As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December, and saw, looming above our heads, the pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on Fox News, I couldn’t help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach. And as I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he seemed to condone physical violence as a response to political disagreement, alarm bells started to ring in my head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.

Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”? Is he testing democracy’s singular weakness — its susceptibility to the demagogue — by blasting through the firewalls we once had in place to prevent such a person from seizing power? Or am I overreacting?

Perhaps. The nausea comes and goes, and there have been days when the news algorithm has actually reassured me that “peak Trump” has arrived. But it hasn’t gone away, and neither has Trump. In the wake of his most recent primary triumphs, at a time when he is perilously close to winning enough delegates to grab the Republican nomination outright, I think we must confront this dread and be clear about what this election has already revealed about the fragility of our way of life and the threat late-stage democracy is beginning to pose to itself.

Plato, of course, was not clairvoyant. His analysis of how democracy can turn into tyranny is a complex one more keyed toward ancient societies than our own (and contains more wrinkles and eddies than I can summarize here). His disdain for democratic life was fueled in no small part by the fact that a democracy had executed his mentor, Socrates. And he would, I think, have been astonished at how American democracy has been able to thrive with unprecedented stability over the last couple of centuries even as it has brought more and more people into its embrace. It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional craftsmanship and cultural resilience. There is no place I would rather live. But it is not immortal, nor should we assume it is immune to the forces that have endangered democracy so many times in human history.

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished. The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones, as the culture of democracy slowly took deeper root. For a very long time, only the elites of the political parties came to select their candidates at their quadrennial conventions, with the vote largely restricted to party officials from the various states (and often decided in, yes, smoke-filled rooms in large hotel suites). Beginning in the early 1900s, however, the parties began experimenting with primaries, and after the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, today’s far more democratic system became the norm.

Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math and, more egregiously, to a partisan Supreme Court vote. Al Gore’s eventual concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis, but the episode generated widespread unease, not just among Democrats. And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional nominating system is rigged.

Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud. Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet, blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist, defeating the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary and later his Republican opponent (both pillars of their parties’ Establishments and backed by moneyed elites). In 2012, the fund-raising power behind Mitt Romney — avatar of the one percent — failed to dislodge Obama from office. And in this presidential cycle, the breakout candidates of both parties have soared without financial support from the elites. Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists. Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics.

None of this is necessarily cause for alarm, even though it would be giving the Founding Fathers palpitations. The emergence of the first black president — unimaginable before our more inclusive democracy — is miraculous, a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the system. The days when party machines just fixed things or rigged elections are mercifully done with. The way in which outsider candidates, from Obama to Trump and Sanders, have brought millions of new people into the electoral process is an unmitigated advance. The inclusion of previously excluded voices helps, rather than impedes, our public deliberation. But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.

What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.

And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism.

The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.

Trump, we now know, had been considering running for president for decades. Those who didn’t see him coming — or kept treating him as a joke — had not yet absorbed the precedents of Obama and Palin or the power of the new wide-open system to change the rules of the political game. Trump was as underrated for all of 2015 as Obama was in 2007 — and for the same reasons. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of American political and media elites, and he had long fashioned a public persona perfectly attuned to blast past them.

Despite his immense wealth and inherited privilege, Trump had always cultivated a common touch. He did not hide his wealth in the late-20th century — he flaunted it in a way that connected with the masses. He lived the rich man’s life most working men dreamed of — endless glamour and women, for example — without sacrificing a way of talking about the world that would not be out of place on the construction sites he regularly toured. His was a cult of democratic aspiration. His 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, promised its readers a path to instant success; his appearances on “The Howard Stern Show” cemented his appeal. His friendship with Vince McMahon offered him an early entrée into the world of professional wrestling, with its fusion of sports and fantasy. He was a macho media superstar.

One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.

In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo.

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. And as the tea party swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held the government budget hostage, threatened the very credit of the U.S., and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what others didn’t, just as Hoffer noted: “The frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo.”

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates who refuse to vote for Trump.

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form. The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.

Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect. At his rallies he has recounted the mythical acts of one General John J. Pershing when confronted with an alleged outbreak of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Pershing, in Trump’s telling, lines up 50 Muslim prisoners, swishes a series of bullets in the corpses of freshly slaughtered pigs, and orders his men to put those bullets in their rifles and kill 49 of the captured Muslim men. He spares one captive solely so he can go back and tell his friends. End of the terrorism problem.

In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

And though Trump’s unfavorables are extraordinarily high (around 65 percent), he is already showing signs of changing his tune, pivoting (fitfully) to the more presidential mode he envisages deploying in the general election. I suspect this will, to some fools on the fence, come as a kind of relief, and may open their minds to him once more. Tyrants, like mob bosses, know the value of a smile: Precisely because of the fear he’s already generated, you desperately want to believe in his new warmth. It’s part of the good-cop-bad-cop routine that will be familiar to anyone who has studied the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

With his appeal to his own base locked up, Trump may well also shift to more moderate stances on social issues like abortion (he already wants to amend the GOP platform to a less draconian position) or gay and even transgender rights. He is consistent in his inconsistency, because, for him, winning is what counts. He has had a real case against Ted Cruz — that the senator has no base outside ideological-conservative quarters and is even less likely to win a general election. More potently, Trump has a worryingly strong argument against Clinton herself — or “crooked Hillary,” as he now dubs her.

His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton. After all, she has been a member of the American political elite for a quarter-century. Clinton, moreover, has shown no ability to inspire or rally anyone but her longtime loyalists. She is lost in the new media and has struggled to put away a 74-year-old socialist who is barely a member of her party. Her own unfavorables are only 11 points lower than Trump’s (far higher than Obama’s, John Kerry’s, or Al Gore’s were at this point in the race), and the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic.

It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout. All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crack (especially without Obama). Throughout the West these past few years, from France to Britain and Germany, the polls have kept missing the power of right-wing insurgency.

Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in Trump’s favor. (In large part, of course, this would be due to the GOP’s unprecedented decision to hold a vacancy open “for the people to decide,” another massive hyperdemocratic breach in our constitutional defenses.) And if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the man would obey: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” He later amended his remark, but it speaks volumes about his approach to power. Dick Cheney gave illegal orders to torture prisoners and coerced White House lawyers to cook up absurd “legal” defenses. Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled executive power look unambitious.

In his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis wrote a counterfactual about what would happen if fascism as it was then spreading across Europe were to triumph in America. It’s not a good novel, but it remains a resonant one. The imagined American fascist leader — a senator called Buzz Windrip — is a “Professional Common Man … But he was the Common Man ­twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”

He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” “ ‘I know the Press only too well,’ ” Windrip opines at one point. “ ‘Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest … plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks.’ ”

He is obsessed with the balance of trade and promises instant economic success: “ ‘I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need … We shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family.’ ” However fantastical and empty his promises, he nonetheless mesmerizes the party faithful at the nominating convention (held in Cleveland!): “Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.”

And all the elites who stood in his way? Crippled by their own failures, demoralized by their crumbling stature, they first mock and then cave. As one lone journalist laments before the election (he finds himself in a concentration camp afterward): “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.

And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.

More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them. Ted Cruz and John Kasich face their decisive battle in Indiana on May 3. But they need to fight on, with any tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end. The Republican delegates who are trying to protect their party from the whims of an outsider demagogue are, at this moment, doing what they ought to be doing to prevent civil and racial unrest, an international conflict, and a constitutional crisis. These GOP elites have every right to deploy whatever rules or procedural roadblocks they can muster, and they should refuse to be intimidated.

And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.
My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50–100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all alike in this way).
So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world.
But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.”
But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.
At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.
My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.
Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.
That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.
But at the time people don’t realise they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:

1. They are only looking at the present, not the past or future
2. They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally
3. Most people don’t read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views
   Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.
   On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.
   We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say ‘oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??’ But they don’t realise that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.
   Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.
   An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:
   Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honour NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.
   With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends ‘peace keeping forces’ and ‘aid lorries’ into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He annexes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).
   A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?
   This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.
   It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop whining, and how we shouldn’t blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible future Hitler (and yes, Godwin’s Law. But my comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of hatred until things spiral out of control). It’s easy to jump to conclusions that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but the wrong one.
   Ignoring and mocking the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.
   So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.
   What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.
   (Perhaps I’m just writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it coming.)

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.

Today we are embarked on a great project to make computers a part of everyday life. As Marc Andreessen memorably frames it, "software is eating the world". And those of us writing the software expect to be greeted as liberators.

Our intentions are simple and clear. First we will instrument, then we will analyze, then we will optimize. And you will thank us.

But the real world is a stubborn place. It is complex in ways that resist abstraction and modeling. It notices and reacts to our attempts to affect it. Nor can we hope to examine it objectively from the outside, any more than we can step out of our own skin.

The connected world we're building may resemble a computer system, but really it's just the regular old world from before, with a bunch of microphones and keyboards and flat screens sticking out of it. And it has the same old problems.

Approaching the world as a software problem is a category error that has led us into some terrible habits of mind.

BAD MENTAL HABITS

First, programmers are trained to seek maximal and global solutions. Why solve a specific problem in one place when you can fix the general problem for everybody, and for all time? We don't think of this as hubris, but as a laudable economy of effort. And the startup funding culture of big risk, big reward encourages this grandiose mode of thinking. There is powerful social pressure to avoid incremental change, particularly any change that would require working with people outside tech and treating them as intellectual equals.

Second, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish. The old adage has it that if you are given ten minutes to cut down a tree, you should spend the first five sharpening your axe. We are used to the idea of bootstrapping ourselves into a position of maximum leverage before tackling a problem.

In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.

Third, treating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help.

Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.

Of course, people obsessed with control have to eventually confront the fact of their own extinction. The response of the tech world to death has been enthusiastic. We are going to fix it. Google Ventures, for example, is seriously funding research into immortality. Their head VC will call you a "deathist" for pointing out that this is delusional.

Such fantasies of control come with a dark side. Witness the current anxieties about an artificial superintelligence, or Elon Musk's apparently sincere belief that we're living in a simulation. For a computer programmer, that's the ultimate loss of control. Instead of writing the software, you are the software.

We obsess over these fake problems while creating some real ones.

In our attempt to feed the world to software, techies have built the greatest surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen. Unlike earlier efforts, this one is fully mechanized and in a large sense autonomous. Its power is latent, lying in the vast amounts of permanently stored personal data about entire populations.

We started out collecting this information by accident, as part of our project to automate everything, but soon realized that it had economic value. We could use it to make the process self-funding. And so mechanized surveillance has become the economic basis of the modern tech industry.

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

Surveillance capitalism has some of the features of a zero-sum game. The actual value of the data collected is not clear, but it is definitely an advantage to collect more than your rivals do. Because human beings develop an immune response to new forms of tracking and manipulation, the only way to stay successful is to keep finding novel ways to peer into people's private lives. And because much of the surveillance economy is funded by speculators, there is an incentive to try flashy things that will capture the speculators' imagination, and attract their money.

This creates a ratcheting effect where the behavior of ever more people is tracked ever more closely, and the collected information retained, in the hopes that further dollars can be squeezed out of it.

Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale.

Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life.

Many of you had to obtain a US visa to attend this conference. The customs service announced yesterday it wants to start asking people for their social media profiles. Imagine trying to attend your next conference without a LinkedIn profile, and explaining to the American authorities why you are so suspiciously off the grid.

The reality is, opting out of surveillance capitalism means opting out of much of modern life.

We're used to talking about the private and public sector in the real economy, but in the surveillance economy this boundary doesn't exist. Much of the day-to-day work of surveillance is done by telecommunications firms, which have a close relationship with government. The techniques and software of surveillance are freely shared between practitioners on both sides. All of the major players in the surveillance economy cooperate with their own country's intelligence agencies, and are spied on (very effectively) by all the others.

As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates. I don't want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I can't figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger.

So I try to spin scenarios.

THE INEVITABLE LIST OF SCARY SCENARIOS

One of the candidates running for President this year has promised to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, as well as block Muslims from entering the country altogether. Try to imagine this policy enacted using the tools of modern technology. The FBI would subpoena Facebook for information on every user born abroad. Email and phone conversations would be monitored to check for the use of Arabic or Spanish, and sentiment analysis applied to see if the participants sounded "nervous". Social networks, phone metadata, and cell phone tracking would lead police to nests of hiding immigrants.

We could do a really good job deporting people if we put our minds to it.

Or consider the other candidate running for President, the one we consider the sane alternative, who has been a longtime promoter of a system of extrajudicial murder that uses blanket surveillance of cell phone traffic, email, and social media to create lists of people to be tracked and killed with autonomous aircraft. The system presumably includes points of human control (we don't know because it's secret), but there's no reason in principle it could not be automated. Get into the wrong person's car in Yemen, and you lose your life.

That this toolchain for eliminating enemies of the state is only allowed to operate in poor, remote places is a comfort to those of us who live elsewhere, but you can imagine scenarios where a mass panic would broaden its scope.

Or imagine what the British surveillance state, already the worst in Europe, is going to look like in two years, when it's no longer bound by the protections of European law, and economic crisis has driven the country further into xenophobia.

Or take an example from my home country, Poland. Abortion has been illegal in Poland for some time, but the governing party wants to tighten restrictions on abortion by investigating every miscarriage as a potential crime. Women will basically be murder suspects if they lose their baby. Imagine government agents combing your Twitter account, fitness tracker logs, credit card receipts and private communications for signs of potential pregnancy, with the results reported to the police to proactively protect your unborn baby.

We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support. Democratic societies sometimes adopt terrible policies.

When we talk about the moral economy of tech, we must confront the fact that we have created a powerful tool of social control. Those who run the surveillance apparatus understand its capabilities in a way the average citizen does not. My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country.

What we've done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.

CONCLUSION

The first step towards a better tech economy is humility and recognition of limits. It's time to hold technology politically accountable for its promises. I am very suspicious of attempts to change the world that can't first work on a local scale. If after decades we can't improve quality of life in places where the tech élite actually lives, why would we possibly make life better anywhere else?

We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART. And if Google offers to make us immortal, we should check first to make sure we'll have someplace to live.

Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. Politics is the thing we do to keep ourselves from murdering each other. In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.

Second, the surveillance economy is way too dangerous. Even if you trust everyone spying on you right now, the data they're collecting will eventually be stolen or bought by people who scare you. We have no ability to secure large data collections over time.

The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just like we don't let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal information. The risks are too high.

I think a workable compromise will be to allow all kinds of surveillance, but limit what anyone is allowed to store or sell.

More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

There is also prior art in attempts at achieving immortality, limitless wealth, and Galactic domination. We even know what happens if you try to keep dossiers on an entire country.

If we're going to try all these things again, let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.

IN A sense, this is a golden age for free speech. Your smartphone can call up newspapers from the other side of world in seconds. More than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blog updates are published every single day. Anyone with access to the internet can be a publisher, and anyone who can reach Wikipedia enters a digital haven where America’s First Amendment reigns.

However, watchdogs report that speaking out is becoming more dangerous—and they are right. As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant.

In this section
Under attack
Don’t cave in, Mr Hollande
Basically flawed
Of banks and bureaucrats
Between Bentonville and Bezos
Cleaning up
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Europe
Russia
Rwanda
Burundi
Vladimir Putin
Free speech is under attack in three ways. First, repression by governments has increased. Several countries have reimposed cold-war controls or introduced new ones. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia enjoyed a free-for-all of vigorous debate. Under Vladimir Putin, the muzzle has tightened again. All the main television-news outlets are now controlled by the state or by Mr Putin’s cronies. Journalists who ask awkward questions are no longer likely to be sent to labour camps, but several have been murdered.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ordered a crackdown after he took over in 2012, toughening up censorship of social media, arresting hundreds of dissidents and replacing liberal debate in universities with extra Marxism. In the Middle East the overthrow of despots during the Arab spring let people speak freely for the first time in generations. This has lasted in Tunisia, but Syria and Libya are more dangerous for journalists than they were before the uprisings; and Egypt is ruled by a man who says, with a straight face: “Don’t listen to anyone but me.”

Words, sticks and stones
Second, a worrying number of non-state actors are enforcing censorship by assassination. Reporters in Mexico who investigate crime or corruption are often murdered, and sometimes tortured first. Jihadists slaughter those they think have insulted their faith. When authors and artists say anything that might be deemed disrespectful of Islam, they take risks. Secular bloggers in Bangladesh are hacked to death in the street (see article); French cartoonists are gunned down in their offices. The jihadists hurt Muslims more than any others, not least by making it harder for them to have an honest discussion about how to organise their societies.

