So I moved to Berlin a few weeks ago and this was my first step to save myself, it was difficult but I did it! And it was so worth it, I can’t even tell you how much my life and my mental state have improved since I moved here. I feel like I found my home, I feel like I belong, perhaps specifically because no one belongs here. And I never feel that way! This is so new and exciting for me, I’m so happy that things are finally starting to work out for me. Anyway, with my field experiment, my friends that I needed to say hello to, all the new people I’ve been meeting, all the summer events going on, looking for a house and moving and my current state of homelessness, it was pretty busy. I didn’t really have time to do much in preparation for the conference and with only a few days left last week I freaked out. My mind went rogue and turned on me, this is the first time that I very concretely understood what imposter syndrome is. The thoughts that were spiralling in my mind!

“As always you left this for the last minute, wtf are you gonna do now?”

“You’re going to the first conference of your life and you didn’t even prepare your presentation yet!”

“What were you even thinking applying to such a conference, you don’t belong there! Who do you think you are?!”

“You used some big sexy buzzwords in your proposal of a paper that doesn’t even exist and they thought you were actually someone to invite but you tricked them. You’re nothing. You’re shit. You’re a mere master’s student who can’t even come up with a decent research question.”

“You don’t have the knowledge to back up anything you wrote on that proposal and they’re gonna see you for who you are. A little girl that doesn’t even know what she’s talking about.”

“Your ruse is going to be uncovered and you’re going to be humiliated. They’re gonna ask you questions and you’re not even gonna understand the question, let alone be able to give an intelligent answer to it.”

“Just say you have covid and don’t show up. You don’t have to go and its so much stress, why do that to yourself?”

And so on. You can see how cruel my mind is to me sometimes. But I’m deeply grateful for my beloved friends and family because they’re the ones that got me through it. So many positive affirmations and comforting words of encouragement. We incorporated a demo presentation into our weekly game night and I presented to my friends and they gave me so much helpful feedback. Now they also know what DAOs are and we have the idea of turning this “learning event” into a regular thing where we can all share interesting knowledge and experiences we gain in our individual lives. I love it! And I want to share some of the encouraging words they shared with me, that helped to shut up my inner saboteur.

“If you don’t know something there’s nothing more natural and honest than to just say I don’t know, and there’s nothing to be ashamed about.”

“You have all of the space to make any mistake you want, that’s the good part about first experiences.”

“Well, we’re all imposters when you think about it. No one knows what they’re doing, we’re just going around pretending. Especially in academia.”

“I have full faith that you’re going to rock this thing!”

“You actually might fuck up, you know. It happens. And that’s completely okay, you’re allowed to fuck up.”

And so much more. So I ended up going, thankfully. I was still very stressed out up to the last minute. And so much went wrong on the morning of my presentation, I just wanted to get it over with. But looking back I now know there was nothing to be afraid of. Everyone was just human. And very kind human beings at that. They were encouraging, supportive and interested. No one made a mean comment at all. There was negative feedback but it was all very constructive and considerate. And I think I did a good job! Both with the presentation and the questions after it. The negative feedback was nothing compared with all the positive feedback I got! I’m still shocked by the experience. And conferences apparently aren’t really about the papers being represented, they’re more about connecting and reconnecting. We share our ideas and talk and have fun together, we become friends. That’s the real beauty of it, it’s a social experience! And I’ve always loved the collective & social part of academia, this is a whole new level of it. So it was truly a transformative and profound experience for me.

So I’m gonna get a little emotional. It was a gathering of brilliant passionate nerds out to save the world, a thousand of them. They were scholars, they were activists, they were artists, they were comrades, they were warriors, they were full of hope and doubt, they were beautiful human beings and most importantly they were friends. After the isolation I have gotten accustomed to in my struggle, the loneliness, the crippling self-doubt, the hopelessness… finding this community changes everything. I’m not alone anymore and there are thousands of others out there fighting for the same things. The way we instantly connected was pure magic. We understood each other on such a deep level: the humor, the struggle, the coping mechanisms, the hope, the hopelessness, the things we read, the things we watch, the way we perceive life and what we want from it. I’ve never experienced something like this before. I feel like I found my people, it was so comfortable to be amongst them, and these are people that I literally just met. I knew exactly what to say around them and it was what I wanted to say, I knew I would be accepted for exactly who I am. We were united under a common purpose and struggle and everything else was irrelevant. We were from all over the world and from different backgrounds and ages and genders, but we were able to form a community. Not only do we already agree collectively that the world as we know it is fucked up, we also agree that that can be changed and that responsibility lies with us, and we have come together to discuss how we can do it. We’ve all devoted our lives to actively and passionately seeking out Alternatives to Capitalism and we’re in it together. I kinda grew up this weekend, these wonderful “adults” listened to me, they gave me the opportunity and space to express myself and my ideas resonated with them. They took me in as an equal. I am an adult, I am a sociologist, I am a scholar, I am an academic, I am an activist, I am an artist! And no one in the world can take that away from me. Despite the words of my inner saboteur, I am not an imposter and I deserve to exist and to be here just as much as anyone else and my ideas are worthy of recognition and praise. Do you realize how valuable this realization is? What an experience, I just can’t get over it. I’m bursting with so many emotions. It was stimulating, thought-provoking, inspiring, liberating, motivating, encouraging, overwhelming, comforting and it was a hell of a lot of fun! It was, in fact, a festival! But of ideas… and with a spirit of sweet sweet solidarity!

I must say that there was a difference between our network and the others. We were kinda like the cool kids of the conference. The gender, age, and nationality distribution of the participants was very diverse, much more than in the other networks. I guess the concept of alternatives to capitalism attracts good people. And interesting people. Apparently normally we don’t just do the conference but we visit local communities, collectives, squats and just do other activities while we’re there. Our wonderful organizers are considering having a more informal event to meet at Christiania in Copenhagen. That would be SO MUCH FUN! I’m so happy to have found them and I will not let them go. Not only was the conference itself great, but I also had so much inspiration for my future plans. LibraryDAO is going to have such gatherings but they’re going to be even better. It will be a Festival of the Commons, an anarchist gathering where the structure of the events will be determined in a bottom-up, flexible fashion. I guess most fo us have heard of the tragedy of the commons. The problem of self-interest that leads to overexploitation when you’re sharing a depletable public good. Well, we’re gonna celebrate love and friendship and knowledge and art. None of which are depletable goods, they are economies of abundance, they will increase the more we share them. So we will have a festival of the commons! Which is not my concept btw, I stole it because I like it too much :) There’s so much we could do. It will resemble a festival even more than a traditional conference does. There will be creative activities and performances. We’ll turn the world upside down in our own little bubble. We won’t only consume together but we’ll also create together. We’ll share, we’ll sing, we’ll dance, we’ll play games! Fun will be built into the experience. I’m so excited!

I will try to paraphrase most of the text and also comment on it, so I’m not taking credit for any of the ideas here, just saying. 

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

This chapter builds up to the idea that asking questions about the origins of inequality is perhaps the wrong approach to understanding human history. Instead of making assumptions about an idyllic original state and trying to find an event in history that messed it up, perhaps we should be asking where we got stuck in the current state of affairs. They start out by acknowledging the fact that we don’t really know much about most of human history and the ordinary person doesn’t really have reason to dwell on it anyway. The questions we do ask concern how everything came to such a mess. What are “the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering? Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?” So this is basically the everlasting debate on human nature and whether it’s inherently good or evil. And what a meaningless and fruitless debate. Can a fish be good or evil? “Good and evil are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with each other. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.” Nonetheless, we ask these questions anyway and there are myths that we are made to believe is the answer to them. The Christian one being the familiar story that we were once innocent until Eve committed the original sin which led to us falling from grace and to an existence where we constantly have to prove how good we are through our deeds. I think the same goes for other religions too. The updated version of this story can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and it goes like this: 

“Once upon a time, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution,’ and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ —which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.”

For the only alternative and even worse explanation we turn to Hobbes. The original state according to Hobbes was not a pleasant one, people were horrible selfish creatures with every intention to hurt each other, living in a constant state of conflict where it was everyone against everyone. The only way we were able to escape this state is through the repressive mechanisms mentioned above like governments, courts, bureaucracies and police. 

Well, I think that this says more about Hobbes and masculinity than it does about human nature so advocates of this narrative should think long and hard about what kind of a person they are before attributing their own toxic masculinities to the whole human species. “Human society, in this view, is founded on he collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place.” The only way “primitive” people were able to get along was “parental investment” and even in these societies there was never equality. “Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.”

The authors object to both accounts of the general course of human history because

1. They simply aren’t true

2. Have dire political implications

3. And make the past needlessly dull.

So this part where they explain the purpose of the book, I’m just gonna quote it all because I think every single word is important and I can’t phrase it better.

“This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaelogy, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications… To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.”

So in this book, the authors never claim to be revealing a universal truth of human nature or history. What they do do is present us with some pieces of the puzzle in order to shatter the narrow and problematic perspective that we already have and enable us to imagine a different story for our species, a plethora of possibilities, and perhaps even different futures. They set in motion a conceptual shift.

“To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk.”

So what is the indigenous critique? I was super excited to learn this concept so let me tell you what I think it means. It means to step out of the Eurocentrism we have grown so accustomed to, and consider that perhaps non-European people have contributed to social thought just as much or maybe more than Europeans have. As a Turkish person, I have witnessed the weird way that non-Europeans drool over Western society. It’s sort of like a collective inferiority complex in which we just assume white blond people are better than us in just about every way imaginable. We’ve internalized white supremacy: they’re smarter, more disciplined, more beautiful, more civilized, more progressive and so on. And this bothers me so much, so I loved reading about the indigenous critique. It especially takes into consideration the contributions from the very indigenous people that Western philosophy has established as Rousseau’s angels or Hobbes’s devils. 

“Both positions preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue: it’s just as hard to debate someone who is considered diabolical as someone considered divine, as almost anything they think or say is likely to be deemed either irrelevant or deeply profound. Most of the people we will be considering in this book are long since dead. It is no longer possible to have any sort of conversation with them. We are nonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive – who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history. There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.”

Now let’s go into the political implications of these two narratives. The Hobbesian assumption about human nature may seem familiar from somewhere. Neoclassical economics maybe? 

“It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation.” I’m actively trying to work against this little assumption here and the influence it has on just about everything is unbelievable. But stay tuned, I’m not letting it go. And Rousseau’s account forms the base of the thought that even though our current socioeconomic systems suck, it’s the best we can do and the only realistic goal we could have is to improve it a little bit. So it’s a reformative approach. And the authors think that the concept and very term of “inequality” plays a role in all this. Inequality is to blame, it is the reason we experience exploitation, subordination and are made to feel that our lives are not as valuable as wealthier lives. And inequality is an inextricable part of living in large, complex societies. The most we can do is lower the degree. The topic of inequality is booming nowadays, with little consensus on what it actually is and no actual solutions to it as far as I know. Apparently we’re even trying to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters, which both turn out to be low. “It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.” That certainly is one argument I’ve come across myself and I have to say I thought it was funny that we actually approached this issue with Gini coefficients and income levels. 

“The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.”

So maybe it’s time to let go of such assumptions. When advocating for the design of alternative socioeconomic systems, and against capitalist realism, the most obvious driving thought for me was: out of all the infinite possibilities of social organization, why would capitalism be the only viable option? It’s ridiculous to assume that any of these infinite ways is the best, especially if you’ve barely experimented with others and the current one is destroying the world. And the same goes for such a boring linear account of history: 

“First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together… We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

Uf that gives me goosebumps. Some agree that agriculture was the event where it all went wrong. Agriculture turned bands into tribes by enabling population growth. Property rights entailed the protection of these rights and disagreements over resources required for there to be some kind of leadership and the inevitable hierarchy and there was absolutely no way back etc etc. Jared Diamond offers us his opinion:

“Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary (Diamond).”

Thanks for the information. Luckily for us anarchists, this information has no scientific basis. There is actually no reason to believe that small societies must be egalitarian, or large ones hierarchical. In fact, the authors claim that even Rousseau never meant for these ideas to become groundwork for an evolutionary study of history. In his case it was mostly a thought experiment to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: “how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality?’” He himself insisted that “one must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin…” Similarly Hobbes himself never claimed that “a war of all against all” had ever actually happened, in fact at best it might have been an allegory for England’s descent into civil war in the mid 17th century. 

“All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers (Rousseau).”

The authors then turn to psychologist Steven Pinker, a modern Hobbesian who acknowledges that neither Hobbes nor Rouseau knew a thing about life before ‘civilization’ while also claiming that somehow Hobbes had gotten it right. He argues that our world today is far less violent and cruel than anything our ancestors ever experienced. Apparently we’re better off because modern nation states monopolize the legitimate use of violence to protect us. Whereas the “anarchic societies” of the past could only offer typically ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives for most. Despite being a passionate advocate of science, the authors claim that he basically makes up the course of history as he goes along. And they provide an example of how cherrypicking evidence is problematic and easy to manipulate. Pinker apparently relies on the finding of Ötzi the Iceman, which is the body of a person who is believed to be murdered while walking on the Alps, due to various injuries found on the body and an arrow in the shoulder. But why should this one incident be representative of all of human prehistory? Take Romito 2, who had a severe condition of dwarfism that would have meant being an anomaly and being unable to participate in the hunting activities of the society. Despite overall low levels of health and nutrition, the community took extensive care of Romito 2 till early adulthood, sharing their food and even arranging a burial. And this isn’t an isolated case. Apparently archaeologists have found that burials from the Palaeolithic very frequently reveal bodies of people with health-related disabilities. So if we were to make claims based on statistical frequency we should be coming to the opposite conclusion that our species is a nurturing and care-giving species. However, the authors do not actually claim this but only mean to use this example as a demonstration of how easy it is to manipulate evidence with such a narrow perspective. In fact, apparently only mostly unusual individuals were buried at all during the Palaeolithic so this phenomenon probably needs a much more complex explanation.

So when it comes to cherrypicking evidence the Hobbes people go to the Yanomami, known as The Fierce People due to violent encounters between men for cultural and reproductive advantages. But apparently statistically the homicide rates are lower for this society than other Amerindian societies. But that’s not what’s important is it? What’s important is that this society was popularized as proof of primitive violence by the anthropologist that became famous for studying them (Napoleon Chagnon). The important point here is that the Yanomami are supposed to represent the “Hobbesian Trap” that human societies are bound to fall into if they don’t surrender themselves to the protection of nation states and the mechanisms that they entail, and meanwhile embrace the virtues of reason and self-control of a European civilizing process. But then there’s also that problem that the current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are not products of Western tradition. The Enlightment thinkers who put forth these ideas did so in the mouths of foreigners, those that Western tradition has seen and perhaps still sees as savages.

“Why insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system… Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.”

Pinker assures us that we should be happy with where humanity has come because all the statistics show that life is much better than it ever was for every one and in every way. Unless, like the authors remark, you’re Black or live in Syria for example. And there is a lot you could add to those examples. How can you be so blind to the experiences of those different from you? Of course life today is great for rich white men, it was designed to be that way and at the expense of everyone else. Well, the authors note quite accurately that this discussion boils down to measuring human happiness, a difficult feat. “About the only dependable way anyone has ever discovered to determine whether one way of living is really more satisfying, fulfilling, happy or otherwise preferable to any other is to allow people to fully experience both, give them a choice, then watch what they actually do.” Luckily there have been several instances of this in the past. The authors provide examples of Westerners being abducted or adopted by indigenous societies, then given a choice to go back, trying it and almost always returning to their indigenous homes. And when Amerindians are incorporated into European society through marriage or adoption, they too mostly return to their indigenous societies. From a private letter of Benjamin Franklin:

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

And here are some of the reasons stated by these people: 

“Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth. Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories)… “Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.”

And this quote is on how dull this narrative of history is and how sad it is that we lack the capacity to see that:

“One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself. One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.”

The authors acknowledge that simplification is a useful tool in social theory and science that enables us to isolate the specific thing we are interested in and dim down the complexity so that we can uncover patters that are otherwise invisible. What is problematic though, is that we often continue to keep that simplified perspective well beyond its use.

“If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility.”

They go on to illustrate this with an example. When looking at objects that have moved around large distances, many theorists take this to be evidence of primitive trade, of currencies, of commercialization, of markets because markets are universal. They then use this circular logic to claim that a form of capitalism must have always existed. “All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument.” They then give anthropological accounts of other reasons why these objects may have moved vast distances: Dreams or vision quests, traveling healers and entertainers, and women’s gambling. Or maybe something completely different that we just can’t imagine.

I would like to close this chapter with some thoughts. You know the question about whether or not the world is better off today than at any point in the past? It’s too broad of a question to mean much in my opinion but let’s just engage with it for a minute. So apparently statistics show that we’re doing better but we have to think long and hard about what those statistics even mean, what they represent and whether or not it even makes sense to try to answer this question. What are the arguments? Science has progressed so we live longer and healthier lives, the mortality rates are at an all-time low? We have eradicated war and disease? I don’t know if we can say that we live healthier lives because everyone around me appears to be suffering from at least one mental illness. We very often have no idea what we’re eating or drinking, we abuse everything from food to drugs to people to ourselves. We spend most of our adult lives working at a desk for companies that exploit our labor and very often treat us like shit and everyone I know is suffering from back pain. We’re in the 3rd year of a global pandemic and there’s talk of more to come if we keep going like this. Our nature is literally dying, cries for help from every corner of the world. There’s war in The Ukraine, and actually its not like it ever stopped it just shifted to less European places and is making a come back. And what about violence? Do we really think we got rid of it? Not only did we not get rid of physical violence in the forms of murder, suicide, homicide, femicide, genocide, rape etc. we also created more subtle every day versions of it: “whether its the violence of having to go all winter in an apartment that has no heat, whether it’s the violence of having to go to a hospital that doesn’t give you service and you end up dying anyway, you don’t die with a bullet necessarily but you die in other ways and that type of violence takes a lot more lives (Dope is Death).” The violence of being poor and getting stuck in vicious cycles that never let you go, the everyday psychological violence you experience in the workplace, the violence of being locked up in prison for voicing an opinion or just being yourself or simply for no reason at all, the violence a person experiences because they have no home, the violence of not being able to fulfill your own desires because you need to pay the rent. I don’t understand how these can be ignored. I don’t enjoy these thoughts but I think it’s a precursor for achieving any change at all to acknowledge that we don’t live in the best world possible. And I know that these topics are disturbing for some but ignoring them doesn’t fix them and I think the comfortable should wake up and get a little uncomfortable.

“In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather than asking how we ended up unequal, we will start by asking how it was that ‘inequality’ became such an issue to begin with, then gradually build up an alternative narrative that corresponds more closely to our current state of knowledge. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.”

So let this be the intro to the book and if you’re intrigued read it! I’ll do my best to provide a reflection/summary of every chapter but that’s a difficult feat for someone who barely has time to focus on her own passions so it will take time. I want to conclude by expressing that I have so much love for the authors for this invaluable contribution to humanity, they’re fucking amazing & brilliant & awe-inspiring and all of the good adjectives!

So let’s start from where it all began, the conception of the idea. I’ve already mentioned elsewhere the psychedelic summer that I spent camping and how it did wonders for me and made me question just about everything. Anyway while we were going from camping place to camping place on the Lycian trail in the southwest of Turkey we had lots of ideas about how to make the best camping site ever. And this became a constant topic of discussion amongst us, we were gonna do it. But the idea evolved into so much more for me. Initially, we talked about the design and then the next step for me was that I didn’t want a commercial camping site. It was going to be organized in alternative ways. No money for example, you don’t buy services, you contribute to the ongoing life in the community whichever way you can and that is the basis for your existence there. So it turned from a campsite to a community for me. We want a stone amphitheater for example, there are so many in the ancient ruins in Turkey but there’s no way someone gives us one of them so I suggested we build it ourselves. And my friends joked that I was trying to build myself an ancient city, can’t say that that isn’t an attractive idea. So anyway, then I thought about the alternative learning communities or villages that we have in Turkey. There are two that I know of, and both have educational programs that vary in topics and are actually pretty interesting: Arkhé Project & Nesin Villages. You stay in tents or bungalows as far as I understand and complete mini-courses. But it’s still commercial and even a bit expensive in my opinion. I would love for my community to have a focus on knowledge and it’s already something I’m very engaged with in my personal life so why not?

So then I started thinking about what kind of an alternative learning community I envision and I had some ideas. First of all, I want to get rid of the hierarchical boring classroom space with a one-directional information flow in the form of lectures. So the educational activities would be designed by the people within the community with full freedom. They can do whatever they want and some examples of alternative teaching methods that pop into my mind are field trips, movies, fireside discussions, performances, book clubs, documentary viewings, games, simulations, arts & crafts, etc. The curriculum would be fully adjustable to the context. And what would the focus of the educational activities be? The way I see it, our traditional school systems suck because they don’t care about what would be best for us to learn in life, they care about what would be best for us to learn so that we can become productive workers. I had three focus points on my mind: Humanity, Nature, Art. When I say humanity, I mean basically anything about humanity (social sciences, humanities, cultural studies, etc.). when I say nature I mean natural sciences, human beings as nature, our relationship with nature, etc. And art is art, a very broad category of human creative endeavors. I want to do a pilot project (like a practice course with my friends) with a topic that is dear to me but I’m not sure where to start. Psychedelic Socialism? My thesis topic? I’ll figure that out later.

So to sum up where we are, it’s an alternative learning community in the form of a self-sustainable ecovillage. Or at least that’s the ideal end goal, it might have to start out not completely self-sustainable. And the evolution of the idea continues. I discovered the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in one of my favorite courses in my masters program. So DAOs are internet native communities, they’re basically a blockchain-based method/tool for social organization of any kind. Any group of people that come together for a common purpose can use a DAO to govern themselves. DAOs basically live on discord, that’s where the interaction mainly occurs. Then they have smart contracts which are basically pieces of code in which the rules defining the organiztion are written. They have tokens that are designable in how they work and they usually give you ownership & governance rights. So they are user-owned entities. The coolest part about them perhaps is that the governance structure and economic structure can be designed, or at least the most intellectually interesting part for me. And I think this presents a unique opportunity to experiment with alternative socioeconomic mechanisms. So that’s what my thesis will be focused on: what kinds of social outcomes do different token economics produce? How do we incentivize collaboration/cooperation/participation without coercion? I’m tackling the collective action problem or the social dilemma or the tragedy of the commons or the coordination problem or the moloch, whatever you call it. While going down the rabbit holes of web3, I realized that despite the possibility of any kind of organization emerging from this concept, most use cases were extremely interesting in that they had an anarchist feel to them. Their manifestos and visions were all very inspiring and exciting. And one observation I made was that they don’t usually create brand new things but take the things we have in web2 and make them better. So this platform I’m writing on, Mirror, is a decentralized version of WordPress or Medium. And its fucking amazing, I love it! I tried both others and am very happy to have found this one.

So this got me thinking, why don’t I create a DAO? I have a purpose too. My academic experience at Mannheim University showed me how fucked up a system academia is. Now I don’t envision to fix academia with one DAO, there’s already a Decentralized Science movement that collectively wants to do that, but I would love to contribute in what matters most to me. Here’s a video on DeSci:

Of the many issues with traditional academia, what bothers me most is the way we produce and disseminate knowledge. Because what is the purpose of academia if not to collectively produce knowledge and share it? And if that is the purpose, I hate to be a killjoy but we are falling very short of that goal. We don’t have a division of labor in teaching and research and not everyone wants to do both and it’s a hell of a lot of work to do both too. But people compromise on the teaching because there is more incentive to publish and no “real” reason to be a good teacher. And what happens with the publishing process? We work our asses off to produce knowledge, it’s fucking hard! And then what happens? we have the product of our intellectual work, an article. And guess what? we don’t get paid for it, no no, in fact we have to pay journals to publish them. And only if we pass through a very poorly designed peer-review process. And then you would expect the readers to be able to reach them for free, right? Nope, guess again. The articles are behind a paywall and fucking expensive ones too. Only universities ever pay a shit ton of money for the articles and that means that not only is the public not reaching the knowledge produced, but it’s stuck in universities and quite often within certain disciplines. And that’s even an overstatement, there are probably so many articles only the peer reviewers read. How is it that the knowledge we produce is not a public and common good? And even if the articles were public goods, we’ve practically created language barriers with the terminology we use and I feel like half the time we use those big complicated words to seem smarter. So what’s the point? It’s a waste of time! It’s distracting an enormous amount of people that give a shit and focusing their creative energies on things that will never make a difference. It’s so so so sad. I think a lot of academics forget this or ignore it though because they are salaried workers with the constant pressure to publish, no time to follow up on what actually happens with their ideas, no time for extra side projects. The system is counterproductive and I refuse to let my labor be wasted like that. I refuse to stand by and watch that happen to my fellow academics. I want to take back that energy and put it into something worthwhile, meaningful, satisfying, fun, purposeful.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a scientific article, but why leave it at that? We could use the knowledge produced within academia and transform it into content that is more impactful, easier to consume for the layperson, interesting and thought-provoking, and emotion-provoking. We can use those ideas and insights and turn them into movies, novels, photograph series, paintings, poems, documentaries, songs, games, podcasts, whatever the fuck we want. And some already do but its not the norm and it takes a lot of extra effort so there’s no incentive other than intrinsic motivation to do it. How would we do it? Well, we don’t have to individually learn all of those skills, there are people with so many different kinds of skills so why not collaborate on such creative intellectual projects? It would be sooo much fun! And so fulfilling! We could earn directly from our work and eradicate the barriers between us and our people, our communities. Knowledge in every form could be a public good. So I want a DAO that would free us in the production & dissemination of knowledge, a digital space for those that resonate with this idea to meet and interact and create. It’s a learning commons, a knowledge commons, or an academic commons.

