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The relationship between governments and teach companies

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The relationship between governments and teach companies

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Apple and Google flexed their muscles by laying out conditions for building apps to track the spread of the coronavirus | Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images

In the digital fight against COVID-19, Big Tech squared off against governments - and won.

As policymakers around Europe pushed to develop smartphone apps to track the spread of the coronavirus, Apple and Google flexed their muscles by laying out conditions for building the tools, which are now set to be rolled out across the bloc and beyond by early June.

In conversations with more than 30 policymakers, data-protection experts, independent computer scientists and tech engineers from across the EU and United States, POLITICO pieced together how Google and Apple got their way, often playing hardball with politicians who have used their opposition to U.S. tech players to earn political capital with local voters. The companies also teamed up with longtime privacy campaigners - often those who have balked at Silicon Valley's collection of reams of people's personal data - to push back against concerns about potential government surveillance.

In often fraught discussions, officials weighed the need to protect privacy against the public health imperative of tackling a virus that, so far, has left almost 300,000 people dead worldwide. Tech officials and privacy groups set aside longstanding feuds to figure out how to build COVID-19 apps, often condensing months of work into a few weeks. Politicians were left to decide whether to go it alone, often with tech offerings that left much to be desired - or team up with some of Silicon Valley's biggest names whose take-it-or-leave-it approach rubbed some the wrong way.

A German-led group pushed ahead with a toolkit, developed alongside 130 tech experts across eight countries, to build apps that could detect potential infections.

"I'm not taking a stand against Apple and Google," Cedric O, France's digital minister, told POLITICO after publicly criticizing the companies for refusing to work with Paris' independent coronavirus app. "I'm saying that I don't want to be constrained by the internal policy choices of any company on a matter of public health."

As governments grapple to bring the coronavirus to heel, the unlikely alliance between some of the world's largest tech companies and global privacy groups is starting to bear fruit.

"We hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19," the companies said when announcing their initiative last month. Both declined to comment on their relationships with governments on creating smartphone apps, though senior engineers involved in the project stressed it was down to governments, not the companies, to determine which approach to use.

By June, national capitals from Berlin and Rome to Paris and London will roll out smartphone apps that use mobile technology to trace people's interactions, informing local populations if they have been in contact with others infected with the coronavirus. Most of these programs, which may be in place well into 2021, rely on the approach championed by Google and Apple - often against initial proposals tabled by policymakers worldwide.

The ability of these tech companies to get their way, often with the support of local privacy and security advocates, has raised questions about the role of Big Tech in determining how governments respond to the global public health crisis. With apps soon becoming available that both rely on Google and Apple's procedures, and those that don't, the confusion will hobble Europe's strategy to coordinate its response across the 27-country bloc and elsewhere because the different digital tools cannot interact with each other.

"The interoperability of these apps has been a major blind spot," said Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, a computer science professor at the Université Paris-Saclay, who co-authored a recent report on how these tools should operate. "From a technical perspective, it will be difficult to get these apps to talk to one another."

Germany switches sides

Nowhere are these tensions more apparent than in Germany, home to some of the world's longest-standing privacy protections.

Early last month, a German-led group pushed ahead with a toolkit, developed alongside 130 tech experts across eight countries, to build apps that could detect potential infections. Critically, the plan allowed for placing everyone's data on a central server and giving epidemiologists and policymakers access to some of the information, to analyze how the virus spread nationwide.

Within days, the initiative hit a brick wall. With little, if any, communication with local experts and EU policymakers, Google and Apple announced on April 10 they had partnered on software which would allow government-backed apps to trace potential infections even while running in the background of people's smartphones. The approach relied on data remaining, for the most part, on people's devices. Both companies refused to open their technology to governments pushing for centralized data storage, a strategy they considered vulnerable to state snooping.

