Posts Tagged ‘law’
“Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within”*…
Government graft in the U. S. has a long (and unbroken) history; but there have been especially corrupt periods, for instance in the Jacksonian era and the Gilded Age… and again today.
Profiteering and insider trading, “pay-to-play”/influence peddling, foreign emoluments, conflicts of interest, regulatory and policy favors, purchased pardons (and commutations)– we’ve got it all, and at epic levels.
The estimable Cory Doctorow uses a telling comparison to drill down on one of the dominant strands: Trump’s (ironic) campaign to fight (what he identifies as) corruption…
… It’s a story about boss-politics anti-corruption, in which anti-corruption is pursued to corrupt ends.
From 2012-2015, Xi Jinping celebrated his second term as the leader of China with a mass purge undertaken in the name of anti-corruption. Officials from every level of Chinese politics were fired, and many were imprisoned. This allowed Xi to consolidate his control over the CCP, which culminated in a rule-change that eliminated term-limits, paving the way for Xi to continue to rule China for so long as he breathes and wills to power.
Xi’s purge exclusively targeted officials in his rivals’ power-base, kneecapping anyone who might have blocked his power-grab. But just because Xi targeted his rivals’ princelings and foot-soldiers, it doesn’t mean that Xi was targeting the innocent. A 2018 paper by an economist (Peter Lorentzen, USF) and a political scientist (Xi Lu, NUS) concluded that Xi’s purge really did target corrupt officials.
The authors reached this conclusion by referencing the data published in the resulting corruption trials, which showed that these officials accepted and offered bribes and feathered their allies’ nests at public expense.
In other words, Xi didn’t cheat by framing innocent officials for crimes they didn’t commit. The way Xi cheated was by exclusively targeting his rivals’ allies. Lorentzen and Lu’s paper make it clear that Xi could easily have prosecuted many corrupt officials in his own power base, but he left them unmolested.
This is corrupt anti-corruption. In an environment in which everyone in power is crooked, you can exclusively bring legitimate prosecutions, and still be doing corruption. You just need to confine your prosecutions to your political enemies, whether or not they are more guilty than your allies (think here of the GOP dragging the Clintons into Epstein depositions).
14 years later, Xi’s anti-corruption purges continue apace, with 100 empty seats at this year’s National People’s Congress, whose former occupants are freshly imprisoned or awaiting trial.
I don’t know the details of all 100 prosecutions, but China absolutely has a corruption problem that goes all the way to the upper echelon of the state. I find it easy to believe that the officials Xi has targeted are guilty – and I also wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they are all supporters of Xi’s internal rivals for control of the CCP.
As the Epstein files demonstrate, anyone hoping to conduct a purge of America’s elites could easily do so without having to frame anyone for crimes they didn’t commit (remember, Epstein didn’t just commit sex crimes – he was also a flagrant financial criminal and he implicated his network in those crimes).
It’s not just Epstein. As America’s capital classes indulge their incestuous longings with an endless orgy of mergers, it’s corporate Habsburg jaws as far as the eye can see. These mergers are all as illegal as hell, but if you fire a mouthy comedian, you can make serious bank.
And if you pay the right MAGA chud podcaster a million bucks, he’ll grease your $14b merger through the DoJ.
And once these crooks merge to monopoly, they embark on programs of lawlessness that would shame Al Capone, but again, with the right podcaster on your side, you can keep on “robbing them blind, baby!”
The fact that these companies are all guilty is a foundational aspect of Trumpism. Boss-politics antitrust – and anti-corruption – doesn’t need to manufacture evidence or pretexts to attack Trump’s political rivals. When everyone is guilty, you have a target-rich environment for extorting bribes.
Just because the anti-corruption has legit targets, it doesn’t follow that the whole thing isn’t corrupt…
On the practice of selective enforcement and prosecution: “Corrupt anticorruption,” from @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy.
For thoughts on what we can do about all of this, see “Building political integrity to stamp out corruption: three steps to cleaner politics” (source of the image above)
* Menander
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As we decide on disinfectants, we might recall that it was on this date in 37 CE, following the death of Tiberius, that the Roman Senate annulled Tiberius’ will and confirmed Caligula, his grandnephew, as the third Roman emperor. (Tiberius had willed that the reign should be shared by his nephew [and adopted son] Germanicus and Germanicus’ son, Caligula.)
