Re: <nettime> Democracy Net Zero

David, I wish the cognitive struggles you are talking about were actually happening. Or rather, that they were making the specific difference of our times. Then we could think in classic democratic terms with well-established ideas about civil society and the like.

The problem is that the new era you portray, of cognitive struggle over the risks of modernization, has indeed been going on since the days of Rachel Carson, and it has unfolded in many of the ways described by Ulrich Beck in The Risk Society, a major work which was published in the 1980s. A lot of what you are saying is very close to that book, although it, like your text, remains more on the level of rational democratic debate whereas society operates equally if not more on the level of passion. Now some six decades after Silent spring, untold numbers of toxins -- whether chemical, social or psychic -- have been identified through quite tumultuous public debates that begin as fringe and minority issues, before coming to occupy the central stages of public discourse. In my view, we have finally reached the point that Beck always wondered about -- the point where there is no longer any doubt about the risks. At this point the cognitive issue fades and the question of will becomes primary. Assembling the collective will for a change in the centuries-old pattern of industrial modernization is the big issue of our time.

In that regard, the article that Ryan sent is incredibly interesting. It deals with one of the basic patterns of modernization, namely dam-building and irrigation. All of California was built on this hydrological foundation, but at a considerable price to the future. Long ago in the 1960s it was understood that ever-increasing water use leads to species extinction, and as the article recounts, the Environmental Protection Act has been used both to halt the flow of irrigation water during droughts and to divert significant resources to endless rebuilds of the hydrological system. Native American tribes like the Yurock became involved in these issues all across the West Coast, as did a generation of urban environmentalists. Now the state that built the hydrological system is making tiny steps toward taking it apart, or at least, regulating it differently, under the pressure of what is now a growing fear on the part of urban populations that the ecological matrix of the West Coast will no longer sustain them (droughts, fires, toxic air etc). Meanwhile the huge agricultural economy of California pushes in the opposite direction, toward continued growth. And in Northern California and Southern Oregon, as all over the world, the constituencies of the growth economy are resorting to neofascism to counter this incipient transformation toward an eco-state.

In my view the climate conflict is not just Indigenous people and/or environmentalists against the state. It is also a struggle that plays out within the state. It no longer has primarily to do with knowledge, because science has spoken and people have heard and understood. It is now a struggle over identities and their corresponding worlds. To advance the struggle in a positive direction means transforming both identities and worlds. The democratic public sphere does not disappear, but it is underwritten by cultural foundations whose structuring influence is now apparent and is passionately at issue.

Some other time I would like to go further with this, but damn, exactly right now we gotta leave to go protest against the Enbridge pipeline that's cutting through unceded indigenous land up in northern Minnesota!

all the best, Brian

On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 5:27 AM <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

On 2021-06-02 18:54, Ryan Griffis wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> This is maybe jumping the tracks of this thread started by David's
> essay, or maybe it’s actually bringing it back online… not sure. But,
> Patrick’s anecdote about verbalizing the urgency of the climate
> catastrophe is something many of us here, I’m sure, relate to.
>

Hi Ryan et al. Thanks for all the reflections and informative links..

For clarification around the text

Writing Net Zero Democracy was driven by a need to understand in broad
terms, the big changes in the underlying political logic of today's
liberal democracies. And most importantly how these changes affect our
capacity to avert climate catastrophe. For what its worth, my own belief
is that action and change can’t happen without experiments that break
out of the rigidities of a limited view of what democracy can be.

The reference to Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ (apart from the intrinsic
importance of her work) was to compare the way it was received and its
impact in an era in which agreement between ideological opponents was
sometimes possible to our own age. Today a relatively new political
grammar that clusters around the structuring polarities of technocracy
and populism appears to make agreement on anything between opponents
impossible.

The underlying argument of the piece is that whatever form our practice
takes needs to take account of this new political grammar even as we
seek to resist its logic. And that new democratic experiments operating
within this logic must above all have a direct impact on decision
making in relationship to the climate emergency.

This is why I underscored the impact of the recent French Climate
assembly and the resistance it has generated to the way Macron has
broken his commitments and diluted the measures proposed by the assembly
that he himself convened.

There is much to be learned by what is unfolding in France as part of
the wider process of cognitive mobilisation. Whether in the numerous
experiments in participatory deliberative democracy around the world or
‘evidential realist’ investigative art movements that can be seen
partnering important forms of on-line investigative activism (Bellingcat
and Forensic Architecture). But a cognitively mobilised society also
includes the toxic conspiracy narratives of the likes of QAnon.. whose
followers also see themselves as independent thinkers and researchers.
And like Wu Ming 1 recommended we must never simply dismiss or debunk
these narratives but always look for the kernel of truth around which
conspiracy fantasies invariably form..

Best

David Garcia

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