Third, the idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offence is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary.

Nevertheless, many students in America and Europe believe that someone should exercise it. Some retreat into the absolutism of identity politics, arguing that men have no right to speak about feminism nor whites to speak about slavery. Others have blocked thoughtful, well-known speakers, such as Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from being heard on campus (see article).

Concern for the victims of discrimination is laudable. And student protest is often, in itself, an act of free speech. But university is a place where students are supposed to learn how to think. That mission is impossible if uncomfortable ideas are off-limits. And protest can easily stray into preciousness: the University of California, for example, suggests that it is a racist “micro-aggression” to say that “America is a land of opportunity”, because it could be taken to imply that those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.

The inconvenient truth
Intolerance among Western liberals also has wholly unintended consequences. Even despots know that locking up mouthy but non-violent dissidents is disreputable. Nearly all countries have laws that protect freedom of speech. So authoritarians are always looking out for respectable-sounding excuses to trample on it. National security is one. Russia recently sentenced Vadim Tyumentsev, a blogger, to five years in prison for promoting “extremism”, after he criticised Russian policy in Ukraine. “Hate speech” is another. China locks up campaigners for Tibetan independence for “inciting ethnic hatred”; Saudi Arabia flogs blasphemers; Indians can be jailed for up to three years for promoting disharmony “on grounds of religion, race...caste...or any other ground whatsoever”.

The threat to free speech on Western campuses is very different from that faced by atheists in Afghanistan or democrats in China. But when progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence. When human-rights campaigners object to what is happening under oppressive regimes, despots can point out that liberal democracies such as France and Spain also criminalise those who “glorify” or “defend” terrorism, and that many Western countries make it a crime to insult a religion or to incite racial hatred.

One strongman who has enjoyed tweaking the West for hypocrisy is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey. At home, he will tolerate no insults to his person, faith or policies. Abroad, he demands the same courtesy—and in Germany he has found it. In March a German comedian recited a satirical poem about him “shagging goats and oppressing minorities” (only the more serious charge is true). Mr Erdogan invoked an old, neglected German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Amazingly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has let the prosecution proceed. Even more amazingly, nine other European countries still have similar laws, and 13 bar insults against their own head of state.

Opinion polls reveal that in many countries support for free speech is lukewarm and conditional. If words are upsetting, people would rather the government or some other authority made the speaker shut up. A group of Islamic countries are lobbying to make insulting religion a crime under international law. They have every reason to expect that they will succeed.

So it is worth spelling out why free expression is the bedrock of all liberties. Free speech is the best defence against bad government. Politicians who err (that is, all of them) should be subjected to unfettered criticism. Those who hear it may respond to it; those who silence it may never find out how their policies misfired. As Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, has pointed out, no democracy with a free press ever endured famine.

In all areas of life, free debate sorts good ideas from bad ones. Science cannot develop unless old certainties are queried. Taboos are the enemy of understanding. When China’s government orders economists to offer optimistic forecasts, it guarantees that its own policymaking will be ill-informed. When American social-science faculties hire only left-wing professors, their research deserves to be taken less seriously.

The law should recognise the right to free speech as nearly absolute. Exceptions should be rare. Child pornography should be banned, since its production involves harm to children. States need to keep some things secret: free speech does not mean the right to publish nuclear launch codes. But in most areas where campaigners are calling for enforced civility (or worse, deference) they should be resisted.

Blasphemy laws are an anachronism. A religion should be open to debate. Laws against hate speech are unworkably subjective and widely abused. Banning words or arguments which one group finds offensive does not lead to social harmony. On the contrary, it gives everyone an incentive to take offence—a fact that opportunistic politicians with ethnic-based support are quick to exploit.

Incitement to violence should be banned. However, it should be narrowly defined as instances when the speaker intends to goad those who agree with him to commit violence, and when his words are likely to have an immediate effect. Shouting “Let’s kill the Jews” to an angry mob outside a synagogue qualifies. Drunkenly posting “I wish all the Jews were dead” on an obscure Facebook page probably does not. Saying something offensive about a group whose members then start a riot certainly does not count. They should have responded with words, or by ignoring the fool who insulted them.

In volatile countries, such as Rwanda and Burundi, words that incite violence will differ from those that would do so in a stable democracy. But the principles remain the same. The police should deal with serious and imminent threats, not arrest every bigot with a laptop or a megaphone. (The governments of Rwanda and Burundi, alas, show no such restraint.)

Areopagitica online
Facebook, Twitter and other digital giants should, as private organisations, be free to decide what they allow to be published on their platforms. By the same logic, a private university should be free, as far as the law is concerned, to enforce a speech code on its students. If you don’t like a Christian college’s rules against swearing, pornography and expressing disbelief in God, you can go somewhere else. However, any public college, and any college that aspires to help students grow intellectually, should aim to expose them to challenging ideas. The world outside campus will often offend them; they must learn to fight back using peaceful protests, rhetoric and reason.

These are good rules for everyone. Never try to silence views with which you disagree. Answer objectionable speech with more speech. Win the argument without resorting to force. And grow a tougher hide.

Violences policières, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Front national, Nuit debout mais aussi écologie, Pierre Rabhi, spiritualité et zapatisme… la rappeuse marseillaise Keny Arkana a accordé à Reporterre un entretien. Redoutant une guerre civile, elle souhaite une ouverture des consciences à la bienveillance.
Keny Arkana a grandi à Marseille. Militante altermondialiste, elle a confondé le collectif La Rage du peuple et réalisé Un autre monde est possible (2006), documentaire tourné au fil de ses voyages au Brésil, au Mali, au Mexique et en France. Son nouvel album, État d’urgence, est disponible en ligne à prix libre.

Reporterre — Ton nouvel opus s’intitule «  État d’urgence  ». Parles-tu de l’état d’urgence du gouvernement, de l’état d’urgence social, de l’état d’urgence écologique  ?
Keny Arkana — En vérité, j’aurais pu l’appeler «  hymne à la paix  ». J’ai écrit ces textes suite aux événements de novembre, dans le contexte de la mise en place de l’état d’urgence. C’est un état d’urgence national mais aussi mondial. Depuis le 11 Septembre, il y a eu toute cette conjoncture de lois liberticides et antiterroristes, et puis la France est partie en guerre, ça fait 15 ans maintenant. Mais la guerre, c’est dans les deux sens : c’est facile de la faire du haut de ton avion, en envoyant des missiles et en tuant plein de gens. Mais, à un moment donné, on se la mange en retour, et c’est toujours des innocents qui payent. Pour moi, il y a vraiment un avant et un après 11 Septembre  et on vit cette continuité, avec notre  11 Septembre  à nous aussi.

Le 13 novembre, c’est un 11 Septembre français   ?
Certains diront Charlie Hebdo, d’autres le 13 novembre, mais ce qui est sûr, c’est que tout le monde est dans la peur maintenant, on cherche des coupables tout le temps, on est dans la division et la haine, on se communautarise à fond. On en est arrivé à des pensées hyper-violentes, la majorité des gens serait presque pour la peine de mort maintenant  ! Mais comme on est représenté par Sarko ou Valls, qui sont eux-mêmes hyper-violents et hyper-bas… Peut-être qu’on a les représentants qu’on mérite, mais je trouve qu’on tombe dans une vague d’obscurantisme.
Et pour moi, c’est devenue une urgence de se poser les bonnes questions. Je crois qu’il est important de canaliser cette violence et d’insuffler un peu de paix. Il faut qu’on arrive à faire un effort de bienveillance, parce que sinon, ce n’est pas la révolution qui nous attend, mais la guerre civile.

Violence d’État, policières, politiques : le climat s’est dégradé ces derniers mois.
Plus il y aura cette escalade de la violence, plus il y aura des lois ultrasécuritaires qui donneront justement raison à cette violence-là. Bien sûr que je comprends les manifestants qui n’en peuvent plus de toutes ces lois, on a toujours l’impression que notre violence est légitime. Mais si on prend une grille de lecture plus haute, j’ai l’impression que tout est instrumentalisé. Y’a un truc où je me dis qu’on joue le jeu du gouvernement.

Mais que faire face aux violences policières  ?
J’en ai parfois parlé avec mes amis militants, qui me traitent d’ailleurs de grosse naïve, mais je pense qu’il faudrait faire des actions de sensibilisation dans les commissariats. Sensibiliser les policiers et leur expliquer pourquoi nos luttes sont justes, et pourquoi elles les concernent eux et leurs enfants. Aller dans les commissariats et discuter, parce que, face aux barricades, chacun est dans son rôle, ça devient compliqué. T’imagines si demain, en pleine manifestation, un CRS décidait, devant ses collègues, d’arrêter, de poser son casque et de passer de notre côté  ? Ça casserait une division à laquelle on veut nous faire croire. C’est le truc qui ferait le plus peur au gouvernement.
Mais j’espère juste qu’à ce moment-là, il n’y aurait pas un lâche qui en profiterait pour aller savater le flic. Parce qu’à un moment, la lutte n’est pas seulement politique et sociale, elle est aussi humaine. Et il faut savoir où est vraiment ton ennemi et où est vraiment ton camarade. Bien sûr qu’on a toutes les raisons d’avoir la haine des flics surtout lorsqu’on a subi ses violences — moi, j’avais 13 ans lors de mon premier passage à tabac, ils m’ont frappée pendant des heures et j’avais la rage. Mais veut-on se venger ou veut-on changer les choses  ? Il faut savoir avaler sa rancœur, la transmuter, pour l’intérêt général et collectif.
De toute façon, on ne gagnera pas dans le rapport de force d’aujourd’hui. Et même si on y arrivait, on reproduirait les mêmes schémas après. Parce que, malheureusement, la plupart des gens n’ont pas fait ce travail intérieur de changement de conscience, au service de la bienveillance.

Ne vois-tu pas une forme d’espoir avec Nuit debout  ?
Si, c’est clair  ! On touche justement cette humanité-là quand on résiste comme cela à plusieurs. Depuis les Indignés, il y a cette nouvelle forme de résistance où il n’y a plus besoin d’être encarté ni de donner son petit pouvoir à un représentant politique ou syndical. On crée des outils, des assemblées populaires, des tours de parole, on apprend à s’exprimer et à s’écouter, etc. C’est super important de récupérer son petit pouvoir et de construire un truc horizontal. C’est quelque chose qui n’existait pas il y a dix ans. Donc oui, Il y a un éveil des consciences, une nouvelle manière de voir les choses, plus solidaire et plus horizontal, et c’est très positif.

Faut-il ensuite s’institutionnaliser à l’image de Podemos, qui est l’une des formes héritées des Indignés  ?
Personnellement je suis contre, j’ai toujours dit que le changement se construirait par le bas. Pourquoi faudrait-il prendre les outils de Babylone pour lutter contre Babylone  ? À partir du moment où tu te structures autour d’un parti, à chercher des financeurs, tu retombes dans le jeu.
J’ai été au Chiapas pendant un an, en 2014. Les zapatistes sont pour moi le meilleur exemple d’autonomie et de politique au service de l’humain. Et ils sont très à cheval sur le concept de la révolution totale : apprend à te changer toi-même avant de vouloir changer quoi que ce soit !
Mais aussi en France : partout il y a ce mouvement de retour à la terre, de construction en autonomie, sous forme de petits collectifs d’une trentaine de personnes, chacun récupérant son pouvoir créatif. Ça ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y a pas d’organisation : il faut les gérer, les trente personnes  ! Il faut trouver les bons outils.
C’est important dans sa propre réalisation, cette idée de pouvoir créateur, parce qu’à la base, l’humain est fait pour créer. Mais vu qu’on évolue dans un monde qui ne nous donne pas cet espace-là, il y a une distorsion. Du coup, on se détruit nous-mêmes, on détruit les autres.
Aujourd’hui, la plupart des gens, si tu leur demandes ce que serait la maison de leur rêve, ils vont te sortir un truc préfabriqué, la villa avec la piscine… Mais non, frère  ! Je te parle de toi, la maison qui te ressemble, toi  !
Peut-être que toi, ton kiff ce serait une maison dans les arbres, et toi, une grande maison sans angle droit avec un toit-terrasse. Et moi, ce serait une maison toute bleue ou peu importe. Chacun peut aller au fond de son imaginaire, on est tous singulier. Mais aujourd’hui, on est vampirisé jusque dans nos imaginaires.
JPEG - 98.5 ko
Keny Arkana lors du festival Solidays de 2013.

Comment faire pour toucher la partie de la population qui n’est pas aussi politisée  ?
Sensibiliser les gens passera toujours par l’exemple. La plupart des gens rêvent d’un autre monde. Juste, ils ont peur, ils n’y croient pas, il n’y a pas de références auxquelles s’accrocher. Mais si demain, ils voient à côté d’eux qu’il y a une autre manière de vivre, que tous ces petits villages qui se mettent en réseau partout créent de l’autonomie alimentaire, que les gens sont plus épanouis, qu’il y a un truc juste et sain, eh bien, petit à petit, ça va se contaminer. C’est important de résister et de pousser les murs, mais il faut aussi construire derrière. Sinon on s’essouffle.

On dirait le proverbe de Gandhi, «  soyez vous-même le changement que vous voulez voir dans le monde  »   ?
Exactement. Pour moi, dans la désintoxication des imaginaires, on a besoin de spiritualité. Ça n’a rien de dogmatique ou de religieux. Tout le monde fait un truc mystique du spirituel, mais c’est juste l’adjectif du mot esprit… Il s’agit de pouvoir se regarder et creuser un peu en soi-même, pour se libérer de tous nos schémas.
Gandhi, il était puissant. On se moque du petit Indien, mais dans le pays le plus divisé du monde, avec les castes et l’empire anglais, il a tout retourné avec la parole, la force de la compassion et de la tolérance, il a su casser les schémas.
On peut avoir les meilleures valeurs et défendre les meilleurs principes du monde, il y aura toujours dans notre quotidien une part de jalousie et d’ego qui reviendra. Et tant qu’il y aura ça, j’aurai du mal à croire qu’on peut vraiment changer les choses. Parce qu’on sera toujours à l’image de ce qu’on combat.

Spiritualité, révolution des consciences, changement individuel : connais-tu Pierre Rabhi et le mouvement des Colibris  ?
J’ai énormément de respect pour Pierre Rabhi, il a fait des choses incroyables, autant par sa pensée que dans ses actes : il a fait pousser des rizières dans le désert… Ce mec-là est puissant.

Le renouveau politique passe-t-il forcément par la terre  ?
Si tu n’es pas autonome sur le plan alimentaire, tu n’es pas autonome tout court. C’est une de nos premières fonctions vitales, le reste est forcément superflu. C’est une évidence qu’il faut reconnecter l’humain à la terre pour de vrai.

Te qualifierais-tu d’écologiste  ?
Je n’aime pas ce terme. Je trouve que c’est encore trop compris comme au service de l’homme. D’ailleurs, je ne me considère pas comme humaniste au sens occidental du terme, qui met tout au service de l’humanité. Une fois, on m’a dit que c’était humaniste de détruire la moitié de l’Amazonie, puisque c’est pour le besoin des humains… alors si c’est ça, je ne suis pas humaniste !
Moi, je suis «  vivantiste  », je suis pour le vivant. Je vois la terre comme les Amérindiens, une vision maternelle de la Pachamama : j’entends la détresse de la Terre, je sens les espèces vivantes, les plantes. Ce n’est pas pour mon intérêt d’humaine que j’ai envie de défendre la Terre. Dans ma conception, la Terre ne m’appartient pas, c’est nous qui appartenons à la Terre. Je crois que, dans tous les écosystèmes, il y a une harmonie. Et nous, dans notre instinct de domination, on casse cette harmonie.
C’est le Vatican et l’inquisition qui nous ont coupés de la nature en nous faisant croire qu’elle était une menace, que c’était le diable. Au contraire, si tu connais vraiment la nature, tu sais que là où tu te fais mordre par un serpent, à côté il y a la plante anti-venin. La nature est bien faite. Il y a un truc beau, un truc aimant. Elle te soigne, la nature, si tu es un peu connecté aux énergies, tu sens qu’elle est puissante, vivante…

Tu es végétarienne  ?
Oui. Mais je ne veux pas être trop rigide non plus : si je suis chez des indigènes qui ont tué un poulet pour moi, je ne vais pas faire la tendax.