And this combines with my initial idea for an ecovillage. The DAO can be the umbrella global organization that lives on the internet and we can have online public goods in the form of multimedia content. And then members like me could build their own villages as more localized physical centers for just plain living life and also to gather for our creative projects and in-person educational activities. I can see it! I now truly understand what a “vision” is, it’s so concrete! I can close my eyes and I see it and it’s so beautiful! I feel that I would do anything to achieve this goal, I can devote my life to this and I’ll die happy. It’s given me a purpose, a will to live, an adventure to embark on, a cause, a vision, a drive, a reason to take care of myself, a happy place, a home, peace, belonging… But I need help. I can’t do this alone and I don’t want to, the whole idea is based on a community. I need to perhaps take leadership to initiate the process, to get the wheels moving. And I can use my academic career as a means to understand what the best way to design this community would be. It’s like all the pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place, I know what I want to do and it all makes sense. It’s like my whole life has brought me to the conception of this idea and I will follow through with giving birth to it.

The spirit of the commons is the spirit of imagining, of bringing people and resources together, and creating a necessarily positive vision for the world not as it is, but as it could be. And commons are all around us: from community gardens, to certain kinds of open source software, to worker cooperatives. We participate in a commons when we submit our work to institutional repositories that are tended by communities with the goal of disseminating research to the world, and we participate in a commons when we collaborate with our neighbors and catch a glimpse of this vision of our fate. For libraries, the moment has never been more urgent and emergent – we have the tools in our hands, and it is up to us to make it happen.

- Jenny Rose Halperin

I also found a fitting theme. With the hopefully approaching end of the pandemic, something wonderful has happened. Libraries are open again! Not to say that they weren’t open at all, but they had lost their appeal with the requirements to wear masks all the time, to present health documentation and to book your spot in advance. And I came back to the library for the first time after years. I remembered how much I’ve always loved this space and I thought about the different libraries I’ve loved over the years. All in very different places --countries even, at different times, with different meanings to different versions of me. So what is it about libraries that make them so great? I spent the last week thinking about this and I have a cool idea!

I remember when I was a kid, the library was my absolute favorite place! It was sort of like going to a park to play with imaginary new friends. Instead of swings and slides, it was a playground that had thousands of magical portals to new worlds (I always liked to think of the experience of reading in the way Cornelia Funke portrays it in Inkspell). I also liked bookstores, Barnes & Noble being my childhood favorite, so what’s the difference there? Well, as much as I liked Barnes & Noble, it created a sense of deprivation in me that libraries never did. When you go to a library you literally have access to everything in there because it’s the community’s to share: everything belongs to everyone within its walls, you’re only expected to be responsible and caring. When you go to Barnes & Noble, nothing belongs to anyone except the corporation unless the individuals have enough money to buy it. So the library was a huge space filled with endless opportunities for exploration & learning with no barriers, no exclusion, no bitter feeling of having a book on your mind that you just weren’t able to afford today but maybe next month you can try again. No abandoning books that you’ve already read to a shelf where no one else can benefit from the magic in its pages. When you think about it, libraries are perhaps one of the last remaining commons we have, books are one of the only goods we’re able to share effectively.

And libraries aren’t just about sharing books, they’re actually so much more than that. Did you know that libraries used to be Google? People would have a question, go and ask the librarian, they would do the research and get back to them. So interesting! Later in my life, the library became a space for learning. I would go to the library whenever I needed to focus on studying. This could be a collective study process or an individual one, libraries offer spaces for both. It became a place for me to give birth to new ideas, a delivery room of sorts. I remember when I needed to write I would just put myself in the library and let the magic happen, there was always something about the space that put me in a flow and helped to give some form & structure to my thoughts. After 3 years of not having this space, I was going crazy constantly trying to learn in an isolated, individual way in my room. Then I came to the library last week and oh the difference it made! Just having other people around me increased my motivation & concentration so much.

Let’s consider the history of libraries for a bit. So they were initially places to store information so that we could cumulatively advance our collective knowledge but they evolved into something more: community centers. Libraries don’t only have books anymore, they’ve expanded their collections to keep up with technological developments. They not only have various accessible multimedia content, they even adapt to local context and can be a center for sharing non-learning related materials such as kitchen supplies, electronics, etc. They can have training programs and workshops based on the needs of their community. Hell, they can even be a home for those who don’t have one. Some libraries welcome people to sleep there. I’ve actually done this a few times during my university years and it was a pretty common phenomenon. Not that comfortable maybe but it was something, it was a shelter. And I was never worried to leave my stuff unattended at the library, which is unlike pretty much any other public space, especially in Istanbul. It’s almost as if the competitive self-interested ethos of neoliberalism doesn’t exist within that space. It’s an impenetrable bubble.

So what is a library then? It’s a public space open to everyone. It’s a commons in that it rejects the idea of private property in a way and works based on the organization of sharing, or we can call it a space for public goods perhaps. It promotes learning along with sharing. It provides you with not only resources for learning but also an accessible space. They’re localized institutions that take shape based on the needs of their communities which means they’re flexible and adaptive to the needs of their communities. They are social spaces that always also offer individual spaces for independent work. They can be a space for collaboration and intellectual or artistic production, and a very inclusive space at that. It can be a space for connection and creativity and collaboration. It’s the perfect metaphor for what I envision the DAO to be!

Commons theory can provide important interventions within neoliberal managerial information capitalism when applied to the library as an institution. The commons and its associated practices provide a model of abundance, sharing, and cooperation. Libraries can and should participate in alternative economic and management models to create an inclusive vision beyond and in opposition to current social formations.

- Jenny Rose Halperin

So if any of this appeals to you or resonates with you, find me. Let’s do it together, let’s build the world we want to live in! We’re in for an adventure and one hell of a good time.

“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue… I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

*― Mark Fisher, *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

INTRODUCTION

Are we in the midst of a global mental health crisis? An imperative question with a very elusive nature. Global measures of the prevalence of mental health are not very reliable for several reasons. One major problem is the vague definition of what constitutes mental health. Another is under-coverage. However, based on the accepted definition it is safe to say that the inclination is towards underestimation rather than overestimation because not every case of mental illness is reported or diagnosed. In 2017, 10.7% percent of the global population has been estimated to suffer from at least one kind of mental disorder, with depression and anxiety taking the lead (Ritchie & Roser, 2018). This can be regarded as a minimum estimate, especially in lower-income countries. So we can infer that more than 1 in every 10 people worldwide suffer from mental illness and we do not know how much more. The available data also indicate that there has not been a significant increase in mental illness from 1990 to 2017, but considering the confessed unreliability of this data this inference does not really mean anything. Another interesting health statistic used to measure the burden of disease is the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) which reflects the number of years lost due to premature death and years lived with a disability. The global burden of mental disease and substance abuse (these two concepts are often grouped together) is estimated to have increased from 90.65 million DALYs in 1990 to 142.01 million DALYs in 2017 (IHME, 2017). Another approach we could take to understand the cost of mental illness would be to consider suicide statistics, as approximately 90% of suicides in high-income countries are claimed to be caused by underlying mental illness. This differs by country and can be lower because suicide caused by dysphoric effect or impulsivity is not regarded as connected to mental illness. Although the arbitrary nature of these definitions must be considered given that mood dysphoria has a very similar definition with depression. Globally, we lose 800,000 people to suicide every year. That means that one person every 40 seconds takes their own life. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, especially for young people. Any given person is more likely to die at their own hands than someone else’s (Ritchie et al., 2015). That’s something to think about. And keep in mind that these measures are also underestimates.

What can we actually infer from this information? Are we in the midst of a global mental health crisis? Many sources think not. But our information mostly proves that we do not, in fact, have enough information and that the information we do have is quite unreliable. However, we can’t ignore the fact that there does seem to be a problem that actually costs a significant share of the population many of their healthy years or even their lives. Let us now dive deeper into what mental illness means, as this is one of the major issues surrounding the subject.

What Does Mental Illness Mean?

Mental illness is a tricky concept as it is not absolutely clear what the term means. Mental illness has only recently begun to be diagnosed using biological indicators through brain imaging techniques and these techniques are less effective in diagnosing more mild disorders such as depression and anxiety. Therefore, the definition of mental illness is to some extent still open to interpretation. Although not the first, the most renowned study that exposes the arbitrariness of psychiatric diagnosis is Rosenhan’s study that effectively proved that psychiatrists are not able to actually distinguish between real patients and “pseudo-patients” in psychiatric facilities (1973). The same idea was also portrayed in an even more famous movie and the book it was based on, Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).” These critiques of the psychiatric industry are intriguing but do they have an actual basis? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association is considered “the Bible” of psychiatry. The earlier editions of the DSM were highly criticized for not having an empirical basis and for reflecting social norms to a degree that resulted in the classification of any kind of deviant behavior as mental illness. The latest edition, DSM-V which was published in 2013, improves upon these criticisms (Stein et al., 2010). It defines mental illness as:

“A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above (Thyer, 2015).”

Despite being an improvement on previous definitions, this definition has also been criticized to be a tautology — -or scientifically meaningless (Thyer, 2015). The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA) distinguishes between two types of mental illness based on the severity of the condition. Any mental illness (AMI) is defined as exhibiting any disorder that meets the DSM definition and serious mental illness (SMI) is when an AMI interferes with the regular functioning of a person (NIMH, 2021). As is evident from these definitions, and as these sources themselves confess, “no definition perfectly specifies precise boundaries for the concept of either ‘medical disorder’ or ‘mental/psychiatric disorder (Stein et al., 2010).’” Even Allen Frances, lead editor of the DSM-IV claims that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it (Greenberg, 2010).” Let’s turn to a critical discussion of mental illness and address why a lack of a concrete definition is problematic.

Deconstructing Mental Illness

In essence, the definition of mental illness is derived from the definition of normality, and this relies extensively on social and cultural context and norms. Even with brain imaging, I still don’t understand how we decide whether or not we consider a certain state of the brain ill or not ill. I mean this is obviously easier to do with more severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, but what about ADHD for example? Why are we pathologizing neurodivergence?

The not-so-obvious nature of the concept puts the definition of mental illness into the hands of certain people that form the authority when it comes to mental health. This category of people are referred to as the “psy-professions” by Sociologist Bruce M. Z. Cohen in his book “Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness,” which constitutes the inspiration for this paper. Cohen defines these people as those that have the required training and credentials to make claims about what constitutes “normal” when it comes to the functioning of the human mind, and hence, what is “abnormal” and requires intervention (Cohen, 2016). That is, obviously, a lot of power. What happens if these professionals make a mistake? Well, let’s take a look at the dark past of the psy-professions and some of the mistakes that have been made before and their consequences.

Perhaps the most criticized embarrassment of the mental health industry was the DSM classification of homosexuality as a mental disease that ought to be treated, and the treatments were quite horrifying: aversion shock therapy, conversion therapy with hired prostitutes, lobotomies and even castration (Blakemore, 2019). The earlier legitimization of differences in sexual orientation as a mental disorder still has its effects on the everlasting stigma associated with the queer community today. Another cultural bias we see reflected in the psy-professions is against women. In his book, Cohen elaborates extensively on how psychiatric discourse legitimizes and reproduces the age-old oppression of women and the patriarchal order in neoliberal society (2016). Not only are women more likely to suffer from mental illness, they’re more likely to be misdiagnosed and they are more likely to attempt suicide (Ritchie, 2018; Tasca et al., 2012, Ritchie et al., 2015). Another disparity involves children. Child and adolescent mental illness prevalence is increasing and was globally at 15% in 2018 (Bruha et al.). Critique emphasizes that this is the sedation of children who merely exhibit completely normal childhood attributes. It is an issue that has gained popularity in recent years, especially regarding the diagnosis of ADHD, an “illness” so many children seem to be experiencing (Erlandsson & Punsy, 2016). While the psychiatric community regard their previous biases as steps towards a better understanding of the human mind and claim improvement, in my personal opinion these mistakes are way too colossal to be just be forgiven and forgotten. Also, there is no guarantee that mistakes aren’t being made today. The above examples of bias in the mental health industry make it evident that the concept of mental illness and the power associated with authority in the industry make this concept a very effective tool for social control. A dangerous tool that is vulnerable to exploitation by the powerful, exercised on the powerless.

What Does it Mean to be Mentally Ill?

The legitimate form of practicing medicine in the “developed” world is Western medicine. Western medicine is characterized by diagnosis rather than prevention, a specialized division of labor rather than a holistic approach, and treatment by pharmaceutical drugs and surgery (Saks, 2018). This means that our system for dealing with mental health waits for one to become noticeably ill, diagnoses the illness and then prescribes a treatment based on the severity of the condition. It’s a solution-oriented approach applied after the problem occurs rather than an approach that might address the causes of the problem to prevent it. So what are the solutions for mental illness? The less severe cases of mental illness are often treated with various methods of therapy which are often quite expensive especially considering that it takes several sessions to actually get any result. Increase the degree of severity and you’ll get prescription drugs, especially if the condition interferes with the daily “functioning” of the individual which is another way of saying if it reduces an individual’s work-related productivity. SSRIs like Prozac are often prescribed, the effectiveness of which is controversial. Not only that, but the associated side-effects are a legitimate point of consideration as they can be addictive, or even lethal. In even more severe cases where you might be deemed a threat to society, individuals are basically imprisoned in mental asylums, deprived of many of their basic human rights. It’s basically incarceration.

From this brief overview of current solutions for mental disorders, it seems as if the solutions are either expensive and inaccessible, involves sedation and a risk of addiction or death, or dehumanization on grounds that have a controversial scientific basis. (How wonderful!) This situation makes one wonder who our mental health industry actually benefits, given that it does not seem to be very beneficial for the “mentally ill.” I obviously believe that states of mental unwellness exist, but are there no better solutions? It is not within the scope of this paper to fully discuss the topic of alternative solutions, but the recently re-emerging research on psychedelic medicine holds promising potential in the curative treatment of several psychological conditions: especially depression, anxiety, PTSD and substance addiction (Tupper et al., 2015). That makes one wonder why they were deemed extremely dangerous and illegal in the first place when they are at least just as effective as, and less addictive and toxic than the palliative prescription drugs that are currently used (Hendricks et al., 2015; Haden & Woods, 2020). (This is all I could say in a term paper but I have so many more ideas about this, maybe in another post). So what function does the mental health industry serve in capitalist/neoliberal society?

What is the Function of the Mental Health Industry in Society?

One popular point of criticism is the mental health industry’s connections with pharmaceutical companies. The more people diagnosed with a mental health condition, the more prescription drugs sold. The longer these people suffer from their condition, the more prescription drugs sold. The more addicted people are to their prescription drugs, the more prescription drugs sold. The more drugs prescribed, the more the psy-professions gain legitimacy in the medical community (Cohen, 2016). What kind of subjects does this solution create? Sedated, passive, obedient subjects that can “function properly” in society, or more specifically in a capitalist labor market. A neoliberal ethos that defines the main objective of society as economic growth, holds the danger of reproducing and legitimizing anything that contributes to this objective. Including mental illness. Our well-being is only profitable in the sense that we’re well enough to go to work and maintain our state of constant productivity. Cohen argues in his book that the mental health industry and the discourse produced by it are social constructions that have risen with capitalism “to police dissent and reinforce conformity, not to emancipate people (Cohen, 2016).”

What Kind of Relationship Exists Between Capitalism and Mental Illness?

Why do so many people feel mentally ill? We’re generally taught that this has to do with our own individual experiences and traumas and that we must learn to cope with them in various ways. What about our environment? Is it possible that these symptoms of mental illness could disappear given that we changed our environment? What about our socio-economic systems? Could they possibly have an effect on our well-being? Capitalism itself may be a cause for the prevalence of mental illness, considering that it is not an economic system designed with the well-being of humankind in consideration. Not only this, but our current perception of mental illness and the industry built around it distract us from the systemic nature of the problem. This approach to mental illness makes it seem like an individual issue, a natural phenomenon that just happens to people. However, mental illness does not just appear in a void, it is the reaction of the body & mind to stimuli. Along with the individual factors, and maybe even to a greater extent, external social factors out of our control can also trigger mental illness. This more comprehensive approach is called the psychosocial model of mental illness (Cohen, 2016). So perhaps it is our modern way of life and modern neoliberal society that produces so much suffering? Perhaps it is the immense inequalities inherent to capitalism and their consequences that are the problem? Perhaps it is the constant push for productivity and the idealization of it that deems you as worthy as how much you contribute to economic progress? Perhaps it is the unnatural expectation of spending most of our lives in institutions that prepare you for the labor force and the work organizations that are allowed to exploit you for your labor? Or the inherently traumatizing experience of living in a patriarchal society? Or perhaps it’s the several forms of poverty and social exclusion you are exposed to if you don’t agree with this lifestyle? While all of this may seem very difficult to discuss objectively (no surprise there), in the case that we do find a positive correlation, in our discussion we will try to explain the micro-level mechanisms that could produce such a macro-level phenomenon, relying on psychological papers regarding status anxiety, work and subordination.

These are not novel ideas, the idea that capitalism is the fundamental cause of mental illness has been explored before (Rosenthal & Campbell, 2016). However, it must be acknowledged that establishing a causal relationship between capitalism and the prevalence of mental health is quite the empirical challenge, if it is possible at all. First of all, as we discussed in the beginning of this paper the data on mental health prevalence is very problematic due to issues of under reporting, under diagnosing, the problems associated with self-reporting, the confidentiality of health data and just the mere fact that the definitions of mental health terms are vague and open to interpretation. Perhaps the people best equipped to study this idea, the psy-professionals, wouldn’t even want to because of conflicts of interest. So there is a lack of empirical evidence for these claims. Perhaps the closest attempt was when Wilkinson & Picket, using WHO data, took on the intriguing challenge of demonstrating that more equal societies had fewer problems, including mental illness, in their book “The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2010).” However, the book was met with criticism regarding their empirical approach, the lack of actual statistical analyses, and non-replicability (Snowdon, 2010; Saunders, 2010; Sanandaji et al., 2010).

This study aims to use an innovative approach to studying the correlation between capitalism and mental illness prevalence by utilizing big data methods. It is only a tiny step towards a colossal goal and it is far from perfection but we need to start somewhere and can only hope this study will inspire improvements. Perhaps similar to the industrial revolution, we are at a point in history where we have the revolutionary opportunity to redesign our socio-economic systems while they are being digitalized. We could also just end up transferring the existing inequalities and biases to these systems if we don’t intentionally try to fix them. In order to fix them, we must acknowledge these problems first, and acknowledge their relationship with our socio-economic systems. As an indicator of the general absence of well-being in society, I believe mental illness is a good starting point to study this idea.

DATA & METHODS

To overcome, to some extent, the problem of underreporting in mental health statistics, this study uses Google Trends data that signals potential mental illness to derive country-based estimates for the prevalence of mental illness. The assumption made here is that someone who experiences feelings that they think are a symptom of mental illness, would at least try to obtain information about this personally even if they do not end up seeing a professional about the issue. There are obviously several other reasons why someone would search for information on mental illness and it is also obvious that not everyone who experiences mental illness would do a Google search on it. The study acknowledges but operates on these assumptions. Also, not everyone who suspects mental illness is actually mentally ill but we already established that we don’t really have an objective definition for mental illness so this study accepts individuals’ feelings as sufficient evidence that something is wrong.

First, we will try to establish whether or not using Google Trends data provides useful estimates for mental health prevalence by comparing our results to official sources. Since Google Trends data does not offer a specific number of cases but rather how popular a search term is compared to everything else that has been searched for in a specific place and time, we expect that the comparison amongst countries will be approximately the same.

In the second part of our analysis, we will try to understand the relationship between mental health prevalence and the welfare state regime of countries. In other words, we want to see if more capitalist societies have a higher tendency for mental illness. We operationalize this using Esping-Andersen’s classification of welfare state regimes: liberal, conservative and social democratic (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Of these categories, countries classified as liberal would represent what we deem to be a capitalist/neoliberal society. It is expected that these countries would have higher estimates of mental illness prevalence compared to the other two categories. Google Trends data provides you with a number from 0 to 100 that represents how popular the search term is in comparison with all other search terms in a given time and place. Our sample will consist of all countries that we can fit into this classification, although we believe it would be beneficial to have a separate analysis of just postindustrial Western countries (European and North American countries) because this sample might constitute a relatively better research setting due to our assumption that the differences between these countries (confounding factors) would be less compared to the differences between all the countries of the world. Also, we assume that most people would have access to such a search possibility in these countries although there may be systematic under-coverage due to a lack of a computer or a smartphone that may be linked to low income which is itself a factor for mental disorder.

Google searches containing keywords regarding mental disorders, more specifically “depression,” “anxiety,” and “stress” are considered a single case of mental illness. We specifically exclude more severe forms of mental illness as they may have a higher risk of being genetic, and aren’t what we are interested in, in this study. Google Trends data doesn’t count the same search term for the same person over short periods of time (the information offered by the tool is not more specific than this unfortunately) and it includes searches that contain this keyword and its relevant translations. The data will be collected from the years between 2010 and 2020, the Covid-19 Pandemic will not be included as this is an obvious reason for the increase of such searches. Despite the limitations, we believe the study is worth executing, even if only to spark a discussion that might pave the way for better research.

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The concept of fire has been occupying my mind lately. Maybe actually always. Fire has a thing where it manages to really captivate your attention, it’s a primitive feeling. I remember being mesmerized by anything burning as a child. The fires that warm us, the ones that frighten us, the ones that enlighten us, lead the way, the ones that connect us, the ones that drive us, the ones that feed us and the ones that consume us. I see fire, candle fires, bonfires, campfires, hearts on fire, forest fires, a touch like fire, hair like fire, fiery feelings, skin on fire, fire coming out of the monkey’s head, skies on fire, firestarters, the world is on fire… It's like the spring butterflies in our bellies rekindle the fires in our hearts, the fires that almost died out over the long winter. And the vitality those warm fires bring. A wise person once said “the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.” Waking up from a dark winter sleep to a scorching sun and neon green and vitality. And people and the smiles on their faces. We need people, we need each other. Because we’re all in this together and we have more in common than we think. How obvious a thought, yet how much we fail to acknowledge it. It’s not surprising that the coming of spring has been celebrated across space and time, it’s like the regaining of a collective vitality. The will and desire to live. The vitality that gives us the power to rekindle the familiar flames of old friendships, flames that you thought were extinguished, and the power to embrace the exciting sparks of new ones to come. You want to relate, you want to connect, you want to feel, you want to laugh, you want to cry. Beautiful extraordinary people with hearts wide open and sometimes familiar, sometimes completely new worlds to explore. The warm reassuring touch of massages, hugs and kisses. Not to be confused with the consuming fires of toxic masculinity, and the scorched bodies its touch creates. See, it sucks to realize that the idea of a hug or a kiss or a massage sometimes frightens you. Something that once, could only evoke love, compassion and care. The bitter realization that all those things that you’ve repressed have actually taken a toll on you when you were going around pretending it didn’t matter in the name of being strong. You weren’t going to let it bring you down. It was only a touch, or a word. But it wasn’t. It was an invasion. A friend told me that if you think about countries, invasion is grounds for war. It’s a raid, it’s a plundering of body and mind. And some people have stolen bits and pieces of your fiery character from you, the character that could fearlessly love and care and touch and connect. The realization that you’ve let others make you a colder person, afraid of warmth, fire, and intimacy, afraid to touch anyone, afraid of the sparks because you’ve been devoured by them before. And most of all, afraid that you won’t be able to protect yourself from the flames, once again. That feeling of self-betrayal. But don’t forget the understanding, the self-compassion, the determination that gives you the power to not let these experiences define you for the worse. Sometimes burning something to the ground creates the space you need for rebirth and regrowth into a stronger, wiser version of yourself. So burn it all down! And you will grieve, you will mourn the self you abandoned. Acknowledging the existence of those moments burned into the back of your mind but also acknowledging the strength within you that keeps you coming back despite the fear. Forging meaning and building identity, learning to refuse that which you don’t deserve. Because you don’t deserve it, no one does. You deserve all the best in the world. And with that acceptance, the fiery rage you feel not only towards the predators you have encountered and trusted and that did this to you but also the rage towards the structures that produce these supposedly individual traumas, the rage that gives you the power and the courage to resist those structures. The fiery compassion that you feel for your fellow oppressed whom you know you share these experiences with. The sweet warm solidarity you feel for each other, without even actually meeting each other but still knowing each other. Healing together from collective traumas, protecting each other, taking care of each other. Realizing the value of rage, and letting it drive you instead of repressing it. Sometimes to destruction but also to action and creation. What are you afraid of? Why do I always have to smile? Damn, I’m tired of being nice all the time. Just find the courage to say no and be fucking rude and mean and angry and crazy and internalize that sometimes it’s more important to be kind to yourself, and face whatever comes after that, do it for yourself. Let’s make a promise to take care of each other as a revolutionary act. Let’s protect each other but let’s not forget to protect ourselves along the way. You deserve your care just as much as anyone else does. Stand up for yourself no matter what. Just like you would for someone else. Don’t be afraid. You will probably find conflict, and resolution and both at the same time more often than not. Conflict is not necessarily a bad thing, embrace it. Don’t run away, I know you want to but you can’t avoid it forever. Once you face it there will be nothing left to avoid and no regrets. And then you will find the healing warmth of those around you. Have the courage to let yourself be engulfed by the fiery flames of friendship. Let yourself heal. You might find resistance within yourself, resistance to believing that things can be good for you, but you deserve no less than that so let yourself accept all of the wonderful things to come. It’s so fucking hard to believe that you deserve all the best in the world, believe me. In the face of good news, the first reaction of my inner voice is that there must have been some mistake. For so long great things rarely found their way to me, or they came but they came engulfed by darkness. It’s like good things can’t happen to me, there must be a catch, a cost, a price to pay, I will need to fight for it or someone will take it away. But it’s not that things are just happening to you, don’t undermine your agency. You are a factor in what happens to you, we create the lives we live. So just take it. Radiate with all your emotions, look into the mirrors of self-discovery, share, become a tribe, learn, listen, unlearn, express yourself and dance. The world is on fire but you dance tonight, like you’re never gonna die. I’m the catcher in the rye and I will never let you down.