German privacy and security experts quickly jumped into action. Within often-heated WhatsApp conversations, some debated whether to throw their support behind Apple and Google. Others questioned if the companies' efforts would cement their already dominant position in the smartphone market. But by late April, following similar warnings by international researchers from more than 25 countries, six influential civil liberties organizations sent an open letter to the German government, criticizing the storage of people's data in one place and warning that it could lead to mass government surveillance.

Two days later, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government intervened to ditch the initial German-led proposals in favor of those promoted by Google and Apple.

"The discussion among tech experts killed the credibility and trustworthiness of the technology," a high-ranking German official told POLITICO. "That's why we decided to go with the different approach." Berlin's decision was quickly followed by similar moves in Ireland, Italy and other countries as officials shifted to adopt a decentralized approach, realizing it would be better to partner with the tech giants, and the Germans, if these coronavirus apps were to take off across the EU. The European Commission stressed it is up to national governments to determine which app to use, but urged officials to find ways for the tools to communicate across borders.

The choice in Germany was made out of pragmatism rather than conviction - as well as a growing awareness that Berlin needed to work closely with Apple and Google to develop the app if engineers wanted to avoid serious glitches in their eventual digital tool, according to conversations with almost half a dozen German government and industry officials who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are private.

"We need to have a discussion on how Silicon Valley is increasingly taking over the job of a nation state," said a government official. "But we don't need to have it amid a pandemic."

Germany now plans to unveil its app, built by industry giants Deutsche Telekom and SAP, by mid-June, several weeks later than originally planned, in part because the tech giants will not release a key software component until mid-May, the same officials said.

France digs in its heels

While Germany ultimately sided with Apple and Google, France went the opposite way and ended up in an open confrontation with the tech giants.

Paris' work started in mid-March just as Singapore was unveiling its own tracking tool. While the country's interior minister said at the time that coronavirus apps were "not part of French culture," O, the country's digital minister, was already making plans with close advisers.

Experts at France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in March initially reached out to Apple - without the backing of the French government - with technical questions about how such a tracing tool could work, according to a person involved in those discussions.

By early April, officials had confirmed they were working on an app that would work by centralizing users' data - an approach that had also been embraced by Germany, until Google and Apple unveiled their plans in mid-April. French experts close to those discussions told POLITICO that many involved in the project saw the centralized approach as being more privacy-friendly compared to storing data only on people's phones.

Not everyone agreed. Amid an intense debate about potential government surveillance, several government coders who favored Apple and Google's plans were excluded from the so-called StopCovid app project, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the project.

France moved ahead with its app that, by the government's own admission, would not fully function on Apple and Google devices because it would switch off when smartphones were in sleep mode.

"We chose the centralized system because of data protection concerns and issues regarding interconnection with [our] epidemiological system," O told POLITICO. Both the country's privacy regulator and National Digital Council said that France's plans complied with EU privacy rules, as long as appropriate oversight was in place.

Several people involved in the project said they were caught off-guard by Google and Apple's announcement about the joint coronavirus app project. When they found out, many through the companies' public statements, officials tried to convince them to lift technical restrictions on the French approach that would prevent the StopCovid app from working properly on almost all smartphones.

Aymeril Hoang, who sits on the scientific council advising the government on digital tracking, told POLITICO that he spoke repeatedly with Sébastian Gros, a government relations manager for Apple, after the April 10 announcement to persuade the firm to lift the constraints. His efforts were not successful.

Despite that roadblock, France moved ahead with its app that, by the government's own admission, would not fully function on Apple and Google devices because it would switch off when smartphones were in sleep mode. That would be a major stumbling block to the app's primary goal of tracing all potential encounters with infected persons.

On April 20, O again urged the companies to work with officials to find a workaround. But his pleas were rebuffed when the tech giants reaffirmed they would only work on projects relying on decentralized data.

The digital minister, who was previously an adviser to President Emmanuel Macron, dug in his heels, refusing to bend to the decentralized approach. In particular, he told POLITICO that it should be up to governments, not companies, to determine what's best to protect citizens from the global pandemic.