En France, l’une des luttes emblématiques pour la terre, c’est Notre-Dame-des-Landes…
La dernière fois que j’y étais, c’était en 2013, ça fait un petit moment. Je trouve ça super, tout le mouvement des Zad en France, mais des fois, ça me met aussi un peu en colère. Une colère de grande sœur, tu vois, mais j’ai envie de leur dire : « Les frères, soyez vraiment des gardiens de la Terre  ! » Je suis désolée, mais la lutte, c’est sérieux, c’est pas boire des bières et fumer des pétards. D’ailleurs, quand tu vas chez les zapatistes, c’est interdit. Je suis moi-même une fumeuse, je suis pas en train de juger. Mais je dis ça parce que j’ai vu trop de fois des pollutions de Babylone-système sur la Zad. Il suffit pas de faire le révolté, il faut aussi être à l’image du changement.

Mais défends-tu tout de même l’occupation  ?
Bien sûr qu’il faut occuper  !

Et pour la consultation, tu voterais non si tu pouvais  ?
Non à l’aéroport  ? Ah oui ! D’ailleurs, ça fait chier de devoir voter pour ça : ça devrait être une évidence  ! La France, c’est tout petit : vous voulez mettre combien d’aéroports  ? L’aéroport, il y en a déjà un à Nantes. Là, il y a un super écosystème, préservé. Sans parler de toutes les familles, de tous les agriculteurs, de tous les paysans. Et puis, il y a le problème du financement aussi. Les contribuables qui paient un truc dont ils n’ont pas forcément envie, pour les bénéfices d’un privé [Vinci]. Et si ce privé-là ne rentre pas dans ses chiffres, il y a encore l’État qui lui donne des subventions  ! Il faudrait plus qu’un référendum local.

C’est-à-dire  ?
Pour moi, le meilleur moyen de se faire entendre dans le rapport de force, c’est de bloquer l’économie. C’est l’exemple des piqueteros en Argentine : ils ont réussi à le faire dans un pays qui fait huit fois la France. La France, c’est petit : il y a cinq autoroutes principales… C’est Vinci, l’ennemi : on pourrait faire une action « péages gratuits », des concerts et des teufs sur les autoroutes pour les bloquer. Si tu bloques ne serait-ce qu’une journée, tu bloques toute l’économie du pays, et tu fais perdre des millions à Vinci  ! Il y a de vraies actions à faire, et quand tu touches au nerf de la guerre, on t’écoute un peu plus.

Le « collectif de Tarnac » dit qu’il faut que tout s’arrête pour pouvoir tout recommencer. Es-tu d’accord avec cette approche  ?
Oui. Le seul problème, c’est qu’il y aura toujours des gens qui le prendront comme un acte violent. Parce que c’est une frustration et parce qu’ils n’en sont pas là dans leur conscience. C’est compliqué : au bout d’un moment, où s’arrête l’autoritarisme  ?

La grande difficulté des mouvements de contestation aujourd’hui, c’est de toucher les classes populaires…
C’est compliqué. Un mec de quartier a toujours été exclu, pourquoi il se sentirait concerné ? Qui est là pour lutter à ses cotés contre la discrimination, la ghettoïsation, les abus policiers et toutes les portes qu’on lui ferme à la gueule ? En voyant les manifs, il peut se dire que c’est les bourgeois contre les bourgeois, que ces mêmes gens qui militent n’en ont jamais rien eu à faire de lui. Il y a un désintérêt du fait de l’exclusion. Le manque d’humanité pousse au manque d’humanité, c’est un cercle infernal. Et puis, il y a aussi toute cette pression capitaliste, dans les quartiers, une sorte de culte de l’argent. Quand ta famille a tout sacrifié, qu’elle a quitté son pays, ses proches, pour pouvoir t’offrir une situation et un certain confort de vie, c’est difficile de mettre une croix sur toute cette douleur et tout cet espoir sous prétexte qu’il faut faire la « révolution ». C’est dans les quartiers qu’on subi toutes les pires galères dans ce pays. Quand ton grand-père s’est battu pour la France et que, trois générations après, on te parle encore de rentrer chez toi, il y a de quoi cultiver quelques rancœurs. Ça rend la convergence beaucoup plus compliquée. Je pense qu’il va falloir une génération ou deux encore, pour faire évoluer cette situation.
Forcément, ceux qui viennent de la classe moyenne n’ont pas tout cet héritage, ils sont forcément plus libres. Et puis, en France, il y a toujours eu ce côté élitiste chez les militants. Leurs brochures, c’est pas donné à tout le monde de les lire. Quand tu vas en Grèce, il y a un truc beaucoup plus populaire dans le militantisme. Il n’y a pas la même histoire d’immigration aussi, parce qu’il n’y a pas toute cette histoire des colonies. C’est compliqué, la France, et c’est pour ça que, tant qu’il n’y aura pas eu des guérisons entre les gens, j’ai peur que pousser à la révolte ne rapporte que la guerre civile. Et ne fasse le jeu des identitaires, qui prennent à fond du galon depuis quelques années.

Certains mouvements d’extrême droite noyautent les quartiers populaires, autour de Dieudonné ou de Soral, par exemple. Le FN a déjà tenté à certains moments de récupérer tes chansons. Que fait-on face à cela  ?
Je suis pour l’humain et donc pour le débat. Pas avec des Marine Le Pen, parce que c’est des manipulateurs, ces gens-là. Mais avec les petites gens. Souvent, les gens qui ont les idéologies et les pensées les plus nauséabondes ont aussi des blessures de ouf. Est-ce qu’on continue à alimenter cette blessure  ? Je veux que les gens comprennent bien mon discours, sans faire d’amalgame, parce que c’est subtil ce que je raconte. Je pense qu’on se trompe à faire des camps. L’exclusion ne fait que renforcer les fractures.
Franchement, si demain, avec mes potes du quartier, on voit débarquer des fachos, plutôt que d’aller se «  fighter  », je préférerais dire : « Venez, on se pose et on discute, c’est quoi le problème en fait  ? Elle vient d’où, toute cette haine  ? Pourquoi  ? Tu connais l’histoire  ? La France, si c’est un pays riche, c’est grâce aux minerais de l’Afrique noire, encore aujourd’hui. Vous êtes sûrs de vouloir faire chacun chez soi  ? Parce que c’est vous les perdants  ! »
Dans l’histoire de la France, on ne peut pas enlever la colonisation. S’il y a une dette, c’est les pays coloniaux qui doivent beaucoup… Je me dis qu’il faut parler, aller au fond des choses, mettre les mecs face à leur contradiction. Alors que dans le rejet, tu donnes raison à l’autre. On est semblable dans nos cœurs. Tu vois, même le raciste, peut-être que si tu connais son histoire et que tu as un peu de compassion, tu peux te dire : «  Ah, okay, il en est arrivé là, pour ça, il a eu telle expérience de vie.  » La compassion, c’est important pour notre guérison générale. Parce que vraiment, on est tous un peu malade. Il faut être tolérant. Et ne pas être comme ceux que l’on combat.

As-tu prévu de voter en 2017  ?
Je ne sais pas. On ne changera jamais rien par ça. J’aime bien le dicton : « Voter, c’est lécher le fouet de son maître. » En même temps, je me dis qu’au nom de tous les gens qui se sont battus pour ce droit, les femmes qui n’ont voté qu’en 1945… C’est clair qu’ils n’ont pas lutté pour cette mascarade-là. Mais ça ne nous coûte rien de mettre un bulletin dans l’urne. Le XXᵉ siècle, c’était gagner des droits, le XXIᵉ, faire qu’ils ne nous les enlèvent pas  ! Notre acte citoyen devrait être au quotidien. Je ne ferai pas la promotion pour les grandes campagnes de vote, mais peut-être que j’irai à titre personnel.
« ÉTAT D’URGENCE », UN EP À PRIX LIBRE

Keny Arkana — Ça faisait longtemps que j’avais envie d’essayer pour être plus en direct avec le public. L’accès aux chansons est gratuit, mais sans dire gratuit, car en France, on a un problème avec ça : la gratuité sous-entend quelque chose de bâclé, qui n’a pas de valeur… Donc là, si tu veux participer, tu participes.
J’aimerais pouvoir tout faire en prix libre, mais c’est compliqué dans ce système. T’imagines du « prix libre » à la Fnac… ? Du coup, c’est moi qui ai tout produit, et j’ai laissé Because Music [sa maison de disque] le mettre sur Itunes, pour qu’ils s’y retrouvent.
J’ai décidé de rentrer dans l’industrie pour sensibiliser des gens qui ne seraient pas touchés sinon. Ma maison de disque comprend la démarche et valide depuis le début la profondeur du projet. On ne m’a jamais dit « il y a une phrase que je n’aime pas » et ça, c’est le plus important.

• Propos recueillis par Barnabé Binctin et Vladimir Slonska-Malvaud

On this newsletter, we talk a lot about the ambiguity and uncertainty caused by technological change, and the resulting feeling of anomie and being lost. This means a lot of people are looking for a purpose, and almost always doing so through their work. How do you find your purpose? It's quite simple. Find your people. Specifically, what I call your pizza team.

"Purpose" is one of those rare "deep" life questions that actually has a simple, practical answer that works for almost everybody. I didn't see this for a long time because I happen to be one of the minority for whom this simple, practical answer DOESN'T work. So this is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" issues of the breaking smart newsletter.

1/ Several big, anchor ideas in Breaking Smart Season 1 revolve around small teams.

2/ The idea of a rough consensus around a direction of maximal interestingness assumes a small team.

3/ The idea that most effective teams can be fed by two pizzas assumes a small team. Let's call such teams pizza teams.

4/ The importance of pizza teams goes far beyond mere effectiveness in pursuing the specific work you're doing.

5/ For whatever complicated reasons, small teams don't just effectively pursue a direction in the outer world, they induce a sense of inner purpose in members

6/ This sense of inner purpose is crucial for psychological health for most people, and is what makes the specific thing you're doing meaningful.

7/ What you do may make an impact on the world due to how tens or hundreds or millions of people react to it.

8/ But it will make an impact on YOU because of at most 11 other people. This is is your meaning-creating pizza team.

9/ Solitary individuals struggle to find purpose. Equally, groups larger than about 12 struggle to catalyze purpose in their members

10/ You may depend on larger groups -- your "tribe" say, or strangers providing critical services, or your ideological "people," be they liberals, conservatives or libertarians.

11/ But they aren't going to create meaning for you. Only your pizza team can do that. Purpose is personal and social, not institutional or impersonally cultural.

12/ This effect can be seen in many domains: military units, science collaborations, sports teams, business turnaround teams, and startup teams.

13/ Finding purpose and finding your pizza team are a chicken-and-egg pair of problems, but it's generally easier to start the loop by looking for your pizza team.

14/ This is necessary, not sufficient. Whether your pizza team decides to create a great product, make a movie, or plan a terror attack depends on many other things.

15/ Business teams, and startups in particular, unlike sports teams or military units, have a double jeopardy situation: they have to find external AND internal purpose.

16/ A sports team has its external purpose defined by the sport: win the big tournament. It just needs to find the inner purpose/meaning.

17/ But a startup has to find inner purpose by discovering its pizza team at the same time as it pivots around looking for a product-market-fit in the market.

18/ Mature organizations have a weaker version of this: a historical purpose and an existing senior executive team that may have become maladapted to current reality.

19/ The "bus principle" proposed by Jim Collins ("get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, then decide where to go") is the big-corp version of (re)discovering your pizza team.

20/ Occasionally a really powerful and charismatic leader can start with a one-person purpose and attract a rallying around his or her flag.

21/ But this is rare. Most often, fertile, high-bandwidth personal relationships form first, and great external missions start to emerge as inner purpose starts to gel.

22/ When such relationships form, they create one of the most scarce things in the world: collective attention from two or more people.

23/ Collective attention is MUCH more powerful than the attention of a single person because it allows for shared meaning creation through communication.

24/ When only one purposeless person sees something to possibly latch on to as a purpose, not much can happen. And they are more at risk of chasing delusions caused by ambiguities.

25/ When 2+ do, they can talk, validate each other's perspectives ("no, it's not all in your head"), learn from differences ("you're missing this part"), and make great things happen.

26/ So if you find a relationship that seems to catalyze meaning and purpose in your life, make sure you immediately begin investing in it. Your life depends on it, not just your current project.

27/ Even if you are most effective alone (like me), you likely have a pizza team of (possibly dead) people you relate closely to through their writings or loose collaborations.

28/ But don't rationalize the social situation you may have adapted to out of necessity. It's far too easy to believe that the life you have is where you'll discover purpose.

29/ Until you've tried a variety of trust relationships of various intimacy levels, in groups of various sizes, you don't know what kind of pizza team you need.

30/ So go forth and eat as much pizza as you need to, until you find your purpose. There's all sorts these days: gluten-free, vegan, low-carb. So you have no excuse.

IN JULY 2012 a man calling himself Sam Bacile posted a short video on YouTube. It showed the Prophet Muhammad bedding various women, taking part in gory battles and declaring: “Every non-Muslim is an infidel. Their lands, their women, their children are our spoils.”

The film was, as Salman Rushdie, a British author, later put it, “crap”. “The Innocence of Muslims” could have remained forever obscure, had someone not dubbed it into Arabic and reposted it in September that year. An Egyptian chat-show host denounced it and before long, this short, crap film was sparking riots across the Muslim world—and beyond. A group linked to al-Qaeda murdered America’s ambassador in Libya. Protests erupted in Afghanistan, Australia, Britain, France and India. Pakistan’s railways minister offered a $100,000 bounty to whoever killed the film-maker—and was not sacked. By the end of the month at least 50 people had died.

“Consider for a moment: the most senior officer of the mightiest armed forces the world has ever seen feels it necessary to contact some backwoods Florida pastor to beg him not to promote a 13-minute D-movie YouTube upload. Such are the power asymmetries in this connected world,” writes Timothy Garton Ash in “Free Speech”, a fine new book on the subject. The story of “The Innocence of Muslims” illustrates several points about how freedom of speech has evolved in recent years.

First, social media make it easy for anyone to publish anything to a potentially global audience. This is a huge boost for freedom of speech, and has led to a vast increase in the volume of material published. But when words and pictures move so rapidly across borders, conflict often results. Different nations have different notions of what may and may not be said. If the pseudonymous Mr Bacile had made his video in the early 1990s, Muslims far away would probably never have heard of it, and no one would have died.

Second, technology firms are having to grapple with horribly complex decisions about censorship. The big global ones such as Facebook and Twitter aspire to be politically neutral, but do not permit “hate speech” or obscenity on their platforms. In America the White House asked Google, which owns YouTube, to “review” whether “The Innocence of Muslims” violated YouTube’s guidelines against hate speech. The company decided that it did not, since it attacked a religion (ie, a set of ideas) rather than the people who held those beliefs. The White House did not force Google to censor the video; indeed, thanks to America’s constitutional guarantee of free speech, it had no legal power to do so.

In other countries, however, governments have far more power to silence speech. At least 21 asked Google to block or consider blocking the video. In countries where YouTube has a legal presence and a local version, such as India, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, it complied. In countries where it did not have a legal presence, it refused. Some governments, such as Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s, responded by blocking YouTube completely.

Shut up or I’ll kill you
The third recent change is that, whereas the threats to free speech used to come almost entirely from governments, now non-state actors are nearly as intimidating. In the Mexican state of Veracruz, for example, at least 17 journalists have disappeared or been murdered since 2010, presumably by drug-traffickers. The gangs’ reach is long: one journalist fled to Mexico City, where he was tracked down and butchered. And their methods are brutal: in February the body of a reporter was found dumped by the roadside, handcuffed, half-naked and with a plastic bag over her head.

Globally, the willingness of some Muslims to murder people they think have insulted the Prophet has chilled discussion of one of the world’s great religions—even in places where Muslims are a minority, such as Europe. Radical Islamists are attempting to enforce a global speech code, in which frank discussion of their beliefs is punishable by death.

This began in 1989 with a threat from a state: Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s leader, issued a fatwa condemning Mr Rushdie to death for a novel that he thought insulted Islam. He invited devout Muslims everywhere to carry out the sentence. It was almost certainly one of them who murdered Mr Rushdie’s Japanese translator in 1991, though the killer was never caught.

Since then, the notion that individual Muslims have a duty to defend their faith by assassinating its critics has spread. Most Muslims are peaceful, but it takes only a few to enforce what Mr Garton Ash calls “the assassin’s veto”. The Islamist who murdered Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, for making a film about the abuse of Muslim women, said he could not live “in any country where free speech is allowed”. In 2015 two gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French paper which had published cartoons of Muhammad, killing 12 people. Many speakers and writers across the world are terrified of offending Islamists. A satirical musical called “The Book of Mormon” is an international hit; no theatre would dare stage a similar treatment of the Koran.