This year my birthday was different. I was born on the 30th of April which turns out to be Hexennacht or Walpurgis Night in Germany, how cool is that?! I knew I was meant to be a witch! And apparently, this is also a celebration of the coming of spring, of rebirth and vitality. And I always felt reborn around my birthday, spring has that effect on me, but this year it was different somehow. I feel like after a year of living in Germany, sort of alone, I’m kind of rediscovering myself, connecting with myself. I think I’m growing up, which is something I was afraid of, but it’s not so bad. Knowing yourself is empowering and exciting. It’s like when I first found myself alone in my dorm room in Mannheim, I was there with a stranger and that stranger was myself. Someone I knew from very long ago, but I had neglected her for so long I didn’t know who she was anymore. What does she like? What does she not like? What does she do in her free time? Who am I when I’m alone? I couldn’t answer these questions and it was awkward and uncomfortable and I just wanted to get away from her but instead, I had to confront her. I had to listen to everything she was saying, years of repressed feelings and thoughts. We had to go through our whole life and be honest about what had happened to us. She cried and screamed and raged, it felt absolutely horrible. I just listened to her and found understanding, pity, pride, and love for her. We decided we don’t want a life where things just happen to us, we want to create the life we want to live and build the world we want to live in. And I had help, my beloved therapist did wonders for me. And the more I tried the closer I became to myself. It was painful and stressful but now I have a friend in myself and I love her. I believe in her, I have faith in her. Obviously, I still fall back into my insecurities, they never completely go away but it’s getting better. It’s like the birth of my “new” adult self, but in so many ways it’s actually a familiar old feeling, like going back to my childhood. It’s like, coming out of my cocoon, or blossoming or waking up, or finding a superpower, or my magic. And it feels fucking amazing. I can’t wait for all we’re gonna do together, it’s going to be an adventure!

And then, just when I discovered what a wonderful thing therapy is, I had to give a break because I can’t afford the sessions at the moment. Interesting how something that’s supposed to help relieve your distress can also cause stress in its own materialistic way. Anyway, I found something even better in Berlin: friend therapy! And then elsewhere as well. It’s an organic collective healing process based on the natural instinct of caring that doesn’t cost anything but effort. It’s not actually something new, I’d just missed it because it was something I took for granted until I lost it. It reminds me of when that taxi driver told me how strange it is that we used to talk to each other and now we talk to therapists. Not to undermine therapists, I love them, but really when you think of common talk therapy it is basically someone listening to you in an objective way and taking interest in what you have to say, asking questions more than actually telling you what to do. What if we all did that the best way we could to each other? Why do we refrain from compassion and love, why be so frugal, is it running out? Why do we compete over love? Moving from economies of scarcity to those of abundance, the magic of dissecting trauma with those whom you already know and love, creating safe spaces for each other to express our worst and best emotions without fear, spaces where we can explore new identities and examine old ones together, encouraging each other to embrace the art of refusal and just be ourselves, practicing unconditional love, choosing our families. Spaces with the highest ceilings and the biggest windows and baby jungles, ethical feasts and ethical sluts, the old feeling of exhaustion and dehydration but now with the new feeling of growing old, the fear of becoming an adult mixed with the pleasure and power of knowing yourself. Chemically induced profound experiences, babysitting each other, new perspectives we encourage each other to adopt in our everyday lives, long sincere conversations with strangers, sharing learning, perspectives, ideas and music. The cathartic release of feelings bottled up for years and years, wise words from “ordinary” people, the words that once said will forever be there to reassure you when you lose faith in yourself. Growing up together, discovering each other, losing each other and finding our way back again, losing each other and having the courage to fight for each other, to keep on building after each collapse, the slivers of hope we so easily lose sight of. You need to work on it, because love is an art. Love and friendships are not found, they are built my dear. No one said it would be easy, but you’ll emerge stronger from it. Sometimes you need to hold on but sometimes you also need to know when to let go, no ifs and buts, just let go. And you have the intuition in you to know which it is. You need to let go so that there is more of you for those who actually deserve your love, starting with yourself and then your people. You have a huge heart bursting with emotions, allow yourself to feel the full range of emotions, experience what it means to be truly human, be a romantic, express your love to the fullest, and your hate, your joy and your sorrow, do big things, write your letters, play, be silly, be the lover you crave for and fall stupidly in love with anything and anyone you want. You don’t always have to be smart. There is so much power in just telling people how we really feel, and usually nothing to be afraid of. All of those beautiful thoughts and emotions we hide within ourselves, why? Why only feel the need to express the shitty things in life? Why let our loved ones go through life feeling invisible and misunderstood when we can nourish each other emotionally and intellectually? In the lonely confusing haze of modern mobility, let’s be home to each other. Now’s the time to have faith in what we can do. Our time is now, here in the morning of our lives.

“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” -Carl Jung

Check out the song links, they’re like therapy :)

I’ve been spending some time contemplating what the final product of my master’s education will be, I mean my thesis. It’s like my past experience and everything I’ve learned in the past year or so were all independent strands of thoughts and observations and it’s all coming together weaving a story, a narrative, an idea or whatever. It’s like giving birth, weirdly. That was a metaphor one of my dear teachers used to use, the birth of ideas require a lot of mental pushing and they’re uncomfortably painful. Well, I feel like I’ve come to a decent point in articulating my problem and a blueprint of a solution strategy in my social scientific endeavors and I want to lay out the plan here. The ideas I present here are definitely not entirely my own but it's more of a synthesis of what I’ve learned from several other people/thinkers new and old. What does it mean to own an idea anyway?

We live in an age of massive complex problems that we seem to be unable to solve. When the stakes are this high, and the devastation of most of the global population so obvious; why can’t we do anything about it? I mean, is it just me or is the world falling apart? It’s like there’s destruction and disappointment and pain everywhere. So many causes to fight for, so so many unhappy people. Why can’t we just fix this? I believe the answer lies in the social structures that we navigate in. We don’t act randomly, we each are playing a game with certain rules that shape the strategies we employ. We are playing the zero-sum competitive game of neoliberalism, and this game assumes rational self-profit maximizing independent individuals. Now, it’s simply not true that the behavior of humankind can be reduced to this easy definition, we have the capacity to be so much more than that. But I believe the game creates the players it assumes, we’re being transformed into the “rational man.” Ugh what a boring thing to be. However, this doesn’t mean we have to go along with it, it is still us, and only us, who can change the rules of the game. Our structures shape us but we also have the power to shape them, we are the only ones who can do that. No one else is gonna do it for us. We have agency, we should use it.

I think one great thing I’ve learned at this school is the benefits of dissecting social phenomena into their macro-micro-meso level components and looking for mechanisms instead of looking for grand theories. So let’s consider our macro situation. The way I see it there are two important components of macro social systems: our economic and governance systems. Our economic system is the way we produce, distribute and consume goods and services and our governance system encompasses our collective decision-making processes. The first produces markets and the second produces institutions and social norms. What we currently have is capitalism and democracy in a significant portion of the world. But I think that we can combine the essence of both systems under the ethos of neoliberalism. The problem is that both systems don’t really work for everyone and they produce so many unintended negative consequences for the masses. The micro-level is the sphere of individuals, which we will get back to later. I think an appropriate meso level is the level of organizations. And I have a very broad understanding of organizations, basically any group of people working together towards a mutual purpose. You would think that given the infinite possibilities of forms of organization, there would be a rich diversity to observe in practice. Guess what? Our forms of organizing show more similarities than differences for several reasons I and others have explained elsewhere. Basically, we have the proliferation of the traditional rational bureacratic organization which is very much a product of the social systems it was born in. Well was this always the case? I’m reading Graeber & Wengrow’s brand new account of human history that actually makes sense and acknowledges the creative capacity and diversity of the human species. They claim, with anthropological and archaeological evidence, that the history of social life and organization is so much more diverse and colorful than we are led to believe. Across space and time and even within the same community, there is a multitude of different organizational practices that humankind has experimented with. Until they were wiped out by the exploitative and dominating forces of colonialism. Now, why am I obsessed with the concept of organizations?

First of all, I don’t think creating a whole system and enforcing it top-down is a good strategy for social change. I think solutions to social problems are very context-dependent. Which is why I think localization is a good idea, leave it to the people that actually live in and know the environment to make the decisions about how to go about their lives. However, designing whole new systems as a thought exercise is very appealing and admirable in terms of the imagination and creativity it requires. I’ve recently learned at a conference that sci-fi and fantasy worlds are actually a way to imagine alternative futures, and it’s beautifully brilliant! But I think I want to choose to be more practical. And the way I see it, a complete new system is too big to work with. We have to dissect it into manageable parts which we can consider mechanisms of collectively doing things. Experiment with those mechanisms and their social outcomes, design them, implement them, develop them, mix and match them for different contexts. How do we make decisions? How do we produce the things we wish to consume? How do we distribute responsibilities?… But if we go to the micro-level, the individual, we’re too zoomed in, we’re missing the social aspect of things. So this in-between space where I think organizations reside is perfect. Organizations are influenced by the larger social structures they are a part of and they influence the individual behavior of the people within these systems as well. As individuals, we may not have the power to single-handedly change a social system but we have influence in the organizations that we create and are a part of, they are our tool for collective action. Not only that, organizations provide us with something almost like a microcosm to experiment with alternative socio-economic systems. We can experiment and develop our ideas and then scale them perhaps. Or perhaps we don’t even need to scale them and we could have local communities that work the way that is appropriate to their context. Why do we even need a global world order? And by that I mean a one-size-fits-all plan. Of course, we are highly interconnected and interdependent and we need to make some decisions together, on different scales. But we have to consider the specific contexts of the different problems. Anyway, I think it’s kinda bullshit to claim to have the perfect alternative to capitalism or democracy. You can’t really know without trying it out and there probably isn’t one universal solution, so we need to have a micro manageable space to carry out our experiments, test them and improve our ideas. Traditional organizations have several problems associated with them: tendencies to hierarchical structures that promote relations of domination/subordination, bureaucratic structures that end up being inefficient and counterproductive even, meritocracies that legitimize competition and reproduce social inequalities, centralized power structures… and worst of all a neoliberal ethos that legitimizes and idealizes the pursuit of more and more profit above everything else and by all means. Without it, you can’t compete because this is the environment you’re competing in. Competition pushes organizations to be more and more uniform in all of these ways, and just a little bit different for a competitive advantage which usually has more to do with the product than the structure of the organization.

So how can we actually transition into a stage of experimentation when the general tendency seems to be in the opposite direction? Well, I think we may be in luck. I think that two important things that could give birth to a mass revolution are social discontent with the status quo and new technologies that offer new ways of doing things. Well, I think that social discontent is only on the rise given that we fucked up the environment, are overpopulating the world and depleting our resources, and there are social inequalities everywhere in so many different forms. A global pandemic is the cherry on top, it brought us face to face with some of the ugly consequences of a neoliberal ethos and it gave us some time to stop and think about what the fuck we’re doing as a species. Mental illness is on a rise and arguably more so in capitalist countries. I think it’s quite clear that we’re doing something wrong. But there’s another problem: capitalist realism (Mark Fisher’s concept, there’s a whole book to read with this title). People have lost the capacity for imagination and creativity in regard to alternative futures. Is a better world possible? It’s so depressing that so many people think it is not. The only viable option, to so many, is the current one. But why? I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason for that to be the case. We will get back to this problem later.

I think we might be in luck with the technology aspect of the problem. Many know by now that the blockchain “revolutionized” finance. Well, it goes further than that and that’s where things get interesting, for me at least. Blockchain technology also provides us with tools for mass organization with properties that are fundamentally different from traditional organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are a way of organizing on the blockchain that eliminates the need for third parties. This brings us the advantages of decentralization and autonomy which we didn’t really have with traditional organizations. Arguably, one of the most problematic aspects of our current socioeconomic systems is that they somehow always end up centralizing power in the hands of a few: political power and market power. Hopefully, extreme centralization of power will become a thing of the past, but that’s not going to be easy. I do not actually believe that DAOs or blockchain technology will save the world. That’s too simple a narrative. I just believe that we need to understand human behavior and the social outcomes of the ways we do things, and continuously experiment and improve the ways that we live with each other. And I believe that rigidity in organizational structures makes it very had to do that. The cool thing about DAOs, for me, is that they’re like live labs where organizations of very different types are experimenting with very different ways to govern themselves. They’re definitely not perfect, but they are interesting in my opinion. And I think since they are already happening whether we’re interested or not, they are worth social scientific academic/intellectual attention, specificly because there is a lack of just that.

Let’s talk about some of the problematic aspects of DAOs and cooperative organization. Even though there are no third parties governing the organization with a DAO, there is the “rule of code.” Whatever the rules are, they are executed once the appropriate conditions arise, so there is no room for human interference which can be a good thing but it can be problematic as well. The rules can be changed based on a vote (the consensus rules of which are designed by the organization and also written in the code). This can make taking action slow, and we have to see what kinds of other things can go wrong. Also, trust in the code and the ability to understand this infrastructure requires some technological competency. I think initially this is a big barrier, but not one we can’t overcome. No one knew how to use a computer 100 years ago and look at us now. And finally, one problem that I want to understand more about regards the organizational environment. DAOs and cooperatives are at a disadvantage in a traditional competitive environment which will reduce adoption and produce probably not so great results for those that take the risk. If you judge them by the standards of a capitalist system, they might not be efficient enough or profitable enough to compete with capitalist organizations. But that’s exactly the paradigm that we’re trying to shatter. So adoption is necessary to overcome the problem of the environment. I have two questions here:

1. Blockchain technology has boomed in finance, why not organization? Why does everyone know what a bitcoin is but not a DAO?

2. Cooperatives have actually been around forever but have not been a big hit with humankind. Considering their benefits, why is that the case?

The first question I will attempt to answer through a survey in which I will hypothesize potential reasons an individual would not be interested in DAOs, and measure their actual involvement with them as an outcome variable.

The second question is a bit more complicated. Here is how I want to tackle it. Cooperation is a difficult concept and is related to collaboration and coordination. I’ve learned that, if you’re gonna do an academic study (especially a quantitative one) on this concept you can’t just use it as an overarching concept for decent human behavior. You have to specify what it means in practice and in the context that you want to look at. I’m still trying to figure that out because its more difficult than it sounds, but I’m also thinking about the different ways it’s been approached before. Game theory provides an interesting lens for understanding cooperation. Cooperation is defined as a group of individuals working together towards a common purpose and is opposed to competition in which individuals work against each other for their own self-interest. So what I want to know is: what individual factors make a person more disposed to cooperative behavior? And then which structural factors make an individual more disposed to cooperative behavior? So my outcome variable will be the level of cooperation which I plan to measure with a public goods game experiment. Initially, I want to keep the game design stable and see how different individual characteristics affect cooperation through a survey before the game. In a second step, I would like to play with the game design to see what kind of structures make people more cooperative.

So let’s talk a bit about games. Game theory is the study of interdependent interactions between adaptive players and it has three main components: the players, the strategies and the payoffs. Traditionally, it assumes the rational actor which is concerned with maximizing their utility. Rationality, however, just means behaving in line with a certain value system. So when you have a very narrow understanding of rationality that encompasses only material value you have a hyperrational agent that doesn’t really accurately represent what a human being is. But if you factor in other kinds of values that motivate people, you have a more general concept of rationality which is perhaps more accurate but I think still problematic given imperfect information and the existence of emotions. That’s another discussion. So anyway, a game is still a pretty cool way of modeling social interactions. The rules represent the abstracted features of the social structure you want to model, and then you observe how this affects individual behavior. I think that the problem with this method is that you really have to simplify some things which distances you from real-world situations. But why can’t we combine game theory with the actual game sector and design games similar to real-life that we can use to experiment? I think that would be very interesting. But let’s not get carried away for now.

So game theory distinguishes between two different kinds of games: competitive and cooperative. Competitive games are defined as zero-sum, with little or no interaction between agents and therefore no trust, and the strategy is simply maximization of individual payoff. It is easy to represent and understand mathematically but it's obviously not enough to explain all real-life social interactions. According to the logic of a competitive game, cooperation shouldn’t even exist. But that’s far from the truth, isn’t it? Cooperation is one of the strongest abilities of the human species, not that it’s absent in other species. But we’re just really good at it. Sometimes. Cooperation games have a potential win-win outcome which is essential in fostering trust and cooperation. So in cooperative games, the payoffs are no longer only individual, we now also have group outcomes that we have to take into consideration: individual behavior not only affects the utility function of the individual but with positive and negative externalities has consequences for the group. In such games, individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality. The social dilemma or collective action/coordination problem or tragedy of the commons is a situation in which if all agents cooperate and contribute fully, every agent is better off but the immediate incentive to contribute less and increase individual payoffs gets in the way of cooperation and the optimal group outcome. This is a model that is useful to represent many complex collective problems and illustrates the tension between self and group that is inherent to the concept of cooperation. The underlying problem is that individual behavior has costs for the group that the individual feels isn’t really their problem. Individual behavior has positive/negative externalities or benefits/costs for the system that the individual thinks is external to their own utility function. You think you don’t have to bear the costs of your actions. But as we will discuss, this is merely a matter of perspective.

Of cooperative games, I want to initially focus on public goods games because I think this is a good analogy to common ownership which is an important concept we need to get familiar with if we’re gonna abolish private property. Private goods are characterized by rivalry (meaning it can be consumed by one agent) and excludability (you can exclude others from access to it) so with private goods, you don’t have as big a problem of externalities as you do with public goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. For private goods, the good’s value is easily integratable into the individual’s cost-benefit analysis whereas this is not the case for public goods. “The tragedy of the commons” explains the situation as such: when individuals have open access to a common resource they will act independently in their own self-interest and cause the depletion of the resource through uncoordinated action. But only if you consider human beings as selfish individuals who don’t have the capacity to care or communicate with each other, or realize that we all share the same world and are actually extremely interdependent. Especially now in such a globalized world. There is no social dilemma if the individual always bears the full cost of their actions so its a matter of reconnecting the individual’s costs to the organization/system with the individual’s utility function. But how do we do that?

Externalities are “a function of independence.” For something to be external to you, there must be a dividing line between you and others because it assumes your independence of other things. So there are two solutions (that I know of) to the social dilemma. Our traditional solution was to use top-down structures like governments to realign externalities with individual behavior: the only tool available to us was “formal centralized regulatory institutions of the nation-state.” So if you have costs to your environment you are punished for it by the judicial system and you are incentivized to generate positive externalities with various reward mechanisms. One problem with this is that in the case of negative externalities you are punished once you have already caused a negative externality and your punishment doesn’t fix what you did wrong but it just creates another negative situation within the overall system, it’s not solution-oriented — it’s just imposing an extra cost. Also, the third party institutions we use for this have overhead costs, are open to corruption and manipulation and have unintended consequences like the centralization of power as we have already discussed. So what’s the other solution? We could increase the connectivity between agents to create positive interdependencies. It’s a change of perspective: if we realize how connected and interdependent we actually are, we start to see externalities not as externalities but as something that affects ourselves just as much as it affects others. And that’s the truth, isn’t it? We just have to wake up to it. But how do we do that? For groups with high levels of independence and low levels of interdependence, cooperative structures must be imposed through regulation; basically you need to have rules for people to understand what they should and should not do. However, if you have high interconnectivity and interdependence people are more capable of understanding what they should and should not do for the common good without the need for rules and you can have self-sustaining cooperative organizations. So it boils down to two things: connectivity and values. Connectivity is the infrastructure we need, and our values will determine how we use that infrastructure. So the technology is the blockchain, the tool is DAOs and then we are left with the problem of values. How do we foster positive interdependence? Well, there are ways to design structures for it: ongoing interaction, identifiable others, reputation mechanisms, feedback loops and transparency. But what can we do on the individual level? How will people born and raised in neoliberal norms and values change their perspective? First of all, I want to know: who are these uncooperative people? Are there systematic differences between them and cooperative individuals? Which cultures did they grow up in? What socioeconomic statuses do they belong to? Are they gender-conformative? Do they belong to any minorities? How do they feel about competition? How do they relate to the world? How connected do they feel to their surrounding environment? Are they capable of trust and under what circumstances? Are they empathetic? How are they doing with emotional intelligence? So many questions…

So if there is really a correlation between the perception of connectedness and cooperative behavior, how can we increase people’s feeling of interconnectedness? I’ve recently read about the concept of “anti-self technologies.” This strict distinction between the self and everything else didn’t always exist, and its never been stronger than it is today. Some experiences have the power to help you realize your connectedness to the rest of the universe and give you a sense of responsibility because of that. Among others, the one that I find to be most promising is the use of psychedelic substances. As controversial as it may seem, these substances have played a role in societies since forever. I think it’s stupid that we aren’t reaping the benefits of this extremely promising tool. We need collective healing from the trauma we’ve inflicted upon ourselves as a species. The psychedelic revolution is happening, like it or not, and I think this is the final piece of the puzzle. The last ingredient in the recipe for revolution. Oh and by the way, this idea is called acid communism or psychedelic socialism, check it out! That’s it for now.

Introduction

Our contemporary world faces a myriad of problems. Social problems are everywhere and perhaps their ubiquity is caused by our heightened awareness of them or perhaps we’re just not as good at solving social problems as we are at creating them. A whole sector in society has come to bear the responsibility of social needs but it seems to not be enough. The civil sector is a sector of great diversity but it is also in a phase of transition to more rational, formal methods of organizing that are more commonly observed in the market sector. This organizational transition reflects the neoliberal cultural ideology of our age and deserves greater critical attention (Bromley, 2020). This article aims to provide an overview of our collective organized solutions in response to social problems and discuss the implications of neoliberalization in this context. In order to provide important context, we discuss the construction of social problems and provide a brief historical development of solutions to social problems before discussing the nonprofit sector and the rise of social enterprises.

What is a social problem?

Before discussing our organized solutions to social problems, we must first address the issue of the definition of social problems. Social problems are complex and dynamic just like the social world we live in and naturally, they are spatially and temporally contextual. However, what is considered to be a social problem is not random, it’s closely linked to the political, cultural, and economic context. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge the subjective aspect of social problems and their social construction (Spector & Kitsuse, 1987). For example, child labor has existed for quite a long time and was very much legal and even regulated in some countries, especially after the industrial revolution. Now, it is considered a human rights violation. Or take government or corporate mass surveillance for example: do we consider it as big a problem as poverty? Not yet, perhaps because it’s a relatively new phenomenon that we don’t fully understand yet and it’s also an important tool for powerful people. What is defined as a social problem and how it is defined are important factors in the solutions we come up with. A universal definition does not exist and it is not within the scope of this paper to come up with one, but Mary and Peter Senn have traced a history of the definition of a social problem and summarized the literature with a comprehensive sociological definition constituted of eight parts that each have their implications:

“(1) a social situation (2) involving a substantial number of persons (3) which is declared (4) to be inconsistent with the values (5) of some powerful group (6) and labeled as a situation (7) which must be dealt with (8) by some kind of collective action (Senn & Senn, 1993).”

This definition also implies that in their construction, social problems go through stages of claims-making and legitimation in which it makes all the difference who is making the claims and what the legitimation process entails (Spector & Kitsuse, 1987). Therefore, in our analysis of the types of organizations that are meant to address social issues, it is also worth mentioning what these organizations perceive as social problems. Just like social problems themselves, the organized solutions we have for them also come in all shapes and sizes. They differ throughout history and they differ from place to place. Not only that, they differ in terms of what part of society is responsible for addressing these problems, and the organizational forms adopted to address these problems. It is not my goal to provide here a complete account of all of these organizations, but to provide a general perspective of their historical development and a critical discussion of contemporary trends of organization in response to social problems.

Historical Development of Solutions to Social Problems

What were preindustrial social problems and how were they dealt with? Especially because the term “preindustrial” spans over a very large period of time and space, there most probably existed a variety of solutions to social problems but let’s focus on some general themes. The main social problems of preindustrial societies seem to center around poverty, health and social deviance. The characteristic of these acknowledged problems most relevant to this study is that they were considered smaller in scale than the social problems we face today: they were considered local and were able to be dealt with locally. Also, some phenomena that we would today definitely consider a problem, weren’t seen as problems by those who had influence in determining the social problems of the day, such as the widespread practice of slavery. Due to less dense populations and the trivial negative impact on the environment, many of our contemporary problems weren’t experienced by preindustrial societies. Although many problems we generally don’t experience today had serious consequences on preindustrial societies such as high child mortality rates (Mayne et. al., 2020). Depending on the context, there were formal and informal approaches (or both) to dealing with these problems. Informal methods of addressing social problems could be kinship-based community support systems in which other members of the community help those in need. This could be in the form of sharing resources or looking after orphans. When it comes to formal solutions, it seems like the main institution responsible for dealing with these problems were religious institutions, especially if they held power and influence in their societies. Many religions have incorporated the idea that those who can, must help those in need in the form of charitable religious practices. These practices are likely the origin of what we call charity and philanthropy today. Monetary aid wasn’t the only form of solving social problems, there were service-based institutions such as orphanages, hospitals and asylums too (Hardy, 2013). So, if we had to generalize we could say that the formal responsibility of solving social problems was mainly assigned to religious institutions traditionally. With the advent of industrialization, most societies underwent major economic, social and political transformations that significantly contributed to shaping the world as we know it today. The industrial revolution brought with it new ways of life… and several new social problems as well. Agrarian economies became industrial economies that relied on machines in manufacturing and a factory system instead of the previous domestic system of production that paved the way for mass production. Production became cheaper and more efficient with the new organization of work. The concept of work was redefined, laying the foundations of our work experience today. The capitalist mode of production that was adopted created unprecedented wealth and higher overall standards of living which led to the expansion of the middle class and brand new structural social and economic inequalities. Factory work often involved undesirable and dangerous working conditions, even for children. The disintegration of traditional communities and their ties severely damaged the community support networks of preindustrial life which left more social problems unaddressed and called for greater formal solutions. The rapid urbanization accompanying industrialization led to problems related to overpopulation such as disease, lack of housing, unemployment etc. The ever-increasing use of non-renewable resources for production at an unprecedented scale led to the environmental problems we are facing now. Social problems reached a scale that traditional methods could no longer handle and the distribution of this newly found wealth became an issue (Kuhnle & Sander, 2010). “Industrial, urban, and capitalist developments, with their inherent, unprecedented social problems, spurred political demands for change of regimes and of social rights (Kuhnle & Sander, 2010).” Government involvement in social issues was not a new phenomenon but it was generally limited in preindustrial societies. In Europe, it was mostly restricted to Poor Laws which wasn’t enough for the increasing prevalence and severity of social problems in industrial societies. Rising nation-states were required to take on a new, larger role in the wellbeing of their citizens. Problems weren’t local anymore, but national. Along with these new social problems, the idea that humans should have rights was born from the American and French Revolutions. With the rise of concepts such as social insurance and social security, nation-states went from governments that primarily protected their citizens from external and internal threats and produced public goods to governments that were also responsible for the welfare of their people. Thus, the rise of welfare states. A new realm of public services was born: public education, public health and legal protection from the dangers of workplaces (Kuhnle & Sander, 2010). Educational inequalities were now acknowledged as social problems and so were certain forms of worker exploitation. But what about the problems that weren’t acknowledged by the state? Democracies provide citizens with a choice in who governs them, to some extent. However, democracies are designed to represent the interests of majority groups which means social problems experienced by minority groups receive less public recognition. Alternative solutions in the form of nonprofit and non-governmental organizations that tackled these underrepresented problems were pursued. Hence, the rise of the *third sector *of society that is comprised of these organizations. Perhaps paralleling the intensifying division of labor in production, the structure of society itself was subjected to an “intersectoral division of labor: the distribution of functions among for-profits, nonprofit organizations and public agencies (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990).”