With the country starting to come out of its nationwide lockdown, France now plans to roll out its app by June 2. But the standoff between Paris and Silicon Valley firms continues to divide privacy advocates and government regulators.

"We have a sort of statement of principle that Apple is putting forward that says this or that solution is more or less protective for users without there being any contradictory discussion on the issue," Sébastien Soriano, head of the French telecoms regulator, told POLITICO. "Perhaps Apple is right and would be able to demonstrate that accepting certain protocols poses risks to its users. But there is no process for independent judges or authorities to decide."

United Kingdom stuck in the middle

After an initial stalled response to the global public health crisis, London was eager to show it was on top of tackling COVID-19 - and quickly turned, in early March, to a potential smartphone tracking app that had proved successful in parts of Asia.

Within NHSX, the U.K. health service's newly created tech innovation unit, the debate quickly focused on centralizing people's data - a strategy then being followed by other countries in Europe - in part because it would allow nationwide modeling on how the virus was evolving, something that could not be done through a decentralized approach.

Ahead of Google and Apple's decision to go down a different path, informal discussions were held between the companies' government affairs executives and some in Westminster to brief policymakers on the upcoming plans. But no formal heads-up was given to the British government, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

The announcement divided opinion. Some within NHSX discussed changing the U.K. strategy as questions began to be raised about how the app could access smartphone technology needed to keep the tracing tool running when devices were in sleep mode. Outsiders, including Michael Veale, a British digital rights professor who helped to build a privacy-focused digital tracing tool that was copied by the tech companies' separate efforts, also warned London their efforts could be wasted if they didn't shift gears.

"On the day of the Apple release, I sent them an email to explain their system would not work properly in the background," he said.

London still plans to roll out its app nationwide by late May and more than 65,000 people have downloaded it during the test phase.

Discussions between the tech companies and U.K. officials remained mostly amicable, often focused on how to get the the U.K.'s app quickly approved for both firms' app stores. But frustrations have also boiled over because of Apple and Google's refusal to work more directly with the U.K.'s centralized approach to its tracing tool, according to two outside consultants briefed on the discussions.

On the technical front, the NHSX app was also beset with problems, several times failing basic security and privacy checks required for approval in the health service's procurement process, according to another outside consultant with knowledge of the matter. The Health Service Journal first reported these failures.

Privacy groups involved in the initial testing of the U.K. app said their communication with NHSX was patchy, at best. Emails would go days without receiving a response. Basic requirements, like filing a Data Protection Impact Assessment, a mandatory part of any app development, were done after the digital tool began to be tested on the Isle of Wight earlier this month, according to a review of government documents.

"To say the app is limited would be an understatement," said Christopher Weatherhead, tech lead at advocacy group Privacy International, who was involved in the tool's early testing. "As soon as the phone screen is off, the app doesn't scan."

London still plans to roll out its app nationwide by late May (more than 65,000 people have downloaded it during the test phase). But officials also have approved plans for another tracing tool - this time based on Google and Apple's approach - in case the technical limitations of the current app cannot be overcome, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project and government procurement records. The Financial Times first reported the potential U-turn.

Nothing has yet to be decided, with officials saying they want to keep every avenue open.

But as the U.K. considers jumping ship to join the tech companies, privacy advocates stress the irony that after years of berating Google and Apple for not protecting people's privacy, these tech giants are fast becoming gatekeepers to stop potential government surveillance - a position that may further cement their position in people's digital lives.

"The most efficient privacy regulators in the world right now are Apple and Google," said Daragh O'Brien, a privacy consultant in Dublin who pushed back publicly with other local experts at Ireland's initial efforts to create a centralized app. The government eventually shifted to Google and Apple's approach. "We are reliant on a duopoly of tech companies that control the operating system market."
Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting from London, Jacopo Barigazzi and Giorgio Leali contributed reporting from Brussels.
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How Google and Apple outflanked governments in the race to build coronavirus apps

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In the digital fight against COVID-19, Big Tech squared off against governments - and won. As policymakers around Europe pushed to develop smartphone apps to track the spread of the coronavirus, Apple and Google flexed their muscles by laying out conditions for building the tools, which are now set to be rolled out across the bloc and beyond by early June.

