Double Standards?

Political science has struggled to explain the exponential pace of democratization in the world—from five electoral democracies in 1900 to 90 in 2022. There are two main schools: Marxism focuses on economic development, while proponents of rational choice argue that rulers democratize because they believe it is in their interest. However, a systematic examination “suggests democracy emerges as often as not by another path: human error,” according to Treisman, who concludes that while it does “sometimes emerge through irresistible revolutions or the deliberate decisions of incumbents,” three quarters of the time “change came because the ruler made a mistake.”

“In 1848, after Parisian mobs stormed the Tuileries Palace, France’s King Louis Philippe I had to shave off his whiskers and flee to England in disguise. A ragbag provisional government then called an election with close to universal suffrage. This was hardly unavoidable. In fact, the pressure only escalated to street protests after the government banned a banquet organized by the opposition — and then again after troops shot dead several dozen protesters. As rioting spread, Adolphe Thiers, who Louis Philippe had appointed to form a new government, begged the king to approve a franchise reform that would have increased suffrage from about 0.5% to just 0.8% of the population — and likely returned calm to the streets. Even the reformers whose banquet was banned were asking only for 1%! Yet the king refused point-blank. The revolution caught everyone by surprise. Alexis de Tocqueville, who served in the provisional government, wrote later that he had heard all three of Louis Philippe’s closest advisors describe the events as ‘a pure accident.’ The revolutionaries were, Tocqueville wrote, ‘as astonished by their victory as the defeated were by their loss.’”

An optimistic take on how artificial intelligence will create new opportunities for a middle class that has been automated out of existence by the transformations wrought by computing, which concentrated expertise and decision making in fewer hands, pushing less qualified workers to low paid service jobs and creating a socio-economic chasm of inequality. In Autor’s reading, AI will aid the industrialized world’s worker shortage. And, akin to the way the Industrial Revolution made consumer goods more accessible, AI could expand access expensive “essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts.”

“The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization—to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise for a larger set of workers. Because artificial intelligence can weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. In essence, AI—used well—can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”

Data centers have been heralded by champions as the cornerstone of a new economy for a post-housing-and-banking-crisis Ireland. Traynor explores the construction of the environmentally costly centers—if all the data centers currently proposed in the country are built, they could use up to 70 percent of the country’s electricity by the end of the decade—from the perspective of the country’s own memory failures. From the destruction of centuries of public records in the Civil War to the instability of digital files, the author complicates our understanding of what it is to preserve data, and at what cost.

“All that material floating around in the cloud—which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens—is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon. And even then, these files will degrade, deteriorate and become obsolete. Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.”

“Exploring the many kinds of selves that compose our breathing biosphere, cultural ecologist David Abram and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake assert the selfhood and agency of the fluxing multitudes with whom we share the Earth. Published in partnership with the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project, and following the project’s inaugural symposium, this conversation reimagines the legal frameworks through which we define rights and well-being for the more-than-human web of life.”

David Abram wonders “if a more useful juridical designation for rights-holders—one that sidesteps the human-centered associations of personhood and the overly passive and floating sense of beinghood—might be selfhood. Having or being a self, in common parlance, signifies something rather more focused and agential than simply having being; a self is the sort of subject-like presence that one would readily associate with having rights. Selfhood implies the capacity to act, and to experience, to feel and to suffer and to enjoy as well. Selfhood conveys just what many folks seem to want to convey by using personhood, but without the human-centered overtones. And yet self remains a remarkably open and democratic notion, a quality accessible to any and all things, since—at least in English—we can affirm of anything (woodland, wetland, toad, boulder, compost heap, beehive, or eroding mountain) that it manifestly is itself, or its self.”