“Recent years have witnessed a considerable surge of interest throughout the world in the broad range of social institutions that operate outside the confines of the market and the state. Known variously as the “nonprofit,” “nongovernmental,” “voluntary,” “civil society,” “third,” or “independent” sector, this set of institutions includes within it a sometimes bewildering array of entities — hospitals, universities, social clubs, professional organizations, day care centers, environmental groups, family counseling agencies, sports clubs, job training centers, human rights organizations, and many more (Misuraca, 2007).”

The Nonprofit Sector

What exactly is the third sector, the “civil sector” of society? We are easily able to differentiate between the state and market, public and private, but defining the third sector is a challenge. One might assume that the diversity of the organizations considered to be a part of the third sector and the sector’s comparative weakness in terms of power and influence to the other two sectors are the reasons that it hasn’t received much attention. However, Salamon & Anheier argue that these explanations are insufficient because the same diversity can be observed in for-profit organizations and because the third sector isn’t as weak as you might think in every context. They claim that a more important reason for this disregard has to do with the availability of a proper definition and that “the lack of attention to the third sector is a function less of the weakness of the sector than of the weakness and limitations of the concepts that have so far been used to comprehend and define it (Salamon & Anheier, 1992).”

“That clearer specification of the nonprofit sector is urgently needed should be apparent from the varied terminologies used to depict this range of institutions. A great many such terms are used — ‘nonprofit sector’, ‘charitable sector’, ‘independent sector’, “voluntary sector’, ‘tax-exempt sector’, ‘non-governmental organisations (NGOs)’, ‘associational sector’, ‘économie sociale’ and many more (Salamon & Anheier, 1992).”

Each term by itself highlights a certain aspect of the sector, but ignores other important aspects. Salamon & Anheier provide an account of the different types of definitions surrounding the third sector: the legal definition, the economic definition, the functional definition and the structural/operational definition. They illustrate the explanatory advantages of the structural/ operational definition with three case studies of countries with considerable differences: the UK, Germany and Brazil. This definition is comprised of five key components; the organizations that make up the third sector are:

1. Formal: have some degree of institutionalization,

2. Private: are separate from the government,

3. Nonprofit-distributing: don’t return generated profits back to owners or managers,

4. Self-governing: not controlled by external entities,

5. Voluntary: involving some kind of voluntary participation (Salamon & Anheier, 1992).

From now on, we will use the term nonprofit to describe this sector as this aspect of the sector is more relevant to our discussion. Now that we’ve established to some extent what the nonprofit sector is and acknowledged the ambiguity of the concept, the question of why these organizations exist comes up. Many scholars from different fields have looked into this question and we don’t yet have a consensus but let us review some of the major perspectives. First of all, let’s examine some economic approaches that originate from the multitasking literature in contract theory. The relevant takeaway from this literature is that if organizations are balancing different objectives that are not equally measurable, such as profit and social impact, the incentives for these objectives have to be designed accordingly. For example, the nonprofit form may have emerged because its non-distribution constraint decreases the incentive to prioritize profit related goals and ensures that social objectives are put first. Hansmann defines the “non-distribution constraint” as a mechanism inherent to nonprofit organizations that overcomes contract failure. It prohibits the distribution of surplus profits to owners or managers of the organization, thus rendering nonprofitness an inappropriate form for personal profit (Ghatak, 2020). This constraint ensures the reliability of the organization by eliminating the potential for opportunism; assuring that funds and donations will be used strictly for the cause. Also, those looking for a profit won’t choose this form of organizing anyway. So from this perspective, nonprofit organizations appear where this constraint is required: “when consumers cannot make informed choices because (a) donors buy services for unknown third parties (overseas charities), (b) known beneficiaries are seen as unreliable witnesses to service quality (daycare centers, mental hospitals), © pooled donations cannot be tracked to specific services (political advocacy), or (d) services are so complex that ultimate consumers cannot evaluate their quality and so important that low quality poses unacceptable risk (medical care) (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990).” Heterogeneity theory (or market failure/government failure theory) is also an economic approach that explains the existence of the nonprofit sector/civil sector by building on classical economic theory. Market failure here refers to the idea that markets are not useful in the production of public goods (goods that are free and for everyone) which is why a government is needed. Economist Burton Weisbrod goes further to suggest that in a heterogeneous society in which many people have different ideas about which public goods should be produced, governments also fail to satisfy the needs of their citizens so the need for a “third sector” arises. This perspective has certain implications such as the expectation of a larger nonprofit sector in countries with higher population heterogeneity and lower production of collective goods by the government, and that the third sector would mostly be funded by private charity. Salamon & Anheier test these hypotheses cross-nationally and are not able to find evidence for this explanation. While the heterogeneity approach emphasizes the aspect of competition in the relationship between government and the third sector and explains the existence of a third sector based on the absence of the state, interdependency theory emphasizes cooperation between the two and acknowledges the existence of “voluntary failure” along with market and government failure, meaning the constraints on the third sector to provide public goods. Salamon & Anheier’s analysis provides evidence for the implications of the interdependency approach but this approach fails to explain the conditions that produce such a relationship between the nonprofit sector and the government (Salamon & Anheier, 1998). These economic perspectives, although quite interesting, are based on assumptions of rational actors that act through utility functions and the explanations have an instrumental aspect to them that does not fully capture the cultural and institutional factors that contribute to the existence of these organizations. Salamon & Anheier claim that social origins theory provides a more comprehensive explanation that takes into consideration the embeddedness of societies in their social, political and historical context and formulates a categorization based on the amount of government social welfare spending and the scale of the nonprofit sector that better fits to explain their cross-national empirical data. They find that this approach has more explanatory power than economic theories but it still doesn’t explain all of their data. Critiques of Salamon & Anheier’s use of social origins theory recognize the usefulness of the approach but highlight the shortcomings. Einolf claims that their analysis is incomplete in that they ignore “the role of ethnolinguistic diversity, the timing of state formation and above all the role of religion and the relationship between church and state.” He emphasizes the importance of cultural and religious differences between societies but also the effects of the nonprofit organization in the Western world on the rest of the world (Einolf, 2015). In explaining the division of labor among different forms of organizations from a historical perspective, Dimaggio & Anheier claim that “US nonprofit organizations appear less a single form than a kind of cuckoo’s nest occupied by different entrepreneurs for different purposes” and of these they focus on the most prevalent: status groups, professions and the state. In the US, nonprofit organizations were differentiated from other forms of organization in the 19th Century by upper classes who had an interest in shaping their urban environment and to this day they remain involved with the activities and decisions of nonprofit organizations. While their influence was originally in the form of local elites taking part in boards of trustees, this kind of influence has decreased whereas recently its more in the form of upper class managers that bring to the nonprofit realm corporate approaches to governing. While other status groups exist such as worker and minority groups, the organizations founded by them have more difficulty legitimizing their organizations and collecting resources. The Progressive Era shows a tendency for professionals to resort to nonprofit organizational forms perhaps due to the parallels in ideologies: “service ethos, autonomy from market values, and exercise of expertise on behalf of the common good (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990).” However, while nonprofit hospitals and universities exist, some professionals such as lawyers prefer for-profit forms of organization and there are a lot for-profit hospitals and universities as well. The state and the nonprofit sector also worked in coordination, the government would delegate certain responsibilities to nonprofit organizations and fund them while they did the actual implementation. So much so that government funding became the number one source of revenue for nonprofits. After providing a historical perspective they illustrate three institutional (and “implicitly ecological”) explanatory factors for nonprofit prevalence. First, the key decisions that initial entrepreneurs make are decisive because these decisions become institutionalized making it more costly to stray from initial forms through various mechanisms. Second, are public policies such as tax policies and government financing. Third, is the climate of opinion. People have their beliefs about what forms of organization are suitable for certain purposes, for example some “goods” should not be produced by the market because of the motive of profit and its negative consequences for consumers of that good (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). In their examination of cross-national variation in the nonprofit sector, Dimaggio & Anheier find that sectors equivalent to the nonprofit sector in the US with similar central characteristics are widespread and that institutional factors have greater explanatory power in cross-national variation than microeconomic approaches. Cross-national differences in intersectoral relationships influence the prevalence and roles of nonprofit organizations and the polity structures of nations create tendencies for specific forms of organizing that are reflected in the organizational form of nonprofit organizations. The heterogeneity of cultural contexts produces different demands for collective goods and because nonprofit organizations originate from strong ideological and religious orientations, the sector and the organizational structure often reflect these institutional backgrounds (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). Nonprofit organizations also exhibit organizational inertia and they especially tend to imprint on periods of historical conflicts rather than reflect the contemporary context (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Dimaggio & Anheier reach the conclusion that seeking general differences between the three sectors of society is a problematic endeavor. There are a lot of subtypes of nonprofit organizations based on factors such as legal forms, the resources they depend on, government assistance etc. So much so that the variety within this organizational form exceeds the differences by sector. Also, the boundaries between these sectors are quite ambiguous, and some organizations span these categories with their activities or structures, making it difficult to identify which sector it belongs to. All of these factors result in an abundance of forms of nonprofit sectors and organizations throughout the world: “‘nonprofitness’ has little consistent transnational or transhistorical meaning (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990).” So as we can see, we don’t have a general law that explains the existence of the nonprofit sector and its difference from the state and market, but scholars are making progress in identifying factors that contribute to the prevalence of this phenomenon and when you’re trying to explain something so contextual, you shouldn’t expect there to be a universal law anyway.

Social Entrepreneurship

Today, a new kind of organizational actor takes the spotlight in the struggle against our problems: social enterprises. To start, let’s think about social problems today. Along with local or regional problems, we have social problems of a global scale now and we have so many of them. Poverty is an age old global problem that some might say we’re alleviating but that depends on how you define poverty. We also struggle with several versions of inequalities based on gender, class, race and disabilities. We’re in the midst of a mental health and substance abuse crisis. Not to mention we’re also in an environmental crisis and a global pandemic. There are an overwhelming amount of contemporary problems that would be impossible to list here. What’s more, we’re very much aware of many of these issues. Yet, these problems don’t seem to be going anywhere. We have a whole sector working on these problems, yet we’re not making much progress towards resolving them. The progress that we are making is hard to quantify and hard to measure making it difficult to understand if our current method is working. According to a 2018 survey of 3,400 nonprofit leaders in the US, demands for services are increasing at a rate faster than nonprofits can meet them, especially those serving low-income communities. For most, the top challenges facing their organization are related to staffing and financing: recruiting enough staff, finding managers, offering competitive salaries, raising funds that cover their costs, raising unrestricted revenue and achieving financial stability (Nonprofit Finance Fund, 2018). The effectiveness of the nonprofit sector as a solution to the massive, complex social problems of our day has been called into question. The challenges experienced by those involved in the sector have produced critiques on the constraints of nonprofit organizing. In his book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, humanitarian activist/entrepreneur Dan Pallotta explains why he thinks nonprofit organizations don’t work. He claims that the underlying problem is the way we think about social initiatives, specifically the myths that we believe about them. We have social problems of a tremendous scale and very small organizations to deal with them, and our beliefs about these organizations keep them small. We discriminate against nonprofit organizations because we have a separate “rulebook” for them. He identifies five problems: constraints on employee and manager compensation, prohibition on risk-taking, impatience with outcomes that discourages long-term vision, low tolerance for paid advertisement and no incentives for investment. Pallotta argues that the “demonic label of overhead” comes from the Puritan origins of charity that perceive charity as a method of penance for capitalist profit making which made it essential that there was no profit-making involved in charity activity. It seems that what Pallotta is describing is an institutional interpretation of an example of imprinting that results in the undermining of the purpose of the organization (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Nonprofit organizations are sanctioned for adopting practices that work for for-profit organizations, even if this is irrational and has negative consequences in the long run. The legitimacy of nonprofit organizations is compromised in the form of losing the trust of their donors, when they engage in for-profit activities. These problems are related to the non-distribution constraint mentioned earlier and nonprofit organizations being dependent on donations, not having the means to gain resources themselves. The challenges the constraints of nonprofit organizations present, combined with the erosion of the already vague boundaries between sectors has prompted an appealing new idea: let the market solve social problems. Commercial organizations seem to use an effective method of organizing and reaching goals especially related to making profit, and some of the most powerful organizations today are corporations so even nonprofit forms of organizing have strong resemblances to formal rational commercial organizations. However, the blurring of boundaries is two-sided: for-profit organizations have begun to incorporate social and environmental goals (Bromley & Meyer, 2014). This blurring coupled with the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional forms of nonprofit organizing contributed to the rise of market-based solutions and the emergence of new hybrid organizations that balance financial and social concerns, and a fourth sector of society that represents this wide range of organizations (Battilana & Lee, 2014). The idea that business should be used to address social problems manifests in different ways at the organization level. For example, some trends treat businesses themselves as the problem. Corporations use resources, determine working conditions, and impact their environment, often to a greater extent than any other organization or individual. Therefore, some movements prioritize minimizing or completely eliminating the harm that corporations inflict on their environments. For example, Certified Benefit Corporations define themselves as “a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment (B Lab, 2021).” The concept of “stakeholder capitalism” similarly is based on the idea that corporations should aim to benefit all stakeholders rather than focus on increasing only shareholder value (Hunt et al., 2020). These ideas can be understood as versions of corporate social responsibility. The term corporate social responsibility (CSR) has actually been around since the 1950’s but the specific responsibilities lacked definition. Since then, with changing social expectations and the efforts of academic interest, its meaning evolved from generating economic profit to creating shared value (CSV). Along the way, the dichotomy between business and social benefit was challenged and doing “good business” was understood to be profitable in the long run (Agudelo et al., 2019). CSV differs from CSR in that it brings social responsibilities to the core of the organization rather than treating it as a peripheral philanthropic matter. The created social values themselves are percieved as integral to competition and profit maximizing. The inventors of the concept of CSV argue that for-profit companies are now taking the blame for the problems with the world when in reality a change of perspective could be the first step towards a new kind of capitalism that has social problems at its core and emphasizes the creation of shared value: “creating new policies and operating procedures that allow your company to maximize its revenues, whilst also offering benefits that add to the local community (Porter & Kramer, 2011).” This line of thinking represents an approach that sees for-profit organization as a powerful tool for meeting human needs and considers social enterprises our best chance against social problems. However, social entrepreneurship encompasses all of these ideas and is a broad term that applies to the many forms of organizing that blur the lines between for-profit, nonprofit and public. Although we can’t generalize about their form of organization, their distinguishing goal is to balance purpose and profit, without the rigidity of nonprofit or public organizations. Perhaps, its best to think of social enterprises on a spectrum between the two poles of nonprofit and for-profit organization, encompassing the full range of hybrid organizational structures in between (Dees, 1996). The rise and prevalence of this new hybrid form deserves critical attention. Let’s discuss the potential implications of the emergence of social entrepreneurship as the ideal solution to social problems.

Discussion

“Australia, like many countries, is a place where neoliberal orthodoxies are so naturalised that most of us largely don’t even notice them. In jurisdictions where social enterprises are used as policy instruments to respond to the dismantling of welfare states, or to valorise paid work and enterprise as the source of all human value, where the discourse of social enterprise is used to impose managerial norms on not for-profit organisations, where (mostly male) social entrepreneurs are held up as heroic standards of greatness, where we establish endless pitch competitions and encourage students to devise business solutions to problems of which they have no experiential knowledge (and which may not have market solutions), and where legal definitions of the concept determine what is and is not social enterprise according to mainstream regulatory agendas, we can’t but acknowledge the close interplay between legitimised forms of social enterprise, university discourses of social entrepreneurship and neoliberal agendas (Barraket, 2019).”

With all this discourse on a new capitalism, it may seem like we’re on the brink of a revolution that will bring an end to all of our many sorrows. Social enterprises are increasingly being perceived as the new best way to tackle social problems. The corporate world has begun to acknowledge social problems and their role in producing them, and corporations are even contributing to solutions. However, it’s not really a revolutionary idea to mimic corporations because they are efficient in accumulating capital. If we were to use social movement terminology, it’s more of an example of a reformative organizational social movement rather than a revolutionary one (Aberle, 1966). It does not challenge the ideal of neoliberalism, but attempts to solve these problems within the ideology of neoliberalism. This transition relies on a popular mechanism: mimetic isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Traditionally nonprofit forms of organization are imitating the models used by for-profit organizations deemed to be successful, shedding their institutional origins. Social enterprises are hybrid organizations composed of social and market aspects that correspond to nonprofit and for-profit forms of organization and when we think of it as a spectrum, these enterprises can be located anywhere between nonprofit and for-profit with varying degrees of resemblance to either form (Dees, 1996). Now if these enterprises were homogeneously distributed in this spectrum, we might not have a problem. The existence of both nonprofit and for-profit forms of organization within industries has been shown to produce beneficial competition effects (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). However, there is reason to believe that these enterprises would tend to resemble market corporations rather than nonprofits. In a for-profit environment, competitive isomorphic pressures could push social enterprises to increasingly resemble for-profit corporations because it would be easier to interact with the organizations surrounding them (Hannan & Freeman, 1977). The formal and managerial structures of social enterprises are already more similar to traditional businesses, especially if their solutions are to be scaled which is considered an advantage of the for-profit form. Scaling would result in large for-profit organizations which are known to have a tendency to inertia, inefficiency and goal displacement (Sharma, 2016). Also, the justifying arguments for social enterprises centered on the non-distribution constraint also delegitimize nonprofit forms of organizing which could lead to a decrease of diversity in our solutions to social problems and the dominance of for-profit solutions to social problems, an approach that we don’t know the consequences of yet. This situation brings up the question of relevance: these organizations by definition hold very different goals, which entail different challenges in achieving them (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). The for-profit form of organization is proven to be successful for a very specific measurable goal, that is making profit. How can we assume that the same model will work when we add other goals of a very different nature? Would this not create a form of goal displacement and general confusion around the primary purpose of the organization? Also, what would be the primary goals of these organizations? One would like to imagine that it would be the social cause, but achievement of goals are measured by outcomes. The outcomes for social goals — social impact — are not so easily measured. However, profit related goals are easily quantifiable which might make the achievement of material goals an easier measure of success. Assuming that there is a tradeoff between profit-making and social benefit, the mission-integrity problem describes the tension between the different goals of social enterprises. Mission-oriented social enterprises need a mechanism that balances the incentives of decision-makers towards the specific mission. This can be achieved through the selection of socially motivated managers, but this is a quality that may not be very easy to observe (Ghatak, 2020). Even if the selected managers have prosocial motives, will they be able to relate to the beneficiaries’ experience or will the organization be alienated from the problem? Another issue that must be addressed is how this trend would affect the construction of social problems. As we mentioned previously, a social problem needs to be acknowledged as one before we can speak of solutions. When the legitimate form of social organizing becomes social enterprises, who decides what is considered a social problem? Social entrepreneurs and people or organizations that invest in their solutions. Nonprofit organizations were criticized as tools of elite control due to the board trustees and corporate managers assigned to several of them but as the sector grew, the diversity of key decision makers had increased (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). With social enterprises, the decision makers are directly a part of the market system, which might create conflicts of interest in the legitimization of social problems that the neoliberal market system creates. So, the key question here is “who is more likely to found or invest in a social enterprise?” And how does this effect the inclusivity of the representation of social problems and the effectiveness of the designed solutions? Social enterprises have positioned themselves as the self-sustaining antithesis of nonprofit organization, and the emphasis of differentiation is the regard for profit whereas ideally the solution to social problems would focus on the needs of the beneficiary (Sharma, 2016). If we agree that social problem solving should focus on the well-being of the humans involved, how are we supposed to achieve that if we’re playing by the rules of a neoliberal system that doesn’t have a regard for overall human well-being? From what we’ve discussed, the key actors of social enterprises and their prosocial personalities are decisive for the prioritization of social outcomes over financial outcomes. The assumptions core to neoliberalism define human-beings as self-interested, rational utility seekers, a perspective that doesn’t seem to believe in a selfless desire to solve social problems. Some regard social enterprises as a vehicle for a better world, others see it as a vehicle for neoliberalism. Constructing social enterprises as our main solution to social problems shifts the responsibilities of the state and nonprofit sector who in many contexts work together for the alleviation of our problems, to the free market which ultimately increases the already dangerously high influence of the market on our lives (Sharma, 2016). Neoliberalism is an ideology that emphasizes the benefits of competition, would it not be better if we emphasized cooperation in addressing social problems? It is an ideology that treats endless economic growth as our salvation, but haven’t we already seen enough negative consequences of this perspective?

Conclusion & Further Research Suggestions

“Nonprofit sectors are often described as sources of diversity and innovation. They contribute to pluralism by creating centers of influence outside the state and provide vehicles through which disenfranchised groups may organize. They enlarge the menu of models among which policy makers may choose when experimenting locally with solutions to social ills (Dimaggio & Anheier, 1990).”

We have established that nonprofit organization was a field of enormous diversity and the benefits of such diversity might be in danger. This discourse surrounding social enterprises not only pushes the nonprofit form towards an idealized neoliberal substitution, it also delegitimizes nonprofit ways of organization that contribute to the heterogeneity of our solutions to social problems. And social goals come in variety, so while some might be suitable for the for-profit form, there’s bound to be some that the market can’t solve and that would benefit from a diversity of solutions. This article is a general review of the literature that explains our organized collective solutions to social problems. After providing a historical development of nonprofit organizations and the rise of social enterprises, I aimed to illustrate concerns regarding the delegitimization of nonprofit forms of organizing and the idealization of for-profit social enterprises. I believe these concerns deserve further academic attention. Further research could first of all test the assumption that the rise of social enterprises has negative effects on the nonprofit population. An ecological approach could investigate the relationship between population growth rates of nonprofits and social enterprises and whether there is a significant amount of conversion from one form to the other. Another important question regards which social problems are better suited to the for-profit social enterprise form. Studies of the individuals within organizations could comparatively explore the kinds of people that work in nonprofits and social enterprises. Suggested focuses would be on their demographical background, previous experiences, relation to the social goal of the organization, and prosocial attitudes. The topic of multiple goals also deserves further attention: research could address how social enterprises define their goals and what kind of incentive mechanisms help to balance them. Finally, critical studies of how social enterprises define and measure impact would provide a better understanding of how effective these organizations are against social problems.

“Neoliberalism has a track record of favoring the few at the cost of the many. The charity sector tries to redress these inequities and give succor to those left behind. One is the antithesis of the other. Should we not get together to halt the advance of neoliberalism into charity? Do we need to see social entrepreneurship as a “non”-nonprofit? Should we instead promote hybrid models that plan the social change effort with both charity and revenue streams? Should we encourage community entrepreneur networks where charity funds are used to support entrepreneurial efforts from within a beneficiary community that help solve their social problem? Should we advocate for governments and corporates to join hands with nonprofits in planning, delivering, and monitoring welfare services? Equally, should we set ethical and social responsibility standards for entrepreneurships and applaud them for their contribution to society? Social entrepreneurship is definitely a part of the bouquet of social solutions. But should we be mindful about preventing its slide into the neoliberal form that it is perceived to take now (Sharma, 2016)?”

References

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I’ve had several dream jobs while growing up. Ranging from being a secret agent to being a writer, a doctor, or a lawyer. Actually deep down inside I still want to be a secret agent haha :) So in high school, I had decided on becoming a doctor and my plan was actually to specialize in psychiatry or neurology and then to join Doctors Without Borders. Well, I never became a doctor so that didn’t happen. I turned to social sciences. While I was studying literature, I was quite active with side projects. Of these the most memorable one was working with Romani children in a “ghetto” neighborhood, trying to organize educational and fun activities for them every Sunday. I really loved the children and the amazing people I worked with. I worked briefly with Syrian children and tried to help them in their classes in Turkey. I volunteered for a project in Algeria to work with children staying at hospitals even though that project wasn’t exactly well-organized. And then when I came back to Turkey I wanted to contribute to similar projects in Istanbul so I worked at AIESEC for a while with the incoming volunteers and interns. I organized a summer project that promotes youth involvement in NGOs with a small team, one of the most stressful experiences of my life but it was also super fun. Even in school, I wrote all my papers on some kind of social inequality. I remember one of my best papers was an analysis of the character of Othello who is one of the first protagonists in Western literature that isn’t white. Social problems always attracted me and I guess I always had the feeling that it is my humane mission to make the world a better place somehow. Because how can you just see all the injustice in the world and ignore it? I don’t get it. But I always felt like I was only scratching the surface of so many super complex problems, and I really wasn’t getting anywhere with it. I was disappointed in NGO/volunteer work because it was so hard to do anything considering they are not profit-oriented enterprises. It was a lot of disappointment. You work for an organization fully aware that you could earn better elsewhere and you give it your best in non-ideal conditions and you barely get any result. The results you do get, it’s so hard to measure that you don’t really know your impact. So, these organizations can’t compete in a capitalist profit-oriented system. That’s a whole other topic and I even have a paper on it. I should also upload that actually. Anyway, I felt like I could do something more or better but I didn’t really know how. I was interested in transferring to Psychology. I found it exhilarating to try to understand how the human mind works, to understand people and their lives and their decisions. But along the way, I fell in love with Sociology because it gave me the opportunity to dive deep into the structural, collective reasons as to why our world is the way it is. When you understand the history, the structures, the patterns you get a feeling for what went wrong. And my current opinion is that social sciences are all extremely interconnected, they study the same phenomena but with different perspectives that each offer valuable insight into different aspects of those collective phenomena. I decided that I’m good at learning, then I will learn as much as I can about all the wrong in the world, and that way I can find an in-depth, effective solution, or more accurately contribute to one of the many possible solutions. I wanted to go to the core of our problems and sociology seemed to be the perfect way to do that.