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The overriding idea is that if Utopia is attempted without the very best and most ethical of the species (without behavioral engineering, mind alteration and eugenics), then new members will carry in contamination from the old world and destroy the Utopia.

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Once again we see a resurgence of interest in intentional communities and in Utopian experiments in living communally. Even Time Magazine is advocating such ways of living as a solution to the problems of modern living.

Over the last ten years I have made forays into alternative living; finding and testing out Utopian intentional communities. My intention was originally to escape from the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism and join one such community. However the results of these life experiments threw up a body of evidence that, I feel, disproves the viability of such forms of living.

The following are observations from residential visits to the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland, an ecological communal farming community on the border between Scotland and England, and an anarchist commune in Wales, with further observations on Auroville, India, Esalen, California and the history of Utopian attempts since the middle ages. Intended as evidence of what can go wrong within communal living experiments, these points may also shed some light on why hundreds of such communities since the 19th century did not survive beyond one generation and frequently collapsed after only a few years. It is hoped that lessons can be learned from honestly admitting to these failures.
The Communities
Both Findhorn and Auroville were established as separatist Utopias, retreats from the western world, created in the 1960s. Bound together by loose aggregations of diverse belief systems these were intentional communities - communities forged not by history, culture or clan but by the intention to be self-sustaining Internationalist Utopian communities. While many such ventures failed (478 intentional communities since the 1820s have now shrunk to 112 worldwide in the last 30 years) these are now two of the largest spiritual centers in the world. They have large residential communities of around 200 each, while at the same time supporting themselves by running courses for numbers of visitors (Findhorn has 1,200 paying guest per year and Auroville over 50,000 visitors.)

Both communities originated from the mixed bag of ideals within the hippie era, but have now developed ways to survive within capitalism. Both have moved away from self-subsistence as a means of economic survival towards what could be termed Spiritual Tourism or Spiritual Education.

On their own terms, they are thriving, however, viewed through the prism of their own claims about themselves and their founding beliefs, they have problems. And not only that, they have problems in common, which are shared with other intentional communities and this is evidence that these kinds of issues are systemic and intrinsic and maybe even foundational to intentional communities.

The following are things I have diagnosed from first-hand observation that go wrong when we try to turn Utopia into a real location. As my ventures involved other intentional communities as well, rather than explain all of their contexts, and to protect anonymity, I refer throughout to several of the communities as "Community X."
Being Model Humans
"If everyone was to behave like us then the world would be a better place - we would be able to get rid of guilt, inequality, competition, greed and anger.""If we all ate less and were less materialistic the world would be a better place." "Only by changing ourselves can we change the world, by our living example."

This is the one foundational belief system of every intentional community that all members can agree on. This was also the justification that the hippies used for practically everything. The theory goes like this: Instead of acting in the world, all you have to do is become a peaceful, non-violent person - a model human, and others will follow your model. This is how you change the world, by focusing entirely upon yourself.

The results of this experiment are, generations later, clear - changing yourself became a vast industry of self-help books and courses, dietary, fitness and personal "spiritual" planning regimes - a form of obsessive self-focusing and self-policing, which, it turns out, corporations are very happy to encourage. Ironically, intentional communities also make a lot of money from self-discovery courses. A seven day residential workshop at Esalen, will set you back between $1850 and $7000. Five days of "Vital MovesHeartbeat" workshop at Findhorn, and the "being in community" workshop were both more modestly priced in the range of £490-£780.

And of course, the true self is ever illusive and ever flawed, so there's so much self-perfecting to do that no one ever actually gets back to the question of the fixing the world.