Islamist intimidation is the most extreme example of a broader, and worrying, trend. From the mosques of Cairo to the classrooms at Yale, all sorts of people and groups are claiming a right not to be offended. This is quite different from believing that people should, in general, be polite. A right not to be offended implies a power to police other people’s speech. “Taking offence has never been easier, or indeed more popular,” observes Flemming Rose, a former editor at Jyllands-Posten, a Danish paper. He should know. After his paper published cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, at least 200 people died.

The zealots who hack atheists to death in Bangladesh (see article) are far more frightening than the American students who shout down speakers with whom they disagree (see article). But they are on the same spectrum: both use a subjective definition of “offensive” to suppress debate. They may do this by disrupting speeches they object to; Mr Garton Ash calls this “the heckler’s veto”. Or they may enlist the power of the state to silence speakers who offend them. Politicians have gleefully jumped on the bandwagon, and are increasingly using laws against “hate speech” to punish dissidents.

This article will argue that free speech is in retreat. Granted, technology has given millions a megaphone, and speaking out is easier than it was during the cold war, when most people lived under authoritarian states. But in the past few years restrictions on what people can say or write have grown more onerous.

Freedom House, an American think-tank, compiles an annual index of freedom of expression. This “declined to its lowest point in 12 years in 2015, as political, criminal and terrorist forces sought to co-opt or silence the media in their broader struggle for power”. The share of the world’s populace living in countries with a free press fell from 38% in 2005 to 31% in 2015; the share who had to make do with only “partly free” media rose from 28% to 36%. Other watchdogs are similarly glum. Reporters Without Borders’ global index of press freedom has declined by 14% since 2013.

Uncle Xi is watching you
Among big countries, China scores worst. Speech there has hardly ever been free. Under Mao Zedong, the slightest whisper of dissent was savagely punished. After he died in 1976, people were gradually allowed more freedom to criticise the government, so long as they did not challenge the party’s monopoly on power. Digital technology accelerated this process. By the time Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, hundreds of millions of Chinese were happily sharing their views on social media.

Mr Xi found this unnerving, so he cracked down. China’s thousands of censors have ramped up efforts to block subversive online messages. Hundreds of lawyers and activists have been harassed or jailed. Liberal debate on university campuses has been suppressed (students and teachers are being urged to pay more attention to Marxism-Leninism). According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog in New York, at least 49 journalists were in prison in China in December 2015. In April that year Gao Yu, an elderly reporter, was given a stiff sentence for “leaking state secrets”—namely, a party document warning against “Western” ideas such as media freedom.

Many Chinese stay one step ahead of the censors, using software to jump over the Great Firewall of China and reach foreign websites. Nonetheless, Mr Xi’s crackdown will surely weaken his country. If information does not flow freely, it is hard to innovate or make sound decisions. In recent months, as the stockmarket has wobbled, the party has pressed economists to put on a happy face. Analysts who predict turmoil are warned to shut up or recant. How policymakers are to understand the economy when no one is allowed to discuss it honestly is anyone’s guess.

In China the state is the source of nearly all censorship. Private organisations play a role, but largely at the party’s behest or to avoid upsetting it. Baidu, the Chinese answer to Google, blocks potentially subversive search results. Google refuses to do so, and is therefore unable to operate in China. Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are also blocked.

In the Muslim world, by contrast, speech is under attack from state and non-state actors in roughly equal measure. The assassin’s veto is exercised keenly in such places as Bangladesh, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria. In several Arab countries, after a brief flowering of free debate during the Arab spring, regimes even more repressive than the old ones have taken charge.

Consider Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country. In 2011 mass protests led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, a dictator. For a while, Egyptians were free to say what they wanted. But a Muslim Brotherhood government elected in 2012 curbed secular speech, and the coup that toppled it in 2013 made matters worse, says Muhammad Abdel-Salam of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, an Egyptian pressure group.

Media outlets supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s present ruler, has branded a terrorist organisation, have been closed down. A new law makes it illegal for journalists to publish “untrue news or data” (ie, anything that contradicts the official line). “Don’t listen to anyone but me,” warned Mr Sisi in February. “I am dead serious.”

Foreign reporters have been branded as spies and run out of the country. Local reporters have it much worse. Mahmoud Abou Zeid, a photographer, was arrested while snapping the authorities gunning down Islamist protesters in 2013. He has been in jail ever since, accused of “damaging national unity”. He has been beaten, tortured and denied medical care.

On May 7th an Egyptian court recommended the death penalty for three journalists it accuses of spying. They deny the charges; one says he is being punished for publishing an embarrassing leaked document. The regime is incompetent as well as oppressive: in May an internal memo on how to squash the press was accidentally sent to the press.

Claiming to act as Egypt’s father, Mr Sisi is anxious that his children not be exposed to adult material. Saucy writers are jailed. Rights groups say that the number of prosecutions involving “contempt of religion” and “debauchery” (often used to prosecute homosexuals) are at all-time highs.

The authorities mine Facebook and Twitter for information on future protests, which are illegal, and for evidence against dissidents. Amr Nohan, a student, was sentenced to three years in prison for posting a photo of Mr Sisi with Mickey Mouse ears. Others are locked up for running websites without a licence. Asked why someone would need one, an assistant minister said: “You cannot drive without a licence. You cannot administer a website without a licence. It’s the same.”

All over the world, the spread of organised violence has prompted governments to curb speech they think may foster terrorism. Even in liberal democracies they are starting to punish not only those who deliberately incite violence, but also speakers who are merely intemperate or shocking.

In February, for example, two puppeteers were arrested in Madrid. Their show, “The Witch and Don Cristóbal”, was provocative: a nun was stabbed by a crucifix; a judge was hanged with a noose. What upset the police, however, was a scene where a puppet policeman accused a witch of supporting terrorism and shoved a sign reading “Up Alk-ETA” (a reference to al-Qaeda and ETA, a Basque separatist group) into her hands. The puppeteers are now awaiting trial and face up to three years in prison for “glorifying terrorism”. They are said to be surprised.

In much of Europe anti-terror laws are being used more zealously than before. This is partly because governments are more scared of terrorism, but also because they have started to police social media, where words that might reveal extremist sympathies are easily searchable. ETA laid down its arms in 2011; yet the number of Spaniards accused of glorifying terrorism has risen fivefold since then.

France criminalised “the defence of terrorism” in 2014 and has enforced the law more aggressively since the attacks on Paris last year. In the days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, prosecutors opened 69 cases for “defence of terrorism”. One man was sentenced to a year in prison for shouting in the street: “I’m proud to be Muslim. I don’t like Charlie. They were right to do it.”

Many countries have introduced or revived laws against “hate speech” that are often broad and vague. In France Brigitte Bardot, an actress, has been convicted five times of incitement to racial hatred because, as an animal lover, she complains about halal slaughter methods. In India section 153A of the criminal code, which was introduced under British rule, punishes with up to three years in jail those who promote disharmony “on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever”.

Such laws are handy tools for those in power to harass their enemies. And far from promoting harmony between different groups, they encourage them to file charges against each other. This is especially dangerous when cynical politicians get involved. Those who rely on votes from a certain group often find it useful to demand the punishment of someone who has allegedly insulted its members, especially just before an election. For example, when an Indian intellectual called Ashis Nandy made a subtle point about lower castes and corruption at a literary festival in 2013, local politicians professed outrage and he was charged under India’s “Prevention of Atrocities Act”.

Many countries still have laws against blasphemy, including 14 in Europe. Rita Maestre, a left-wing Spanish politician, was convicted in March of insulting religious feelings during a protest in a Catholic chapel, during which women bared their chests, kissed one another and allegedly shouted “Get your rosaries out of my ovaries!” She was fined €4,320 ($4,812).

Islamic governments such as those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which punish blasphemy against Islam ferociously, are keen for a ban on insulting religion to be written into international law. They argue that this is a natural extension of the Western concept of “hate speech”. Some Western authorities agree: Danish police in February filed preliminary charges against a man for burning a Koran, thus, in effect, reviving a law against blasphemy that had not been used to convict anyone since 1946.

Europe is full of archaic laws that criminalise certain kinds of political speech. It is a crime to insult the “honour” of the state in nine EU countries; to insult state symbols such as flags in 16; and to say offensive things about government bodies in 13. Libel can be criminal in 23 EU states. Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal all punish it more harshly when it is directed at public officials. Some of these laws are seldom invoked, and France got rid of its law against insulting the head of state in 2013, five years after a protester was arrested for waving a banner that said “Piss off, you jerk” to President Nicolas Sarkozy. (The banner was merely quoting Mr Sarkozy, who had said the same thing to a different protester.)

In Germany, however, Jan Böhmermann, a comedian, is awaiting charges for insulting a foreign head of state, after he recited a scurrilous poem about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and some frisky livestock. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, is now considering repealing the law. Poland and Portugal, among others, have similar laws against insulting foreign heads of state. Icelanders can in theory get six years in prison for it.

“These are the kinds of provisions we are constantly fighting in countries where freedom of expression is not as open,” says Scott Griffen of the International Press Institute. Autocratic regimes are quick to borrow excuses from the West for cracking down on free speech. China and Russia accuse dissidents of “promoting terrorism”, “endangering national security” or “inciting ethnic hatred”. This can mean simply expressing sympathy for Tibetans on social media—for which Pu Zhiqiang, a Chinese lawyer, was locked up for 19 months. Rwanda’s government, borrowing from European laws against Holocaust denial, brands its opponents as apologists for the 1994 genocide and silences them. Europeans may laugh at Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws—a Thai was recently prosecuted for being sarcastic about the king’s dog. But when 13 European democracies also have laws against insulting the head of state, it is hard to avoid charges of hypocrisy.

A determined regime can usually think of ways to muzzle a voice that annoys it. Khadija Ismayilova, a journalist in Azerbaijan who revealed scandalous details about the ruling family’s wealth, received photos in the post in 2012 showing her having sex with her boyfriend. A secret camera had been installed in her flat. A letter threatened to post the video online if she did not stop investigating corruption. She refused, and it was posted on a website purporting to belong to an opposition party. When this did not silence Ms Ismayilova, she was charged with tax evasion and driving a colleague to attempt suicide. No evidence supported these charges, but she was sentenced to seven years in jail.

However, after an appeal to international law and a campaign to persuade donors, such as America, to take notice, Ms Ismayilova was released on May 25th. Even oppressive governments can sometimes be shamed into behaving better.

« And there are gods who would trade their lives
To have a heart that can know human pain,
Because our sufferings will allow us to become
Greater than any world or deity. »

Several months after my mother was killed, I was helping to relocate a pear tree from a learning garden in Vancouver. I spent hours digging around its roots so as to give it the best chance of life in its new home, another garden not far away. As I dug, I recalled the tree in Kabul. The bullet-riddled trunk was more than a reminder of environmental loss. That tree in the historic garden demonstrated something I came to understand in the months following my mother’s death: the resilience of resuming our shape before trauma strikes is an impossible request of our souls and our spirits.

In whatever we do, we do not forget the pain of the past, but rather hold it and the joy of the present, simultaneously. This trunk of a tree, riddled with bullet holes, stood as proof of the shallowness of resilience. To remove it and create a space that had erased the trauma of the garden’s past is akin to asking someone to return to the person they were before a life-changing event. As it stands in the garden, that tree trunk now is a quiet champion of patience, a movement to endure. And it bears witness to all those who have crossed its path.

I think of the tree trunk in Kabul often. The city’s landscape will forever hold the scars of what happened to its people. The holes left behind by bullets stand as witness to the lives lost and the millions of refugees who are no longer home. From this landscape, I take the lesson that I need not be who I once was, that I may hold my scars and my joy simultaneously. I need not choose between bending or breaking but that, through patience, I may be transfigured.

|=[ 0x01 ]=---=[ Hacker Luddites - anonymous ]=--------------------------=|

In the west, far gone are the days of slavery. Men live freely with their
minds and bodies. So the idea of technology potentially limiting these
things is absurd.

Computer technology today might not always encourage these principles of
free mind and body though. Hardware and software is increasingly built in
the same manner as stone walled gardens, restricting those outside the
inner circles of technocrats. The designers decide to clutch tightly to
their systems, defining the full set of actions allowable and therefore
thinkable on their systems. They are limiting the potential for
creativity, discovery, and reason in order to further profit. This profit
is furthered by control because certain control limits piracy, stops
malicious software from propagating, simplifies the user experience for
the majority of consumers, and creates revenue through software-regulated
micro decisions that constrain the full capacity of the hardware and
software systems being sold.

Only the masters of the garden, the designers, are allowed inside the
stone walls, where they are free to create and are conscious of the inner
workings and plans. Those outside are not allowed inside the garden. Those
who are not inside the circle of the original creators do not get to
create without delegated permission. And consumers and third-party
developers are too far down the caste system to be allowed arbitrary
control of their own possessions.

This leaves the creators on the outside of the stoned walls dependent on
brilliant and dedicated minds to bypass the wishes of the designers. These
brilliant minds attain a level of consciousness about the constraints of
the system that the designers themselves did not understand, and pass this
on to the masses. Along the way come miscreants, thieves, and pirates.

In a free market system, if more arbitrary creation is vital in the long
term, then more creative systems will arise to fill the need. In the short
term, allowing feedback from the outer castes and integrating their ideas
has been shown to be more than sufficient for sustained exponential growth
on the rise to market domination.

Hacker Luddite: (Oxymoron) A person opposed to technology that greatly
limits, through artificial means, human potential for consciousness,
reason, or creativity with that same technology.

Hacker Luddites hate stone wall garden technologies. Why shouldn't a
person be allowed to hold a piece of technology and attempt to modify or
adapt that technology to suit their will at any given moment? The only
limitation should be the consciousness required to make changes. And
certainly not artificially restricted by the designers of the technology.
In the same way that Kant based the premises of the categorical imperative
on the ability for humans to reason, Hacker Luddites view this capacity
for reason as a fundamentally important human ability. When computer
technology, purchased and entirely in the physical possession of the
owner, denies arbitrary modification and creation, it greatly reduces the
ability to reason about the universe with that technology. That technology
does not allow people to transcend the designers ideas and fully embrace
some of their most important human traits. Instead it delegates the
consumers to subordinates with restricted consciousness, and restricted
capacity for reason, and restricted creativity.

Next up, computer technology applied excessively for the conversion of
human attention into personal profit.

To the hacker luddites, another nefarious category is the computer systems
of the world which have been built to turn human attention into profit.
Rather than proceeds coming from the advancement of humanity, the proceeds
come primarily from the ability to guide human attention into that
technological system. The system might be making the profit through ads,
or it could be a game consumers pay for.

It is understood that resources are required to run technologies and that
some exchange of information and resources is expected between consumers
and creators of that technology. Ads can be helpful to a consumer by
showing them products which they actually want, and games or sites for
information exchange are highly enjoyable to many people and therefore
provide benefit. It is when the methods and means become excessive that
hacker luddites take an issue.

When technologies, whether delivering advertisements or games, exploit
human psychology and physiology to turn a profit from their consumers,
they may often be directly limiting, and in a significant way, the
consciousness, reason, or creativity of that consumer.

The other problem is when instead of advertisements showing people what
they want, advertisements subconsciously manipulate peoples desires (such
as sex, popularity, and power) to override their consciousness and
reasoning abilities to get them to want and purchase products regardless
of the products abilities to help the consumer attain those desires.

And what if technologies instead of providing an opportunity for
relaxation or fun or profound information sharing or whatever also create
systems of psychological control where neurophysics brings users attention
back to technology to get addictive releases of dopamine or serotonin or
who knows what, using the darker arts of gamification. Or perhaps innate
human survival mechanisms related to group dynamics are being exploited by
the technology, such as showing automatically generated advertisements,
messages, and symbols as endorsed by members of a group, or creating
virtual resource systems where drives for competition or collaboration
drive behavior.

It may be that these technologies which capture human attention are simply
what most consumers want from their technology, after all 30% of internet
traffic generated by humans is for porn [1]. If distraction and the
subordination of reason, creativity, or consciousness is the will of the
majority, Hacker Luddites seriously disagree with the majority and most
definitely oppose the designers that subordinate them.

