Thank you for this. It’s been painful to watch otherwise insightful thinkers pulled into this mind-numbing vortex, wherein one reasons about the world as it appears through this peculiarly provincial prism of Americanised left/right (words that have less and less anchoring in anything real.)
I’m reminded of that famous assertion by Stafford Beer, that the purpose of a system is what it does. We obsess over intentions and finesse our precise stance vis-à-vis the world, but ultimately we are inescapably integral parts of a system built atop exploitation, and we benefit enormously from all the layers of isolation between our gorgeous AirPods and the unforgivable situation on the ground in the DRC. We would search in vain for the one mastermind who engineered all this; it’s an emergent property of a self-healing system we are nearly helpless not to support and maintain, even as we just try to live relatively decent lives.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. It is a fairly typical story of the extraction industries in regions where the people are powerless and the politicians are not, for whatever reason, acting in the interests of the people. In the case of the DRC the country is poor to enforce some of the anti-child labour laws it has but meanwhile these valuable commodities that have been clawed from the earth are being exported without any real controls.
Thank you for this. It’s been painful to watch otherwise insightful thinkers pulled into this mind-numbing vortex, wherein one reasons about the world as it appears through this peculiarly provincial prism of Americanised left/right (words that have less and less anchoring in anything real.)
I’m reminded of that famous assertion by Stafford Beer, that the purpose of a system is what it does. We obsess over intentions and finesse our precise stance vis-à-vis the world, but ultimately we are inescapably integral parts of a system built atop exploitation, and we benefit enormously from all the layers of isolation between our gorgeous AirPods and the unforgivable situation on the ground in the DRC. We would search in vain for the one mastermind who engineered all this; it’s an emergent property of a self-healing system we are nearly helpless not to support and maintain, even as we just try to live relatively decent lives.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. It is a fairly typical story of the extraction industries in regions where the people are powerless and the politicians are not, for whatever reason, acting in the interests of the people. In the case of the DRC the country is poor to enforce some of the anti-child labour laws it has but meanwhile these valuable commodities that have been clawed from the earth are being exported without any real controls.
Here is the video that is now marked as private in the article. https://youtu.be/8nfDFWWBq0k?si=Sx3HWv3iJ9FPU-z6