While he has been remembered as the poster boy for profligacy and corruption, Caligula (“Little Boots”) is generally agreed to have been a temperate ruler through the first six months of his reign. His excesses after that– cruelty, self-dealing, extravagance, sexual perversity– are “known” to us via sources increasingly called into question.
Still, historians agree that Caligula did work hard to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor at the expense of the countervailing Principate; and he oversaw the construction of notoriously luxurious dwellings for himself. In 41 CE, members of the Roman Senate and of Caligula’s household attempted a coup to restore the Republic. They enlisted the Praetorian Guard, who killed Caligula– the first Roman Emperor to be assassinated (Julius Caesar was assassinated, but was Dictator, not Emperor). In the event, the Praetorians thwarted the Republican dream by appointing (and supporting) Caligula’s uncle Claudius as the next Emperor.
“I am not Cinna the conspirator”*…
As Philip Goldfarb Styrt explains, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a telling parable about the administration of justice—and rife mishandling thereof—in our day…
American politics has a long history of referencing William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, from Abigail Adams, who identified with Portia, the wife of Brutus, as Betsy Erkkila has noted, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which “both was and was not reenacting” the play, in Cary M. Mazer’s words. These references are likely due to the intersection of American identification with Roman republicanism, which the play dramatizes, and the long history of American interest in Shakespeare specifically. More recently, a great deal of ink was spilled during Donald Trump’s first term comparing the president to Caesar. But while an excellent hook for contemporary stagings of the play, this kind of parallel has limitations. King George III and Abraham Lincoln weren’t Caesar, and neither is Donald Trump, even if a lead actor sports a distinctive red tie. This history does, however, raise the question of what Shakespeare’s play might have to tell us about our current historical moment.
One overlooked area of governance that has become increasingly important in the early days of the current administration is due process: what procedures does the government have to go through and what kinds of hearings must be held, particularly in immigration cases, in order to arrest someone? To remove or deport someone from the country? From the Mahmoud Khalil case at Columbia University to the Rümeysa Öztürk case at Tufts, the Secretary of State has been personally marking individual visas and green cards for revocation; in addition, in cases like the one that centers on the removal of alleged gang members to El Salvador, whole categories of people are being removed without a hearing or a trial and with at least some allegations that the individuals removed aren’t even part of the targeted class.
Julius Caesar treats these issues directly. The play focuses on the assassination of the title character by a conspiracy headed by Brutus and Cassius and the defeat of the conspirators in battle by Caesar’s successors, the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. Along the way, the play presents punishment as a major theme: First, the punishment of Caesar for the perceived sin of royal ambition, and second, the punishment of the conspirators for his murder. Because of this, a close look at the play and the scholarship surrounding it can help make clear the stakes of due process. While the term itself wouldn’t have been used in Shakespeare’s time, his era was one in which the procedures of law we now call due process were being formalized, and his plays show a consistent interest in whether that proper procedure is being followed.
A pair of crucial scenes related to this issue immediately follow the play’s most famous parts (Caesar’s assassination and the speeches delivered by Brutus and Antony over his body, in Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2, respectively) and may be sometimes overlooked. But when considered together, they give insight into why arbitrary executive action without due process is dangerous, whether it technically operates within the law or not.
The first of these two scenes—in Act 3, scene 3—features mob violence. Incited by Marc Antony to seek revenge, the citizens seek out conspirators to murder, and they mistake the poet Cinna for a conspirator of the same name. They tear him to pieces. Though this act is hardly the same as an official arrest, which might seem to distance it from discussions of due process, this moment isn’t just about the mob, as Martin Mueller points out; it’s about how power acts, whether through masses or through government. It’s a case of enacting punishment in a case of mistaken identity, particularly one where despite that mistake having been corrected in real time, the damage is done. “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” are the victim’s last words, but the play gives neither time nor opportunity for his insistence to convince anyone to keep him alive. Due process would allow for potential Cinnas to demonstrate innocence and remove themselves from the unwarranted threat; without it, everyone is imperiled.
There’s another element of the current concern regarding due process that relates to the fate of poor Cinna. His death isn’t merely the result of mistaken identity; as Jeffrey J. Yu writes, after he tries to identify himself the mob changes its tune, declaring that they’ll kill him for being a bad poet instead. Absent due process, there’s no pause to decide whether this person should be condemned or if the reason given for condemnation is legitimate. This episode serves as a reminder that due process doesn’t merely protect people from mistaken identification; it also requires those who would mete out punishment to specify, up front, the reason for it.