The many divergent and different countries of the world are not going to adopt the standards of intentional communities so this whole idea of being self-perfecting model humans is myopic and even narcissistic. It is also a way of thinking only in terms of intentions and not of consequences. You may declare outstanding universalist intentions for world peace, but what are the actual consequences of twenty people in the western world deciding to go on a fast in protest against GM crops? Zero. What are the consequences for the Global economy of 1000 people in the west dropping out of the consumption cycle and growing their own vegetables? Zero. You can do this as a way to make yourself feel better about your consumption choices, but if you use "changing the world" as a justification, then you are deluding yourself.

"If everyone did it the world would be a better place."

This is also patronizing because it sets up the self as an example for all. And this narcissism is self-reinforcing as the failure of the rest of the world to adopt all your choices and opinions, become just more evidence of how ethically superior you are.

Those who use organic food as a metaphor for self-perfection fail to grasp that not everyone in the world can afford to eat or grow organic vegetables and to drop out of capitalism: it is technically impossible to feed the entire population of the planet with organic produce.

Ergo - perfecting yourself is a minority pursuit which would actually have damaging repercussions if adopted by society at large.
No Lawyers Please - The Utopian Door Police
The idea that intentional communities will only permit the entry of certain kinds of people has a long history and may have its roots in monotheistic religions which have a Heaven for those without sin, or further back within the Greek idea of Elysium, home of the Demi-Gods and heroes (regular mortals excluded). If you want to create a better society from scratch then you have to keep the bad people out, so in Plato's Republic (94BC), Lawyers are banned by punishment of death, and "tragic poets" (artists and writers who excite the irrational emotions) are banished beyond the city walls, while Plato insists that the "deformed offspring of both the superior and inferior" be put away in some "mysterious unknown places."

In the Utopia of The Diggers (1649), a group of early communist agrarian Utopians, Gerard Winstanley's Law of Freedom shares Plato's hatred and states that "anyone who administers the law for money or reward, and anyone who buys or sells anything, will be executed."

Then there is the banishing of all money lenders in Utopias from Thomas More (147-1535) - in his Utopia gold is used only for piss pots, to remind the populace of its worthlessness. In Thomas More's book, there are no soldiers; when the Utopians need to fight wars they hire mercenaries from nearby warlike nations and as such More's Utopians are just as keen to find wicked men to exploit as good men to employ. They are most happy when the mercenaries they hire die in combat, as they want to eventually " wipe the fifth off the face of the earth completely."

In real attempts at feminist lesbian separatism, in communal living experiments such as Kate Millet's Art colony (1961-) and the Furies Collective (1971- ) all men were banned. While the fictional Utopia of the devout Catholic first president of Sinn Fein, Edward Joseph Martin (1859-1923) is an island with no women, in which Greek is spoken and all men are artists and aesthetes and the "ignorant feminized masses" are banished.

In the Utopia of social revolutionary Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), it is a capital offense for women to wear cosmetics or high heels, or a particular kind of gown that Campanella found to be sexually provocative - in a move very much like that expounded by Islam where all difference between women are eradicated by the use of the Burka, so as to avoid hostile competition between males. While in the Solarian City, sodomites are punished with death, social engineering also takes place: and "fat girls are matched with thin men and thin girls with fat ones, so as to avoid extremes in their offspring." This kind of eugenic manipulation foreshadows the Nazi Utopia, and the eradication of Jews and homosexuals with the goal of purifying the Aryan race.

H.G Wells (1866-1946) in his New Republic advocated phasing out the "vicious helpless and pauper masses" (also described as "People of the Abyss") plus criminals, the insane, drunks, addicts and the physically unfit through sterilization or poisoning - "the men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess."

