
Inequality had escalated to where it was destabilizing even supposedly prosperous societies (like Chile, where I’ve been living for eight years now).
Were you in that significant fraction of Americans with no savings, who couldn’t come up with $500 in an emergency?
A four-year university degree could saddle your son or daughter with over $30K of student loan debt. Most health care was priced out of your reach.
Something had gone off the rails….
Are you sure you want to go back to that? Suppose you learned of an option to go forward into something else? Something better?
The idea that civilizations have life cycles just like people, and go through stages of development, is key. So fasten your seatbelts while we take a journey through history and time.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) (www.pinterest.com)
Back in early 1800s France there lived a dour-faced but brilliant gentleman named Auguste Comte. He’d come of age during Napoleon’s reign. A scholar by temperament, his pet obsessions were scientific knowledge and the idea that it could be used to make the world better.
Comte became known for founding sociology as a science. He’s also known — unfortunately — for starting up the philosophical movement known as positivism. The basic idea is that science and its methods are the sole source of truth — and the basis for an optimistic or positive view of the future.
The centerpiece of Comte’s thinking was his Law of Three Stages.
The First Stage we’d gone through was mythological and religious. Societies in the First Stage look to supernatural agencies to explain the world and themselves. They devote their lives to serving or maybe placating these perhaps whimsical and sometimes hostile entities (hostile if they aren’t properly placated, that is).
At their height, said Comte, First Stage societies become monotheistic, settling on one god; say, the God of Christianity, or Allah as worshipped by Muslims, as opposed to a smorgasbord of deities.
First Stage societies spawn priesthoods and imams and ayatollahs. They give rise to such notions as the divine right of kings.
Not much room for intellectual curiosity, which could be dangerous to the curious.
For such restless souls, authority doesn’t get the last word. Who speaks for God? The priest? Why? And does God speak to him directly? Right. How do we know God even exists?
As I said … dangerous.
But even in the ancient world there were a few relatively open cultures, usually on trade crossroads where there was a lot of diversity and hence awareness of a variety of opinions and worldviews. One of these places was Miletus, an Aegean city on the coast of what is now Turkey.
Thales (6th c. B.C.) (www.byhandandeye.com)
The Presocratic philosophers — who started there — developed the first (that we know of) systematic ways of looking at the world in terms of explaining principles.
Thales, the first Miletian philosopher: “Water is the principle of all things.”
Thus began Second Stage thought.
If you think of the first as the Stage of Faith and the second as the Stage of Reason, that’s good enough for now.
Soon, philosophers were creating grand systems to explain the world and our place in it. They wanted proofs anyone could learn, not revelations only priests understood.
This had its strong suits, and out of it — whether following Plato or Aristotle or a Christian such as Augustine of Hippo — came traditions that continued for the next two millennia.
The medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century), Second Stage to the max, held that God left us “two books.” There was Scripture. But there was also the Book of Nature, one might call it.
For after all, “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).
Later philosophers picked up on this theme, and out of it came such notions as natural rights (as opposed to the divine right of kings). Rights of persons against arbitrary power of monarchs and parliaments informed British common law. Such notions came to America, whose founders tried to build a republic based on them.
European Enlightenment philosophers were busy working out universal human rights.
The Second Stage thinker sees things this way: the universe is put together in ways enabling us to discern right from wrong, good from bad, or good versus evil.
For everybody.
It depends on the results we get. If our results are hurting us, or destroying our cities and lands, something is wrong.
Not a crazy idea at all!
Needless to say, fallible human beings had problems putting it into practice.
Most people don’t think in such terms. Tribal existence had always confined morality to one’s own tribe. But the moneyed and the powerful were another story.
Many were real pieces of work, even then.
Natural rights seemed to mean landowners doing as they pleased. Slavery contradicted the idea of rights being universal, of course, but I don’t think many landowners gave the matter much thought until they were forced to.
I’m skipping over a lot, of course. You probably get the idea.
The biggest drawback of Second Stage thinking was not such inconsistencies. Its thought leaders all disagreed with one another. Each had his own theory of the universe. While some of these seemed better than others, when all is said and done no one could prove that systematic philosophy was getting anywhere. Dissatisfaction started to set in.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)(www.moodycatholic.com)
Many Second Stage thinkers — especially theologians — had tried to prove, using logic, that God must exist.
Aquinas’s Five Ways offer the textbook example.
None of these proofs worked. Other Second Stage philosophers found reason to object to them.