The Trump administration’s refusal to give key information to multiple judges in the removal cases recalls this danger. By refusing to specify details of the case, the government keeps the possibility alive of changing their reasoning or their claims to have the same effect for different reasons—just as the mob changes its reasoning for killing Cinna. This belies the question of whether those who are looking to deliver punishment are acting in good faith, a concern that became part of the appeals court decision in the El Salvador case and has subsequently been raised in other courtrooms as well. Just as Shakespeare’s mob finds new justifications for why Cinna the Poet should die, the government keeps open the possibility of producing a different reason for removing the people it currently claims are alien enemies—a process they have already begun with individual visa revocations. Due process requires a commitment to the reasons punishment is sought and thus allows those reasons to be addressed and countered.
As Nicholas Royle argues, the scene of Cinna’s death can easily be treated as a version of Julius Caesar in miniature. The play as a whole is about categorical error: killing someone because you think they are one thing only to find out you were wrong. This, in turn, centers the idea of due process, because only through it can deliberative decisions about identity, guilt, and punishment be properly engaged. The lynching of (the wrong) Cinna is the madness of a mob; the murder of (the right) Caesar is a conspiracy of nobles; the removal of hundreds of (alleged) Venezuelan gang members is the action of ICE. Each is a distinct entity, but they hold in common a lack of judicial process to determine what is to be done and to whom.
If the death of Cinna is a microcosm of the play, the other moment that reinforces the importance of due process in Julius Caesar is even more compressed, lasting a mere eight lines at the start of the fourth act. That’s all the time it takes for Marc Antony, Octavius (the future Augustus Caesar), and Lepidus to choose the Romans who will die by proscription in order to keep their triumvirate in power while they war against Caesar’s assassins. This is an arbitrary and impersonal form of execution: the triumvirs check off the names of those they want dead: “these many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.” As Robert Kalmey observes, this moment encapsulates what Roman historians thought of as the worst of all of Octavius’s crimes against the state before becoming emperor. This “tyrannical ruthlessness and cruelty,” in Robert Miola’s words, reveals that the triumvirate will be no better than Caesar’s assassins or the mob; they too will kill at whim to stay in power.
There’s something disturbing about these proscriptions, which is why both Kalmey and Miola identify them as critical. The triumvirate make a cold-blooded choice to kill many Romans; it has neither targeted motivation, as did the assassination of Caesar, nor does it possess the emotional if not legal justification embraced by the inflamed mob in its misdeeds. This isn’t to justify those prior murders. Rather, it’s to point out that the proscriptions somehow exceed even them in horror because of how they’re administered. There’s no due process here, either; the three triumvirs don’t get their hands dirty, their decisions can’t be appealed, and there’s no public process by which those to be killed will be identified before the decision is final.
In this there’s a distinct echo of the process currently in use for determining which visas (permanent or temporary) will be revoked under the current administration. The decision lies solely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to determine if a particular immigrant poses a threat to national security; if he makes that determination, then the immigrant in question can be picked up off the street without hearing or appeal. Thus far, there’s no venue for disputing such a determination nor is there a published list of those whose visas have been revoked, even though Rubio claims to have revoked as many as 300 (coincidentally, as Kalmey details, the number of senators proscribed by the triumvirate).
Of course, deportation or removal from the United States isn’t the same as death; Rubio’s unilateral visa revocation isn’t the same as the proscription. But the lack of transparency and due process are similar, and there are few to no guarantees of the safety of people whom ICE agents remove, often without identifying themselves, and move around without notifying the family or lawyers of the detained. In fact, the government has argued in court that it has no responsibility to return those who might be removed incorrectly or by accident.
In Julius Caesar Shakespeare demonstrates the extreme consequences of a lack of due process. Not every such deprivation becomes a literal matter of life and death as in the play, but making use of such scenarios enables Shakespeare to highlight more effectively the danger of arbitrary action. Whether we imagine ourselves, like Cinna the Poet, hunted for a crime of which we are innocent or, like the Roman dignitaries proscribed by the triumvirs, marked out for condemnation, the drama asserts that some kind of due process is a necessity for a free state. If, as Lloyd Matthews has argued, America’s founding ideals of liberty are intimately linked to Julius Caesar, that connection should remind us that such liberty requires due process to function properly…
“The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (“A Harvard Law class uses the Bard’s plays to explore legal themes and concepts past and present”)
* Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 3
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As we recognize rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners (a huge number of whom joined in progress, after tuning over from the Edgar Bergen show on NBC) that a real Martian invasion was underway.