It is a shocking fact but almost half of all imagined Utopias involve some degree of eugenics and/or social engineering plus the abortion or destruction of undesirables. In the dystopias (inverted utopias) of Orwell and Huxley, only those who have had their brains altered to come in line with the dominant order are allowed to remain alive, whether this is through a pacifying pleasure drug ( Huxley's Soma) or through torture and brainwashing in 1984. The Thought Police and doublethink of Orwell is just the negative face of what in the history of Utopianism is seen as a positive force. The logic goes that the only way to really make a Utopia work is to change the minds; to as the hippies said "Free your mind and your ass will follow." Huxley also wrote a hugely influential Utopian text - The Island (1962), which mixed Buddhism, behaviorism and mind-altering drugs on a fictional Utopian island called Pala, in which behavioral conditioning made it impossible for "rabble rousers" and "heroic leaders" to arise. The overriding idea is that if Utopia is attempted without the very best and most ethical of the species (without behavioral engineering, mind alteration and eugenics), then new members will carry in contamination from the old world and destroy the Utopia.

Rather than attempt to modify the behavior of the population of the world, modern intentional communities chose instead to screen out bad people, and to work on changing the minds of those who are "open to transformation." Entry is usually by referral from an existing member, or through interview by elders. While Esalen is accessible "by reservation only," Intentional Community X has a perimeter fence and people who acts as ad hoc security guards to stop strangers entering. Intentional communities - these havens of universal openness and egalitarianism - are actually extremely exclusive.
If You Can't Change the World Then Enforce a Regime Change in Your Diet (& Please Pass the Ketchup)
In trying to exorcise the demons of the outside world, to detox from western culture, individuals in intentional communities become focused on the body. The body can be managed, punished and changed whereas the outside world cannot. This is literalized by those who engage in activities like "Fasting for Peace."

Taking joy in food is also looked down upon, as food is fuel for the body and the body is the vehicle of the soul. Such body punishment in the name of spiritual purity is positively medieval and has its roots in the Christian idea of Anorexia Mirabilis (miraculous lack of appetite) and Inedia Prodigiosa (Prodigious fasting) and to this day modern intentional communities harbor and nurture people who hold the belief that the body should be sustained not with food but with "universal energy."

In intentional communities food is generally seen as mere fuel, and pleasure in food is seen as un-spiritual. Food is usually prepared collectively with people with little or no experience of cooking taking turns on rota. The resulting food is bland, tasteless, overcooked, recycled and reheated, and attempts to improve the quality and taste are frowned upon and seen as being "materialistic" and "hedonistic." The food is basically a form of penance - the bare minimum of nutrition with the least taste - after all, if one taste is too strong some people may object and feeding 100 people means that 100 people might differ on what they like - so food has to be re-boiled to rudimentary blandness.

In Findhorn, ironically, vast amounts of vegan mayonnaise and ketchup are used to fill in for the lack of flavor. This creates feelings of guilt. People talk more than in any other community about how much they miss their decadent old treats - chocolate biscuits, meat, potato chips, sauces etc - and they pride themselves on how well they are resisting the urge for such temptations. They talk about how much they have come to like "simple food" in the hope that they can convince themselves and others that they are being "pure" and "good." Food-pleasure-denial becomes a metaphor for self-purification. Like medieval doctors discussing the consistency of excrement, looking for signs of spiritual improvement, such conversations are not uncommon in intentional communities.

Since hierarchies supposedly "do not exist" and status symbols are denied, they re-surface in sublimated ways. Diet becomes a signifier of moral superiority. Thus macrobiotic vegans are at the top of the pecking order, with vegetarians in the middle and carnivores are very often not even permitted entry to the community.
The Purity Race to the Bottom
As intentional communities are some of the only harbors left for people who are essentially craving the same experiences that led people in past eras to severe asceticism, to vows of silence, to the abandonment of all property, the punishment of the mortal body or to becoming anchorites, people who are drawn to such experiences are revered and protected within intentional communities. One of the problems of this is that the proximity to those who are involved in self-punishment-unto-death leads the other members of the community to revere these people too highly and to feel guilty that they too are not making enough sacrifices - that they are too tied to bodily pleasures and modern inventions.