So I started my journey, absolutely loving it and I think I did a good job in embracing the sociological perspective and imagination. It’s become second nature almost, I can’t step out of my sociologist shoes anymore. It makes life a bit hard, I can’t ignore the problems I see around me which is a hard burden to bear. But I don’t really want to anyway. I learned a beautiful new word: “Weltschmerz.” This is a word I’ve been looking for, from what I understand it means the pain you feel from thinking about all the injustice in the world. So beautiful! I feel it all the time, nice to know that I’m not so alone in this feeling and that there is even a word for it.

I started my master’s degree in sociology in Germany and I was in for a surprise. Because for some reason it feels like I’m studying data science at a business school. Not the kind of sociology I’m used to at all. I was warned about the quantitativeness, and I was up for the challenge but I didn’t realize how this affects the topics we discuss, what we are “allowed” to say and what isn’t scientific enough. Apparently, it’s so hard to say anything in academia. If you want to say something then you have to read all the previous literature on the topic and prove “scientifically” or “quantitatively” that your hypothesis is true. And there’s constant pressure to specialize so that I have to ignore my curiosity about lots of other things. Not even other fields, things also in Sociology. I’m actually curious about the sociology of gender and queer theory, radical Marxist feminism, (recently) immigration, the sociology of drugs and psychedelics, social practices of primitive societies, criminology, the sociology of emotions, organizational theory, the sociology of work and labor, the sociology of science, the sociology of mental health etc. You get the picture. Not only do I not get to learn about all of these at once, we just don’t talk about gender, class, race/ethnicity in most of my classes here. Gender is a binary variable at best, and female data isn’t even included in many analyses. I have a friend who was discouraged by one of our professors in writing her term paper with a gender focus because apparently these studies don’t get published. wtf?!?! It’s sad really. And disappointing. This isn’t true for all of my classes, there are some exceptions. This semester my classes consist of Research Design, Online Behavioral Experiments, Cross-Sectional Data Analysis and I am also learning QGIS (basically making digital maps) for my student job. It’s a completely new world for me. Anyway, ever since I started this program a year ago, I have not had a real break. There is always some uni responsibility I can worry about. And I’m so tired. I feel overworked and in desperate need of a real vacation. I usually have my summers to reset and I didn’t really get that chance this summer. It was so hard to finish my final paper from last semester while already having a new job and starting the new semester. But the driving force behind my demotivation isn’t just a lot of work. I’ve worked a lot before, it’s definitely not something I’m incapable of. But I need a purpose, I need to know why I’m doing what I’m doing and I need to believe in it and want it. That’s just how my brain works, I need internal motivation. I want to explain why this is currently creating a problem.

How do we learn as a society? What is our system for this? Science, right? Well, science isn’t as innocent as it seems to be in my opinion. So our scientists have the responsibility of producing knowledge and then we disseminate this knowledge into the world to make learning a collective activity. But there are soo many problems in this system. I’m speaking more about social scientists since that is my background, I can’t say much about other things but I have a feeling that some of my thoughts are generalizable. Producing knowledge in sociology works like this: You have to write articles that ideally will be published in journals where people can read them. In order to become someone who can actually write a publishable article you have to go through years of education where your labor isn’t even properly recognized because you don’t even really make money but live off either other income or scholarships, maintaining a poor student status for a very long time. Writing a paper, you can’t say anything without proving it, there is no room for normativity or describing what should be which cuts off ideas of change. You have to have read everything about a topic before having the right to an opinion (which gets harder and harder as time passes since there is more and more to know). You basically have to completely detach yourself from your paper, as if the person behind a paper or an idea has no effect on it. Subjectivities are ignored for some reason but that doesn’t make them non-existent. Even using the word “I” is discouraged. You’re alienated from the knowledge you yourself produced. You write a paper and it takes years to go through the publishing process sometimes decreasing the relevance of your paper or just making it outdated by the time it's published. Even if you do publish it you get no money for your work and sometimes you even have to pay to publish it. How is it that the main product of our work has no monetary value for us, the producer? What does that say about how much value we attribute to knowledge in a society where everything’s value is determined by a price? You would think then that this knowledge would be accessible, right? Well, guess what? It’s not. The journals get all the money and they create a huge barrier for the accessibility of these articles. No one actually pays money to read an academic journal and despite this, they’re pretty fucking expensive. Schools and libraries buy very expensive access to them for their students. So the only people reading these are students in the discipline and other academics. This knowledge is actually not disseminated at all, perhaps creating the “ivory tower” of academia. And people argue that our responsibility as a sociologist is to write objective articles and it's up to policy people to read them and use them in policy decisions. That’s bullshit, I highly doubt that policymakers go through all sociology journals and try to learn and understand what kind of policies would have better social outcomes and then actually implement them. So why are we doing this? How does it make sense?

I’m a person that wanted to change something in the world and I dedicated myself to sociology for that, I know others share this purpose as well. But all I’m doing is focusing on the things I’m allowed to study and working my ass off for things that I’m not sure I really agree with. This takes so much of my time, I never get around to all my ideas that I believe can actually make a difference. I feel that I’m being distracted. Academia has become such a thing that you can spend your life working your ass off and have no impact on the world at all in practice. If you keep people with revolutionary ideas busy enough, they’ll never get around to the revolution, right? If you don’t even let them discuss their ideas freely, how can these ideas grow? How can I change anything if I’m only allowed to talk about what currently is? I’m sick of all these limitations and restrictions, and I’m not only tired I’m becoming angry with it too. What a smart and sneaky way to pacify intellectual minds that actually give a shit. We give years and years to get our stupid titles and end up changing nothing. Even if journals were free and accessible, no one would read them because as scientists we’ve practically created new languages with complex terminology that an ordinary person can’t understand anymore so why bother? Plus, people don’t even read books anymore, no one will read a journal article full of sociological terminology and boring empirical analyses that they barely understand. We’re making it harder and harder to achieve collective learning. Making sociology more scientific is a dangerous endeavor. It’s making it irrelevant. I refuse to be a part of it. I want to create knowledge that can be transferred to the masses. We need to learn together. We should be making the knowledge we produce more consumable, understandable. Go ahead, write your scientific article. But also have a project to explain the main points as a documentary for example. Or have a short, lay-person version available. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you can collaborate with artists or basically anyone capable of helping you and make a project out of it. You would probably even earn more for this kind of an approach.

Well, Sociology isn’t like this in all universities, not my home university at least. But then how do these two approaches relate to each other? Qualitative and anthropological studies are looked down upon here, where analytical sociology is the dominant approach. The sociology I know is shoved under the labels of “cultural studies” and “ethnography” and “humanities” and delegitimized because of its normativity and lack of scientific method. There is no room for normativity, subjectivity, emotions, opinions or art in science. Well sorry to burst your bubble but “science” wasn’t even invented to study the social world so directly copying a method that’s not even meant for your object of study doesn’t seem so smart either. Now let’s look at excerpts from a very interesting article to illustrate further how this is a problem.

Ever since I started this masters program that takes an “analytical” approach to sociology and prioritizes quantitative analyses in the name of a more “sound” scientific method, I have begun to think about the concept of objectivity because something didn’t feel right in what I was expected to learn and internalize as a sociologist. I couldn’t really understand what it was, but the unintended consequences this approach produced really bothered me. Paying less attention to theory was one downside but then I realized that data is everything in this approach so you kind of have to study what you have data on. This means the widespread exclusion of any gender identity other than male and female, and apparently, even female data is also not used because it is easier to do the analysis without it. Apparently men and women are so different from each other that if you include both in the analysis then you can’t isolate your treatment effects. Quantitative analysis means you don’t actually know any of the people you are talking about. They are pure numbers. It means that if you can’t translate a concept into a number, you can’t discuss that topic. It also means that asking “why” and “how” questions becomes pretty difficult. It means making many assumptions you hide behind your claims of objectivity. And for some reason, I just felt that this approach is a masculine approach to science. It just didn’t feel right and luckily, because I couldn’t explain myself to those around me, I tried to find a feminist critique of scientific objectivity and I was successful! Elizabeth Fee explains it all so well, I want to reflect on some of her ideas.

I think we all know by now that we still live in quite a patriarchal world but sometimes I think we don’t understand how deep it actually goes. I didn’t for quite a long time. For example if you say women are disadvantaged in science, I think one would usually think of low female representation in certain scientific jobs or unequal pay. But that’s just the surface in my opinion. Fee argues that the underlying patriarchal power dynamics characterized by inequality and oppression are masked by some notions of “scientific objectivity” and that we must reexamine the role this concept plays in society. She explains subjectivity and objectivity really well in one paragraph:

“The liberal ideology of science posits man as a rational individual. “Man” is capable of creating a rational knowledge of the world through a process of testing and discarding hypotheses. The techniques of a scientific discipline, such as controlled experimentation, the use of specific quantitative and statistical techniques, the replication of findings, and the submission of results to the collective criticism of the scientific community, are specifically intended to root out any individual eccentricities, biases, or other sources of error. Subjectivity is regarded with suspicion, as possible contaminant of the process of knowledge production, and one which must be subjected to stringent controls.”

Liberal ideology brings with it the idea of “rational man” as the default human being and Fee argues that the characteristics of this man are actually male characteristics that are contrasted with “emotional women.” The dichotomies go on: rationality and emotionality, objectivity and subjectivity, culture and nature, public and private. So she says in liberal philosophy there are two binary categories of existence: male and female.

“Science itself is perceived as masculine, not simply because the majority of scientists have historically been men, but also because the characteristics of science are perceived as sex-linked. The objectivity said to be characteristic of the production of scientific knowledge is specifically identified as a male way of relating to the world. Even the hierarchy of the sciences is a hierarchy of masculinity; as the language suggests, the “hard” sciences at the top of the hierarchy are seen as more male than the “soft” sciences at the bottom.”

This made me think of how “objectivity” in terms of science and “objectification” are related to each other. Objectivity is supposed to be a good thing, right? Well, when you think about it objectivity requires to objectify things and as far as I know objectification does not have positive connotations. It requires putting a certain distance between yourself as the scientist and the “object” to be studied. It requires ignoring that subject’s subjectivity. It’s a cold of way of learning in my opinion. Anthropology and qualitative studies, on the other hand, require getting up close to the subject of examination. It requires talking for hours with several people and listening to them and their subjective experiences. You have to listen and ask the right questions, you have to observe everything and empathize and try your best to understand. It requires getting to know them almost personally. The stories that my interviewees have told me! I probably know a lot about them that even their close ones don’t. And when you are close to your subjects of study, you feel for them and you care about them and you care about the consequences of the story you tell in their name. You have a responsibility to that person. It’s a warm way of learning, perhaps a feminine way of knowing the world. You don’t care about numbers that are in some way attached to some people you have never actually seen before.

And how would we define this kind of objective scientific approach? This masculine scientific approach has been criticised for being “analytic, mechanistic, controlling, exploitive, and ultimately destructive.” It is a science that holds the goal of exploiting the whole world for white men. It’s the same science that justifies the rape of the world by these men. Controlling and abusing the natural and social world to their own advantage. The same science that brought us to today. Science backed up the idea of eugenics and fueled the holocaust and other disgusting crimes against humanity. Science created the ridiculous working conditions we are subject to today. Science justified the subordination of all people to white men. “Russell Means, a major figure in the American Indian Movement, has denounced all forms of “European” thought as devoid of spiritual appreciation of the natural world, and as therefore leading merely to different forms of exploitation of the earth and natural resources.”

Fee writes that according to feminist psychologists, the male psyche of the western capitalist world is just plain “unable to integrate self-creative activity with a primary concern for others,” leaving the responsibility of care and emotional expression and forming and maintaining healthy relationships to women. Basically, we have to think about the social consequences of masculine action because men don’t. “This contributes to men’s inability to organize technology for human ends… Scientific culture which is responsive to human needs depends on the recovery of that part of human experience which has been relegated to the female.”

Today, you see women everywhere trying to prove themselves in this patriarchal system. How do they do it? They very often try to be more “manly,” more masculine. They try to enter male-dominated fields, they try to adopt the masculine ways of doing things. Me too, all my life I felt that I had to prove that I can do anything a boy can. Now I think fuck that. Maybe boys should try to be more like me, I can do it better than them. Instead of making women the problem and trying to integrate them into the system they are not well represented in, maybe we should change our perspective and recognize that the system is a problem and women do not have to fit into it.

“The radical feminist critique of science and technology locates the problems not in women, but in the particular character of our production of scientific knowledge. The problem is not one of making women more scientific, but of making science less masculine. When masculinity is seen as an incomplete and thus distorted form of humanity, the issue of making science and technology less masculine is also the issue of making it more completely human.”

Fee also explains how the scientific method is not completely evil and it has very useful aspects so we shouldn’t think of it as black and white, but a grey area with room for improvement:

“Because science has been presented as an objective force above and beyond society, it may appear that the claim of science to be the arbitrator of truth must be accepted or rejected wholesale. If rejected, we seem to be left without mutually agreed criteria of validity. Decisions between different theories (for example, evolution vs. creationism, or feminist vs. sexist interpretations of social arrangements) would be quite simply a matter of political power. We need not, however, go so far as to reject the whole human effort to comprehend the world in rational terms, nor the idea that forms of knowledge can be subjected to critical evaluation and empirical testing. The concept of creating knowledge through a constant process of practical interactions with nature, the willingness to consider all assumptions and methods as open to question, the expectation that ideas will be tested and refined in practice, and that results and conclusions of research will be subjected to the most unfettered critical evaluation-all these are aspects of scientific objectivity which should be preserved and defended. The hope of learning more about the world and ourselves by such a collective process is not one to be abandoned. The ideal of individual creativity subjected to the constraints of community validation through a set of recognized procedures preserves the promise of progress.”

So what are the problematic consequences of this system that we should specifically focus on? I’ll provide you with her categorization and explanation and I will add a reflection with an example in the paragraphs following the explanations.

*Production of knowledge/social uses. *The idea of objectivity can be used to create a distance between the production of pure science, as seen as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an abstract and value-free ideal, involving purely intellectual and technical decisions-and the uses of sciences, seen as involving purely political and economic considerations. If the production of knowledge is isolated from the uses to which that knowledge is put, then the scientist is freed from any social or moral responsibility. Even the scientist who accepts funding from military sources is therefore free to insist that the use of “his” research is outside of “his” control, and not part of “his” responsibility; the researcher in a corporate laboratory is free to consider “his” work as purely objective and unfettered by any economic considerations.

This is kinda like what I mentioned above where it’s our job to just produce knowledge and leave it to others to decide what to do with it. I think this distinction alienates us from the big picture and also distances us from the concept of “responsibility” like Fee says above. In one of my classes last semester we read an article about how having high-performance employees in an organization and increasing contact between them and the other employees, increases overall productivity within the organization. I found this to be deeply disturbing. My kind of sociology would question why we’re trying to trick people into working more with subtle psychological tactics. It reminded me of one of my own work experiences. I was working at a boutique consultancy company that had very few employees and even fewer that were legally working there and being compensated “fairly” (I mean it was legal but my boss told me herself that she didn’t pay them sufficient money). And you know what, the two people she had hired formally, they were two of the most extreme over-achievers I have ever met. Their contributions and effort were honestly pretty impressive, they basically devoted their lives to the company and they did a great job too. The thing is, those were the standards that I (as a homeless, severely underpaid, full-time intern) were held to. I was expected to integrate into the “culture” of this company. Except the thing was, I had no money and no home. Working everyday and sometimes overtime and on weekends left me with very little time to actually earn money which I did through ghost-writing. But in Turkey even that doesn’t pay well but I needed every bit. Plus I was always staying at a friend’s place. Do you realize how overwhelming and stressful a situation that is? My coworkers didn’t and I was politely made to believe that I wasn’t good enough for the company and lacked motivation and I was basically kicked out when I asked for a decent wage. Well, I’ve been checking out what the company is doing these days and I also asked my boss how she wanted to grow the company and she basically said it would stay just about the same as it was then. So she has two full-time legal employees that work their asses off and then she hires underpaid interns and squeezes work out of them by exposing them to extremely high performers and once they wake up she finds new ones. Maybe she isn’t doing it intentionally but it just works out that way because it’s cheap labor which is an efficient way to create profit. I don’t want to think that she actually did read it somewhere and is cruel enough to actively execute it as a business strategy. I honestly don’t know. But I hope you can see where I’m going with this. There are people or companies in the world who will exploit this knowledge given the chance so someone has to take responsibility for it.

*Thinking/feeling. *The claim of “objectivity” may be taken as requiring a divorce between scientific rationality and any emotional or social commitment. Thinking is supposedly divorced from feeling, and feeling is said to be outside the realm of objectivity. Indeed, the concept of scientific objectivity may be used to devalue any positons expressed with emotional intensity or conviction; feeling becomes inherently suspicious, the mark of an inferior form of consciousness. Once this hierarchy between thinking and feeling has become internalized, it is axiomatic that those who identify with “thought” can justify their dominance over those identified with “feeling.” Women are very used to the separation between thought and feeling and the ways in which it can be used to reproduce relations of dominance and subordination between the sexes; it is a familiar aspect of intimate relationships. If a man can present his position in an argument as the point of view of rationality and define the woman’s position as an emotional one, then we know that she has already lost the struggle to be heard; he has already won.

I mean, WOW! This excerpt is just very self-explanatory and such a good formulation of a feeling that I believe a lot of people probably experienced. Why is rationality more valid than emotionality? Why? Why the fuck are we so terrified of emotions and have so much trouble trusting them? I can relate to her example from my own relationships. I have very often been made to feel that my emotions were non-valid because they were emotions. I would just be told that it’s not logical for me to feel whatever way I was feeling and I think I was never able to explain that that is precisely what emotions are and they don’t go away when you tell them they’re not logical. Human emotion is a huuuge part of our existence, everyone has emotions. Why do we ignore them? repress them? delegitimize them? And I’ve also been told that my writing is too emotional. I took it as a compliment, I refuse to be shamed because of my completely natural emotions and I won’t hide them just for the convenience of others. This is kinda like what qualitative science is compared to quantitative science, it is ignored precisely because it is more human and emotional.

*Expert/nonexpert. *This dichotomy reproduces a similar power relationship on a social scale. Everyone lacking scientific credentials can be made to feel uninformed, unintelligent, and lacking in the skills required for successful debate over matters of public policy. Those with sufficient wealth can afford to hire the scientific expertise needed to give their positions public validation; those without wealth are made to feel that they must bow to the superior knowledge of the experts. Knowledge can, in this system, flow in only one direction, from expert to nonexpert. There is no dialogue; the voice of the scientific authority is like the male voiceover in commercials, a disembodied knowledge which cannot be questioned, whose author is inaccessible.

Wow, this one is a powerful point as well. Knowledge is authority, it’s power and only some people have access to it. In practice I don’t actually need the credentials to become a scientist or an expert, learning is possible outside of that system but you will get no recognition for it. This reminds me of how a self-taught astronomer in a village in the East of Turkey found a star or something and informed NASA and I think he didn’t actually even get the credit for it. Perhaps being self-taught is even better?… So, if you consider that men are always advantaged in life and careers, they have more power over the knowledge being created. I mean, birth control is the perfect example for this, isn’t it? If men are creating the knowledge surrounding the topic, the solutions will be convenient for men with no regard to how it is for women. We have normalized taking dangerous pills that fuck up your hormones and mental health while men have to do nothing and are free from any responsibility. Do you think that this would be the case if women had a say in it? And not being able to question “experts” because of their credentials? How is that a good idea? We don’t trust subjectivity but we forget that subjectivity is everywhere, including science. The scientist is a person and people have subjectivities and they do affect your actions and your work and also the knowledge that you produce. So why can’t we question that kind of subjectivity?

*Subject/object. *This relationship is again one of domination; the knowing mind is active, the object of knowledge passive. This attitude toward nature has been immensely productive in allowing the manipulation and transformation of natural processes to serve human ends. Women, who have already been defined as natural objects in relation to man, and who have traditionally been viewed as passive, have special reason to question the political power relation expressed in this epistemological distancing. The subject/object split legitimizes the logic of domination of nature; it can also legitimize the logic of domination of man by man, and woman by man. Just as the ecological crisis requires that we see “man” as part of nature and not as a superior being above and beyond natural processes, so too the task of human liberation requires us to see science as a part of human society, determined by particular aims and values, and not as the depersonalized voice of abstract authority. Rejecting the efforts made (in the name of scientific objectivity) to deny the social content of scientific knowledge will enable us to concretely debate the values and intentions of scientific practice.

Honestly, she doesn’t leave much to be said. The next part of this post is all her. I couldn’t phrase it better anyway so I just left it the way it is. She explains how “science” is not some abstract thing that is separate from the rest of the world and the socio-economic systems that structure it. They are very much embedded in and a part of those systems, and should be acknowledged as such.

This raises another set of problems with the theme of scientific objectivity, the question of the social position of scientists. Those scientists who choose to become actively involved in questioning the social uses of science or the power relations which determine its direction, risk being seen as no longer “objective.” Here, the notion of “objectivity” merely a code word for the political passivity of those scientists who have tacitly agreed to accept a privileged social position and freedom of inquiry within the laboratory in return for their political silence. We are told that the production of scientific knowledge must be independent of politically motivated interference or direction. Yet we see scientists testifying before congressional committees, we find scientists in law courts, we find scientists involved in disputes at every level of public policy, and it is obvious that the experts take sides. It is also obvious that these “experts” are very often funded by corporate interests and that there are few penalties for those who find that their research supports the positions of these powerful lobbies.

We may still treasure the mythology of the individual scientist, alone in “his” laboratory and isolated from mere daily concerns, wrestling with fundamental problems of the physical universe. In reality, the scientist today is a salaried worker, part of an institutional hierarchy-perhaps a small cog in a corporate research team-working on some small aspect of a problem which has probably been formulated by others. Her or his survival depends in a very concrete way on the structure of funding decisions made far from the laboratory; she or he is usually dependent on economic and political decisions beyond her or his control or influence. In what way is the average scientific worker independent of the larger political process, and how can we say that science as a whole is autonomous of social organization?

A moment’s reflection shows us that the production of scientific knowledge is highly structured and organized, and is closely integrated with structures of political and economic power. It is naive to present the idea of scientific objectivity as though science itself were above or beyond politics. The assertion of objectivity is, however, used to mask the actual conditions of scientific work. Any society will attempt to generate the kinds of scientific knowledge which best fulfill its social, economic and political needs. Determines the kinds of questions which can be posed, and the tools available for answering them.What we know as modern science developed only with the capitalist mode of production and its new kind of practical activities and economic needs.

To understand the social position of scientists, then, we must study social organization and its production at various levels. At one level, the identity of the scientist is a secondary question, not because he or she is above politics, but because scientists must fit into an existing political reality. The funding and organization of science follows social priorities as established by existing relations of power. At another level, we must recognize that scientists have a certain autonomy within these structures, and therefore have a special responsibility to examine the ways in which particular forms of research may help or hinder the goal of human liberation.

If we are to move in the direction of a more fully human understanding of science, we should resist rigid separations between the production and uses of knowledge, subject and object, thinking and feeling, expert and nonexpert. This requires readmitting the human subject into the production of scientific knowledge, accepting science as a historically determined human activity, and not as an abstract autonomous force. If we admit that scientific activity is not neutral, but responds to specific social agenda and needs, then we can in turn begin to see how science, and scientists, might relate in a different way to social, including feminist, questions.

Historical investigations of the ”woman problem” have considered women as natural objects and as passive in relation to the creation of knowledge; at this stage, we can only imagine what it might mean to be the active subjects in the creation of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. At this point, while it is necessary to argue the case for the entrance of women into the scientific professions as presently constituted, it is also important to push the epistemological critique of science to the point where we can begin to construct a clear vision of alternate ways of creating knowledge. The feminist critique should be used as a tool for seeing what it might mean in practice to liberate science from the inherited habits of thought resulting from the previous separation of human experience into mutually contradictory realms. Overcoming the dualisms that feminists have identified as being associated with sexual dichotomies may offer the prospect of a radically transformed science, one that is as yet only faintly visible as a possibility for the future.

Finally I want to share with you an email I wrote to my teacher that was my reflection of a talk he had recommended and that describes why quantitative methods do not fit perfectly to social sciences and why we should be cautious about this.

The talk brought up a lot of questions and I want to summarize it for you before I pose them. From what I understand Lily critiques the applicability of the interventionist concept of causation in the social world. She claims that the categories that we’re interested in, whose effects that we are trying to measure (race, gender, class etc.) have an irresolvable normative element which makes it impossible to understand what is constitutive of the concept/category and to separate that from the context. The example she provided to illustrate this idea was to compare an audit study with a botanical experiment where the treatment is a fertilizer. So in the latter, you can talk about causal effects of a fertilizer because you really can isolate its effect and control for everything else and the effect you are studying is caused by the molecular composition of that fertilizer which is an inherent quality. Whereas in an audit study the treatment is race for example and race is not an inherent quality of a person, it’s a relational concept that is in essence a certain positioning in social structure that results in advantages or disadvantages. So “race” only exists when there are multiple people of different races, it is not an inherent quality. It only means something socially, not individually. So you can’t study it the same way you would a fertilizer.

Another illuminating example: in a gender audit study you match on CVs but not on clothing, why? Where do we decide to stop matching? People of different genders wearing the same clothing (or even just them being confident) can create different responses. So the method makes it hard to measure what we want to measure. The complexity of the social world leads us to make abstractions which involve the prioritization of certain things based on research aims or normative backgrounds: what is too complicated to factor in and what is essential? What assumptions are necessary evils and which are unacceptable? She says this is especially problematic because legal issues are informed by studies of causal effects of race that are based on social scientists’ experiments in which they claim impartiality in order to gain legitimacy but she thinks that they are not impartial. She argues that quantitative research should show more reflexivity, which is something I’ve learned is very important in qualitative analysis for example.