While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phony-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.
“If I am to be remembered, I hope it will not be primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom, enlarging Terence’s words, nothing human and nothing in external nature was alien.”*…
Interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician Ross Simonini with 47 thoughts on the glory of looking– and living– beyond a specialty…
1. I was raised to believe that I was made to do one thing. Find that one pursuit that fills my life with meaning and empty all my energy into it. This is the realization of human potential: to excel with rigorous focus on a refined lifelong mission. This and only this will bring us to our greatest success and fulfillment.
For me, this was not something I even had to be told—though I was, many times, by many people—because I implicitly understood that this kind of teleology was woven into the fibers of my world. I also knew that rejecting a singular pursuit would be an insult to my very existence. Without this unifying reason for being alive, I would wander aimlessly into the barren void of nihilism. I’d heard about great artists who refused to create, who stepped away from their work to fritter away their time on leisure, and I knew this was a life of tragedy.
Likewise, I understood that sliding your attention across interests is a way to waste your gift. The more hours you put into a skill, the more skilled you become—right? To treat your gift with the proper deference, you must exhaust yourself into it.
Within this paradigm, the most unfortunate people are those who do not have a single, clear vocation. These types float from job to job without a trajectory; they are vagabonds who have given up on greatness.
This may sound a little dramatic, but somewhere inside me, these beliefs are there—and as a lifelong generalist, I spend every day rubbing up against them.
…
16. Let’s talk about mastery. Everyone wants to be a master, even if they are disgusted by the monstrous implications of the word. Mastery suggests dominance over something, but every true master knows that they are merely a supplicant at the mercy of their field, which existed long before them and will exist long after them. Anyone who believes in their own mastery likely suffers from hubris. Work hard enough at something and you watch your dominance slip ever further away.
Mastery is an illusion, a notion of a fictional purity that cannot be understood or measured in terms of time. Just look at those young savants who excel wildly after only a few years spent on their craft. For them, mastery cannot be the result of time plus work, as we all assume it is. In fact, maybe the newness of their skills is precisely what gives their work its value.
But these little wonders are exceptions, right? The rest of us have to dedicate our lives to something to achieve greatness, and anyone who doesn’t do this will likely be middling in their work. Most writers I know are immediately suspicious when an actor publishes a novel. We delight in calling the person a moonlighter. Literature is our territory, and the only way to live here is to put in the time and labor.
…
24. Isaiah Berlin, the political theorist, ethicist, philosopher, and historian, wrote a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he divides people into two types: hedgehogs, who see the entire world through one big thing, and foxes, who see the world as many things that cannot be reduced. According to Berlin, hedgehogs include Plato, Dostoyevsky, and Proust, while foxes include Aristotle, Shakespeare, and James Joyce.
“Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new,” said David Lynch (musician, filmmaker, painter, lamp maker, sculptor, writer, actor, and lecturer, mostly on meditation).
…
29. Sometimes history hides generalism to preserve a specialized agenda. Isaac Newton, a figure whom we consider the father of modern math, physics, and reasoned thinking, was also a dedicated alchemist. Alchemy, a generalist practice in itself, was a precursor to modern chemistry. It involves spirituality, myth, belief, and metallurgy, but its inclusion of belief stands in direct conflict with the scientific rationalism Newton now represents. Subsequent generations of historians and scientists buried Newton’s dedication to the occult, willfully ignoring the blow it deals to their obsessive, single-minded materialism. But Newton’s own records tell a different story. He wrote over a million words on alchemy in his lifetime, and his study of the subject helped inspire some of his most paradigm-shifting discoveries.
…
31. A filmmaker must understand aspects of sound design, photography, storytelling, music, acting, props, environment, finance, writing, and dialogue. In this way, some jobs are naturally suited to the generalist. A skilled homemaker, for example, understands everything from cooking to cleaning to healing to sociology. Acting, too, is a fairly generalist vocation. The practice of writing, what I am doing right now, is extremely broad, without consistent subject matter, form, or even mediums.