Thus, in Community X, there have been those who have rejected modern medicine, and who have become severely ill as a result. Also, diets geared towards austerity and partaking of the minimum for daily sustenance are not good for growing children, and having an entire community living on very low energy, a state of exhaustion is not good for morale or for communication, either with each other or with outsiders. When self-imposed suffering and refusal of al pleasures becomes the goal of a community, it accidentally triggers conflict within its ranks. Those who are suffering from lack of sustenance, are want to accuse others of hiding forbidden foods, partaking of forbidden pleasures. Forms of envy and craving are twisted into an ever more austere puritanism, and witch hunts of those who are not behaving and consuming austerely enough begin.

This race to the bottom towards the way of life of the most austere, can begin simply, with say a vegetarian community bending towards the dietary needs of vegans for all communal meals, out of respect for the higher austerity-factor of the vegan diet. Then, those who are involved with the more ecological practice of macrobiotic eating, can complain that the vegan diet is dependent upon expensive imports, (which create carbon emissions in shipping, etc) so then the community attempts to be both Vegan and Macrobiotic - eating only that which can be grown within the community. This is the danger when austerity is elevated above natural bodily needs and a community can quickly amplify austerity into a competition, in which those who eat least and eat the most austere food are seen as having more spiritual currency.

In 1999, a long-standing member of the Findhorn Foundation who followed the "Breathenarianst" belief - took this process of body-denial to its zenith, believing that a body could live on light and air alone. She was found dead in the mountains of the remote Scottish Highlands.
Entropy
Projects get abandoned in intentional communities. Because no one can admit they have failed, because 'there is no such thing as failure' and it is not a culture that is into "blame," "risk" or entrepreneurial competition, people avoid taking any risks or addressing the consequences of failure.

As individual inner motivation and goal orientation are frowned upon, projects lose energy very quickly and are often even sabotaged by others. So in intentional communities it is not uncommon to come across broken machinery, overgrown un-weeded herb gardens that only a year ago were part of an "aromatherapy' project." An overgrown mosaic path that was left incomplete and that leads nowhere. Rooms packed full of junk with a hand-drawn sign on the window that reads: Pottery workshop. These places become cluttered with half-completed art projects and abandoned attempts at making extra money through crafts or home produce.

In Community X for example, I witnessed an abandoned attempt at digging a well, an abandoned reservoir, a broken polytunnel, an abandoned tractor and an abandoned plan to rebuild stone houses, to enable the inhabitants to move out of caravan living into more stable housing.

Inhabitants don't blame themselves, "things just happen," or "projects lose steam" as if some malignant deity broke the tractor or punctured the polytunnel. Everything lingers in a non-judgemental state of entropy and sinks into decay, while nature, time and the outside world gallop onwards.

As H.G. Wells noted in an essay he wrote after meeting Stalin - "All Utopias are static." (His interview with Stalin can also be found here.) He meant this critically, in the sense that all Utopias are burdened by the need to stick to one single plan without divergence and that this leads to stagnation. The economic and existential stagnation that is seen everywhere in communist countries, and that leads to their demise, is apparent on a micro scale in intentional communities.

Failure comes from failure to admit failure. Instead people hide from admitting failures, they don't report them, they don't learn and try again, they simply avoid places and activities as if they are cursed, and they endeavour to not blame themselves and to "keep on believing." And in that great doing of nothing, the processes of entropy accelerate.

There is one other great de-motivator: Although they may not like to admit it to themselves or to others, people in intentional communities also smoke a lot of weed. It feeds the "chill out, don't be so goal orientated and judgemental" ethos and helps people to forget about failures. "Fristaden Christiania," the autonomous anarchist intentional community in Copenhagen established in 1971 (with 850 residents), became an example of how a separatist community can become almost entirely focused on escape-enabling-drugs and stuck in hash-stasis.
Falsification
Lying and "mistake denial" are endemic within intentional communities and this feeds failure. Fear of failure of the community's well intentioned projects leads to falsification of results and to propaganda ("We had a great year for turnips," "the therapeutic singing session cured Samantha's Asthma," "The organic cabbages are the best ever") - this is not dissimilar to the falsified quota announcements of more extreme Utopians who had control of entire nations - Mao and Stalin.

