Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
Word of the day (again) is ‘unasinous’: ‘united in stupidity’.
A 17th-century riff on ‘unanimous’ (literally, of ‘one mind’), based on the Latin for behaving like ‘one ass’.
Tweets From Susie Dent
@susie_dent on Twitter
To achieve sustainable prosperity, we can’t afford to hide behind the permissions attached to our professional roles as they now stand. Being a responsible professional, entrusted by society with the privileges of such a role, should involve an orientation to taking initiative in bringing about the future that global society most needs.
A New Professional Ethics for Sustainable Prosperity
Melissa Lane
__Without social struggles, the model of constructing counter-hegemony based on technological development is likely to become a project of imposing social transformation ‘from above’__. Intellectuals, technocrats and politicians come up with the ideas for realizing policies as they are supposed to know better in terms of how to effectively manage and mitigate the ecological and economic crisis. They will monopolize the power of decision-making about which technologies to use and how to use them. __Although scientific knowledge is undoubtedly indispensable, centralized and gigantic locking technologies, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to democratic control because they require top-down policies and management.__ Even the mitigation of the ecological crisis becomes a means of subordinating individuals to undemocratic and technocratic command from above. This is why Gorz warned that a project of Promethean modernism would end in the ‘negation of both politics and modernity’ (Gorz 2018: 48). This risk cannot be underestimated after the failure of the avant-garde socialist model in the 20th century.
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Kohei Saito
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