Generalism can be an approach of the neophyte or of the seasoned worker. Some entry-level positions (assistant, secretary, intern) are, in fact, compilations of micro-jobs, and some high-level positions—
managers, CEOs, directors, business owners, presidents—are positions of vast, nonspecific oversight. Sometimes the highest perch has the widest perspective.…
39. A generalist must engage with both sides of any argument: skepticism and belief, optimism and pessimism. So, for this essay, it would only be right to take a look at the dark side of generalism and the side effects of adopting it as a whole-life philosophy.
The glaring danger of general thinking in its extreme form is relativism, a sort of mushy non-position in which there are no universal standards: nothing can ever be condemnable or universally wrong. At the most dramatic levels, relativism might dismiss murder and genocide. It’s a slippery slope of open-mindedness.
Likewise, a generalist must contend with political centrism. In our bifurcated world, the center is one of the most reviled of all political positions, and a generalist will come to understand whether their own centrism is an evasion of choice or a refusal of unpalatable options.
Few things are more torturous than making decisions, and a mind will do anything to avoid such a relentlessly complex activity. Adherence to these vague philosophies, as I see them, can certainly be used as an excuse for escaping commitment. As a generalist, I must stay vigilant against this kind of laziness of mind and instead allow many fierce, contrary ideas to exist at once.
…
42. Generalism is not a thing. It’s definitely not an ism or some kind of doctrine. The general approach defies the nature of ideologies, which are characterized by the limits they place on understanding the world. There is no system of generalism. The general philosophy is to love variety.
For this reason, generalists don’t exist—not in the way that, say, Marxists do—because they can’t identify as generalists. I can call myself intra-, cross-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary—which, for some, are all legitimate and distinct prefixes—but that does more to distinguish and alienate me from others than to connect me with a community. There is no lineage of generalists, as there is for microbiologists or flutists, because every generalist works with their own complex bouquet of interests.
Probably this whole essay is my attempt to give a sense of unity to my life. Maybe I have to write a manifesto on “the art of doing many things”because I fear that if our culture doesn’t have a catchy keyword for my role, I’ll just fade away. So here I am, reducing generalism to a single, branded snap, just like a specialist.
After all, generalists are, in moments, great specialists. Likewise, a deep specialist can approach their niche from an ever-growing number of perspectives. A man with a repetitive job can endlessly engage with his work from fresh angles. And, of course, it’s all relative. A single task looked at from another angle is a plentiful cornucopia of individuated micro-tasks.
Some long-term generalists focus exclusively on a single activity for a number of years before moving on to the next. Rather than doing many things simultaneously, they do them sequentially.
Pure generalism and pure specialism are just intellectual games. Our minds drift between unified oneness and individuality without ever settling into either. Binary thinking is for computers.
These two states of being are not roles we need to inhabit but rather nodes to be considered. One situation requires diligent focus, but another benefits from a more diffuse form of attention. Certain qualities of engagement can occur only when you do multiple things at once. This is the value of the glance.
…
47. Generalism is not the opposite of specialism. It includes specialism. Everyone gets to experience both. Or maybe both approaches lead to the same place. Maybe the study of quantum physics brings a mind to the same conclusions as basketry. Maybe it’s like meditation: You can sit in open awareness and experience everything until you reach an unprejudiced understanding of life. Or you can unflinchingly focus on a single mantra for decades, repeating it with each breath, and as you plunge deeper toward a single infinite point, you discover that everything is already right there.
Eminently worth reading in full: “In praise of generalism” from @thebeliever.net.
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As we widen our irises, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Pierre de Fermat; he was born on this date in 1601. While he is remembered as one of the two great mathematicians of the early 17th century (with Descartes), Fermat was (like Descartes) driven by wider interests. Fermat was a trained lawyer, who served as a councilor at the Parlement de Toulouse, one of the High Courts of Judicature in France. He was fluent in six languages and praised for his written verse in several of them; his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts… which is to say that mathematics was but one of his interests, and more a hobby than a profession at that. Still, Fermat made foundational contributions to analytical geometry, probability, number theory and calculus.
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything”*…
A “great reshuffle” of the land is underway, Michael Albertus explains– and it will force us to reconsider traditional ideas of property and ownership…
… It can be easy to forget the significance of the ground beneath our feet – and how much it has shaped the societies we live in. For most people, their home is their house – or their landlord’s. It is bought, sold or rented along with the land underneath it, passing between families over the years. But at some point – and probably several times – there have been abrupt changes to that seemingly permanent arrangement. Land tenure can be profoundly reshuffled. It has in the past and it will be again in the future.