So was there any reason to believe this God existed, much less created this world, much less answers my prayers?
Even if you’re a believer, surely you see the problem.
If having a formal proof is the main justification for your belief, and then the best proof you can muster doesn’t work … what then?
Naturally, most people don’t believe in God because they have a proof. This is another problem for Second Stage philosophy: its separation from real life, having built proverbial air castles of abstractions.
If you’re an unbeliever, though, maybe you’re cheering this progression on!
Some were. Some Second Stage philosophers disbelieved in God.
A group of thinkers was coming down the pike deciding that testing their ideas empirically was a better way of finding out what was true and what wasn’t, no matter the subject.
Enter the Scientific Revolution, which began to replace Second Stage philosophy with Third Stage science … and technology. For physical principles could be applied to concrete problems like propulsion, and we got the steam engine and then the railroad.
According to Comte, when we turned to Third Stage thought, we gave up idle abstractions and started basing our conclusion on concrete evidence, which is never total but permits us to make a rational decision about probabilities.
Knowledge, says the Third Stage thinker, is always growing and changing. Because the world we want to learn about is a pretty complicated place, full of unknowns.
So what we ought to do is frame our hypotheses and test them step by step. Those that seem confirmed by our best tests, and can be replicated by others’ tests, deserve to be called knowledge. Those not confirmed — we get counterexamples or refuting instances or no results at all — get tossed.
Thus the birth of the scientific method. William Whewell, a contemporary of Comte’s, coined the term scientist in the 1830s. (Until then, even leading Third Stage thinkers called themselves natural philosophers.)
The Enlightenment gave voice to these ideas as well. Question traditional authorities be they religious or political. Use your mind.
Base your convictions about what kind of world this is, who we are, where we came from, and how we should design our societies, not on Faith (what a First Stage priesthood says) or on Pure Reason (Second Stage air castles), but on Scientific Reason (Third Stage empiricism, based on verification or fact-checking).
You could look at the Law of Three Stages this way:
The First Stage is our civilizational childhood. As small children, our parents and other adults seemed almost godlike. We couldn’t begin to fathom their comings and goings, or their priorities.
The Second Stage is akin to adolescence. We became rebellious, demanded reasons, called on authority give an account of itself (asking for proofs of God, for example, instead of “because the Bible says so”). We tried to build new sorts of societies, based on reason instead of tradition. We took a few wild chances, and often our reach exceeded our grasp. Some people paid a terrible price (as during the French Revolution).
The Third Stage is then our adulthood. We’ve given up childish faiths and teenage extravagances. We’ve accepted adult responsibilities. We’re finally standing on our own!
A person can do this, but can a civilization?
Some say the Western world did.
We — meaning Western man (and this has a masculine flavor about it, does it not?) — built a world around the findings of science, the workings of technology, the building up of businesses large and small, and educating the next generation for the roles they would assume as grown-ups.
What philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper called “piecemeal social engineering” tried to apply the scientific method to social problems, finding out what improved society and then doing it.
Thus arose Third Stage Civilization: based around science, technology, commerce, education — and a firm confidence in progress.
By our own efforts (not reliance on a god) we could become better humans. Some of us, anyway. Maybe a lot of us.
Some called this modernity.
A world getting more complicated, but better and better….
What could go wrong?
Goes without saying, some philosophers threw cold water on the idea.
Traditionally, in the West anyway, morality was revealed by God. Both First and Second Stagers accepted this, but Third Stagers had thrown God out … had made Him redundant. Shaved Him off with Occam’s Razor, one might say.
Pierre LaPlace, another French Third Stager from the early 1800s, had said of God (note the clinical, scientific language): “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) (www.russkiymir.ru)
Over in Russia, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced great unease with what he saw developing elsewhere. He replied (he put this in the mouth of one of his characters in his The Brothers Karamazov):
“If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.”
Except maybe getting caught.
Uh-oh!
Yes, there were important attempts at moral philosophies based on something other than religious beliefs. Secular moral theories, we’ll call them.
Kant’s thinking invoked duties deduced from Pure Reason (he was more a Second than a Third Stager). Like always telling the truth, or never breaking a promise.
But sometimes one duty would seem to conflict with another.
A group of British philosophers calling themselves utilitarians derived morality from happiness versus unhappiness, pleasure versus pain. We should always act, major utilitarian John Stuart Mill told us, to maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness, pursuing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.
Several problems here. Different people and different communities understand happiness in different ways.