What defenses does the modern person have to protect against the likes and
tweets and clicks and slide to unlocks and checkmarks and tabs and porn
and endless dopamine and serotonin harvesting mechanisms? These systems
were sometimes built to reap monetary gain, sometimes built for
communication control, and sometimes for nothing of any value... in
exchange for a portion of the time, attention, and thoughts of the user as
well as their information...

Don't buy and don't use them.

If you do use them, use the them only in great moderation and only at
consciously specified times.

Inform others and expose existing and emerging technologies which may be
limiting human potential.

Augment the technology in your possession to block advertisements.

Degrade the quality or value of your attention to the attention-to-profit
technologies by:

• Sharing and proxying accounts with multiple users.
• Writing user interfaces to the user interfaces.
• Poisoning user activity with subtle fuzzers alongside your normal
  activity where it makes sense.

Similarly, make your information more useless by lying.

• Don't bother with real names where they don't matter.
• Fill out forms like madlibs.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites
-- 30% of the internet traffic out there is porn

L’école comme l’université ont trop longtemps asservi l’écriture au seul dogme de l’accès aux savoirs et à l’injonction de la communication.

Elles l’ont cantonnée à un rôle instrumental, en marge du sillage du capitalisme cognitif (Yann Moulier Boutang), à travers des modes de production industrielle des connaissances, la vidant peu à peu de ses dimensions artistiques, esthétiques et politiques (Luc Dall’Armellina, a).

La situation est telle aujourd’hui qu’écrire n’est plus pour la plupart des élèves et étudiants qu’un passage obligé, une compétence parmi d’autres, une technique qu’il faut bien manipuler puisqu’elle est nécessaire pour réussir à l’école, quelle que soit sa discipline.

Le drame de l’écriture ainsi (s)abordée est qu’elle soit envisagée au singulier, sans alliés, pas même la lecture, dont la pratique collective relève de l’exception. C’est une grande perte car c’est autour d’elle que se dessine, se forme et se révèle la qualité d’une attention (Alain Giffard), terreau d’une culture commune, par delà les langues, au coeur des pratiques de lecture, d’annotation, d’invention.

L’écriture contemporaine est devenue numérique : elle ne porte plus uniquement sur le texte du langage inter-humain mais aussi sur celui du langage humains-machines intégrant les boucles complexes et interactives qui nous lient tous. Il était prévisible que lecture et écriture en soient profondément transformées, altérées. L’écriture numérique agit de plus sur la nature même de la connaissance et en re-configure les modes d’existence (Stéphane Crozat, Bruno Bachimont, Isabelle Cailleau, Serge Bouchardon, Ludovic Gaillard).

L’écriture est devenue autre : fluide, fragmentaire, multiple. Sous nos yeux, sous nos doigts, elle est devenue hybride, trans-disciplinaire, avec plus ou moins de bonheur ou d’inquiétude pour toutes celles et ceux qui s’y livrent sur les réseaux, dans les jeux, sur les tablettes ou les ordinateurs. Les couches de langages superposés, constituantes des écritures numériques, induisent et co-produisent nos récits. Si techniques et écritures ont depuis toujours des destins mêlés (Friedrich A. Kittler), leurs codes comme leurs inter-relations sont aujourd’hui universellement partageables.

L’école reste encore en marge des pratiques d’écritures sur les réseaux, largement considérés comme sources de danger. Quel accompagnement à la culture numérique pour les élèves, les étudiants, les enseignants aujourd’hui ? Ces derniers ont pour mission d’initier les enfants du 21è siècle à des pratiques qu’ils ignorent souvent eux-mêmes, ce qui n’est pas un problème en soi, certains nous ont superbement montré (Joseph Jacotot) qu’on pouvait innover à partir d’une ignorance. Ce qui fait problème, c’est que nos institutions en charge de l’éducation cherchent encore à former à des « outils ». Cette vision réductrice empêche de mesurer que la révolution numérique est essentiellement culturelle, anthropologique. La question éducative portait jusqu’ici sur des compétences, des savoirs techniques et cognitifs mesurables quantitativement. Elle repose aujourd’hui sur une capacité à entrer en relation avec ses pairs, renouvelée par la curiosité, la créativité et la coopération, évaluables qualitativement. Le changement de paradigme est complet (Ken Robinson).

Après la révolution des logiciels libres puis celle des données open, c’est au tour de la pédagogie de devenir ouverte, coopérative, conviviale, et partageable (François Taddéi). Il ne s’agit plus aujourd’hui d’empiler des savoirs, d’ailleurs souvent accessibles sur les réseaux, mais de les articuler à nos expériences sensibles pour en faire des connaissances, puis des nouveaux savoirs. C’est cette boucle d’interactions qu’il nous faut construire ensemble.

Artistes, enseignants, formateurs, chercheurs, designers, auteurs, citoyens, nous déclarons la naissance des écritures numériques créatives, augmentées des pratiques d’ateliers d’écritures créatives en littérature, métissées des pratiques de workshop en art et design, pollénisées de celles des hacklab en développement de logiciel libre.

Nous déclarons révolu le temps des ntic et des tices qui ont découpé, chosifié, didactisé - assez doctement il faut le dire, à coups de stratégies d’usages et de procédures opérationnelles, dans des ENT (espaces numériques de travail) protégés comme des camps retranchés - des pratiques qu’il convenait surtout de découvrir avec attention et d’expérimenter avec curiosité.

« Un signe majeur de la déconnexion des élites est l’usage de l’expression « nouvelles technologies ». Ils parlent de « plan numérique » comme on planifiait la récolte de blé en URSS, cherchant à contrôler des choses qui ne sont pas contrôlables. » déclare Adrienne Alix de Wikimédia (Laure Belot).

Pourquoi dans les écoles, les salles de ntic sont-elles des endroits dont on veut sortir à peine entré ? Des ordinateurs et des étudiants alignés en rang d’oignon et l’enseignant faisant face au groupe, contrôlant les écrans de ses élèves : excellente recette pour décourager toute créativité !

Bougeons les tables, changeons les câblages arborescents au profit de grappes en étoiles. La table ronde permettra à chacun de se voir, de se sourire, de se parler, elle favorisera la convivialité, elle appellera la coopération, une pédagogie ouverte pourra naître. Avec une variété d’assises confortables, d’espaces modulaires, retrouvons les possibilités de notre corps discipliné par trois siècles de dispositifs contraignants (Michel Foucault, a). Créons des espaces dans l’espace, des temps dans le temps, des singularités dans le collectif.

Avec les écritures numériques créatives, nous entendons redonner au mot savoir son sens premier de saveur. Nous appelons créatives, les écritures numériques qui ne se contentent pas de produire des dispositifs, des œuvres ou des savoirs selon des modalités déjà connues, mais qui cherchent dans une co-élaboration émancipée, à mettre ceux-ci en question, en critique, en trouvant de nouvelles voies et formes, en fabriquant par percolation, hybridation, expérimentation. Il n’y pas de modèle pour qui cherche ce qu’il n’a jamais vu (Paul Eluard), aussi, si la littérature c’est ce qui change la littérature, alors pratiquons la sous toutes ses formes !

Pour ce faire, le temps des spécialisations disciplinaires doit cesser son dictat. Les pratiques sensibles doivent retrouver leur place avec les savoirs théoriques, avec les expériences techniques. Écrire n’est pas seulement noter ce que l’on pense pour ne pas l’oublier, mais se constitue en soi-même - et plus que jamais - comme un mode de pensée, qui doit pouvoir se décliner dans le texte donné à lire comme dans le code présidant à son apparition. A quand des ateliers croisant arts visuels, littérature, musique, programmation ? A quand d’autres croisant géographie, sciences économiques, design et data-mining ?

Les écritures numériques créatives œuvrent bien sûr avec les arts et manières de faire de la littérature et de la poésie, mais aussi – c’est leur différence avec les ateliers d’écritures créatives - avec ceux du design et de la programmation car le texte numérique a une forme, réglée par des conditions d’apparition et d’interaction qu’il s’agit de penser et d’expérimenter avec la précision d’une science et l’exigence d’un art.

Ces écritures font appel aux singularités de celles et ceux qui, augmentés en collectifs mixtes de praticiens, théoriciens, artistes, techniciens, n’aspirent qu’à s’élever même s’ils ne savent pas encore très bien comment se nommer (Mc Kenzie Wark). Peu importe, ils sont la communauté qui vient (Giorgio Agamben,(b)) et leurs productions parleront pour eux.

Ce qui s’appelle ateliers d’écritures en littérature, workshops en arts, fablab en design, hacklab en ingénierie pourra constituer en alternance, autant de moments fondateurs dans une culture des écritures numériques créatives. Ces lieux ont émergés des pratiques du réseau, des pratiques de leurs écritures. Ils sont irrigués par une pédagogie du faire et de la coopération, de la créativité et de l’invention, du partage et de l’émancipation. Ensemble, ces cultures peuvent doter l’école des moyens de participer créativement aux transformations majeures qui s’annoncent. Saura-t-elle s’y engager ?

Ces temps et leurs approches trouveront avantageusement leur place - transversale - dans tous les lieux, avec tous les enseignements, de l’école à l’université et en formation (Philippe Aigrain, (a)).

Quelle politique pédagogique, incluant la formation des enseignants et des citoyens tout au long de la vie innovera en proposant d’accueillir et de faire fructifier ces pratiques ? Quel projet pour porter et valoriser l’interdisciplinarité en partenariat comme socle fondateur ? Si les initiatives heureuses ne manquent pas (Café Pédagogique), y compris dans les institutions, les centres de recherche (projet PRECIP, COSTECH-UTC), elle se font encore en marge, avec des énergies individuelles, et beaucoup trop souvent contre l’institution qui ne sait pas les reconnaître, les épauler, en favoriser la fédération, le marcottage, l’essaimage.

Redonner au mot savoir son sens premier de saveur est une question d’exigence esthétique et politique. C’est aujourd’hui une urgence. La restauration de la saveur sera le premier pas vers une démocratie renouvelée, car derrière ce qu’on appelle les écritures numériques, avec le code, les machines, opère une certaine manière de faire : une culture singulière.

Singulière, c’est-à-dire porteuse d’une façon inouïe d’envisager nos rapports les uns aux autres, à l’économie, au savoir, à la connaissance, aux arts et aux techniques, à la science, à l’amitié, au collectif, à l’esthétique, au politique (Jacques Rancière (a)) : « L’homme est un animal politique parce qu’il est un animal littéraire qui se laisse détourner de sa destination « naturelle » par le pouvoir des mots. » Avec les écritures numériques en réseaux, est née la conscience d’habiter le même monde, et avec elle, celle de pouvoir créer, partager, coopérer en pleine conscience et en toute liberté (Olivier Blondeau).

Ensemble nous voulons concevoir l’acte d’écrire numérique créativement. Nous refusons les héritages idéologiques pesants qui maintiennent les pratiques d’écritures dans les corsets de l’utilitarisme ou de la spécialisation, mettant dos-à-dos les techniciens et les littéraires. Nous refusons les coupures disciplinaires, les clivages institutionnels, les protectionnismes administratifs, les oppositions stériles. Les arts contre les sciences, les humanités contre les techniques. Nous avons besoin de la liberté de les hybrider car nous sommes devenus des êtres hybrides (Bruno Latour) : arts, sciences, techniques, humanités.

« Être libre et agir ne font qu’un » dit Hannah Arendt. Le réseau des réseaux est libre - du moins y-a-t-il là un combat - et libres sont ses arts et manières de faire. Nous voulons sans entrave et dans le même mouvement :

écrire - penser - coopérer - expérimenter – résister - lire - apprendre - devenir - construire

// ce texte est le programme d’émergence

// des écritures numériques créatives

// libres échappées de la longue nuit des ntic

// avatars relevant des digital humanities

// après avoir listé les variables qui seront mobilisées

// nous les détaillons ci-après

écrire

Nous parlons, écrivons, lisons, tendus vers l’avenir. Nous vivons aujourd’hui à travers nos machines connectées, manipulant les signes de nos alphabets vieux de deux mille cinq cent ans. Nous pressons les touches de nos claviers-machines, à la suite des scribes qui marquaient avant nous la cire ou l’argile avec leurs stylets-calames.

A la différence des signes gravés, nos signes écrans semblent disparaître chaque nuit de nos moniteurs éteints. Mais le lendemain, la machine réveillée, ils reviennent d’un simple appel. Les voilà comme re-générés, formés de quelques traits agencés en vecteurs, scintillants de tous leurs pixels.

Le travail conjoint d’une puce calculante au silicium, d’une mémoire autonome et d’un algorithme produit une forme, un signe, un mot, une phrase, un paragraphe, un texte. Un clic et le voilà à l’autre bout du monde, partagé avec nos pairs lecteurs-scripteurs, dansant, glissant, sous leurs doigts.

Nos machines sont devenues les extensions connectées de nos cerveaux (André Leroi-Gourhan), rencontre pragmatique de nos recherches et de nos désirs. Sensibles savoirs.

Ecriture, histoire ancienne s’il en est, de la Mésopotamie à l’Egypte, de l’Amérique pré-Colombienne à la Crète, de l’Irak à la Palestine, de la Chine à la Syrie, de l’Angleterre à l’Amérique (Anne Zali). Sans cesse elle a changé de forme, d’outils, de supports et conséquemment, de pratiques. Des omoplates d’agneau aux carapaces de tortues, du marbre au parchemin, du papier à l’écran, de l’écran à l’architecture elle-même.

Nous n’avons de cesse, hier comme aujourd’hui, de jouer, rejouer, déjouer l’écriture, de la repriser comme un tissu aux bords sans fin, carte sur le territoire de nos pensées, telle celle que commandait, toujours insatisfait, l’Empereur du Milieu à ses cartographes (Jorge Luis Borgès).

« Si je devais écrire un livre pour communiquer ce que je pense déjà, avant d’avoir commencé à écrire, je n’aurais jamais le courage de l’entreprendre. Je ne l’écris que parce que je ne sais pas encore exactement quoi penser de cette chose que je voudrais tant penser. [...] Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j’écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu’auparavant. » (Michel Foucault, b).

C’est qu’écrire est en soi, une aventure, la tentative fragile, sensible et raisonnée de former une pensée singulière. Écrire c’est choisir une série de mots qui appartiennent à tous et qu’on fait siens dans un certain agencement, dans une respiration qui nous est propre.

Nous écrivons avec les mots des autres (Bakhtine) car la langue est ce qui nous rassemble tous et pourtant nous distingue chacun-e par la liberté du souffle et du style.

L’écriture dès ses origines, réussit à tenir ensemble la culture qui nous unit, et l’art qui nous singularise. C’est cette complétude qu’il nous faut retrouver dans les écoles. Il y a urgence ! Écrire dans notre hyper-modernité en réseaux est devenu une façon essentielle de faire lien, d’enrichir notre pacte démocratique en renouvelant nos arts et manières de de faire.

Quelques-uns nous ont montré qu’on pouvait le faire, avec exigence (André Schiffrin).

Si « écrire c’est (aussi) se livrer à la fascination de l’absence de temps » (Maurice Blanchot), la suspension du temps dans laquelle écrire prend place, est sans doute son point de fondation, la vacance par laquelle naît une pensée propre. Pensée qui ne doit rien à des usages pré-conçus ou formatés, rien non plus aux modes, et rien encore aux injonctions.

Écrire, c’est chercher aujourd’hui, avec le corps et l’esprit, avec nos extensions machiniques, un devenir, animal, humain, un devenir soi (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari). Écrire, c’est avancer dans la nuit, attentifs aux lucioles (Pier Paolo Pasolini).

Écrire n’est pas garder une poire pour la soif c’est marcher avec ses semelles de vent, c’est lécher la rosée à même les brins d’herbe. Écrire, c’est porter attention à ce qu’on ne sait pas, c’est neutraliser ce qu’on croit savoir de façon à être nu devant le dire.

penser

La pensée qui se forge dans l’écrire, prend source dans un vacillement de la perception, et se constitue comme une aventure, entre émotion et savoir. Nos écrits sont trempés dans nos vies tissées par les techniques, dans des villes où nous prenons des bains de multitude.

Nous vivons l’entre deux ères des machines mécaniques industrielles et des technologies de l’esprit. Nos innombrables véhicules motorisés nous permettent de nous transporter physiquement sur les réseaux routiers. Nos ordinateurs reliés aux réseaux numériques, eux, nous permettent de lire, voire entendre, échanger à distance, voyages immobiles. Notre pensée contemporaine s’y forme dans une remise en jeu du je et du nous, confrontés-aux mais aussi reliés-par toutes ces machines qui nous environnent.