As a political scientist, I’ve studied how land power has shaped societies all over the world. From Ireland to Italy, from Chile to South Africa, and across the US West, struggles over ownership and land use are etched in family histories and have determined the fate of nations…
… Today we are in the middle of a ‘great reshuffle’ of land. Over the past two centuries, nearly every society has reallocated land ownership and property rights. And because of the power that land confers to those who hold it, this reshuffling has set societies on distinct trajectories of development. It’s helped some countries become more egalitarian and productive, whereas for others it has embedded racial hierarchies, deep inequalities and economic stagnation.
The global population bubble and climate change will amplify the reshuffling, and a picture of how that will happen is starting to emerge. Land will become ever scarcer and more valuable as populations increase – and the opposite could occur in the next century as the world’s population plummets. Meanwhile, a changing climate will make vast areas of land more attractive and productive while rendering other areas uninhabitable. Amid these changes, the question is how to reshuffle land well. One thing is clear: centuries-old approaches to property rights and ownership are not up to that task…
[Albertus quickly reviews the hstory of property regimes, with special emphasis on the devlopment of today’s, whihc he calls “the Great Reshuffle”…]
… This great reshuffle began in different ways. In some cases, it entailed the appropriation of Indigenous lands on the part of settlers. Other times, it involved stripping large landowners of their property and granting it to peasants, whether collectively, in cooperatives or as individuals. My ancestors in southern Poland won a small plot of land – presumably taken from the local noble family – through the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe.
Land reshuffling rewired nearly every country on Earth and set societies on new trajectories of development, race and gender relations, and treatment of the environment. For some societies, that meant becoming more egalitarian. In the years after the Second World War, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all adopted sweeping programmes that transferred land from landlords to their tenants in small, family-sized plots. The governments of these countries followed that up with generous subsidies. Within a generation, families were sending their children to schools rather than the fields. Urbanisation and industrialisation followed, vaunting these nations to the forefront of the global economy.
Far more countries stumbled. Following the end of China’s civil war in the late 1940s, the Communist Party seized all private land in the country, nationalised it, and then formed large land collectives that incorporated some 430 million people. It was one of the largest experiments in land reshuffling in human history. And it wreaked havoc as China’s forests were felled and underproductivity in agriculture drove the Great Famine. Walking through the fields of a place like Dali in Yunnan province today, as I have done, paints a different picture of productivity that emerged only after China broke up its collectives and allowed families to farm specific plots of land…
In the US, land reshuffling had varied consequences. The displacement of Indigenous communities and reallocation of their land to settlers set the stage for a radical experiment in democracy among smallholding settlers in New England, the slavery and plantation system in the South, and a system of Indian reservations in the West. When I did fieldwork at the Agua Caliente Reservation that centres on Palm Springs, California in late 2023, tribal members pointed to repeated land grabs as the root of attempts by outsiders to break down tribal cohesion and cultural preservation.
Around the world today, people are living and breathing the consequences of how the great reshuffle has rewired societies – from resource depletion to racism, gender inequalities, prosperity levels, and the global pecking order. In the coming decades, addressing problems linked to these shifts will require recognising their origins and crafting policies that turn land into a force for positive social change.
After all, land is still the world’s most valuable asset, despite the economic rotation toward technology and manufacturing in advanced economies. Growing populations and the need to feed them and generate resources for them have driven a spiralling demand for land. This is true even in urban areas, where land prices typically skyrocket. Pressure on the land is only going to increase in the coming decades. More land reshuffles are coming…
… The future lies to the north. Latitudes north of the 45th parallel make up only 15 per cent of the world’s surface area but have 29 per cent of its ice-free land and are very sparsely populated. Even more northern land is set to shed its ice and permafrost in the coming decades and become more temperate and productive. Much of this land is owned directly by governments and Indigenous communities, often with colliding claims; little of it is privately owned.
Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest northerly countries, will undergo the most dramatic changes. Agriculture could dramatically expand through longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and the melting of millions of acres of permafrost. One recent climate model shows Canada gaining 4.2 million square kilometres of arable land suitable for growing crops like wheat, corn and potatoes by 2080 – a fourfold increase of its current stock of suitable land. A comparable amount of land will become newly arable in Russia, positioning these two countries as the world’s key breadbaskets of the future. At the same time, these changes will threaten expansive boreal forests and the forestry industry.