The sadist gets his pleasure by causing pain….
And even if we dismiss such examples as rhetorical slaps…. Utilitarianism is compatible with isolating one group and disregarding its happiness, its pleasure, if doing so makes everybody else better off. If the overall amount of happiness / pleasure is increased.
This was not idle and academic. It had real world consequences.
Search out information on the Tuskegee Experiment, and you’ll see what I mean.
In a word, secular moral theories had made a mess of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com)
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche shredded them. Nietzsche is usually associated with atheism, with the idea that “God is dead,” but he was up to more than that.
He was issuing a challenge that every Third Stage thinker ought to have listened to (most did not).
It was not God that was dead, but everything the idea of God had made meaningful. Including morality as most people understood it. For even secular moralities were trying to have Christian principles without the supernatural.
Such as duty, serving others, and so on.
We live in a “material world,” however (shades of Madonna!).
Science hadn’t disclosed reason to believe in gods, spirits, or anything transcendent. No one can be born of a virgin; no one is resurrected from the dead!
Develop a morality suited for such a world, challenged Nietzsche, and proceeded to give it a shot.
What resulted was not a morality of Christian duties. It wouldn’t seek happiness for all … at the expense of those who’d gotten off their duffs and done something.
A post-Christian morality, said Nietzsche, would be a morality of strength, of health and resilience … celebrating the prowess of the warrior … in all things defying the bland, blind indifference of the universe!
A morality of those who move the world, who make its rules and enforce them to impose order and create safety, often amidst chaos and hostility!
A morality of Masters, not slaves!
Most people are slaves. Let’s just admit it.
Most are weak. They want to be led. They need to be led!
Like Christians, kneeling before their imaginary God…. Or anyone bowing to some substitute….
These are the thoughts Nietzsche stirred up.
They weren’t nice, progressive thoughts.
But he warned nevertheless: either develop new values for this materialist world of science … or risk an “advent of nihilism” … falling, gradually, into a cultural ambience where nothing matters, because nothing has value. Not really.
Third Stagers shrugged this off.
After all, Nietzsche went nuts. He ended up in the care of his sister for the rest of his life, which ended in 1900.
The start of the twentieth century….
The century into which Third Stage Civilization grew. And grew and grew and grew. (Expansion, after all, had become one of the things industrial capitalism does best.)
The new century experienced two of the most destructive wars ever seen. First the Great War of the 1910s. Then World War II.
It saw acts of genocide on a scale previously unimagined!
The Holocaust. Stalin killed seven times as many people as Hitler; Mao, several times more people than Stalin!
To say that something had gone off the rails would be the understatement of the era….
Was it just fascism? And communism? Or did the problem go deeper than that, in which case, as bloody and brutal as those systems were (are?), they are but symptoms.
Something weird was happening in modern art, and it predated fascism and communism.
If God had disappeared, Humanity was vanishing as well.
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) (www.pinterest.com)
Consider Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). It’s considered a landmark of twentieth-century art.
Can you see the nude?
I can’t, either.
Or contemplate the products of the Surrealists, or the Dadaists, who celebrated distortion of perception in often-disturbing ways.
In Jackson Pollack’s art, representation vanishes utterly. Pollack laid canvases on the floor, poured cans of paint on them, let them dry, gave them obscure names or sometimes just numbers, then hung them on the wall as art. I recall a comment from an “unofficial critic” from my student days: “My cat could do that.”
Much modern art celebrates what most people would consider ugliness and absurdity.
What did it all mean? What are these artists saying? Are they all just “sick in the head”? Or is that too simple.
Jackson Pollock’s Convergence (1952) (www.animatedspirit.com)
There’s ugliness and absurdity in modernity, after all. Many jobs under capitalism seem as absurd to those stuck in them as they are necessary if the system is to work.
Maybe the artists saw something the rest of us were hiding from ourselves.
Maybe life wasn’t getting better and better under modernity. Maybe it was getting more and more absurd.
A world where nothing had value, except for what gave us transient pleasure, like sex or watching big men bash each other’s bodies and heads on football fields or getting snockered.
Maybe Auguste Comte’s world of science and technology and commerce and progress wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
A lot of maybes, here, but maybe Comte gave us too few stages.
—
Indeed, with Dostoevsky’s unease, Nietzsche’s challenge, and Duchamp’s vanquishing of the human figure, a Fourth Stage was brewing.
It continued with existentialism (1920s, 1930s, 1940s).