I would be interested in hearing what you think of this, I hope I was able to convey her arguments in an understandable way because, honestly, I can’t say that I understand it 100%. She and another participant also said that this could be a problem of misspecifying the unit of observation: the person being racialized vs. their surroundings (people who racialize). But operationalizing this is difficult as far as I understand. This took me back to our discussion on networks and I was wondering if the practicality of network analysis in social sciences is because of this? But then, can you establish causality in network analysis? Or was it the whole point of the talk that we shouldn’t be trying to establish causality? Someone asked if there are other modes of causation that we can conceptualize: structural, linear, layered, transitive or set-theoretical. I have never heard of these before but this also seems like an interesting question.

Ok, now I’m done :) Here’s a link to the article: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/archives/scientific-objectivity-feminism/

Today I want to talk about a topic very important to me. My friends say I’ve become an advocate of it and that’s kinda true so I want to advocate for it here as well, especially since I really need it lately. Guess what our topic is? **lysergic acid diethylamide! …or acid :) **Well, I guess I can say that the things I discuss will be about psychedelics in general since the experience is quite similar in the important aspects. But my favorite is acid, just saying.

Well, anyone who’s been on a psychedelic trip will probably tell you that it’s not something you can describe but something you have to experience for yourself. Well, that’s true. It is such a different state of consciousness that if you haven’t done psychedelics you will not understand what it’s like by just hearing about it. It’s very far from our “normal” mental states. But I want to try to share my knowledge of what is actually going on in your mind during the trip, as best as I can. After a long, ridiculous period of being illegal, psychedelic research has begun again and it’s very promising.

First of all, I think the most important thing about having a good psychedelic experience is really knowing what you’re doing. As long as you’re careful about a couple of things, I think psychedelic experiences are not only extremely fun but also healing. It’s literally healthy for you. I would recommend it to everyone, in the right conditions. So, first of all, you should be careful about the dose. I personally think that slowly going up to 100 mc is better than immediately going for a full dose. But even if you mess up, the toxicity of lsd is very very low compared to a lot of prescription drugs so it won’t kill you. You just might have an intense trip. And then, another very important factor is the “set and setting.” Who you are with for this experience matters! It should ideally be someone you know, someone you trust, someone you love and that loves you. Or someone you can be vulnerable with because you will be as vulnerable as a newborn baby. Psychological safety is of utmost importance. Someone that stresses you out or you don’t trust is not a good idea, trust me. You should be able to talk about everything comfortably, because things will come up and they can be of a very deep nature and repressing feelings is not a good idea on acid. And then where you are is important as well. I prefer to be in nature as isolated from society as possible (and the higher the dose, the more important I think that is). Some of my friends enjoy a trip at home but I don’t think I will do that unless I have a big garden or something. Camping is perfect! Also, you’re current state of mind is important. Don’t do this when you’re stressed or you have something important to do that day. You should aim for when you feel calm and comfortable. It also helps when you have someone who is experienced with you. Like a guide! This actually exists in many places I think. Kinda like a shaman, I guess. But I have to dig deeper into what exactly shamans do. I like being a guide but sometimes it's difficult. One time I took on the responsibility of being the guide for about 10 people who were taking shrooms for the first time. Everyone kept asking me questions and all I could say was “I don’t know!” I was very confused haha, a common feeling on psychedelics I guess. Anyway, let’s move on to what happens in the brain.

So for different substances we get different reactions and I really don’t remember exactly the biological/chemical thing going on but I will share my knowledge as best I can. Normally, we are people of habit. It would be hard to fully think through every single behavior in normal life so our brain has shortcuts. You get used to doing something in a certain way so regularly that your brain makes strong connections between the different parts coordinating that activity: you’re on autopilot! A lot of things we do are automatic. You don’t really think about them, you just do. So what acid does is, first of all, it gets rid of the autopilot. It’s kind of like when you’re a child you haven’t been programmed yet in a certain way and you are curious and creative about everything and then society teaches you things that you internalize. Imagine all of that internalization just gone all of a sudden and you’re back to your child self. Also, LSD creates new connections between different parts of your brain so that’s where the creativity comes from. And another interesting effect is that it deactivates the part of your brain that controls your self perceptions: ego dissolution or ego death. So this part really helps with addictions because one part of addiction is believing that “I am someone who smokes” or drinks or whatever. I almost stopped smoking entirely after my first trip because I realized that I didn’t actually enjoy the activity that much. It’s nice every now and then but constant use makes it a more unpleasant experience in my opinion. Even so, I was unable to quit until my first psychedelic shock. Also, psychedelics are like a key to your subconscious. You know that mysterious thing that we don’t really understand? Well, acid will unleash your subconscious and give you direct access to it, where a lot of our psychological problems lie. All of these make it a super promising tool in mental health and therapy.

Amazement, wonder, speechlessness, confusion, curiosity, vulnerability… these are the dominant feelings I have on a trip. It really feels like being a child again but since you’re not you may panic because suddenly you forgot how to do everything. But don’t panic, just go with it and discover everything with a fresh gaze. It makes me feel almost like a primitive person discovering the world for the first time and it becomes a really cool adventure. And all you’re doing is really basic everyday activities. You’re energetic and your mind is reallyy working. You think about things in ways that you’ve never thought about before, it kinda makes you feel like a genius at times but completely hopeless with some really basic activities too, like just changing clothes for example. But I like to think of it as a new realm, or a new perspective of the world. A different, more genuine you. And every time you enter that realm you don’t start from scratch but you build up your psychedelic character. It becomes easier to be in control and calm in that state of mind after a while. Although I do miss the first shock sometimes.

My sister was going through a hard phase in her life and I couldn’t stand to see her so depressed. And I had gone through a period of my life I like to call a blackhole. I was depressed, had no self-confidence and I was really lost. Then I was born from my ashes on a very special day when I did a full dose for the first time. I remembered that I’m not worthless and I deserve better from those around me and I completely changed my life for the better. I still need a good trip every now and then (every summer at least) to put things into perspective and think about my life and what I want it to be. So I wanted to share that with my sister but I was so scared that it would go wrong. At one point I decided to let her decide, I told her everything I know and offered to take her on a camping trip with some friends. And she said yes! And it was so good, even though we had some trouble during the night that even turned into a good thing. Her reaction made me so proud, I remember she looked up at the night sky and started crying with emotion at how beautiful it was. I thought that was such a natural, sincere reaction and I hadn’t seen it before. And it was so interesting and comforting to have someone who has known me up close all my life with me for that experience. It was a different trip from any other. I realized that our psychedelic selves were similar to each other in ways it can’t be with any other person on the planet.

I think that psychedelics are also very intellectually interesting. The perspectives you can gain are perfect for social sciences and sociology in particular in my opinion. Thinking about how we got to where we are is important in sociology and it's hard to take a step back and see the big picture when we’re so caught up in it. a psychedelic experience is perfect for taking that step back and really engaging with your thought material. It’s not surprising that a lot of great thinkers were into psychedelics. It’s like anthropology but living it, you become a primitive person. For example, I didn’t really understand what toxic masculinity was even though it’s become a popular expression. I literally visually saw what toxic masculinity was on one unfortunate acid trip, and in such a concrete way. I’ve had my fair share of bad trips, but even with them it’s not all bad and I learn so much from them so I don’t really mind. This year has been a not so psychedelic year for me and I feel the absence of it. I really need a reset, I didn’t get to do my pilgrimage this year and I’m already running out of sun :)

Mark Fisher uses a concept called “acid communism” and I’m really curious what that is because it sparks so many cool ideas in my mind just hearing it. I believe psychedelics will be revolutionary and I will advocate for them with all my heart once my thoughts mean something to people. I want to design a psychedelic game at some point, like a treasure hunt but fully customizable and with little mini-games and riddles and puzzles. I need time :)

Watch fantastic funghi and the psychedelic adventures documentary on Netflix!!

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Introduction

Is a better future possible? Will we ever overcome the increasing social and environmental problems that seem to only grow in size and complexity? As a student of Sociology, these questions and many like them have been plaguing my mind for a long time. The most discouraging part is that people, even the ones that suffer the most from these problems, have no tolerance for any mention of alternative systems, immediately lashing out that “capitalism is the best thing we ever had!” and “do you think communism is any better, are you aware of its history?” Capitalist realism is a concept that refers to the prevailing notion that capitalism is the only viable economic system (Fisher 2009). As unreasonable a notion it is, in these discussions I could never find a convincing example of an alternative no matter how much I tried and the discussion would end there. Out of endless possibilities, why would capitalism be the only way to organize society? Especially considering all the suffering it causes in the world. In the end, I had decided that if people like it so much so be it but I won’t be a part of it; I’ll eventually drop everything and create a small environment in which alternative lifestyles are encouraged. Then, I was introduced to a course titled “Blockchain Economics and Radical Markets” offered by Dr. Stefano Balietti and honestly, it was life-changing. I was introduced to completely new concepts and ideas that basically said, “yes, a better future is possible” and the course provided us with several ideas and tools to work towards it. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of such a learning experience and this paper is actually my personal contribution to it.

I will try to explain the context of this unconventional paper and hope that it is not too messy. Throughout my journey as a sociologist, I have jumped from subject area to subject area until I came to the realization that for the solution of the fundamental problems that I want to contribute to, I need to focus on Economic Sociology — an aspiration I am still working on. Within Economic Sociology, I was especially intrigued by the critical study of organizations because in my opinion organizing is power and understanding organization is a part of the solution. This interest led the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations to immediately catch my eye. The more I learned about this organizational form, the more ideas regarding the possibilities this technology could facilitate popped into my mind. The more I learned about alternative socioeconomic mechanisms the more I was encouraged to pursue these and other alternatives in my own academic journey. My dream of creating a space for alternative lifestyles suddenly transformed from being a signal of my giving up into an idea that could potentially enable experimentation with the ideas I develop throughout this journey. And this course provided me with the answer to so many of my impossible questions surrounding this dream: What am I going to do about money? How can I enable exchange? How will we make decisions?

So I have divided this paper into two parts. The first part can be considered a literature review of decentralized autonomous organizations and social tokens, how they work, their fundamental differences from traditional organizations and the implications and finally some examples of their implementations. The second part is more like an essay in which I propose self-sustaining, self-governing community building as a space to implement, experiment and improve upon alternative socioeconomic mechanisms with the help of the technological tools described here. I am writing this paper in the hopes of sparking a discussion and encouraging such ideas, and also to inform such communities of the possibilities available to them.

Part I

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Humankind’s capability to organize at a large scale is quite fascinating and the idea that this ability might even lie at the core of our species’ evolutionary success warrants further critical attention to the subject of organizations. Organizations are ubiquitous in modern life, they are our main method of collective human action. While “organization” loosely means a group of people who come together under a specific purpose and could refer to a variety of things, what the term initially brings to mind is the traditional rational formal organization. That may sound like a complex concept, however a rational formal organization is simply what we call the hierarchical, bureaucratic structure of a traditional company for example. In other words, rationalized formal organizations have become “the preferred model for structuring social life (Bromley & Meyer 2014).” However, since the emergence of such organizations after the industrial revolution, organizational theory has been preoccupied with the inefficiencies born from this structure that was actually meant to maximize efficiency and productivity. Despite minor attempts of some organizations to tackle these problems by “delayering” their hierarchies or introducing informal practices, most organizations stick to the traditional style of organizing and a widespread revolutionary breakthrough is yet to happen. However, it may be close. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) “involve a set of people interacting with each other according to a self-enforcing open-source protocol (Blockchainhub 2019).” But what exactly does that mean? In this section, I will discuss the emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations and how they work. I will also briefly explain social tokens in relevance to DAOs. Then, I will discuss the advantages of DAOs compared to traditional forms of organization and provide examples of real life implementations.

What is a DAO?

“Beyond their sheer diversity, they display a key similar feature: the ability to facilitate the collective management of common goods, including cultural and intangible works, natural resources, economic and industrial production, and social systems (Honigman 2019).”

While decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a broad concept that can take several forms in practice, I will try to explain its defining characteristics. A DAO is in essence an organization which means it is a “tool for coordinating human activity (Honigman 2019)” but its design is fundamentally different from that of a traditional organization. The Binance Research definition of a DAO is “an organizational form that coordinates the efforts and resources of members via an a priori binding, formalized and transparent set of rules that are agreed upon in a multilateral fashion (2019).” Ethereum defines a DAO as an “internet-native business that’s collectively owned and managed by its members” and “an effective and safe way to work with like-minded folks around the globe (2021).” However, it’s not easy to grasp what a DAO is exactly at first so let’s dive deeper into the different aspects of a DAO.

What does it mean to be autonomous? In the context of DAOs, autonomy refers to the fundamental fact that the rules that govern the operations of a DAO are programmed or written in a source code which means that they are automatically executed in the appropriate conditions, without the influence of any kind of human actor. For this to work, the rules must be operating on a public, permissionless blockchain (although there are exceptions), meaning that it is open for anyone to join. This makes it possible to put crypto-assets directly under the control of the DAO and eliminates the need of a third-party as it would have been in the case of traditional software (Honigman 2019). And what does it mean to be decentralized? There are two main interpretations of the decentralized aspect of DAOs which are, in my opinion, complementary rather than conflicting. The first refers to the public permissionless blockchain as a decentralized infrastructure that isn’t dependent on a centralized authority as I have already established above. The second interpretation adds a new and very crucial characteristic regarding the distribution of power within the organization: decentralization refers to the non-hierarchical structure of the organization that prevents the concentration of power in the hands of a few people. Power is exercised collectively which can be deemed a “heterarchical” structure or “based on mechanisms of cooperation without subordination (Honigman 2019).” Depending on the purpose of the organization, the code defining a DAO could need to be supplemented by individuals or organizations that provide services that the DAO can’t do itself.

“DAOs can be seen as distributed organisms, or distributed Internet tribes, that live on the Internet and exist autonomously, but also heavily rely on specialist individuals or smaller organisations to perform certain tasks that cannot be replaced with automation (Blockchainhub, 2019).”

How does it work?

First of all, a DAO needs a secure infrastructure on which to operate on and a set rules that define the organization. Before the arrival of the Ethereum Network, creating your own secure infrastructure in the form of blockchain consensus protocols was a prerequisite to create a DAO but with Ethereum’s smart contracts creating DAOs became much easier, and thus more accessible (Blockchainhub 2019). Smart contracts are basically public computer programs that automatically execute the terms of a certain agreement that is defined in its code. Once deployed, the rules can only be changed by vote through a democratic process and any attempt at an action that doesn’t comply with the set rules is programmed to fail. In addition to holding the rules, a smart contract also functions as the organization’s treasury which means the funds are also protected from individual interference (Ethereum 2021). Second, you need funding. DAOs are funded mainly through crowdfunding that distributes native tokens representing the shares of the DAO, which become a sort of currency within the organization that can have multiple purposes such as being used as member incentives for certain behaviors or voting rights within the organization. This also means that members of a DAO are not bound by formal legal contracts but rather incentivized by economic mechanisms to behave in the interest of the DAO, while also preserving their self-interest if the mechanisms are well-designed in terms of aligning the two. Members are represented as addresses that can be owned by various entities and actions or votes are represented by transactions on the blockchain (Sharma 2021). Members have the right to propose various actions that are then subject to a voting process that requires the consensual approval of members based on network consensus rules that can be designed according to the context. These decisions can be about modifying the original rules, the distribution of funds, the hiring/firing of individuals etc. based on the more specific type of organization and objectives the DAO represents. Finally, the DAO needs to be deployed. After going live, the DAO becomes independent of its creator and it is only possible to change the code with consensus from stakeholders (Cointelegraph 2021). Wang et al. Have formulated the reference model for DAOs that can be seen below:

Reference Model for DAOs (Wang et al. 2019)

Social Tokens

I think it is important to briefly discuss social tokens and their relevance to DAOs here because I think social tokens are just as promising and revolutionary a technology as DAOs are and they can be implemented together in some scenarios. Social tokens are a very new, very interesting topic that deserve their own paper but here I will try to explain the aspects relevant to the objective of this paper. Social tokens (also known as social currencies or creator coins) are crypto tokens that can be created by individuals (personal tokens) or communities (community tokens). Personal tokens imply that a specific individual is the driver of the token’s value and the token can be exchanged for the time or labor of that individual. Community tokens, which are more relevant to this paper, imply that membership to a community is what drives the token’s value and the token provides access to various resources of the community. Sound familiar? I would say that community tokens have a stark resemblance to the native tokens described above that DAOs use. In addition to the membership and voting rights uses of tokens in DAOs, community tokens can be used for unlocking certain types of community content.

Social tokens are basically digital assets that anyone can mint for financial and social capital. One of the most interesting things about social tokens is their flexibility in use cases, they can be just about anything which creates the potential to make them revolutionary for the creator economy (Steinwold 2020). When you think about it there is an overwhelming abundance of productive activities that create value through online content but don’t result in direct financial gain for the creator: writers, influencers, bloggers, artists etc. One interesting example is $ESSAY, a token created to crowdfund essays that both enables the writer to be compensated for their work and allows for the resulting essay to be a public good accessible to everyone (Critchlow 2021). Various platforms like Roll have emerged to facilitate the creation of social tokens or what they call “social money” by anyone, “allowing you to own, control and coordinate the value you create across platforms.” You have the opportunity to determine the dynamics of your tokenomy meaning how your token will be distributed and can be spent and earned within your community (Roll 2021).

How are DAOs different from traditional organizations?

From centralization to decentralization (Wang et al. 2019)

Advantages

The characteristics of DAOs that we have gone through above distinguish them from traditional organizations in fundamental ways. The matters of hierarchy, bureaucracy, authority, power, corruption are ongoing problem topics in organizational theory and DAOs make a difference precisely in these areas. One of the major problems with traditional organizations is that they suffer from centralized forms of authority: the governments that they are dependent on comprise external authorities and the concentration of power in shareholders and other positions higher up in the hierarchy comprise internal authorities. DAOs, as mentioned above, overcome both types of centralization of power and have a decentralized collective power structure based on community which increases the voice of all members involved in the organization. Not only are DAOs a promising alternative to traditional companies but they have even been proposed as a tool for e-governments (N. Diallo et al. 2018).

Traditional organizations implement hierarchies, even the flattest organizations usually have some kind of hierarchy but with less layers. These hierarchies are meant to make management more efficient through the division of operational work and managerial work, clear lines of authority and increased accountability (Chandler 1977). However, they do so through a system of domination and subordination that produces many unintended consequences such as top-down decision making, information asymmetries and tensions and conflict between the managers and the managed (Goulder 1954; Crozier & Friedberg 2017; Dalton 1959). Hierarchies are obliterated altogether with DAOs because blockchain technology enables an efficient method of decision-making that can involve the direct participation of all members with no need for a hierarchy, even at a very large scale. Even if a traditional organization were to use voting as a decision-making method, the results would still have to be interpreted and implemented by a human being, again leaving room for manipulation and corruption.

A traditional organization operates on contracts, however unlike smart contracts these contracts cannot execute their terms themselves and need third-parties i.e. human involvement to be interpreted and enforced. The introduction of third parties into this process again results in vulnerability to manipulation and inefficiency due to transaction and management costs. Speaking of contracts, a traditional organization such as a business uses employment contracts and salaries to organize the involvement of members whereas DAOs use incentive mechanisms based on native tokens to organize members towards a common purpose. These members don’t even need to know each other or trust each other as long as they trust the code, so DAOs make trust irrelevant which is also a crucial distinction from traditional organizations. The alignment of interests that result from the incentive scheme implemented through native tokens along with common ownership and participation in decision-making of all members in DAOs can also address the principal-agent dilemma common to many traditional organizations. This dilemma emerges in situations where a conflicts in interests arise between one party (principal) and another party (agent) who is making decisions on behalf of them. In traditional companies this problem can arise from the separation of ownership (shareholders) and management (CEO), and results in moral hazards such as the agent prioritizing their self-interest where the two conflict or taking risks when the burden is on the principal. The model of community governance adopted by a DAO prevents such a situation from ever arising (Binance Academy 2021). Also, DAOs minimize information asymmetry which is a common problem in traditional organizations and fuels the principal-agent problem. Finally, one last important characteristic of DAOs is that they are transparent, their rules and activities are completely public whereas traditional organizations are usually quite private.

Disadvantages

Along with all of these wonderful advantages, it must be acknowledged that DAOs have their own shortcomings. Like any revolutionary innovative technology, there are risks just because it is new and we don’t really know what a widespread adoption of DAOs could entail. We criticize bureaucracies and hierarchies now after we’ve seen the consequences they have in practice, but when these ideas were first theorized they were advocated for with the best of intentions. They were meant to actually make it easier to manage/govern large groups of people, they were meant to make governance more scientific and rational rather than arbitrary and personal but they resulted in unintended consequences. Let’s discuss some of the anticipated problems associated with DAOs. For one, collective decision making that involves or requires the participation of every member of an organization can be very slow and inefficient. There is bound to be non-participation on part of some members since there is no obligation in the first place. In addition to hindering decision making, this situation also makes it difficult to fix any bugs in the original code which might constitute emergency situations such as cyber attacks; thus, the same immutability that might be considered an advantage also composes a risk. Another major problem is the uncertainty that is characteristic of the legal environment surrounding DAOs which might include members of very different jurisdictions which might have limited or no regulations regarding DAOs, making the external resolution of conflicts difficult and also might discourage people from participating in DAOs. Another issue which is not exactly a problem just yet but something that deserves to be mentioned is that despite all of this talk of decentralization, a DAO cannot be completely decentralized or autonomous due to the governance rules which represent a point of centralization and dependence. Therefore, these concepts should be thought of as spectrums and different DAOs take different places on these spectrums (Binance Academy 2021).

Examples of implementation

DAOs have come to be a flexible tool for many different uses rather than a rigid type, ranging from simple to complex depending on their code and to what extent the governance of the organization is dependent on the code. The Bitcoin is considered by some as the first implementation of a simple DAO (Siegel 2020). A more complex and renowned example is The Dao. Launched in 2016, The DAO was a venture capital fund that was to be managed by the investors themselves on an Ethereum blockchain. It was a short-lived success because after the 28 day initial coin offering which raised around 250 million dollars in Ether from 10 to 20 thousand members, The DAO was hacked and taking advantage of some bugs in the code, around 1/3 of funds were drained. This event is an example of the risks associated with DAOs and may have caused a general distrust in the idea. Because The DAO unexpectedly happened to contain 14% of all ether, this problem had severe consequences for the Ethereum Network as well, causing it to split into two chains after a Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s proposed hard fork that caused quite a bit of controversy. The controversy was based on the fact that the code was actually working the way it was supposed to be working so the money was technically not stolen, “rewriting history” to protect The DAO would be a compromise to the values that blockchain stands for (DuPont 2017).

Since The DAO, more DAOs on a broad spectrum of use cases have emerged. DAOs can be used for venture funds, philanthropic organizations, social media platforms, the operation of IoT devices, freelancer networks, mutual insurance, natural resources, software, works of art etc. (Honigman 2019; Binance Academy 2021; Cointelegraph 2021) I want to briefly mention three cases that I find to be especially intriguing and that I think are more relevant for the second half of this paper. One example I found especially interesting is Aragon Network which is a DAO devoted to supporting and facilitating the creation of more DAOs through providing platforms, tools and even a decentralized digital jurisdiction for conflict resolution (Aragon Association 2021). Another is Colony, a DAO that, by providing infrastructure and tools, enables people to build online organizations that are customizable to the context to enable experimentation and gradual adoption. They have a vision that challenges the rigid and problematic traditional conceptualizations of work and companies, and tools to promote “a Cambrian explosion” of organizational forms that were previously impossible (Colony 2021). La Suite du Monde is an interesting DAO that represents a communalist movement that has the purpose to support self-sustaining, autonomous local communities or “imagined communes” through the provision of various services and resources. They acquire land and real estate which they then free for the use of these communities or projects that are in line with their vision of autonomy and work to make these models multipliable and connected to each other (La Suite du Monde 2021).

Part II

“We believe that the fate of humanity will be decided at the frontier of technological innovation.
We will either see technology lead to a more free, open, and fair society or reinforce a global regime of centralized control, surveillance, and oppression. Our fear is that without a global, conscious, and concerted effort, the outlook is incredibly bleak.
The Internet has opened the doors for universal, cross-border, and non-violent collaborative effort to fight for our freedom.

However, the Internet has also opened the doors for global surveillance and manipulation.
We believe humankind should use technology as a liberating tool to unleash all the goodwill and creativity of our species, rather than as a tool to enslave and take advantage of one another.

(Aragon Association 2021)”

To some, these examples and everything we have discussed regarding DAOs and social tokens may seem like intriguing new trends or profitable business/investment opportunities. I think they have the potential to be so much more. The fundamentally different nature of DAOs from traditional organizations, and social tokens from traditional money have the power to change how we organize and how we exchange, for the better. The widespread adoption of these technologies can pave the way for new paradigms in organization and exchange. Not only that, these developments can revolutionize governance in a way that benefits the majority of humankind. In our contemporary world, we have a myriad of social problems that we just can’t seem to solve within the parameters of our current socioeconomic systems. These complex problems need collective solutions, individual efforts are not enough. Thus, the way we organize in the face of these problems is of utmost importance; organizations are how we act collectively so the way they are designed matters. Unfortunately organizations are path dependent and exhibit inertia, they are also prone to various forms of isomorphism which make it extremely difficult to break free from traditional organizational forms that operate under the influence of neoliberal ideals (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Schreyögg & Sydow 2011). The problem is not a lack of ideas, brilliant minds have been working on solutions, but they need to be implemented and improved upon. Considering the role that the emergence of a new technology — the steam engine — played in the industrial revolution and how this revolution became critical in determining the socioeconomic systems of today, it seems reasonable to anticipate that any revolution to come will have something to do with innovative technologies. In their book “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society,” authors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl claim that we need to intentionally design new socioeconomic mechanisms that work better for more people if we are to do something about the multitude of problems associated with capitalism and democracy today (Posner & Weyl 2018). If we want a more equal, a more just society, it isn’t going to happen by itself. We need to design for it.