The more temperate climate and increased economic activity in these countries will drive population growth and migration, placing pressure to reshuffle lands. In Canada, 89 per cent of all land is ‘Crown land’ – publicly owned by the federal government and provincial governments. Indigenous First Nations people lay claim to large portions, so tensions could boil over as private interest strengthens…
… As for the US, the picture in Alaska parallels that in Canada. The US federal government owns 61 per cent of Alaska’s land, and a growing share will become arable within decades. With Indigenous claims to a large portion, there will be campaigns to reallocate this land – for instance by privatising more federal land – as it becomes more attractive for settlement and economic activity.
And alongside this thawing, governments, private interests and, where present, Indigenous communities, are poised to clash over sparsely populated territories like Greenland and Antarctica with weak, absent or transitional sovereignty. Indeed, under President Donald Trump, that has already begun.
While looming northern land reshuffles will catch outsized attention, climate change will also foster internal reshuffles on the land in countries across the globe. That dynamic could be scary and destabilising, but it is also an opportunity. Changing land relationships and migration patterns associated with climate change present a possibility to put land in service of society in ways that have rarely been attempted in human history…
[Albertus describes some of the approaches to land rights developing around the world…]
… There will inevitably be mistakes and growing pains associated with such approaches. But these efforts will be increasingly important if we are going to manage future land reshuffling to the benefit of societies as a whole, and without systemic conflict. Everyone from Aboriginal Australian leaders to Minnesotan farmers have expressed excitement to me about this future under new land arrangements.
In the 22nd century, the great reshuffle will shift once again. There will be major changes in the size of human populations, the climate, technology and, inevitably, in politics. The result will be new relationships with the land that could look foreign to what we experience today. Experiments with new forms of property rights will need to go mainstream in order to accommodate shifting populations and climate change in an orderly and equitable fashion.
There is considerable uncertainty in population projections beyond 2100 but, if fertility rates continue their steady decline, the several-millennia-old human population boom is most likely going to bust. If the world converges to today’s average low fertility rate in East Asia, the 22nd century would be one of rapid depopulation, tracing back to some 2 billion people…
… In the 22nd century, many cities may trace Detroit’s trajectory. If housing remains dense, city footprints will have to shrink dramatically. Meanwhile, in the countryside, there will be far more land to go around, but that land may be degraded if it was not adequately protected.
The climate picture in the 22nd century will also drastically alter where people live on the land and how they relate to it. Even if emissions slow considerably, global temperatures and sea levels will rise, and weather patterns will be more extreme. As we explored earlier, a thawing North will continue to open up to agriculture, but land elsewhere will undergo drastic change. Arid and drought-prone areas like northeastern Brazil, the US Southwest and the African Sahel will become increasingly hot and pose a challenge for human livelihoods. Crop yields in the US Southwest are already declining and farmers are struggling to access water for their fields. Some are giving up and fallowing or leaving the land. Meanwhile, low-lying coastal areas in places like Florida and Bangladesh will disappear, as well as entire island nations like the Maldives.
That changing land use will inform the political landscape. Some countries may trace the path that Canada envisions for itself: welcoming immigrants into a dynamic economy. An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration. Other countries may wall themselves off to protect existing landholdings, resources and wealth from outsiders.
Growing wealth inequality could directly impact who owns the land, too. Powerful multinational companies have increasingly amassed land in order to secure their supply chains, crowding out local populations. If wealthy individuals and investors buy up land at a large scale, a significant portion of the world’s population could end up as renters, mimicking patterns of concentrated large landholding and widespread landlessness that prevailed prior to the onset of the great reshuffle.
Amid all these climatic and economic changes, future generations will make choices once again about whether to spread out on the land or to concentrate in shrinking cities. Land will once more undergo a radical reshuffle in either scenario.
If humanity is to flourish, the next century and beyond will again require a rethink of land relationships…
Reconsidering property rights and ownership: “On unstable ground,” from @mikealbertus.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
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As we ponder just how real real estate is, we might recall that on this date in 1916, the Easter Rising, an insurrection launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period.
High on the republicans’ list of grievences with their colonial masters was the issue of land reform.
“The street finds its own uses for things”*…
Your correspondent is off again, this time across borders and for a little longer that my last few absences; regauler service should resume around April 19…
The estimable Matt Webb on an approach to thnking more comprhensively and creatively about the ultimate impacts of and given innovation…
… I recently learnt about twig, which is a biotech startup manufacturing industrial chemicals using custom bacteria.