Machines de transport : avions, trains, voitures, motos, vélos, rollers, chacune ayant son rythme, ses fulgurances et ses fantasmes. Vitesse, fluidités, saccades, allongements, coupures, glisses, heurts, forment la matrice d’un dire à travers leur filtre.

Machines d’informations : télévision, radio, presse, réseaux numériques, ordinateurs, chacune imprimant son flux, son flow, son flu, son mode de circulation, de propagation, sa viralité. Quelques écrivains ont montré de belle manière, comment la fréquentation de ces machines altèrent nos représentations de leurs espaces-temps-mouvements singuliers imprimant leur climax : La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France de Blaise Cendrars, Sur la route de Jack Kerouac, le Traité du zen et de l’entretien des motocyclettes de Robert M. Pirsig, Les autonautes de la cosmoroute de Julio Cortàzar, En voiture de François Bon, (...).

D’autres se sont attachés à mettre en récit les écritures numériques dans une vision sublimée ou extrapolée de ce qui ne nous offre pas moins de transports que les machines mécaniques, évoquant tour à tour fantasmes et dérives de ces technologies de l’esprit (Pierre Lévy, a) : Le monde de Morel de A. Bioy Casares, Scroogled de Cory Doctorow, Schismatrice de Bruce Sterling, In Milton Lumky Territory et Siva de Philip K. Dick, Idoru de William Gibson, (...).

C’est que « L’art ne consiste pas à mettre en avant des alternatives, mais à résister, par la forme et rien d’autre, contre le cours du monde qui continue de menacer les hommes comme un pistolet appuyé contre leur poitrine. » (T. W. Adorno).

coopérer

La forme, cette grande affaire de l’art, qui n’en reste pas moins un acte de résistance (Gilles Deleuze) est aussi un jeu (Donald Winnicott), qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l’art (Robert Filiou).

Écrire est devenu une activité telle qu’on peut la voir sous l’angle d’une anthropologie (Clarisse Herendschmit). Elle concerne aujourd’hui aussi bien la langue, les nombres, les codes, que le produit de leurs hybridations (Kathryn Hayles). C’est-à dire qu’elle forme et porte en germe les mathématiques et l’économie, la science, la technique et les technologies, les arts et la culture.

Le code est méta écriture, il détermine ce qui sera visible, audible, manipulable, quand, comment, et de quelle manière. Pour la première fois dans notre histoire, avec la programmation numérique les mots n’ont plus seulement une valeur sémiotique mais possèdent une efficience performative, en dehors de nous. On peut aujourd’hui écrire le code d’un programme qui commandera l’impression en trois dimension d’un objet physique : voilà un type d’écriture qui n’est pas moins singulier qu’un autre, poétique, littéraire ou philosophique.

Des codes libres circulent sur les réseaux dont il importe de devenir familiers à défaut d’en devenir experts. Il n’est pas anecdotique de remarquer que Pandoc (John Mc Farlane) est l’oeuvre logicielle d’un philosophe, que cet outil universel permet la conversion de documents en de multiples formats, qu’il est libre, gratuit, multi-plate-formes et fait partie - invisible - de nombreux systèmes partout sur le web.

Il existe aujourd’hui sur des plate-formes libres, un véritable éco-système partagé des environnements, langages (GitHub, Sourceforge), et outils d’écritures numériques (FramaSoft), qu’elles soient écritures d’annotations, de traductions, d’hypertextes, de collaborations, de combinatoires, de génération.

Des outils d’écritures numériques multiplate-formes programmables à l’aide de langage comme Processing sont nés du désir d’acculturer les artistes au code informatique (Casey Reas & Ben Fry) et les informaticiens à la culture des arts (John Maeda). Son code de programmation a été simplifié de façon à être compréhensible, autant que peut l’être une langue naturelle, il n’a pour autant rien à envier à d’autres langages quand à sa puissance.

D’autres ont souhaité expérimenter une approche logico-graphique de la programmation comme avec PureData (Miller Puckette) qui a d’abord été pensé pour le traitement du signal sonore et qui a peu à peu étendu ses capacités à tous les types de médias et de capteurs.

Ces deux logiciels sont libres, ouverts, gratuits et fédèrent une communauté mondiale active d’amateurs, de hackers (Eric S. Raymond), d’artistes (Antoine Moreau), qui documente ses codes sources, partage ses pratiques, invente sa culture. L’art en train de se faire se forme à leurs contacts : arts et design d’interactivité, de la performance, de l’installation équipée de capteurs, du son et de l’image.

Quelles écoles - non spécialisées - pratiquent et enseignent les écritures dans cet esprit aujourd’hui, à part quelques écoles d’art ? Où se pratique donc la programmation envisagée comme un des beaux-arts (Pierre Lévy, b) ?

A l’heure des pratiques coopératives numériques dont les fab-lab, hackerspaces et autres medialabs, sont devenus les lieux vivants, eux-mêmes issus de la culture du logiciel libre (Richard Stallman), une voie s’est ouverte, qui rend ou rendra bientôt caduque l’enseignement tel qu’on l’a conçu jusqu’ici parce qu’il a fait l’impasse de la convivialité (Ivan Illich). Il ne suffit pas de déclarer l’école émancipée parce que bien équipée en matériel numérique, encore faut-il que le monde y entre tout entier, que les codeurs, danseurs, conteurs, artisans, poètes, musiciens, écrivains, techniciens, artistes y aient une place d’invités réguliers, de partenaires, d’amis.

Il faut encore qu’il n’y ai plus l’école d’un côté et le monde de l’autre, mais que le monde vive à l’intérieur de l’école. Il faut pour cela des enseignants passeurs, des enseignants à même de circuler entre les savoirs, collaborant avec leurs pairs de toutes les disciplines, des enseignants médiateurs dans une école généreuse, ouverte et accueillante.

Il ne s’agit pas seulement de former aux langages et aux outils mais d’en accompagner les pratiques coopératives en réseaux, les arts, la culture ! Le numérique relève moins de difficultés techniques que d’une préparation culturelle attentionnée car c’est d’une autre façon de faire société dont il est question. Artistes, enseignants, élèves-étudiants, développeurs doivent pouvoir tisser des liens, se comprendre, co-élaborer le tissu du texte numérique contemporain que les spécialisations ne permettent plus d’appréhender créativement.

Nous sommes là, attentifs sur nos lieux de vie, ateliers, classes, amphis, écoles, fab-labs, sur les réseaux, c’est-à-dire sur le terrain, tous à espérer qu’enfin l’école change, qu’elle mute, qu’elle rende possible, qu’elle s’ouvre au monde qui cogne à sa porte !

expérimenter

« Oui, je suis un criminel. Mon crime est celui de la curiosité. » déclarait Loyd Blankenship, (alias The Mentor) juste après son arrestation en 1986, dans son manifeste du hacker.

Les modalités actuelles de l’éducation et de l’enseignement sont partout mises en crise par la curiosité, l’expérimentation, la coopération, l’esprit d’invention, propres aux manières de faire contemporaines (Neil Gershenfeld) et qui ont déjà été expérimentées à l’école (Célestin Freinet, Fernand Deligny). Quelle excellente nouvelle pour nous tous !

Et pourtant l’école comme l’université, toutes occupées à la reproduction de leur fonctionnement, n’ont pas encore été en mesure de reconnaître, donc de s’approprier ces approches novatrices dont nous, nos enfants et les leurs ont/auront crucialement besoin. La recherche créative engendre ses propres moyens d’élévation des êtres, d’une façon incomparablement plus profonde que ne l’ont jamais été la course aux savoirs et au premiers rangs de classements qu’on aura oublié demain.

Si l’école et l’université ne changent pas radicalement leur modus operandi, elles deviendront comme ces arbres immenses, secs et isolés, qui ne savent plus attirer vers eux que la foudre. Autour d’eux un paysage nouveau apparaît doucement, se couvrant ça et là de petits îlots de verdure tendre : arts et manières de faire du libre.

Du top-down au bottom-up ! Vite ! Le temps presse ! Les anciennes institutions peuvent encore prendre part aux mutations en cours et ré-inventer leur rôle, en s’appuyant, relayant, accompagnant les heureuses initiatives de leurs bases, en cherchant comment les fédérer sans les étouffer. Il y a urgence, les initiatives créatives ne manquent pas !

Il est de première importance que les écoles et les universités reconnaissent et organisent la pratique de toutes les écritures avec créativité : littéraires comme programmatiques, pas seulement au sein des filières spécialisées, mais dans toutes les écoles. Comme on le fait avec une langue étrangère : par la pratique, le jeu, la culture. Créons des ateliers de lecture et d’écriture du code, inventons les approches discursives des n dimensions de sa culture, trouvons l’espace d’analyse critique des formes d’arts qu’elle invente ou auxquelles elle participe... et connectons cette culture aux écritures littéraires que nous pratiquons déjà.

L’écriture numérique créative prend naturellement sa place dans les contemporaines et transdisciplinaires humanités numériques (Marin Dacos et al.) : arts et cultures et techniques. Ce « et » fait toute la différence avec le mode « ou » des régimes éducatifs précédents. Exit l’esprit de concurrence que l’élitisme a instrumentalisé en prétextant l’excellence, place aux puissances infinies de l’esprit de coopération ! C’est d’elle dont les enfants d’aujourd’hui devront être les experts demain.

résister

Il en va de l’écriture du code comme de celle des mots à la naissance des alphabets, elle reste encore aujourd’hui l’apanage des nouveaux scribes. Elle peut mener au désastre d’une confiscation du pouvoir par quelques castes, elle peut aussi devenir un formidable vecteur d’émancipation des individus (Open Classrooms). A nous de peser, d’opposer, de proposer.

Si l’écriture numérique créative a des pouvoirs, nous avons des responsabilités, la première est de prendre toute la mesure de ses puissances. Loin de ne concerner que les individus, loin d’être réduite à des « usages », l’écriture numérique créative suscite par ses pratiques, la collaboration qui conduit à voir le monde avec les yeux des autres.

L’écriture dont l’école a aujourd’hui besoin est celle-ci, plurielle, créative, hybride, littéraire, technique, artistique, philosophique, si l’on veut vivre ensemble dans la complémentarité et la coopération (Denis Kambouchner, Philippe Meirieu, Bernard Stiegler, Julien Gautier, Guillaume Vergne), si l’on veut que chacun puisse vivre une augmentation de son être dans ce mouvement même qui augmente l’autre avec qui il est en relation. C’est là, littéralement, l’origine du mot « auteur ».

Il nous faut pour cela résister créativement et collectivement à la cage numérique dorée que les grands groupes (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook) nous ont fabriquée en nous promettant que c’est pour notre bien. Si notre servitude est volontaire, c’est que nous les laissons croire que leurs services sont faits pour nous. Mais nous avons moins besoin de leurs services que de moyens d’émancipation. Nous devons résister à leurs sirènes car nous n’avons dans leurs plans qu’une place d’objets, de consommateurs, et non de sujets pensants et agissants.

Il nous faut, en sujets libres, inventer nos lignes de désirs, rendre poreuses et circulables les voies étanches des spécialisations qui isolent aujourd’hui les lettrés des non lettrés du numérique.

L’écriture numérique créative a le pouvoir de réunir les conditions de l’augmentation des êtres par l’élaboration, le partage et la confrontation des idées nouvelles, par l’enrichissement des pratiques communes et des expressions singulières afin que chacun-e y dessine sa vie dans l’interaction du regard des autres.

L’école comme l’université doivent pour cela opérer une révolution d’importance inédite (!) : rompre avec la fabrication des têtes bien pleines (Michel de Montaigne) assujetties à l’esprit de compétition... car cette mutation reste encore à accomplir.

lire

« L’astronome qui lit une carte d’étoiles disparues ; le tisserand qui lit les dessins complexes d’un tapis en cours de tissage ; les parents qui lisent sur le visage du bébé des signes de joie, de peur ou d’étonnement ; l’amant qui lit à l’aveuglette le corps aimé, la nuit sous les draps (...) - tous partagent avec le lecteur de livres l’art de déchiffrer et de traduire des signes. » Alberto Manguel

Les singularités créatives dont notre époque a besoin, ne naitront pas d’enseignements spécialisés défendus par des lobbys, dont le modèle s’est vidé de sens, mais de l’expérience attentive, progressive, ludique et informée des savoirs sensibles, scientifiques et techniques tissés ensemble.

Nous pourrions (re)faire nôtre ce mot de Voltaire qui dit qu’un homme qui ne lit pas une plume à la main est un homme qui dort. La lecture partagée doit redevenir une pratique indissociable de celle d’écrire (Philippe Aigrain, (c)). Elle le doit pour participer de notre éveil. Elle le doit car lorsqu’on lit, c’est notre corps, notre voix qui soufflent un texte pour le former. La pratique des écritures numériques créatives nous le fait curieusement redécouvrir.

Il nous faut chacun-e, retrouver notre souffle, en redevenir familiers. De par le monde, on appelle les vents alysés, baguio, bolon, chergui, hurricane, bise, sonora, tramontane, mistral, ou encore loo, eurus, ghibli (...) parce que chacun d’eux est singulier, porte une histoire, une mémoire, une culture, un parfum, un style. De même, l’expérience du souffle de lire est humainement irremplaçable, c’est une praxis : une expérience esthétique qui porte dans sa pratique, ses questions réflexives et critiques (Antonio Gramsci).

« Si tu es seul à rêver, ce n’est qu’un rêve, si vous rêvez à plusieurs, c’est la réalité qui commence ! » dit une chanson populaire brésilienne.

L’acte de lire a été envisagé depuis toujours comme un acte cognitif, savant, technique mais parfois aussi comme un art. Un collectif d’artistes et développeurs (Téléférique) a créé en 2003 le projet Reader, véritable utopie de la lecture collective, soutenue par une réflexion artistique, philosophique et par la création d’un langage d’affichage temporel du texte (TRML). Les séances de lecture collectives qu’ils ont données en public ont marqué les mémoires et changé les représentations de ce que nous pensions devoir rester un acte individuel.

Annie Abrahams dont les travaux portent sur les communications inter-humaines, développe des performances de lecture-écriture sur le web et en présence. Dans le projet Reading Club qu’elle réalise avec Emmanuel Guez depuis 2013, les participants présents et distants lisent, écrivent, commentent, font et défont un texte, dans un jeu intertextuel et à l’intérieur d’une arène interprétative (Annie Abrahams, Emmanuel Guez). Les artistes mettent en scène, en images et en situations, le processus d’interaction, d’interprétation et de création qu’ils expérimentent en performance.

Lire, c’est accepter d’interpréter ce qu’on a sous les yeux comme si c’était la première fois qu’il s’y présentait, mais à vrai dire c’est toujours la première fois car jamais on ne se baigne dans le même fleuve.

Lire, c’est permettre à son esprit de trouver la liberté de parler à travers son propre corps, même en silence. C’est rendre ce corps attentif, à même de traduire les mots en souffle sensible. Lire c’est encore vivre cette intime réconciliation du corps et de l’esprit qui se partage collectivement dans la lecture à voix haute.

On dit (Wikipédia) que le verbe « lire » revêt aussi un sens plus général, celui de lire les signes des temps. De cela aussi nous avons besoin, non pour être des devins approximatifs mais pour devenir simplement des contemporains courageux (Giorgio Agamben, (a)).

apprendre

L’humanisme né de l’imprimerie a libéré la lecture : elle a cessé d’être le privilège des clercs, elle est devenue un moyen offert à chacun de construire sa réflexion et de se confronter au monde.

L’humanisme né avec le numérique libère de surcroît l’écriture : elle a cessé d’être l’apanage des professionnels de la littérature et du savoir, elle est devenue un moyen offert à tous de participer à l’intelligence collective du monde.

À l’école en particulier, il devient par exemple impératif de libérer la littérature des manuels scolaires. Le numérique permet de réinventer-revitaliser-réenchanter le texte, tant il suscite de nouvelles façons de lire, créatives, intrusives, collaboratives, tant il permet de dépasser la tradition de la métatextualité (la culture de la glose, la pédagogie de l’enseignant en chaire) pour s’adonner aux bonheurs de l’intertextualité, de l’intratextualité, de l’hypertextualité, de la textualité numérique…

Le texte est à envisager désormais non comme simple objet (à lire, à étudier), mais comme support d’activités de lecture-écriture-publication, afin que par lui aussi l’élève se constitue comme sujet, sujet de sa langue, sujet de sa représentation du monde, sujet de sa construction de soi et de son rapport aux autres.