Combining the ideas from “Radical Markets” with our discussion about DAOs and social tokens, I would like to propose the idea of self-governing & self-sustaining community-building as a space to implement, experiment with, and develop alternative forms of governance. In other words, communities could take the organizational form of a DAO and use community tokens to implement various economic and governance mechanisms and intentionally design their micro socioeconomic systems and observe the consequences within their societies to improve these mechanisms before large-scale adoption. This would provide the opportunity to not only evaluate how alternative mechanisms work for specific isolated purposes but also how they would work together as a system. Not all DAOs are successful and they’re not appropriate for every context but a well organized community with a well thought through orientation process, well planned structures and roles, effective method of communication and mutual purpose could be the perfect setting for a successful DAO (Kohli 2021). Let us discuss various governance mechanisms that could be implemented with the use of DAOs and community tokens.

Of the mechanisms proposed in Radical Markets, I want to elaborate on two which I believe could be appropriate to implement in a community: the COST and Quadratic Voting. The COST is a mechanism proposed in the context of the monopoly power and allocative inefficiency born by property rights. It is based on the idea of partial common ownership in which “assets belong to no one and everyone” at the same time. It is a system of competitive common ownership that is enabled through the use of auctions which are claimed to produce higher allocative and investment efficiency. In this system assets are not bought or owned by any one individual but rather usage rights can be gained through a decentralized auction in which the highest bidder gains those rights until someone bids higher. However, the user must pay a “common-ownership self-assessed tax” (COST) based on their bid value, throughout the period that they have usage rights over the asset. COSTs would then ideally be distributed equally to members of the community as social dividends which would also ensure a sort of equal universal basic income within the community (Posner & Weyl 2018). Imagine a self-sustainable community that adopts the organizational form of a DAO. This system could be implemented through the use of community tokens in which members would be allowed to use the assets of the community through such auctions while paying the COST back to the treasury of the DAO. One related idea from the book that I find important is that such a system could change the way we relate to the material world and our feelings regarding ownership. This innovative economic mechanism could have the power to produce significant cultural and social change within the community (Posner & Weyl 2018).

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a governance mechanism proposed in the context of the tyranny of the majority that arises in traditional representative democracies that use a one-person-one-vote (1p1v) system. It is in fact a mechanism for decision-making in which members have an equal share of voting credits that they can allocate directly to the resolution of certain issues. However, QV penalizes radical views by increasing the price of additional votes quadratically i.e. one credit for one vote, four credits for two votes, nine credits for three votes and so on. The main advantage of this system is that it reflects the intensity with which one cares about a specific issue which is completely obscured by 1p1v voting (Posner & Weyl 2018). This mechanism for collective decision making can be used in all sorts of decisions and can be implemented through the design of voting rights in the DAO’s smart contract. An important cultural/social transformation this mechanism promotes is the participation of members in their own governance in contrast to the passive citizens we see in democracies today (Posner & Weyl 2018).

In addition to these two mechanisms, there are other alternative systems of governance that communities are already implementing and that could benefit from the advantages that DAOs and social tokens provide. In this paper, I will elaborate on Sociocracy as an example. I specifically chose Sociocracy as an example because it is a system that is currently being adopted in many eco-villages which represent a good example of a self-sustaining community and also other kinds of intentional communities (Sociocracy For All 2021). Sociocracy is a term first used by Auguste Comte and referred to the governance and organization of society by the science that studies precisely this. The concept was built upon and transformed into a specific system later on. Sociocracy is built on the idea of consensus-based decision making or simply gaining the consent of all members through discussion before coming to a decision. The three fundamental principles of Sociocracy are that all members’ interest must be considered in the decision making process while each individual also respects the interests of the group as a whole, no decisions can be made without complete consensus and once a decision is made all members must abide by the decision. This system might work well with small group but it seems problematic at a large scale. The proposed solution to this problem is that when a decision can’t be made either due to size or any other reason, a representative group goes through the same process to arrive at a decision (Rau 2018). Unlike the trustless nature of blockchain technology, this system emphasizes trust and cooperation and one claimed advantage of this governance mechanism is that it fosters trust and cooperation within a community. A more modern adaptation of Sociocracy designed by Endenburg specifically addresses the problem that a need for trust creates in environments where it is difficult to foster and maintain trust among all members such as companies with constant turnover of employees: the Sociocratic Circle Organizing Method. Now known as a circular process or feedback loops, this system involves decision-making through a hierarchical structure of linked circles that are the units of an organization (Rau 2018). Regardless of the community’s opinion on the role of trust within an organization, both mechanisms could be coded on a smart contract and maybe produce insight into which one works better.

Conclusion

One crucial advantage of DAOs and social tokens is that they are very flexible in use cases and can be adapted and customized to various contexts which makes them perfect for experimentation and development. Using these tools we have the opportunity to design our socioeconomic systems and create structures that work for all of us. Perhaps similar to the industrial revolution, we are at a point in history where we have the revolutionary opportunity to redesign our socio-economic systems while they are being digitalized. We could also just end up transferring the existing inequalities and biases to these systems if we do not intentionally try to fix them. The benefits in governance that can be gained by DAOs and social tokens towards this goal deserve more attention. I have explained what those benefits are to the best of my knowledge and proposed an idea towards the development of the uses of these technologies and their implementation and adoption. Hopefully, I have planted the seeds of what could be an ongoing conversation that would give birth to more and better ideas and their implementation.

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Photo by Alexander Popov on Unsplash

I’m thinking of taking up Techno again! So I’ve given some thought as to what Techno actually means for me and I think I’ve figured it out and discovered my purpose in this musical endeavor.

I want to define what kind of Techno that I like exactly, to listen to and to play because Techno has become somewhat of a vague concept that people use to refer to electronic music in general. I really like what I guess we could call hardtechno. So that would mean high bpms, 135+ and preferably in the 140 range. Then I also appreciate techno with hints of more specific techno genres or other genres altogether. So I like it when there are traces of industrial techno, EBM, acid, trance, rap, and trap. I like both dark beats, and funky beats along with general punk style and occasionally melodic breaks. And then, I don’t know if there is a corresponding musical term for it but I like music that provokes emotion, it makes you feel something. A lot of people claim that techno is soulless and repetitive but I don’t agree with that at all. My enthusiasm comes from the desire to present to my listeners a multidimensional emotionally charged audio experience. And my own most intense musical experiences have in fact been with techno. My favorite DJs so far have been Hector Oaks aka Cadency who more than satisfies my passion for punk techno, and I Hate Models who has an amazing talent of enchanting the dance floor with his very emotional style. He actually posted something on Spotify describing his conception of his music and it was beautiful:

In a scene choked by formulae, we need voices that cut through the noise to present something unapologetically true and devoutly non-conformist. In his singular path as an artist, I Hate Models swerves standardised structures and instead focuses on emotional response. The energy of club music serves as a vessel for his own feelings and a tool to manipulate others with. The spectrum of moods expressed — in his productions, DJ sets and on his label Disco Inferno — veers from nostalgia and passion to loneliness, melancholia and brutality, often juxtaposing darkness and light in the same pulse as an authentic conduit of his own artistic self-assesment. … At every turn, his disregard for expectations and conventions has resulted in dynamic, ambitious music that feasts on the flesh of techno, industrial and trance without ever becoming beholden to one source. Within the microcosm of one track, the energy can shift from bruising rythm to swooning ambience and back again — cascades of pearlescent melody giving way to shards of sheet metal, thunderous percussion offset by soflt sculpted sine waves. That the further adventures of I Hate Models feel entirely open-ended is completely by design — generic construction is the enemy of genuine catharsis.

And that’s what listening to him is, it’s catharsis. I unfortunately only got the chance to see him perform once but it was one of the absolute best experiences I’ve ever had, I can’t tell you how much I admire him. When I read this I was not surprised, what he says is something you actually feel, and so grateful that he had put this experience into words.

I have quite a similar approach to techno and want to say more. Art is not just the concrete physical thing that is. Techno is not just sound, it carries meaning and represents a certain culture that I believe should be backed with visual and spatial design as well. As you may have noticed from my other work, I have problems with modern society and the neoliberal ethic that permeates every aspect of it. Whatever bothers me in society has its roots in either the neoliberal, patriarchal, or xenophobic order. I have decided to devote my life to understanding social problems and contributing to their eradication. And to me, that means that capitalism, patriarchy, racism, these have to go. You can imagine how frustrating it is to constantly learn more and more about all the things wrong with the world and how deeply embedded these problems are in society. Most times it’s quite discouraging and makes me feel out of place. People make me feel irrelevant and misunderstood. At best they think these are interesting topics to discuss over a drink but forget about completely the next day. I feel so alone in my struggle, and have to find company in what I read rather than the people I surround myself with. I’m labeled “naive” and an “idealist,” people think I’m out of touch with the real world which is so ironic. So this leads to a lot of emotions that I don’t know what to do with. I have a destructive rage inside me at the hopelessness of the situation and I don’t know where to direct it. There isn’t any person I can blame. There isn’t anything concrete that I can blame, it’s an abstract system with so many dire consequences. If you were to wage a war against capitalism, how would you do it? How do you destroy an idea that lives in everyone, especially when most people seem to love it? What do you attack? Well, all of this bottled-up energy flows so beautifully into music. My friends sometimes say my music sounds like war beats and I know that, it's not by accident. I am metaphorically waging a war. It makes me feel like I get the chance to awaken these feelings in others although I doubt most people actually think about these things on the dancefloor.

I try to challenge the unnatural, inhumane, masculine ideal of rationality that I believe stems from the desire for predictability, power and control. I challenge it by bringing up the emotions that we have to repress in order to deal with the society we live in. I challenge the concept of masculinity by embracing the kind of music so many people define as masculine, as a woman. And I like to think that I bring in a feminine touch. I challenge the ideal of individuality by trying to create a collective experience of bodies moving together in sync, united by the music they are listening to. I challenge the artificial and arbitrary boundaries that divide people by playing a kind of universal music that no one needs to know any language to understand. I challenge the hierarchy because I see a proper underground club as an equalizer. I challenge the sluggish stillness of modern life by inviting everyone to a space where they can move their bodies in any form they want. And just look at the names of techno tracks, they are so interesting and packed with meaning! Techno is accused of being associated with drugs, well I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I believe drugs have an enormous role to play in revolution, and the soundtrack will be techno! :)

Now before I get caught up in daydreams of revolution, I must say this is all the ideal concept of techno and its culture but in reality techno can disappoint. The reason I gave up in the first place was that in Istanbul techno is still a very marginalized and male-dominated area. I desperately tried to realize my idea of what techno should be by trying to organize events and forming a techno collective but I was always discouraged and rejected because I wasn’t profit-oriented at all. The techno scene in Istanbul is dominated by either rich people who have a very capitalistic idea of the whole thing or men who organize underground events but use the stage to promote themselves and other men, rarely providing that opportunity for women. I knew so many people who were quite nice to me and called me a “friend” but didn’t think giving my music a shot was worth it. And I was never one to persistently promote myself. Also, they usually gave women the chance to perform as the warm-up if they gave it to them at all, a position none of them would accept being in because apparently there’s a hierarchy depending on how late you take the stage. The few times that I was given the opportunity to perform, I had various men interfere with the music I was playing, somehow think they can come up to me and tell me what I should play. I’ve even had men directly interfere with the setup and do something without even consulting me. I say men because it was only men who did this. And I can’t imagine them ever doing that to another male DJ. How is that something they take to be extremely offensive is completely okay just because I’m a woman?

Well, I feel like I might have a more fulfilling techno experience in Germany so I want to start over and this time with a purpose. I will design my music not randomly but intentionally, to provoke emotions and thoughts that hold a purpose. Music that will hopefully awaken something inside those who actually listen. I’m thinking I could use samples from historic/modern events that I believe hold meaning. I’m gonna have to put a lot work into it but it was always something I loved working on and it actually aligns very well with my work. I’ve been reading about the concept of hauntology which I believe refers to elements of the past that are not completely gone and come up in modern life. I want my music to have that purpose, we are not over the discussion of the abolition of the patriarchy or capitalism and I want to remind people of that. I’ll be the haunt of all the great thinkers that tried but were defeated by their mortality before they achieved their aims.

So the book is basically about two transformations. The first is the transition to capitalism, the industrial revolution. Polanyi argues that this transition was not a natural transition. He argues that markets are neither natural nor self-regulating, and that they are imposed on and destructive to society. He explains this through fictitious commodities which are things that are not created for the market but are commodities: land, labor and money. With the privatization of land, the former peasants were forced to sell their labor for a wage in order to make a living, creating the landless proletariat. I don’t know for sure how feudal societies lived but I’m assuming that economic actions and actors were mostly based in their communities. In order to live you don’t work in a factory for a wage to buy things, but you are more active in the production and consumption processes in your life so social life and economic life are basically the same thing. There was no such thing as work in the sense that we understand it today, work was just living. But Polanyi argues that with marketization you dis-embed the economy from social life, and I guess it gets out of tune with the actual needs of society. I’m not sure if this is an accurate comment but it sounds to me like Marx’s concept of alienation, where people are alienated from the work they do and the products they produce/consume.

The second transformation was new information for me and I found this perspective very interesting. Polanyi argues that when you dis-embed the economy from society bad things happen: poverty, inequality, starvation, overwork etc. and this creates a backlash from society, desperate attempts to re-embed the economy in society; what Polanyi calls protective counter-movement. What I thought was a very interesting distinction to make was that Polanyi considers these counter-movements to be “natural” compared with the “unnaturalness” of marketization. I wonder what exactly he means by natural here, it’s an interesting choice of a word. So he says that things like the emergence of welfare states, the world wars, fascism, nationalism etc. are examples of this natural backlash. Today protective counter-movements could be the rise of social enterprises, corporate social responsibility, or increasing authoritarian governance. Burgoon uses words like spontaneous, angry and aggressive to describe these attempts at the humanization of the economy and I thought it was very interesting to think of society as something with emotions. He basically says that people are mad when they’re overworked and don’t have enough money so they try to do something about it, they try to re-embed the economy into social values that work for them. So Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness is a macro concept compared with Granovetter’s, the two concepts are confused sometimes.

Then Burgoon goes on to talk about Polanyi’s life and how he was “on a beautiful humane mission,” he says that Polanyi began to look for examples of just economic forms of organization in real life. He was interested in actual moral economies and I think he studied municipal socialism which is an interesting new concept for me. He was also interested in primitive/archaic societies (especially Ancient Athens) and their economic systems. I thought this was so cool because in the west of Turkey we have tons of ancient cities and my psychedelic summers spent among their ruins have led me to contemplate on primitive life a lot. I love looking at them and trying to imagine how daily life was like back then, just the ruins of the buildings are hints because I think the spatial design of environments both reflects and shapes the societies that live in them. I think that trying to envision archaic societies really helps to understand our society and its social constructions better, it really helps with sociological thinking I guess. It helps to put things in perspective and it's intriguing to think that you could look for answers to modern social problems by analyzing primitive societies for economic systems that are more compatible with social priorities. I might not have started with Ancient Athens though, maybe a non-Western ancient society. I really enjoyed learning about a theory in relation to the theorist’s life, it’s made the information much more interesting, relatable and permanent and it was very inspiring. The AISSR Great Thinkers Series has similar talks on a lot of thinkers, if you’re interested. Foucault is next up for me, yay!! I’ve literally been looking for a way to understand Foucault’s life without reading all his work. Not that I don’t want to, I just don’t have time.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about home. Where is home? What is home? And why does it hurt so much that I don’t have the answer to these questions? And what does it have to do with my sense of self?

Well, so far my life hasn’t been exactly conventional. That’s not a bad thing, I don’t really yearn for another life, but it has its ups and downs. The reason my life hasn’t been conventional is because of the increased mobility of modern life, in fact the kind of life I had might slowly become the norm. I was born in Turkey, into a Turkish family, quite a traditional one in fact. And then before I can even remember, my parents migrated to the US with one-year-old me and my sister on the way. My father was pursuing his academic career in the US and he was granted a government scholarship for his studies. So his 10-year academic journey through grad school in the US ended up being my childhood. During that time, my parents struggled with three kids and they took on various jobs like pizza delivery and babysitting to make ends meet. We were actually pretty poor now that I think about it, although I never felt like it back then. I’m currently at the age my father embarked on this journey and I have also started my graduate studies in a foreign country. I can’t imagine taking care of a family of five right now, that was a bold move for him. But I guess having my mom around helped. I can see how it would be easier to migrate somewhere with someone you love.

Anyway, my father’s scholarship required him to return to Turkey once his studies were over. This little condition changed our lives completely. At 12, the summer before 6th grade, we moved back to a small coastal town in Turkey, Çanakkale. I barely knew Turkish and I was extremely unhappy with this forced change. I couldn’t really do anything about it though. Throughout middle school, I attended a different school every year. My first three years were in three different schools in this new country that I had only visited a couple of times on summer vacations. Not only that, each of these schools were very different from each other, with completely different cultures. I didn’t know who I was in Turkey, I didn’t know how to navigate in this new environment, I could barely remember my new friends’ names because they were so strange to me. I was called “the American” by my peers and teachers and they would make fun of me whenever I made a cultural faux pas. My first school was the closest one to our house that our neighbors had recommended. I later realized that people perceived of it as a “gypsy school” which I suppose basically means that kids of minority and underprivileged families went there. There, kids were mostly on the streets and I guess I tried to follow their lead which quickly led my parents to a change of mind. My second school was a left-wing public school, wtf is that, right? It basically means that left-wing/Kemalist families sent their kids there. There, I realized that as a Turkish person, I had to love Atatürk. I didn’t even know who he was until quite recently. That was scary for me, I was so afraid that the other kids would exclude me if they found out that I didn’t really know why I should love Atatürk and that I thought the whole thing with his portraits and signature being everywhere (including tattooed on a lot of people’s skin) was kinda crazy. I just didn’t get it. There were a lot of fights in that school which my parents decided was distracting me from my school work. Then I was offered a free place at one of the two private schools in the city and I took it, not knowing what I was getting myself into. It was one of the schools of the Gülen sect and they were strictly religious. I remember my Harry Potter books being taken away because I wasn’t allowed to read fantasy at school. I remember my teachers literally cornering us on my birthday because we went out to eat cake after school with a bunch of guys and girls. One of those guys was my first boyfriend and I was threatened with detention because of that. Oh and also, it was implied that I was a lying whore. I was 13. I would be taken out of class very often to speak with the counselor who thought my family and I were not religious enough. Finally, my parents stepped in and I was untouchable after that but can you imagine the trauma?

The year after, I started high school at a Science High School in Çanakkale and that’s supposed to be a good school but the thing is you’re totally deprived of social sciences and most good students are sent to these schools. Do you see the problem there? We did have history and literature but we spent that time studying for more “important” things like math and physics. We weren’t even allowed to want to be anything other than a doctor or engineer. It was highly frowned upon. And while all my friends graduated and continued their successful student careers in mostly these areas, I didn’t. Now, I really couldn’t make up my mind about what I wanted to be but four years in that environment was enough to make me think that since I definitely didn’t want to be an engineer because I didn’t really get what that was, I was going to be a doctor. But I wanted to go to university in Istanbul. I couldn’t get into any of the med schools in Istanbul and my plan was to wait another year and study so that I could. But then I just didn’t feel like waiting and I had a really high language score due to my English so I thought I might as well choose a university rather than a profession and I could just transfer to another department if I didn’t like it. So of course I chose the best university in Turkey, Boğaziçi University. And I was the first person from my high school to major in Western Languages and Literature. I was a real bookworm when I was a kid so I ended up really enjoying it. But the best part was that I was introduced to social sciences which turned out to be my “passion,” or whatever you want to call it. I wanted to transfer to or double major in psychology and despite my really high GPA (3.95) I was discouraged by the teachers I consulted, for some reason that I still don’t understand. That doesn’t matter anymore because I randomly took an elective Introductory Sociology course and I fell in love. I immediately transferred that summer and it was one of my best decisions. Although you must understand, I had to deal with constant pressure from people who thought that I had a chance to be doctor and I was throwing it away, on a downhill road to unemployment ever since high school. I stayed in various university dorms for 3 years and then I couldn’t take living with 11 other people anymore and I moved into a poorly chosen house in a problematic neighborhood because I didn’t want to ask my parents for money. That was a nightmare, luckily I went to Utrecht a few months after for my Erasmus exchange so it was a short nightmare at least. Utrecht was perhaps the best 6 months of my life, as if the very lack of belonging shared by everyone there I met, was perfect for me to feel like I belong. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. When I came back I moved into an empty room I found last-minute in a shared apartment. I stayed almost a year there and then I moved into a new house with a new friend. I spent almost a year there as well and that was one of the happier times. Unfortunately, we moved out from there when we graduated because I thought I was going to move to Germany soon but then I decided I wasn’t ready for that yet. So I stayed, but I didn’t have a house anymore. Or money. Once my student status ended, so did my scholarships and I was officially homeless and broke. I refused to live with my parents because I just really didn’t want to, I fought my whole life for my independence and I couldn’t just give it up. Plus my parents were super pissed that I just dismissed an opportunity to start my masters education in Germany so being around them was psychologically very difficult at the time. So I stayed with friends and occasionally at my parents’ house… for about 6 months. Homelessness was driving me crazy so I finally confronted my parents and asked them to pay rent for me because my full-time internship refused to pay me any more than a simple allowance that only covered my expenses of going to the office and eating lunch. Just after I moved into another shared house with someone I didn’t know, the pandemic happened. My flatmate was going through a rough period that had serious effects on her mental health which resulted in some awkward events that I won’t get into but the short story is that I ended up paying rent for a house that I didn’t feel comfortable staying at. And she literally went crazy, like seeing things that weren’t there and talking to supernatural beings crazy. I moved out from there after being accused of being the reason she went crazy by her parents and I went camping for the summer while I waited to start my master’s degree in Germany. And now I’ve already finished my first semester and I’m still not in Germany. Although I am paying rent for 4 months now for a room in Germany I haven’t even seen yet. I finally gave in to living with my parents which I suppose is okay for a temporary arrangement.

So temporary is a key word here for me. Nothing has ever been permanent or even long-lasting for me. Everything is temporary. My country was temporary, my houses were all temporary, my main language is temporary, my friends are temporary. My thoughts are temporary, happiness is temporary. So where is home for me? I really don’t know. Some say that it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, so what if you’ve moved around a lot? But, I don’t know, it is a big deal for me. I’ve never had a sense of belonging, ever. I didn’t belong in America, I don’t belong in Turkey, I barely belong in my traditional family. I’ve never really belonged to any friend group for a long time or had a long relationship. I didn’t belong to any organization like a club or a job for any extensive period of time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried desperately to belong to many things but it just never worked out.

So… that was a summary of my life. All of this has led me to think long and hard about home and what it means.

Adaptation is an important concept for me. I believe it’s one of my strongest attributes. It’s my main survival skill. Everything changes, we all know that. But everything is changing really fast lately and I think the pace of change is kinda dependent on a person’s context. I think that in all that change, I was so preoccupied with adapting to my environment that I don’t even know who I am anymore. Trying to fit in all the time made me a generally likeable person as far as I know, but now I can’t stand being alone. I’m mostly confident in my social relationships but I don’t know how to deal with my own emotions, my own thoughts. It’s weird I feel like I’ve been neglecting myself for such a long time that I kinda want to avoid myself to not have to deal with it. The pandemic has been a mental nightmare for me at times. And I’m sure that I’m not alone in that respect. I don’t think that being an adaptive and agreeable person is necessarily a bad thing but in times of constant change, I feel like one needs something to hold on to. Something stable, not unpredictable, something to lean on. That sense of stability can be so calming. I think that home is not simply a house, but it’s whatever that thing is for you. It could be a place or a person or a group of people. My sister is the closest person I have that feels like home for me. And she’s been halfway across the globe for years now. The last time we actually lived together was 11 years ago. And my brother went to join her as well. How weird is it that me and my siblings don’t even have the same citizenship? They can call America home perhaps, but I legally can’t. I also don’t really want to.

But I want to talk about home as a “space.” I’ve been struggling with ever worsening anxiety for a while now and I constantly feel like I’m on the brink of depression. I don’t have a terrible life to be honest. I may have gone through some things that are anxiety inducing, but that’s not it either. I know I can overcome social hardships as long as I’m at peace with myself. I’ve been thinking and I think I’ve found the problem, or at least a major problem. I don’t have a home, in the spatial sense. A home is a place that you can design, for the most part, according to your needs, desires, pleasures and habits. It has the potential to be a space that reflects you and expresses your identity. It’s your territory. Staying at my friends and my family, I’ve been in others territory for such a long time. Where I abide by their rules, their routines, their preferences. And I think that this has taken its toll on me, especially considering my tendency to adapt.

I mean think about it, If you like to look out the window while sipping your morning coffee and reading a book, you can make that easier to do by the design of your house. You get to decide who to invite to your home and you decide the social atmospheres that will be created there. If you like to watch movies in bed, you can facilitate that. If you like to listen to music and dance you can design for that. You can choose the colors you want to wake up to, and how green you want your house to be. You choose the artwork that you want to encounter everyday, you practically design your everyday experiences and that is such a luxury nowadays! but I think its actually a need, at least for some people. Think about it, its a means for exercising your ideas about how life should be lived.

And then there’s another aspect to it. I love to collect “souvenirs” but not in the traditional sense. Just small, sometimes worthless items like a signed coffee filter from my friend’s parents, or a unique work of art like a sculpture my friend made me. Or books and posters. And many, many photos. And I’ve lost most of these while moving around so much. See, I don’t remember my childhood as well as most people because after 12, I never had any stimulus around me to remind me of my memories and they slowly fade away when that happens. It’s a blurry haze and it feels like a dream. It makes me so sad to think that I’m forgetting all those little memories that make up my life and I think that’s why those little souvenirs were so important for me. And at the same time, I feel like they helped me express who I am and without them I feel kinda lost. I feel like I’m desperately trying to hold onto things that are inevitably slipping away and I hate that feeling.

