The Collective “I”: My Rights Stop where Yours Begin (Human, Animals, Plants and the Earth)
“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” – Ubuntu concept. A person is a person through other people. We do not exist in a vacuum. How do we define our pursuit as individuals and as part of a society to define the framework of our choices, our ethics and morals? The 20th century’s focus on the “I” as an individual leads to differentiating “Us” and “Others”, in an ongoing futile struggle that is always won at the expense of someone else, human, animal or vegetable. We are more and more in need to rethink the collectivity of rights, to find the balance between “Us” and any “Others”: Collective Rights, and not just Human Rights.
What can Western philosophy learn from Asian, African, Native American philosophies which might not separate the “I” from the “Us”, the individual from the collective, humans from the environment? How is the liberal, capitalist, consumption economy dominant in most societies damaging our collective wellbeing? Radically rethinking our perspective on what “One” and “One’s good” mean can direct our actions towards a more sustainable, just global society and a new consciousness of our collective responsibility?
Economics of Technology: Equitable Distribution or Winner Takes All
The Western myth of never ending progress has transformed its metaphors over the centuries. Today technological and industrial advancement is advocated for in the name of lives’ betterment in health and comfort; the opening of new paths for human expression; the creation of new possibilities for humanity and the creation of more ecologically sustainable solutions. We need to ask questions about the driving forces behind technological progress, about the profits that result from investments in the technological sector and about who enjoys them in order to uncover the economics of technology and to understand its politics.
Can technology enable alleviation of poverty or such global concentration only creates a few winners? How do we create policies so that Automation, AI and globalization do not keep on aggregating the wealth in the hands of the few while replacing manpower with machines? When labor is taken away from people, how do we allocate resources and define human value separately from production and ownership of technological resources?
Democracy Redefined: New Publics, Activism and Governance
New technologies and social medias are changing the meaning of “public”. But in fact, how much and how deeply these more republicans peer-to-peer modes of communication influence our contemporary societies? What are the profound consequences of these new ways of communication? Can these new ways underpin a vibrant and inclusive public culture, different from everything we have known, still be compatible with the basis of a communicative democracy? The rise of fake news and its influence on public opinion, is a now a polarizing issue of the populism/representative democracy debate.
On the other hand, the rise of technology revisited the conditions of activism, making new experiments in sustainable collective living easier, but also feeding disengagement to usual institutional and political structures. At a time of fundamental transformation, horizontal connections and knowledge sharing, is it still possible to think about global issues? Are all the groups really connected, really preoccupied by environmental or economical concerns or are they still more deeply worried about the place to place issues? Is class and work-based mobilization possible under these new conditions? Does digital technology provide a better arena for participational democracies? What are the downsides of our new democracy and is the party-based electoral democracy still a path to follow? What do we mean when we say “the old world has died, and the new world is still struggling to be born”? Technology is creating the possibility to build transnational communities, that aggregate in the name of a specific cause, but then dissolve once the battle is over: if it does not rely on long-lasting communities, can activism be effective in the long run? What role traditional class or work-based organizations play in community mobilization?
As we now see the full potential of more inclusive and participatory governance, the dispersion of knowledge, the access to many new and powerful algorithms and the rise of complexity concerning the public management, a lot of pressure is being put on the usual top-down governance systems. On the other hand, the absence of systemic change, the deployment of new technologies is likely to lead to new patterns of control, surveillance and exclusion, that would benefit a limited group of owners and providers of those technologies. Regarding those issues, how can we or public authorities use A.I., robotics and all other new technologies, in order to make governance more inclusive and sustainable? How can we make sure that our personal information and what makes us who we are won’t be used against us, against democracy? Should we be more concerned about social media and space sharing working places? Is this knowledge being used to influence our beliefs and actions?