Autrement dit, par le numérique, la chance est enfin donnée aux pédagogues de faire de la littérature une pratique, démocratique, et du texte une relation, comblante.

devenir

« Fais le pas qui t’élèves. » J’ai vu, comme d’autres, cette inscription écrite à la craie blanche sur le mur d’un couloir de l’université Paris 8, entre le département d’arts et celui d’hypermédia. Elle y est restée lisible les quatre années qu’a duré ma thèse, et ce malgré l’incessante activité d’ajouts-retraits-recouvrements de graffitis et d’affichages tout autour d’elle. Cette petite phrase a finalement été recouverte d’une couche de peinture blanche après des travaux de rénovation. Fragile mémoire.

Le défi des institutions école, université, est de vivifier l’enseignement de l’écriture et de la littérature avec la culture et les pratiques numériques de sa création contemporaine (Luc Dall’Armellina, b). Mais, fluides, légères, ces pratiques débordent cependant de toutes parts toute idée de disciplines. Il s’agit d’ouvrir un espace-temps pour l’écriture numérique créative, comme pratique transversale, inter-disciplinaire, sensible, technique et critique, de l’école à l’université et en formation tout au long de sa vie.

Ce défi est lancé à des institutions dont le mode de gouvernance est sclérosé par des modèles d’organisations hiérarchiques verticales produisant concurrence, défiance, violence. Nos vieilles institutions peinent à relever les défis culturels contemporains de créativité et d’invention, dans les domaines de la formation, de la recherche, de la coopération locale et internationale, soit au moins trois de leur six missions (loi 2013-660 du 22 juillet 2013 sur l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche). Il nous faut agir, transformer les gouvernances, retrouver des institutions à échelle humaine, celle du village (Yona Friedman).

Le défi des accompagnateurs - ensemble hybride de formateurs, d’enseignants, d’artistes, d’auteurs, de musiciens, de chercheurs, de citoyens - est d’aborder les écritures numériques créatives par les arts littéraires (François Bon), mais aussi d’en mesurer les influences et zones de contact, de partage avec les arts visuels (Pierre Ménard), cartographiques et sonores (Cécile Portier), performanciels, narratifs et poétiques car la littérature-monde (Marc Jahjah) les traversent comme jamais auparavant

Leur défi est encore de dépasser le commentaire des œuvres de littérature (numérique ou non) ses outils, langages, esthétiques, pour accompagner les pratiques d’écritures sous toutes leurs formes, connues et à naître. Les accompagnateurs chercheront à ne pas réduire le nouveau au connu mais à favoriser l’émergence de l’esprit d’invention dont tous, nous sommes capables (Joseph Jacotot, Jacques Rancière (b)).

Le défi des pratiquants (élèves, étudiants, chercheurs, auteurs, formateurs, etc) est d’oublier les cours qui se consomment. Leur défi est de coopérer dans un groupe de création et de réflexion artistique et technique.

Leur défi est de lâcher prise afin d’expérimenter dans le même mouvement, la création littéraire en médias d’écriture-lecture, l’écriture des codes performatifs de leurs apparitions, et l’invention d’une esthétique singulière. A partir d’une pratique personnelle et collective mêlée, faire émerger des questions inédites, hybrider des techniques, créer des œuvres, former des idées, inventer des outils.

construire

On pourrait à cet endroit demander : pourquoi les écritures créatives numériques constituent-elles un enjeu si important aujourd’hui qu’il faille un manifeste pour les servir ? Peut-être parce que l’écriture, à chaque fois qu’elle a changé de supports d’inscriptions, a profondément révolutionné nos manières de dire, de penser et de faire en étendant et en externalisant continuellement notre mémoire dans des médias et des technologies.

La naissance de l’écriture a permis la naissance du droit, des villes, de la monnaie, du commerce, de la géométrie, des religions monothéistes. L’invention de l’imprimerie a permis les échanges mondiaux, la monnaie imprimée, la science, la littérature et la démocratie modernes (Michel Serres).

Le troisième temps de la révolution des écritures est celui que nous vivons depuis le MEMEX (Vannevar Bush), c’est celui d’une mutation avec ces deux précédents. Il s’agit de s’affranchir des anciens cadres, non parce qu’ils ne sont pas bons mais parce que le poids patrimonial et institutionnel qu’on leur a conféré empêche et retarde l’expérimentation des modalités dont nous avons besoin aujourd’hui pour construire notre présent en pensant à demain.

Les écritures numériques créatives que nous appelons de nos voeux peuvent et doivent participer à re-construire l’« espace potentiel » (Donald Winnicott) ouvert par le jeu, à la base de toute expérience culturelle partageable.

Cet espace potentiel qu’est l’Internet depuis ses débuts, est aujourd’hui mis en péril, menacé dans sa neutralité (La Quadrature du Net) par des choix politiques et économiques qui l’orientent vers un dispositif de contrôle généralisé. Quel(s) politique(s) mesure(nt) que c’est de l’éco-système créatif de nos démocraties dont il s’agit ?

Oui, les écritures numériques créatives ont la capacité de redonner à l’écriture-lecture son pouvoir d’émancipation personnelle par la restauration des puissances d’agir des individus (Martha Nussbaum).

Oui, elles sont à même de porter la fabrique et l’exercice du pouvoir critique d’une pharmacologie des technologies numériques (Bernard Stiegler, Ars Industrialis). Oui, elles ont la forme et l’ambition de contribuer à l’augmentation des êtres par l’expérience des arts (John Dewey), visant une pratique techno-esthétique partagée des biens communs (Philippe Aigrain, b) au sein d’un processus civilisateur (Milad Doueihi).

Un manifeste, parce que les temps, les pratiques et les sensibilités mutent depuis cinquante ans à grande vitesse, mais que les institutions école et université en charge de les accueillir, de les faire fructifier, de les valoriser et de les fédérer sont encore pétrifiées dans leurs rigidités et ne mesurent pas l’urgence de faire peau neuve.

Partout où nous le pourrons, sans attendre, en braconniers s’il le faut, donnons aux écritures numériques créatives, le pouvoir qui est le leur, celui de nous éclairer.

Faisons ce pas qui nous élève.

Une scène me revient en mémoire à chaque fois que je tente de retrouver l’effet grisant que le mouvement Occuper Wall Street (OWS) a produit sur moi au temps où il semblait promis à un grand avenir. Je me trouvais dans le métro de Washington, en train de lire un article sur les protestataires rassemblés à Zuccotti Park, au cœur de Manhattan. C’était trois ans après la remise à flot de Wall Street ; deux ans après que toutes mes fréquentations eurent abandonné l’espoir de voir le président Barack Obama faire preuve d’audace ; deux mois après que les amis républicains des banquiers eurent conduit le pays au bord du défaut de paiement en engageant un bras de fer budgétaire avec la Maison Blanche. Comme tout le monde, j’en avais assez.

Près de moi se tenait un voyageur parfaitement habillé, certainement un cadre supérieur revenant de quelque salon commercial, à en juger par le slogan folâtre imprimé sur le sac qu’il portait en bandoulière. Ce slogan indiquait comment optimiser ses placements boursiers, ou peut-être pourquoi le luxe est un bienfait, ou à quel point c’est magnifique d’être un gagnant. L’homme paraissait extrêmement mal à l’aise. Je savourais la situation : récemment encore, j’aurais rougi d’exhiber la couverture de mon journal dans une rame de métro surpeuplée ; aujourd’hui, c’étaient les gens comme lui qui rasaient les murs.

Quelques jours plus tard, je visionnais une vidéo sur Internet montrant un groupe de militants d’OWS en train de débattre dans une librairie. A un moment du film, un intervenant s’interroge sur l’insistance de ses camarades à prétendre qu’ils ne s’expriment que « pour eux-mêmes », au lieu d’assumer leur appartenance à un collectif. Un autre lui réplique alors : « Chacun ne peut parler que pour soi-même, en même temps le “soi-même” pourrait bien se dissoudre dans sa propre remise en question, comme nous y invite toute pensée poststructuraliste menant à l’anarchisme. (…) “Je ne peux seulement parler que pour moi-même” : c’est le “seulement” qui compte ici, et bien sûr ce sont là autant d’espaces qui s’ouvrent. »

En entendant ce charabia pseudo-intellectuel, j’ai compris que les carottes étaient cuites. Le philosophe Slavoj Žižek avait mis en garde les campeurs de Zuccotti Park en octobre 2011 : « Ne tombez pas amoureux de vous-mêmes. Nous passons un moment agréable ici. Mais, rappelez-vous, les carnavals ne coûtent pas cher. Ce qui compte, c’est le jour d’après, quand nous devrons reprendre nos vies ordinaires. Est-ce que quelque chose aura changé ? »

L’avertissement de Žižek figure dans l’ouvrage Occupy : Scenes from Occupied America (« Occuper. Scènes de l’Amérique occupée », Verso, 2011), le premier livre consacré au phénomène protestataire de l’année dernière. Depuis, une avalanche de productions éditoriales a submergé les étals des libraires, des discours prononcés sur les campements aux analyses journalistiques en passant par les témoignages de militants.

Ces ouvrages tombent presque tous dans le panneau évoqué par Žižek. Leurs auteurs sont profondément, désespérément amoureux d’OWS. Chacun prend pour acquis que les campeurs anti-Wall Street ont fait trembler les puissants de ce monde et suffoquer d’admiration tous les réprouvés de la planète. Cette vision béate s’exprime souvent dans le titre même du livre : « Cela change tout : Occuper Wall Street et le mouvement des 99 % » (1), par exemple. Les superlatifs s’entrechoquent sans retenue ni précaution. « Les 99 % se sont éveillés. Le paysage politique américain ne sera plus jamais le même », annonce l’auteur de Voices From the 99 Percent (2). Une prophétie presque tiède comparée à l’enthousiasme péremptoire de Chris Hedges. Dans Jours de destruction, jours de révolte (3), l’ancien journaliste du New York Times compare OWS aux révolutions de 1989 en Allemagne de l’Est, en Tchécoslovaquie et en Roumanie. Les protestataires new-yorkais, écrit-il, « étaient d’abord désorganisés, pas très sûrs de ce qu’ils devaient faire, pas même convaincus d’avoir accompli quoi que ce soit de méritoire. L’air de rien, ils ont pourtant déclenché un mouvement de résistance global qui a résonné à travers tout le pays et jusque dans les capitales européennes. Le statu quo précaire imposé par les élites durant des décennies a volé en éclats. Un autre récit a pris forme. La révolution a commencé. »

Ce qui rend ces livres très ennuyeux, c’est qu’à quelques exceptions près ils se ressemblent tous, racontent les mêmes anecdotes, citent les mêmes communiqués, déroulent les mêmes interprétations historiques, s’attardent sur les mêmes broutilles. Comment le joueur de djembé a empêché tout le monde de dormir, ce qui s’est vraiment passé sur le pont de Brooklyn, pourquoi et comment Untel s’est retrouvé là, qui a eu l’idée en premier de tenir des assemblées générales, comment chacun a nettoyé le parc durant une nuit d’affolement pour éviter de s’en faire expulser le lendemain, etc. Mesuré en nombre de mots par mètre carré de pelouse occupée, Zuccotti Park constitue sans aucun doute l’un des lieux les plus scrutés de l’histoire du journalisme.

La grande épopée fut pourtant de courte durée. Les campeurs ont été évacués deux mois après leur installation. Hormis quelques groupes résiduels ici et là, animés par des militants chevronnés, le mouvement OWS s’est désagrégé. La tempête médiatique qui s’était engouffrée dans les tentes de Zuccotti Park est repartie souffler ailleurs. Faisons une pause et comparons le bilan d’OWS avec celui de son vilain jumeau, le Tea Party, et du renouveau de la droite ultraréactionnaire dont celui-ci est le fer de lance (4). Grâce à ces bénévoles de la surenchère, le Parti républicain est redevenu majoritaire à la Chambre des représentants ; dans les législatures d’Etat, il a pris six cents sièges aux démocrates. Le Tea Party a même réussi à propulser l’un des siens, M. Paul Ryan, à la candidature pour la vice-présidence des Etats-Unis.

La question à laquelle les thuriféraires d’OWS consacrent des cogitations passionnées est la suivante : quelle est la formule magique qui a permis au mouvement de rencontrer un tel succès ? Or c’est la question diamétralement inverse qu’ils devraient se poser : pourquoi un tel échec ? Comment les efforts les plus louables en sont-ils venus à s’embourber dans le marécage de la glose académique et des postures antihiérarchiques ?

Les choses avaient pourtant commencé très fort. Dès les premiers jours d’occupation de Zuccotti Park, la cause d’OWS était devenue incroyablement populaire. De fait, comme le souligne Todd Gitlin (5), jamais depuis les années 1930 un thème progressiste n’avait autant fédéré la société américaine que la détestation de Wall Street. Les témoignages de sympathie pleuvaient par milliers, les chèques de soutien aussi, les gens faisaient la queue pour donner des livres et de la nourriture aux campeurs. Des célébrités vinrent se montrer à Zuccotti et les médias commencèrent à couvrir l’occupation avec une attention qu’ils n’accordent pas souvent aux mouvements sociaux estampillés de gauche.

Mais les commentateurs ont interprété à tort le soutien à la cause d’OWS comme un soutien à ses modalités d’action. Les tentes plantées dans le parc, la préparation de la tambouille pour des légions de campeurs, la recherche sans fin du consensus, les affrontements avec la police... voilà, aux yeux des exégètes, ce qui a fait la force et la singularité d’OWS ; voilà ce que le public a soif de connaître.

Ce qui se tramait à Wall Street, pendant ce temps-là, a suscité un intérêt moins vif. Dans Occupying Wall Street, un recueil de textes rédigés par des écrivains ayant participé au mouvement (6), la question des prêts bancaires usuraires n’apparaît qu’à titre de citation dans la bouche d’un policier. Et n’espérez pas découvrir comment les militants de Zuccotti comptaient contrarier le pouvoir des banques. Non parce que ce serait mission impossible, mais parce que la manière dont la campagne d’OWS est présentée dans ces ouvrages donne l’impression qu’elle n’avait rien d’autre à proposer que la construction de « communautés » dans l’espace public et l’exemple donné au genre humain par le noble refus d’élire des porte-parole.

Culte de la participation

Malheureusement, un tel programme ne suffit pas. Bâtir une culture de lutte démocratique est certes utile pour les cercles militants, mais ce n’est qu’un point de départ. OWS n’est jamais allé plus loin ; il n’a pas déclenché une grève, ni bloqué un centre de recrutement, ni même occupé le bureau d’un doyen d’université. Pour ses militants, la culture horizontale représente le stade suprême de la lutte : « Le processus est le message », entonnaient en chœur les protestataires.

On pourra objecter que la question de présenter ou non des revendications fut âprement débattue par les militants lorsqu’ils occupaient effectivement quelque chose. Mais, pour qui feuillette tous ces ouvrages un an plus tard, ce débat paraît d’un autre monde. Presque aucun ne s’est hasardé à reconnaître que le refus de formuler des propositions a constitué une grave erreur tactique. Au contraire, Occupying Wall Street, le compte rendu quasi officiel de l’aventure, assimile toute velléité programmatique à un fétiche conçu pour maintenir le peuple dans l’aliénation de la hiérarchie et de la servilité. Hedges ne dit pas autre chose lorsqu’il explique que « seules les élites dominantes et leurs relais médiatiques » exhortaient OWS à faire connaître ses demandes. Présenter des revendications serait admettre la légitimité de son adversaire, à savoir l’Etat américain et ses amis les banquiers. En somme, un mouvement de protestation qui ne formule aucune exigence serait le chef-d’œuvre ultime de la vertu démocratique…

D’où la contradiction fondamentale de cette campagne. De toute évidence, protester contre Wall Street en 2011 impliquait de protester aussi contre les tripatouillages financiers qui nous avaient précipités dans la grande récession ; contre le pouvoir politique qui avait sauvé les banques ; contre la pratique délirante des primes et des bonus qui avait métamorphosé les forces productives en tiroir-caisse pour les 1 % les plus riches. Toutes ces calamités tirent leur origine de la dérégulation et des baisses d’impôts — autrement dit, d’une philosophie de l’émancipation individuelle qui, au moins dans sa rhétorique, n’est pas contraire aux pratiques libertaires d’OWS.