I never had a sense of belonging or a sense of community and I think my life is full of not so successful attempts to create that for myself but sometimes it feels really hopeless. We live in a world where its completely normal to travel halfway across the world for a job or for education, leaving behind everything you know and love. And for me, I’ve had to do that a bunch of times and I’m kinda sick of it. I just wonder where it’s going to end. Not soon. I’m trying to build a life for myself in Germany starting from a shitty room in student housing that lacks any sense of identity, but only to leave it for my PhD in a couple of years. And then I’ll start over and who knows where I’ll go from there. I sometimes try to let it go altogether and just accept a nomadic lifestyle but deep down I think it’s not really my thing. I guess I should establish a base, a place where I can always return to. And I’ve got plans for that, I’m not giving up. I’m homebound ;)

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

I recently watched the third season of The Sinner and it brought up some thoughts. It’s a crime drama series in which “the reasons behind ordinary people committing heinous crimes” are investigated by a detective that actually tries to understand the guilty. I think the show is super interesting and daring in the psychological topics it probes. This season goes into dark desires, trauma and vulnerability, male vulnerability to be specific.

I’m not going to reveal the whole plot but basically it revolves around two friends, Nick and Jamie who know each other from college. These two are brought together by their mutual recognition of the arbitrariness and meaninglessness of “normal” ways of life, what was once the common sense way of living. Here’s my take on it. Considering the diversity of things and conditions in the world, you might expect this to reflect on our choices and paths in life. But when you think about it, we make extremely similar choices and walk the same paths in life more often than we take the roads not taken. I mean most people go to some kind of educational institution, where they are prepared for the labor market, until they’re “adults.” Then they start to work in one job or another, produce goods and services via various organizations to earn a “living.” We try to form relationships that are standardized and play roles that are standardized. We try to be very stereotyped kinds of things that all come with their own norms. There’s a certain way a mother should be, a father, a teacher, a lover or friend should be. Then again, I think we generally allow for the most freedom in our friendships which is why I think it’s a good form to model our other relationships on. But very often, they’re not like friendships. These ways of life are normal. The very definition of normal implies some degree of standardization. But they aren’t actually natural, which so many people assume they are. You could, in theory, not do any of these things and do completely different things with your life. This realization “frees” you in a way, but it also make visible your chains because alternative lifestyles are not easy to legitimize. This comes together with the realisation that you were delusional to think anything else before, and everyone around you that blindly conforms to the ways and values of modern life is still delusional. A pretty lonely feeling.

And then there’s death, another central theme. Life is nothing but uncertainties. It’s like we do everything in our power to overcome uncertainty, but it’s always there. It’s like a feeling of having no control, and many people strive to attain at least some control. Isn’t that what power is? But there is one certainty and that’s we’re all going to die. (Although this might have become debatable in recent years) But when you really remember death, it's shocking that you could have ever forgotten about it. It’s the end of everything we know and it could be just around the corner, at any given time. How is it that we’re all not freaking out about death right now? Something like this should be our major concern, right? And it’s something we all share. I mean obviously, no one wants to spend all day every day talking about death, but it's like we barely ever talk about it. We go on and on talking about the trivial topics that we’re taught to talk about like how horrible work was today, or who’s seeing who, or often just literally nothing. Death is a taboo, in many cultures I think. It’s like the elephant in the room where the room is the universe. We only think about it when it slaps us in the face and even then all our effort goes into moving on.

“Move on? Why does everybody say that? It’s like the only thing that matters is getting over things as fast as you can. I mean, death isn’t going away. If anything, it’s getting closer. And everyone I know is terrified, but no one wants to talk about it. We just hide it away in hospitals and old age homes. And we don’t even kill our own food, we just get our meat shrinkwrapped into these patties. It just feels like a lie.”

Thinking about death can be paralyzing. We don’t have much time in the world and the time we do have is continuously running out. And we need to do something. We have to continuously make choices and forge our own lives but we’re “steering blind.” We’re not the rational actors modern science thinks we are, we have far from perfect information about the world and no way to evaluate where all the other possible roads would have taken us; a paralysis of choice and a constant state of anxiety (at least if you’re an overthinker — which I think is equivalent to just thinker most of the time). Our vulnerability in the face of death is a fundamental feature of the human condition, so we’re not alone at all in this aspect. However, faced with the inevitability of death, and the uncertainty of everything else, it's hard not to feel alone. The meaning of life can be really obscure. But perhaps life means whatever you make of it. I personally think the meaning of life lies in sharing and experiencing. So I believe that social experiences and relationships are key to a satisfying life. Social experiences need the acknowledgment and acceptance of the fragility and vulnerability of human nature. It’s like a prerequisite for understanding. Do you think we’re good at that?

In one scene, Jamie tries to demonstrate how awkward people can be about death. He small-talks his way into a small group at a bar and gets himself invited to the afterparty where he dares to be honest about death:

“All of us here in this hotel room. Everyone trying so hard. I mean there’s this effort, isn’t there? Underneath it all, it’s a bit desperate. Like we’re all trying to escape something. What is that? I think its fear. We’re scared. There’s this big yawning void we’re stuck in the middle of and we’re all just grabbing onto anything we can, right? Don’t look down.

-Why don’t you do a line and give it a rest?

I don’t want to do a line, I want to be right here with you. Talk me down off the ledge. Come on, help me out, I’m scared. you’re scared too, right? You want to do well, you want to make some money, you want to screw somebody, buy stuff, be someone, for what? Because it makes you feel safe. Deep down, you’re in free fall. All of us are. Look at me, we’re the same, aren’t we?

-I think its time for you and your faggot friend to leave.

Oh, so is that what this is now? This feels too gay for you? You need to swing your dick around, pretend you’re not about to die?”

This conversation brings up so much. I didn’t add all of it here but as Jamie goes on the people around him bombard him with stupid remarks like “what are you talking about?” and “oh, you’re so funny!” And when I watched this scene I remembered when I first became dangerously aware of death. That’s when my anxiety attacks began. I couldn’t talk about it with anyone! Whenever you try you get discouraged by the awkward, avoidant reactions people have. It’s just so weird how alienated we are from something that’s so fundamentally a part of our existence. An extreme form of denial.

Although I think we have a vulnerability problem in general, I also think that some people might be more prone to repressing their vulnerability. The more I learn and the more I think about it, the more I’m horrified by the concept of masculinity. I’m not talking about any given male, I’m talking about the constructed concept of masculinity and there is a difference. Among other things, the concept of masculinity deprives half the population of the freedom of being vulnerable and the implications of that are depressing. The traits attributed to masculinity are inhumane, and feeling the pressure to meet those expectations must be traumatizing. And the consequences of this toxic masculinity! I don’t think I need to get into how fucked up a world we live in, and yesterday a good friend said that half the problem was the patriarchal order. I think he’s right.

The detective examining the case and a potential victim, a painter that works on male vulnerability, discuss what the trauma was that resulted in Jamie’s behavior. The painter says something that just really stuck with me:

“What if it isn't one thing? One trauma? What if its just... a life? A million little things. Little cuts. Year after year. Sometimes a dam breaks. I think he just wants to be seen. Men want intimacy just like anybody else. They long for it. but they’re taught that if they’re vulnerable, they’re not men. It's like there’s this cultural expectation that’s innately traumatizing. I feel sorry for all of you. Wounded little boys.”

Now, I want to talk about the relationship between Jamie and Nick. It reminds me of perhaps the most troubled time of my own life. Nick is someone who is bored with the meaningless of life. And he’s not afraid to deviate from social norms so he does things most people wouldn’t do, or understand. Things that are risky and downright dangerous. Things that are random. Things that are exhilarating. Things that make him feel alive, possibly because they bring him so close to death. Jumping into a raging river, hoping that you won’t hit the rocks. Burying yourself alive for an indefinite amount of time. Driving at extreme speed with no regard for traffic rules and hoping not to crash. That kind of stuff.

“Have you ever had a person in your life that was totally exciting but you knew they were bad for you? When you’re around them, you feel more yourself, or the opposite of yourself. I mean, Nick scared me. It was a relief to get away from him. And without him things just feel … I don’t know how to explain.

-Hollow. My mother was bipolar, and it was kind of like that.”

I met someone a few years ago. The two immediate things I realized about him were that he was quite a bit older than me and that he was different. I decided to talk to him because I noticed he was drinking raki, which I thought was interesting because that’s like the only thing that would be strange to drink at a techno club. I’m not going to tell you the whole story but he basically wrecked me in about 6 months. I was manipulated, lied to, taken advantage of, humiliated, blamed, and played with for 6 months and I wasn’t even aware of it. Hell, he even stole from me. He stole several valuable items. Can you believe that he even stole gold from me? Turns out he was doing a lot more to other people. I later found out that I met him at the start of his manic phase, apparently he was bipolar. And I was at my most vulnerable. For reasons I’m going to write another post about.

Anyway, many of my friends asked me a very legitimate question: why are you with this person? What did I see in him? I mean I was very often embarrassed by him and scared of what he might do, him being the most unpredictable and daring person I’ve ever met. I was very often frustrated and downright furious. I couldn’t understand his disregard for his safety, or for my safety for that matter. I couldn't understand how careless he could be, it's like nothing meant anything to him. But I just couldn’t let go until he’d hurt me so much that I became terrified of him and what he could do. And I never knew why I let myself go through that, despite all the red flags. I think watching the last season of The Sinner helped me answer that question that I just buried away.

“I don’t understand why you listened to him.

-Nick is the most honest person I have ever known.

He’s also a sociopath.

-Are you sure about that? Look around. It’s a world full of sociopaths.”

We all have our dark desires but we’re constantly repressing them and conforming to social norms, displaying socially acceptable behavior and trying desperately to fit in. Not only do we repress our dark desires but also most differences. When you think about it the resulting monotony is kinda boring. I guess what captivated me about him was how fearless he was in being what he wanted to be and his disregard of anything he found boring or meaningless, like rules and boundaries. Now, I’m not saying I approved of everything he did, I definitely didn’t. But just the fact that he really did whatever he wanted was mesmerizing to me because I’d always followed the rules. Even the stupid ones. He made me feel like I could do anything. It was exciting, although extremely tiring. And I think his history was what pushed him to his most extreme, life had been really harsh on him. He was in a constant state of rebellion. Although I’m sure rebellious feelings are shared by many, we don’t really talk about these things. We don’t acknowledge them. Ignoring and even pushing away the people who have somehow accepted the reality of these feelings probably isn’t doing them any good. It makes them invisible at best, and being invisible really sucks. At the worst, they become “crazy” and are locked away and drugged to the point of numbness. When his manic period ended he dove right into hardcore depression and tried taking his own life which is when they realized he was bipolar and put him on lithium. Or at least that’s what he told me. But I believe him, he really was a different person when I saw him after that, he had a disturbing calm about him.

I know I have my own dark fantasies, and they can be spellbinding and awful at the same time. I have extreme feelings that I can’t really let out in a civil manner. Sometimes I have feelings I can’t really describe that are so overwhelming I feel like they’re bound to explode inside me. Especially when I witness an injustice, and there are so many in our world, something just snaps inside me. Not all the time, but sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to justify any problematic behavior. I’m a first-hand victim of this kind of behavioral honesty. But I do think we could be more honest to ourselves about our feelings, more vulnerable with others, and time to time, more reckless.

There are ways of catharsis that aren’t that dangerous or risky. I’ve been thinking about this and I think hard techno is how I channel these feelings, for example. I used to go out to dance every weekend to very aggressive music. I was sometimes ashamed of my taste in music because people would think its too hard or too dark. But I also noticed that most people I met that enjoyed this alternative underground genre were actually very kind. I can’t say the same for mainstream music. I thought about it and I think it was an escape for me from our boring modern lifestyles. Because that music that sounds like we’re going to war was the opposite of boring. It made my mind feel like something was going on. And dancing fast and crazy was the opposite of sitting around all day. It made my body feel like something was happening. It was an escape from the boredom of modernity. Also, it let me purge myself from all the negative feelings from work, from school, from life in general. Stress, anxiety, anger, hurt, disappointment, grief, hate. It’s like you dance it all away, at least for a while. Anyway, I just think that being more true with ourselves and our nature, and building strong connections based on mutual vulnerability might make the world a more interesting place, or at least a more sufferable place.

I can’t help but add that that guy ended up fleeing the country because he’d messed with a lot of people. He went to Denmark where he was fatally run over by a train, but miraculously survived with a really messed up body. How many people get run over by a train?! He recovered and seems to be as good as new now, but I don’t talk to him anymore so I don’t know the details. I’m glad I don’t have that kind of excitement in my life anymore, I feel like I’ve learned the value of peace of mind from that experience. I guess I was ashamed of that period of my life, especially while living it. Because it was so obviously dangerous, bound to end with destruction and devastation. It was like I was knowingly fucking up. But I’m grateful and surprised that something I watched on Netflix helped me to make peace with that part of my life. I feel like I understand myself better and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It just sucks that people who dare to be different are apparently often bipolar or suffering from some other mental disease. Or is that just how we label and control differences? Maybe if we didn’t isolate them from society and drug them to the point that they can’t feel anything, maybe if we tried to understand them, their stories wouldn’t have to be so tragic.

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

Have you ever thought about time? I mean of course you have but like really thought about it? The abstract nature of time provokes many intriguing questions but here we’re going to focus on how we measure it and why. Currently we have a universal notion of time that can be precisely measured quite easily with devices like clocks and concepts like hours or years. Could there be other ways of thinking of time? And what about clocks? Personally, I’ve had a distaste for clocks for as long as I can remember. And I hate watches. Ugh, the thought of strapping a device on my wrist at all times so that I can always know what time it is and worry about buying more of them in different colors and sizes. But I just couldn’t grasp what it was that bugged me so much about these seemingly innocent devices. E.P. Thompson helped me understand why.

E. P. Thompson is a British historian that had a significant role in the emergence of the field of social history and promoted grassroots history narrated from “below.” Do you realize how important that is? History has never been written from below! I just couldn’t help but have a problem with the concept of “history” after I realized that. “Those familiar with Thompson’s historical writings recognized in his peace activism the same concern that had preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life: creating a space for grassroots human agency and for moral dissidence against the arrogance of the powerful.” What a beautiful purpose! He was an activist, a communist and he took interest in the emergence of the working class which is what we’ll be discussing here. And he writes so eloquently! Full of emotion and passion and references to literature. I loved his style!

Before we had clocks and minutes and months, how did we perceive time? Well, I don’t know. Our understanding of time is so deeply embedded in our understanding of life and the universe, it’s kinda hard to imagine what it would be like without it. I spent a couple of months camping this summer and spent a lot of time contemplating what primitive human life would be like compared to the chaotic order of modern life. The sun’s position in the sky, if you know how to read it, actually provides you with a pretty good sense of time of day. After some time, I even got the hang of predicting the time by looking at the sky. Then again, I never really needed to know the time of day. I just went with the natural flow, I didn’t really have a choice. You know how it’s important to maintain a healthy sleeping habit? I was never good at that and I realized that being in nature makes all the difference! It didn’t matter what time it was, I woke up early because it was hot and bright out once the sun rose, then you have to sleep early because you can’t oversleep and make up for sleepless nights — night is the only time when it’s dark enough and cool enough to sleep. Check out how the Nuer — an ethnic group that lives on the banks of the Nile River in South Sudan — perceive time:

“. . . the Nuer have no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to co-ordinate activities with an abstract passage of time because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.”

I couldn’t help but get a little jealous reading this quote. Even though a universal conception of time did not always exist, in many societies there were still measurements of time that took local activities such as chores as their reference point. Thompson provides an example from Madagascar: “a rice cooking” apparently is a phrase that means half an hour and “the frying of a locust” means something instant. This made me realize that I sometimes use the time required for tea to brew as a measurement of time, or perhaps the time it takes to smoke a cigarette although not verbally but more in my mind. Or I measure my shower length by how many songs have played. This approach to time perception is called “task-orientation” and it’s the main way rural societies managed time. Of course, it’s not as precise a system as clock time but apparently it worked well enough back then when punctuality wasn’t a thing. Think about it, it’s a perspective of time that follows the patterns of nature and it’s very intuitive. How does this relate to work?

Work is defined as the methods by which society structures the activities and labor necessary to its survival (Britannica). In preindustrial societies work basically meant just doing the things you need to do to live. You work so that you and your family has things to eat, to drink, to wear etc. This kind of production in which producers mainly produce for themselves and not to sell, is called subsistence living. Producing surplus to sell for a profit wasn’t always a thing. The timing of these tasks was partially based on necessity and partially up to the person in question. So there was an order, it wasn’t totally random, but it was an order that followed the necessities of the rhythm of nature, tasks were completed when they had to be completed: you milk the cow when you must and you attend to the crops when you must etc. It’s based on necessity because you are doing it for your own well-being and you do it on your own time and you have no fear of being cheated because you’re gonna do it eventually. This point of view also blurs the lines between work and leisure; time just becomes one continuous thing because your work tasks are scattered across time. No such thing as weekdays, weekends, work hours… Wouldn’t it be nice if work were such a thing that you weren’t even aware that what you’re doing was any different than living? Pre-industrial work is highly irregular: the tasks themselves are different, the type of activity these tasks require are different, the locations are different, the times are different. Before specialization people were a part of and could grasp the big picture of the work they were doing which means they were highly aware of its purpose, probably. The variety in “work” activities seems like a nice alternative to doing mainly the same thing every day, not really knowing why you’re doing it.

Another point of Thompson’s that I was happy to read was that when people are in charge of the organization of their own work, the patterns of working generally involve bursts of productivity alongside bursts of idleness. Look at artists, writers, students and farmers! And then think about yourself and the situations in which you organized your own work: who would want to work 9-to-5 almost every day regardless of the work you are supposed to complete? No one would do that to themselves. Perhaps giving yourself time off every now and then is a more humane way of working? Is that too crazy an idea? And when you work when you want to work, it just turns into such a better experience that probably yields better quality results. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t always think this way. Being a perfectionist, I used to have a really high tempo myself and I never thought that I was unhappy. There were times that working very hard made me feel great, but I later realized that it was also a very tiring and stressful experience and I just couldn’t help but feel that most of what I did, really didn’t matter. And it made it boring. But at the peak of my personal productivity, I remember that time was like blocks for me. Blocks that I had to allocate to the categories of school, work, volunteering and social activities. That was the only way I could manage such a ridiculously full schedule. It was really hard to actually live in the moment, but in retrospect, how could it not be when you’re constantly so concerned with the productivity of your past and present blocks of time? So what happened there? How did mankind go from “its milk the cow o-clock” to “I have some time for you between 6 to 7.30 before my yoga class?!”

Well, the industrial revolution happened. Now, I’m not gonna get into details because I would never be able to end this post but we’ll focus on the relevant aspects. First of all, once human labor became a commodity, coming to work at sunrise just wasn’t gonna cut it because sunrise can mean different things for different people. When you’re paying someone for working for a certain amount of time as it is when you’re buying labor, you wanna make sure that they’re working during that time because you’re profiting from that work. Not only that, you want to make sure that they’re as productive as possible during that time to increase your profit. This is what the old phrase “time is money” means. Time has become money and must not be wasted. Also as companies, factories, organizations become more and more interdependent, the synchronization of labor also becomes important. So now we have a whole new picture of work: you go to some rich guy’s factory and work your ass off for hours, not for the profit that will be gained from your work, but for the minimal wage that your employer sees fit for you. With that money you’re supposed to be able to provide for yourself and your family. When you think about it, this is a whole new system that is very different from the previous one. And it requires different habits, different incentives, and as Thompson puts it, a different human nature that these new incentives can rely on.

Apparently it wasn’t an easy transition, and you wouldn’t expect it to be. I mean, think about it. Even the transition from student to employee is a hard one for many people. Imagine that, out of the blue, factories are built and the new way of living involves long hours of factory work 6 days a week. Does that in any way seem desirable to you? I mean even if you desire the idea of being a worker, I doubt many people would actually desire what that entails in practice. Waking up early every day at the same hour and working hours on end for a business that isn’t even yours and that can only profit through the exploitation of your labor, regardless of how you’re feeling and what you would actually like to do that day. I saw a tweet the other day that went something along the lines of “how do people wake up, work a nine hour shift everyday, around 45 hours a week, and say ‘yep, that’s the way to live life’ without questioning how absurd capitalism is.” Because that’s what it is if you can look at it with fresh eyes, it’s completely absurd! To disguise the absurdity of capitalism, you have to normalize it, or even further, naturalize it. This is where the story gets dirty.

Thompson describes how the clock was used as a tool of oppression when these new work habits were trying to be implemented in the emerging workforce. Thus, time discipline. Not surprisingly, owning a clock or a watch were signs of status for a while, everyone wasn’t able to afford one. It’s interesting how your class was able to determine your relationship with time. In some factories the workers weren’t allowed to bring a watch. Apparently the factory messed with the factory clocks to lengthen working hours and shorten breaks. How evil is that? The things people were able to get away with in history… not that exploitation is a thing of the past.

Well, of course, oppression breeds resistance. Thompson describes the tradition of Saint Monday, where workers would spend their only weekly vacation on Sunday drinking all night and wouldn’t show up for work on the next day, declaring it the holiday of Saint Monday! I absolutely loved the idea! Some would even extend it to Saint Tuesday! Here is a quote from the article that describes how horrible a regular job in that day could be:

“I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter period, from following his usual occupation”, Francis Place wrote in 1829; and he added a footnote of personal testimony: For nearly six years, whilst working, when I had work to do, from twelve to eighteen hours a day, when no longer able, from the cause mentioned, to continue working, I used to run from it, and go as rapidly as I could to Highgate, Hampstead, Muswell-hill, or Norwood, and then “return to my vomit”…. This is the case with every workman I have ever known; and in proportion as a man’s case is hopeless will such fits more frequently occur and be of longer duration.”

The unproductive tradition of Saint Monday was quickly countered with reductions in wage and similar sanctions. But the disciplining goes way deeper than that, “time-thrift” needed to be internalized. “idleness” became a problem and it wasn’t okay anymore for even children to be idle. Schools were created to take care of the children of working families and prepare them for their turn in the labor force. By the time those children grew up and started working, they would already have been actively doing something every weekday for as long as they can remember. So they would have no problem adjusting perfectly to working hours. Thompson refers to Powell in his article who saw education as a training in the “habit of industry”; by the time the child reached six or seven it should become “habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue.” I ask you, would we really want children to be habituated to fatigue?

Thinking back to my childhood, I remember that I didn’t really have much of a problem with going to school everyday. I’d been doing it as long as I could remember. At university you have to pass the courses which might require exams and papers and a lack of absence to some degree but for the most part you have autonomy because it’s only you that gets affected by any negative consequences. After 6 years of that, white collar work was quite difficult to get used to for me. I feel like it’s just not something your body would naturally do and you have to do it for such unreasonable amounts of time. Here’s a quote from the article about children and schools:

“There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them…”

Well, guess what? It worked! Almost everyone I know supposedly hates working, hate’s being so busy, but has no problem at all with the phenomenon of work. They just hate it, but that’s it, no need to actually solve that problem. It’s understandable because its something that so natural in our culture but it’s also kinda weird. But it goes even deeper than school. The natural “laziness of humankind” was also repressed with an interior moral time piece.

Under capitalist culture, productivity has become a virtue. The best thing a person can be is productive, right? Laziness is the worst. Capitalism owes its spirit of productivity to the Protestant ethic and I think now its way past a religious virtue. Everyone is in on this now. Forget work productivity, people now think they have to spend their leisure time productively! What ever happened to not doing anything? Now it drives us crazy to not do anything, we feel guilty! Guilty and useless for wasting time being unproductive and we feel like we’re falling behind. Falling behind our peers, falling behind our schedule, falling behind in life! These are really crazy feelings to have for not doing anything. That’s how deep it goes. We’ve built a modern world that’s practically designed to fuck us up mentally. And then we have mental diseases flourishing everywhere and we have medicine to treat it — that doesn’t even work but at least lets us keep on being productive — so that’s totally okay and legal. As long as we’re not idle or anything. That would be a problem. People get depressed because they can’t find a job and then people can’t find a job because they’re depressed and then people say you’re depressed because you don’t have a job and you’ll be better if you do. You’re not even a legitimate person anymore if you don’t have a job, you deserve depression if you don’t have job. When did it become necessary to sell your labor for minimal wages to corporations to be happy and mentally well and deserve societal approval? Another quote from the article:

“…if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax? Is it decomposing already? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists? If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not “how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?” but “what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?” If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries.”

I won’t go into detail but I can’t help but mention that it was the worst of all for women because a major part of their labor, household labor, wasn’t even acknowledged as labor. It was naturalized. Because how else would you convince half the species to work so much for free without questioning such a harsh system. I’ll probably write another post on this topic but I want to share a poem from the article that I found quite sincere:

when we Home are come, Alas!
we find our Work but just begun;
So many Things for our Attendance call,
Had we ten Hands, we could employ them all.
Our Children put to Bed, with greatest Care
We all Things for your coming Home prepare:
You sup, and go to Bed without delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have,
Because our froward Children cry and rave
In ev’ry Work (we) take our proper Share;
And from the Time that Harvest doth begin
Until the Corn be cut and carry’d in,
Our Toil and Labour’s daily so extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.

So let’s wrap it up, its already become a long post. Time discipline was imposed and new habits were created through many ways: “the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports.” I get a bit passionate about topics like this, I might come off angry or emotional, and I am, to be honest. That doesn’t mean that I hate modern life and I wish I were born in the past. It just means that we are living in a world that’s far from perfect and if we’re going to do anything about it we have to first realize that this is not the way it has to be. This is not just the natural course of history. The life we are living now is a consequence of things that happened in the past, things other people did, and things that were done intentionally to some extent. Things that involved the exploitation of so many people. And that’s also what Thompson actually wanted to say with this article:

“What needs to be said is not that one way of life is better than the other, but that this is a place of the most far-reaching conflict; that the historical record is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but is also one of exploitation and of resistance to exploitation; and that values stand to be lost as well as gained.”

And what are those values that were lost? Thompson puts it perfectly, so I’m just leaving it to him:

“But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.”

The below resources were used while writing this essay:

Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, And Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, vol. 38, no. 1, 1967, pp. 56–97., doi:10.1093/past/38.1.56.

Bess, Michael. “E.P. Thompson.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/E-P-Thompson.