Hippie culture on display at the infamous Altamont Rolling Stones concert (December, 1969)
Think of movements such as the Beats (1950s) and the Hippies (1960s), steeped in rebellion against “the system.”
Then came postmodernism (1970s and after).
From modernity to postmodernity….
Mere trends? Or signs that the Third Stage of Civilization was inherently flawed and starting to unravel.
If Third Stage thinking, based on science, technology, commerce, and education, is inherently optimistic about human possibilities, Fourth Stage thinking is pessimistic and cynical, even despairing. Positivism, that Comtean philosophy about the first, was effectively dead by 1975.
Extending the metaphor we used earlier, if the Third Stage was our adulthood, the Fourth Stage signals old age, with its infirmities, its dementias, its regrets…. Civilization tottering … on borrowed time (and money borrowed against the future — debt).
And although we’ve been walking through this historically, the Stages are not historical stages. They’ve coexisted. There are First Stagers around, after all. Those are the people waiting for the Rapture.
There are a few Second Stagers around. Mostly in economics think tanks, still pushing free market absolutism and other abstractions….
There are Third Stagers aplenty…. Someone like Steven Pinker comes to mind with his defense of the Enlightenment (Third Stage) mindset.
But the Fourth Stage seems to be having its day in the sun.
This whole idea of some kind of universal morality, or universal human rights … which Nietzsche would say was a holdover from Christianity … has been thrown out.
downwithtyranny.blogspot.com
Enter identity politics (1990s and after), where every group defines its own reality and seeks its own brand of recompense against its oppressors: typically straight white Christian men as a group.
Truth becomes as fluid as morality…. “Alternative facts” reign….
Narratives all the way down….
Meanwhile, industrial civilization seemed to have trashed the planet. Literally.
Natural resources being depleted. Deforestation.
Peak Oil….
Oceans filling up with discarded and nonbiodegradable plastic crap, on which animals choked to death….
Species dying off in record numbers.
A few scientists talking about a Holocene or Anthropocene Extinction (the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, they say).
Not to mention climate change, if by some chance we really are causing it.
We seemed to be trashing ourselves as well. On bad food, contaminated water, sugary soft drinks, pharmaceuticals, air pollution, noise pollution, addictions to those screens, etc.
Obesity leading to diabetes … chemical dependencies … physical infirmities … breathing problems … dysfunctional families….
Mental health issues off the scale…. Spousal abuse; child abuse; animal cruelty; suicides aplenty, especially among the young….
By the middle of the 2010 decade, especially in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–09 during which we watched a “recovery” benefit primarily the rich, mainstream political-economic narratives were unraveling around the world.
Economic populism and neo-nationalism rose in their place. Great Britain saw Brexit. Trump was elected in the U.S. on his ability to command media and make his opponents look like fools. We saw Orbán in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland, eventually Moti in India and Bolsanaro in Brazil, and finally, Boris Johnson in the U.K., because the previously dominant narratives of globalization, economic integration, immigration, and expertise (especially in political economy but in science and health as well) had collapsed.
Most of those narratives were of the Third Stage….
Like liberal democracy itself.
Mass consumerism is both Third and Fourth Stage. It and marketing / salesmanship form a kind of bridge from the former to the latter.
Donald Trump: America’s Fourth Stage President (www.yesofcorsa.com)
And speaking of master salesmen… Trump is Fourth Stage to the max…. No one was better at using all available media to sell himself to a Republican base that considered itself to have been sold out.
But so are the other folks in the above list. So are most corporations, especially media corporations who, as vehicles, enrich themselves through sponsorship and ratings.
Where is truth to be found today?
Media corporations aren’t in the truth business, they’re in the money business.
Big Pharma’s not in the health business but the money business.
Political classes are in the power business. And they accept donations.
Just follow the money….
We may be watching Nietzsche’s “advent of nihilism” …
In the rising inequality brushed off by economists until it proved destabilizing.
In the mounting evidence that industrial civilization is disrupting the natural systems the biosphere depends on.
In the number of ordinary folks whose answers to the dilemmas of life disruptions and world disruptions is to turn inward and tend their own gardens….
I get it. I’ve written about it. There’s peace to be found in your own garden and in personal resilience.
It’s one thing to appreciate morning coffee and daytime sunshine and then get immersed in private work done with a commitment to excellence.
It’s another if those define your whole existence? What does it signify if they do?