The two examples they cite: palm oil which is used in lipstick but displaces rainforests; isoprene which is used to make tyres but comes from fossil fuels.
What if instead you could engineer a strain of bacteria to bulk produce these chemicals sustainably?
The capabilities are present in the metabolic pathways. So that’s what twig does. At scale, is the promise.
- I hadn’t realised this kind of biotech had gotten to commercialisation! And in London too. Good stuff.
- What Are The Civilian Applications?
What Are The Civilian Applications? is of course a Culture ship name, a GSV (General Systems Vehicle) from The Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.
It is also an oblique strategy we deployed regularly in design workshops back in the day at BERG, introduced (I think? Gang please correct me if I’m wrong) by long-time design leader and friend Matt Jones. That’s his project history. Go have a read.
Let me unpack.
Oblique Strategies (a history) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, 1975: a deck of approx 100 cards, each of which is a prompt to bump you out of a creative hole.
For example:
Honor thy error as a hidden intentionOr:
Discard an axiomAnd so on.
In product invention, which is kinda what we did at BERG and kinda what I do now, it’s handy to carry your own toolkit of prompts. So I adopted What Are The Civilian Applications? into my personal deck of oblique strategies.
Therefore.
What would do you with engineered bacteria that can make palm oil or whatever, if it were cheap enough to play with, if the future were sufficiently distributed, if we all had it at home?
Like, it’s a good question to ask. What would civilians do with engineered bacteria?
Tomato soup.
Instead of buying tomato soup at the store, I’d have a little starter living in a jar. A bioreactor all of my own, and I’d fill it with intelligently designed bacteria that eat slop and excrete ersatz Heinz tomato soup.
I’m not 100% sure what “slop” is in this context. The food I mean. Maybe the bacteria just get energy from sunlight, fix carbon from the air, and I drop in a handful of vitamin gummies or fish flakes every Monday?
A second oblique strategy adopted into my personal deck over the years:
“
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” by Frederik Pohl. As previously discussed re a national drone network.Let’s say I can go to the store and buy a can of Perpetual Heinz, or however they brand it. A can with a sunroof on the top and a tap on the side that I keep in the garden and I can juice it for soup once a week for a year, or until the bacterial population diverges enough that I’m at risk of brewing neurotoxins or psychedelics or strange and wonderful new flavours or something.
Heinz is not going to like that, economically. They’ll require me to enrol in some kind of printer and printer ink business model where I have to subscribe to the special vitamin pills to keep (a) the soup colony alive and (b) their shareholders happy.
Which will end up being pricey, like the monthly cash we all pay out to mutually incompatible streaming services. Demand will arise for black market FMCGs on the dark web. Jars of illegal Infinite Coca Cola that only requires the cheap generic slop and it tastes just the same.
So I love to play with these strategies and imagine what the world might be like. Each step makes a sort of sense yet you end up somewhere fantastical – that’s the journey I want to take you on in text, too. Then the game, in product invention, is to take those second order possibilities and bring them back to today. (I’m giving away all my secrets now.)
But I prefer cosier, more everyday futures:
Grandma’s secret cake recipe, passed down generation to generation, could be literally passed down: a flat slab of beige ooze kept in a battered pan, DNA-spliced and perfected by guided evolution by her own deft and ancient hands, a roiling wet mass of engineered microbes that slowly scabs over with delicious sponge cake, a delectable crust to be sliced once a week and enjoyed still warm with cream and spoons of pirated jam.
A small jar of precious, proprietary cake ooze handed down parent to child, parent to child, together with a rack filled with the other family starter recipes, a special coming of age moment, a ceremony…
Thinking broadly and deeply about the implications of innovations: “What Are The Civilian Applications?” from @genmon.fyi.
(Image above: source)
* William Gibson
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As we ponder the particulars of progress, we might spare a thought for Francis Bacon– the English Renaissance philosopher, lawyer, linguist, composer, mathematician, geometer, musician, poet, painter, astronomer, classicist, philosopher, historian, theologian, architect, father of modern empirical science (The Baconian– aka The Scientific– Method), and patron of modern democracy, whom some allege was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I of England (and other’s, the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays). He died on this date in 1561… after (about a month earlier) he had stuffed a dressed chicken with snow to see how long the flesh could be preserved by the extreme cold. He caught a cold and perished from its complications.
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