Inutile d’avoir suivi des cours de « post-structuralisme menant à l’anarchisme » pour comprendre comment inverser la tendance : en reconstruisant un Etat régulateur compétent. Souvenez-vous de ce que disaient durant ces fameux premiers jours de septembre 2011 les militants d’OWS : réintroduisons la loi Glass-Steagall de 1933, qui séparait les banques de dépôt et les banques d’investissement. Vive l’« Etat obèse » ! Vive la sécurité !

Mais ce n’est pas ainsi que l’on enflamme l’imagination de ses contemporains. Comment animer un carnaval lorsqu’on rêve secrètement d’experts-comptables et d’administration fiscale ? En remettant les choses à plus tard. En évitant de réclamer des mesures concrètes. Réclamer, c’est admettre que les adultes guindés et sans humour ont repris la barre et que la récréation est finie. Ce choix tactique a remarquablement fonctionné au début, mais il a aussi fixé une date de péremption à tout le mouvement. En s’interdisant d’exiger quoi que ce soit, OWS s’est enfermé dans ce que Christopher Lasch appelait — en 1973 — le « culte de la participation ». Autant dire dans une protestation dont le contenu se résume à la satisfaction d’avoir protesté.

Le galimatias des militants

Dans leurs déclarations d’intention, les campeurs de Zuccotti Park célébraient haut et fort la vox populi. Dans la pratique, pourtant, leur centre de gravité penchait d’un seul côté, celui du petit monde universitaire. Les militants cités dans les livres ne dévoilent pas toujours leur identité socioprofessionnelle, mais, lorsqu’ils le font, ils se révèlent soit étudiants, soit ex-étudiants récemment diplômés, soit enseignants.

On ne peut que saluer la mobilisation du monde universitaire. La société a besoin d’entendre cette voix-là. Quand les frais de scolarité grimpent à des pics vertigineux, que l’endettement des diplômés débarquant sur le marché du travail atteint facilement les 100 000 dollars, que des doctorants se retrouvent exploités sans vergogne, les personnes concernées ont parfaitement raison de protester (7). Elles devraient s’attaquer au système, exiger un contrôle strict des frais de scolarité. Que l’on songe aux manifestations qui ont ébranlé le Québec au printemps dernier, quand une partie importante de la population est venue soutenir dans la rue l’exigence estudiantine d’une éducation accessible à tous : là-bas, le mouvement a gagné. Les étudiants ont obtenu presque tout ce qu’ils demandaient. La protestation sociale a fait valser les portes de l’université.

Mais c’est quand l’inverse se produit, quand la discussion académique de haute culture devient un modèle de lutte sociale, que le problème surgit. Pourquoi OWS inspire-t-il aussi souvent à ses admirateurs le besoin de s’exprimer dans un jargon inintelligible ? Pourquoi tant de militants ont-ils éprouvé le besoin de quitter leur poste pour participer à des débats de salon entre érudits (8) ? Pourquoi d’autres ont-ils choisi de réserver leurs témoignages à des revues confidentielles comme American Ethnologist ou Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies ? Pourquoi un pamphlet conçu pour galvaniser les troupes d’OWS est-il rempli de déclarations amphigouriques du genre : « Notre point d’attaque se situe dans les formes de subjectivité dominantes produites dans le contexte des crises sociales et politiques actuelles. Nous nous adressons à quatre figures subjectives — l’endetté, le médiatisé, le sécurisé et le représenté —, qui sont toutes en voie d’appauvrissement et dont le pouvoir d’action sociale est masqué ou mystifié. Nous pensons que les mouvements de révolte et de rébellion nous donnent les moyens non seulement de refuser les régimes répressifs dont souffrent ces figures subjectives, mais aussi d’inverser ces subjectivités face au pouvoir (9) » ? Et pourquoi, quelques mois seulement après avoir occupé Zuccotti Park, plusieurs militants ont-ils jugé indispensable de créer leur propre revue universitaire à prétention théorisante, Occupy Theory, destinée bien sûr à accueillir des essais impénétrables visant à démontrer la futilité de toute théorisation ? Est-ce ainsi qu’on bâtit un mouvement de masse ? En s’obstinant à parler un langage que personne ne comprend ?

La réponse est connue : avant qu’une protestation s’élargisse en mouvement social de grande ampleur, ses protagonistes doivent d’abord réfléchir, analyser, théoriser. Le fait est que, de ce point de vue, OWS a fourni assez de matière pour alimenter un demi-siècle de luttes — sans réussir pour autant à mener la sienne ailleurs que dans une impasse.

Occuper Wall Street a réalisé d’excellentes choses. Il a su trouver un bon slogan, identifier le bon ennemi et capter l’imagination du public. Il a donné forme à une culture protestataire démocratique. Il a établi des liens avec les syndicats de travailleurs, un pas crucial dans la bonne direction. Il a redonné vigueur à la notion de solidarité, vertu cardinale de la gauche. Mais les réflexes universitaires ont vite pris une place écrasante, transformant OWS en un laboratoire où ses forts en thème venaient valider leurs théories. Car les campements n’accueillaient pas seulement des militants soucieux de changer le monde : ils ont aussi servi d’arène à la promotion individuelle de quelques carriéristes.

Et c’est une façon encore trop optimiste de présenter les choses. La manière pessimiste consisterait à ouvrir le dernier livre de Michael Kazin, American Dreamers (Knopf, New York, 2011), et à convenir avec lui que, depuis la guerre du Vietnam et le combat pour les droits civiques dans les années 1960, aucun mouvement progressiste n’a opéré la jonction avec le grand public américain — à l’exception de la campagne anti-apartheid des années 1980. Il est vrai qu’au temps du Vietnam le pays fourmillait de militants de gauche, surtout dans les universités. Mais, depuis, étudier la « résistance » a constitué un moyen éprouvé d’améliorer ses perspectives de carrière, quand ce n’est pas la matière même de certaines disciplines annexes. Toutefois, aussi érudite soit-elle sur le plan intellectuel, la gauche continue d’aller de défaite en défaite. Elle ne parvient plus à faire cause commune avec le peuple.

Cet échec s’explique peut-être par la surreprésentation en son sein d’une profession dont le mode opératoire est délibérément abscons, ultrahiérarchisé, verbeux et professoral, peu propice à une démarche fédératrice. Ou peut-être résulte-t-il de la persistance à gauche d’un mépris envers l’homme de la rue, surtout quand on peut lui reprocher d’avoir mal voté ou commis quelque péché politique. Ou peut-être encore est-ce l’effondrement de l’appareil industriel qui rend les mouvements sociaux obsolètes. Ce n’est pas dans les ouvrages sur OWS que l’on trouvera la moindre réponse.

Les activistes anti-Wall Street n’aiment pas, c’est clair, leurs homologues du Tea Party. Dans leur esprit, apparemment, ils ne sont pas tout à fait de vraies gens, comme si d’autres principes biologiques s’appliquaient à leur espèce. La philosophe Judith Butler, professeur à l’université de Columbia, évoque avec répugnance une réunion du Tea Party au cours de laquelle des individus se seraient réjouis de la mort prochaine de plusieurs malades dépourvus d’assurance-maladie. « Sous quelles conditions économiques et politiques de telles formes de cruauté joyeuse émergent-elles ? », s’interroge-t-elle.

C’est une bonne question. Deux paragraphes plus loin, pourtant, Butler change de sujet pour louer l’admirable décision d’OWS de ne rien réclamer, ce qui lui fournit l’occasion d’esquisser une théorie de haut vol : une foule qui proteste est spontanément et intrinsèquement libérationniste. « Lorsque des corps se rassemblent pour manifester leur indignation et affirmer leur existence plurielle dans l’espace public, ils expriment aussi des demandes plus vastes, écrit-elle. Ils demandent à être reconnus et valorisés ; ils revendiquent le droit d’apparaître et d’exercer leur liberté ; ils réclament une vie vivable (10). » C’est réglé comme du papier à musique : les mécontents qui descendent dans la rue le font nécessairement pour affirmer l’existence plurielle de leurs corps, partout et toujours — sauf s’ils appartiennent au groupe mentionné deux paragraphes plus haut…

Pourtant, les deux mouvements présentent quelques ressemblances. Ils partagent par exemple la même aversion obsessionnelle pour les plans de sauvetage de 2008, qualifiés par les deux camps de « capitalisme de connivences ». L’un et l’autre s’expriment en occupant des espaces publics ; l’un et l’autre ont accordé une place importante aux partisans de M. Ron Paul, le chef de file du courant « libertarien » du Parti républicain. Même le masque d’Anonymous (à l’effigie de Guy Fawkes, le vengeur solitaire du film V comme Vendetta) a circulé dans les deux camps.

Sur le plan tactique aussi les analogies existent. OWS et le Tea Party sont restés pareillement flous dans leurs revendications, afin de ratisser plus large. Les deux groupes se sont appesantis avec la même emphase sur les persécutions dont ils s’estimaient victimes. Côté campeurs, on insistait sur les brutalités policières. Dans un récit de quarante-cinq pages (11), Will Bunch narre en détail la répression aveugle et l’arrestation de masse d’une manifestation sur le pont de Brooklyn. Côté Tea Party, c’est le supplice infligé par les « médias de gauche » et leurs accusations de racisme qui nourrit la martyrologie collective (12).

L’absence de dirigeants est un autre point commun aux deux camps. Dans le manifeste du Tea Party rédigé en 2010 par M. Richard (« Dick ») Armey, ancien parlementaire républicain du Texas, figure même un chapitre intitulé « Nous sommes un mouvement d’idées, pas de leaders ». Le raisonnement livré ici ne dépareillerait pas chez les théoriciens d’OWS : « S’ils [nos adversaires] savaient qui tire les ficelles, ils pourraient s’en prendre à lui ou à elle. Ils pourraient écraser l’opposition gênante du Tea Party. »

Si l’on se plonge dans les références littéraires du Tea Party, on peut également y déceler des traces de la philosophie d’OWS relative au refus de toute revendication. Voyons ce qu’en dit la philosophe Ayn Rand, dont les théories « objectivistes » ont servi de socle moral à la dérégulation capitaliste (13). Dans La Grève, sa grande œuvre romanesque parue en 1957, vendue à sept millions d’exemplaires aux Etats-Unis, les « revendications » sont assimilées au monde nuisible du pouvoir politique, qui les formule au nom de ses administrés forcément fainéants et improductifs. Les hommes d’affaires, en revanche, négocient des contrats : ils agissent dans l’harmonie des liens consensuels établis par le libre marché. Le morceau de bravoure se situe au moment où le personnage de John Galt, qui s’est mis en grève contre le fléau de l’égalitarisme, adresse ce discours au gouvernement américain : « Nous n’avons aucune revendication à vous présenter, aucune disposition à marchander, aucun compromis à atteindre. Vous n’avez rien à nous offrir. Nous n’avons pas besoin de vous. »

Faire grève sans rien réclamer ? Oui, car demander quelque chose à l’Etat serait reconnaître sa légitimité. Pour définir cette attitude, Rand a forgé une expression sophistiquée : la « légitimation de la victime ». Engagé dans la réalisation de son potentiel personnel, le grand patron — la « victime », dans la pittoresque vision du monde de l’auteure — refuse la bénédiction d’une société qui le tyrannise à coups d’impôts et de règlements. Le milliardaire éclairé ne veut rien avoir à faire avec les pillards et les parasites qui peuplent une société nivelée par le bas.

Comment ces précurseurs du « 1 % » vont-ils s’y prendre pour l’emporter ? En bâtissant une communauté modèle au cœur même du vieux monde. Toutefois, les milliardaires meurtris imaginés par Rand n’organisent pas des assemblées générales dans les jardins publics, mais se retirent dans une vallée déserte du Colorado, où ils créent un capitalisme paradisiaque, non coercitif, dont la monnaie, un étalon-or fait maison, ne doit rien à l’Etat.

Comment appâter le client ?

Une dernière similitude. L’astuce idéologique du Tea Party a consisté, bien sûr, à détourner la colère populaire qui s’était déchaînée contre Wall Street pour la reporter sur l’Etat (14). OWS a fait de même, mais de façon plus abstraite et théorique. On s’en aperçoit, par exemple, en déchiffrant l’argumentaire de l’anthropologue Jeffrey Juris : « Les occupations ont remis en question le pouvoir souverain de l’Etat de réguler et contrôler la distribution des corps dans l’espace, (…) notamment par l’appropriation d’espaces urbains particuliers tels que les parcs publics et les squares et par leur requalification en lieux d’assemblée publique et d’expression démocratique (15). » Ce type de rhétorique illustre un point de convergence entre OWS et la gauche universitaire : la mise en accusation de l’Etat et de son pouvoir de tout « réguler », « contrôler », même si, dans le cas de Wall Street, le problème vient plutôt du fait qu’il ne régule et ne contrôle à peu près rien. A quelques corrections mineures près, le texte pourrait se lire comme un pamphlet libertarien contre les espaces verts.

Puisque aucun des livres cités ici n’a prêté attention à ces concordances, on ne risque pas d’y trouver une théorie susceptible de les expliquer. Qu’on me permette donc de proposer la mienne.

La raison pour laquelle OWS et le Tea Party paraissent parfois si semblables tient au fait qu’ils empruntent tous deux à ce libertarisme un peu paresseux et narcissique qui imprègne désormais notre vision de la contestation, depuis les adolescents de Disney Channel en quête d’eux-mêmes jusqu’aux pseudo-anarchistes qui vandalisent un Starbuck’s. Tous imaginent qu’ils se rebellent contre « l’Etat ». C’est dans le génome de notre époque, semble-t-il.

Le succès venant, le Tea Party a remisé au placard ses discours bravaches sur l’organisation horizontale. Autant de boniments dont la principale vocation était d’appâter le client. Ce mouvement n’avait pas de penseurs poststructuralistes, mais il disposait d’argent, de réseaux et de l’appui d’une grande chaîne de télévision (Fox News). Aussi n’a-t-il pas tardé à produire des dirigeants, des revendications et un alignement fructueux sur le Parti républicain. Occuper Wall Street n’a pas pris ce chemin-là. L’horizontalité, il y croyait vraiment. Après avoir connu un succès foudroyant, il s’est donc disloqué en vol.

Les élections présidentielles et législatives de novembre 2012 sont maintenant terminées : M. Obama a été reconduit à la Maison Blanche, M. Ryan a conservé son siège à la Chambre des représentants, la guerre contre les travailleurs continue — dans le Michighan, notamment — et Wall Street dirige toujours le monde. Certes, la ploutocratie n’est pas parvenue à convaincre la population qu’elle était sa meilleure amie, mais l’ordre ancien perdure et il apparaît de plus en plus évident que seul un mouvement social de masse, solidement ancré à gauche, pourra mettre fin à l’ère néolibérale. Malheureusement, OWS n’en fut pas un.

There is also simply telling someone involved with open source you appreciate what they do. Whether this is by email or over IRC or in-person to some contributor of the project, having someone literally say "thank you" goes a long way. I know this might sound trivial, but realize that people contributing to open source over long periods are basically either dealing with negative people or people who are cordial but still want something from you. Having someone who doesn’t explicitly want something from you and still feels like saying "thanks" shows that your hard work is appreciated in general and not in some specific instance where you fixed some bug someone needed help with. Think of it as the difference between when you do something for a loved one and then they give you a hug as thanks versus that same person simply giving you a hug out of the blue just because they care; the former hug is nice but the latter one is what makes you feel truly appreciated.

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness

Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.

I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.

In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell. When I was told by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it quite amusing, because among the working-class kids whom I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied, and received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” it also very much concerned me about just what kind of a profession that I had entered. Specifically, if somebody such as myself was being labeled with “issues with authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.

Mental Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians

A 2009 Psychiatric Times article titled “ADHD & ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior” reports that “disruptive disorders,” which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of children and teenagers. ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility, poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”; and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”

Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a “duel diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.

Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?

Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn't pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The Life and Times) asserts that Albert's problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools. Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants.” At age 13, Einstein read Kant's difficult Critique of Pure Reason—because Albert was interested in it. Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.” After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.

By today’s standards, Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would have certainly been diagnosed with one or more disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Alinsky also recalls a time when he was ten or eleven and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew:

One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible . . . Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn’t; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, “This time it’s a nickel or nothing.” He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room.
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

I have also spent a great deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and behavior that were so bizarre that they were extremely frightening for their families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading productive lives. Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends, including reforming mental health treatment.

Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.

There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job

It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.

Maintaining the Societal Status Quo

Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society.

The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”). And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense Rebellion).

In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.

In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”

Documentaire/conférence super intéressante, et tellement bien présentée.