Have you retreated into your own private, exclusive “safe space”? Perhaps alone, perhaps with a spouse or family, perhaps in a small community of the likeminded?
Its understandable, especially these days…..
The COVID-19 nightmare may have enhanced this, via the lockdowns and social distancing measures…..
What else has the coronavirus scare done to us … or possibly done for us, if we look at them and conceivable disruptions yet to come in the right way?
—
I’ve read that this pandemic has revealed the inadequacies of a health care system based exclusively on profitability.
It may have revealed more than that.
With over 30 million people now out of work in the U.S. alone because their businesses or places of work have been deemed “inessential” by government, told to “stay indoors” and be dependent on “stimulus checks” that won’t cover the expenses of a family of four for two weeks, much less the potential duration of this crisis … the door the coronavirus / COVID-19 scare may have kicked open is revealing to us, if we look carefully through it, the inadequacies of a money political economy itself!
mikecorthell.blogspot.com
A money political economy is any political economy in which everybody needs money to survive, and can’t survive without it. Without businesses able to turn a profit, without jobs that trade time for money, without IRAs, without 401(k)s, without Social Security or Medicare, without charity of various sorts (gifts, inheritances, etc.), the actors in a money political economy starve. For its haves, it becomes a near object of worship. For its have-nots, a new serfdom.
Industrial civilization ripped whole populations from the land and sent them into cities where they worked for an employer.
The percentage of the population that farmed dropped from around 90 percent or so to around 5 percent.
And in a couple of generations, knowledge of how to grow crops for food had almost disappeared.
This is a worldwide phenomenon.
If you can grow food, you and your family can survive no matter how bad the economy gets. If you can’t, you need a business or a job or a stimulus check, because you need money to live.
Some, of course, are skilled at luring money their way, then going public with an IPO, investing so that they don’t trade time for money: money making money.
Nothing unexpected there: some are better money-makers than others, just like some are better writers than others, some are better artists than others, some are better auto mechanics than others. We’re all “wired” differently.
But though the story’s longer than I can get into here, that’s how we got not mere inequality, but a billionaire class in the West.
A group of people who would fit into a college auditorium commanding more wealth than the entire bottom half of the world’s population.
The Davos Culture, one might call it.
Our real global political economy: plutocracy.
If you want the truth. Which may be as dangerous today as it ever was. Ask Julian Assange.
If this seems obvious, forgive me. But we’re finally at where I want this to go.
By its nature, industrial civilization and its money political economy create and maintain systems of scarcity — of food, of housing, of education, of jobs.
Because scarcity is profitable.
Scarcity enables control by the powers-that-be in corporations and government, because while there’s always work to be done, there are invariably only a limited number of jobs that match your skills, which you can use to make money.
Scarce resources are owned and sold, and the owners profit.
Abundance is not profitable. An abundance of anything lowers its price. Supply and demand at work. Look at oil. Its price has fallen in world markets because demand has fallen. Demand has fallen because economies all over the world, steeped in the Third Stage industrial system, are struggling with underconsumption, always one of the big dangers in a capitalist economy as it goes through business cycles and otherwise buffets people with forces they can barely understand much less control.
And empowers an ownership class whether anyone likes it or not. Eventually this point-zero-zero-zero-one percent owns nearly everything; no one else owns anything.
Scarcity is incentivized by both industrial and financialized capitalism.
Because ownership of an abundant resource is a liability. It can’t be sold in sufficient quantities to turn a profit, if at all.
With an oversupply of laborers, wages fall. Corporate elites learned long ago: to maintain low wages, maximize laborers.
This, and not sympathy for immigrants, is the major impetus for immigration and open borders.
(Incidentally capitalism may be a money political-economic system, but so is socialism. They agree entirely on this, and on exchange as the basis of value. They disagree on how money and/or goods it buys should be distributed. Capitalism is entirely comfortable with inequality as long as there is a means of getting purchasing power into consumers’ hands no matter their economic status and keeping them pacified with entertainment as they go into debt. Socialism tries, and mostly fails, to lessen inequality and exploitation. But where it takes root, capital flees, and you get Venezuela.)
Now think about this:
Sufficient abundance of an actual human need or good will drop its asking price almost or entirely to zero!
The reason we don’t pay for oxygen in the air we breathe is because it is abundant. The idea of someone owning it would make no sense.
Could we use technology to do this with, say, fresh vegetables in vertical farms?
Could we use 3-D printing on a large enough scale to do it with housing?
Back to our original visioning, filled with abundance and green and peace.
Abundance created and maintained by robots, not human laborers.
We are often told that automation will eliminate a substantial fraction of existing jobs. In a world based on a presumption of scarcity, we find ourselves having to ask, Where will all those displaced workers go?
Where have displaced workers gone, so far?
Often, into poverty. Into chemical dependencies. Or worse.
Because eventually their purchasing power is gone.
Can you imagine what would happen if we had technologies that produced abundance, instead of maintaining systems based on a presumption of eternal scarcity?
Prices would fall until people did not need to trade time for money!
They could if they wanted to, but they wouldn’t have to. The system wouldn’t compel them to do so.
The right renewable energy resource(s), on which admittedly we are still working and have a ways to go, would end the need for extraction and the chronic scarcity in that domain.
Are we looking at the Next — or Fifth — Stage of Civilization here?!
Getting past the priorities of the Third, which were technique and profitability, and the Fourth, which arguably have been power, quarrels over narratives, and fights over the spoils of scarcity created by the Third.
There’s a lot here we aren’t even close to knowing how to do technologically.
But the quest to find out has begun!
Initiatives ranging from the Green New Deal in the U.S. and Diem25 in Europe are part of this look forward, with a renewed if guarded optimism.
So are institutions such as the Long Now Foundation, B Corporations urging business to do good, movements such as Conscious Capitalism, cooperatives of all sorts, and innovations such as vertical farming. These are just the examples I think of first.
Not that all will survive into a viable Fifth Stage of Civilization in their present form. But in some combination and with new voices, such ideas offer starting points and a can-do spirit that may take us “in the direction we want to go” (Stafford Beer again).
Another Utopia?
No. We won’t solve every human problem. In an imperfect world of imperfect people, no system can deliver that. We shouldn’t ever promise it.
Bringing about a Fifth Stage of Civilization will involve a major change of worldviews. We’ve not begun to formulate the hurdles to be cleared. Today’s most powerful industries, after all, will be obsolete.
The billionaire class will definitely not be on board!
Nor its court “economists.”
But a world that does not depend on resources extracted from the ground might be a more peaceful world. A less resentful world. As it will not depend on swindling or coercing indigenous peoples who farm that ground. They will no longer see their ways of life destroyed and replaced by Third and Fourth Stage mass consumerism.
The Fifth Stage won’t enslave us to money and its makers.
In a world of abundance, there will be fewer things to fight over.
Do note: some things will remain scarce no matter what. Diamonds, for example. Or original Rembrandts.
So we are not trying to abolish money or something. Those who wish to continue with a money system will have no trouble doing so … at least for goods still scarce.
We are talking about bringing abundance to the satisfaction of basic human needs.
—
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983)(www.newdimensions.org)
Summing up —
R. Buckminster Fuller also said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
We’ve tried to lay the groundwork for that here.
Maybe, even if we are imperfect and fallible, we can do better than we are doing now.
Believers (in God) and unbelievers alike can agree that we can do better, that we should do better.
It may begin not with some grandiose assumption about building a civilization but just reaching out and treating that other person as like yourself, a person of intrinsic value. Someone you can love — not in the erotic sense, obviously, but in the agape sense.
Not a commodity. The next sale.
Not all money political economies are created equal, of course. The neoliberal money political economy is arguably the worst, because it incentivizes and rewards monetizing everything and everyone.
Yanis Varoufakis (www.nimbio.com)
I like the way Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece, put it in one of his talks. Societies which contain markets are ubiquitous. But when society becomes one big market, you get inequities, eventually corruption and dysfunction; and if the problems are not addressed, upheaval and potential violence. As our 50-year-long “experiment” with neoliberal political economy should have taught us.
There’s more to be said, obviously. Much more. Suffice it to say for this adventure in ideas, older Stages of Civilization (Third and Fourth) are on their way out.
Even if they are not growing old gracefully!
Economies based on mass consumption and debt (money) are everywhere tottering.
All the coronavirus / COVID-19 lockdowns did was give them a push.
The Next Stage of Civilization is beckoning.
A Fifth Stage of Civilization, a world of abundance and peace and love.
Is it possible?
It’s up to us.
Are you ready?
Philosophy
History
Civilization
Coronavirus
Change
Steven Yates
Written by
Steven Yates
Writer, editor, copywriter, philosopher (ex-academic), futurist, Stages of Civilization theorist, aspiring visionary.
The Startup
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