Intentional communities bury their mistakes in the attempt to remain "positive" rather than learn from them. An ironic outcome as these places were set up as "experimental communities." The result of these experiments, however, are never collated, and if they are they are denied. If things go wrong it can't be because of the original plan, but because "people haven't tried hard enough." So residents work harder at a failing project, which may be structurally flawed from the start. Anyone who insists "there's no point in even doing this, we tried it for the last four years and it failed every time" is just accused of being negative. So it is that mistakes are repeated indefinitely and put down to "people not believing enough." Sure enough these projects - like the experiment in insulating houses with bails of hay, that then turn to mold because no-one factored in the damp climate of the North of Scotland - become abandoned and the God of "things just happen" is blamed. The sheer number of eco-projects that fail reveals that there is a causal connection between overblown Utopian intentionality, mistake denial and failure.

When people tell themselves lies about the actual results of their plans, then bad planning and disappointing outcomes continue and continue to get worse. Potatoes have run out, three months too early but rather than admit defeat or place an order for a delivery from Asda, people go hungry then tell themselves it's actually a good thing, it will be good for their spiritual learning and personal improvement. They also will make no attempt to rectify the miscalculation that led to the lack of food, so the next year the same mistake is repeated again and no back up plans made.

In intentional communities, there are outbreaks of hunger, diarrhoea and food poisoning, and rather than blame the root causes, the negatives are transformed miraculously into positives. Rather say "the food you served was rotten" or "someone must have not cleaned the organic fertiliser off the carrots before cooking them as we all now have bacterial infections from ingesting animal excrement," people will say, "I needed a detox and anyway."
No Power Here - No Democracy Either
The existence of power structures within intentional communities is nearly always denied. "There is no power hierarchy here," "everyone is equal" are the mantras. Mention of power is seen as an oppressive remnant of the outside world, capitalistic brainwashing, etc.

On the one hand, there is an absolute refusal of structure, and this can lead to "the tyranny of structurelessness," in which voting takes place not by majority rule but an outcome reached only when everyone is in agreement. This " consensus voting," could be re-named as coercive voting, as many find the process of "no outcome till everyone is unanimously behind the proposal" to be more like gang bullying. Under this system, nothing gets decided until "everyone agrees" and "everyone is happy." This process is thoroughly anti-democratic. People who vote against a motion are slowly coerced and bullied until they fall into line. Problem-solving through consensus-only voting is also extremely slow. Those who continue to disagree with the majority are eventually forced out so that consensus is reached. This also makes it impossible to remove leaders, who, since they have been there since the start, have never been elected. Dissenters cannot even begin to mount an opposition.

All criticism of leaders is banned, all suggestions for improvement in daily operations are seen as "attacks" on the leadership. Obsession with "contamination" from the outside world, leads to ritual obsessive cleansings.

The experience of even the most anarchist of communities is that, over time, hierarchies do form. Such power structures cannot be got rid of by wishing them away or banishing the words "power" or "leader." When communities that deny the need for leaders actually realize that they need leaders their existence becomes a source of shame and cognitive dissonance. When this happens censorship of language occurs and no-one can question those who actually hold power.

This has been a problem in Community X in which unelected leaders or "elders" rule. These elders live in large heated stone houses on the property and there is a hierarchy that descends down through communal wooden houses to communal caravans. As these leaders are not elected they cannot be unelected. The class hierarchy that has developed in a place that insists that everyone is equal can only be explained by investing the elders with higher spiritual stature.

As if by symbolic resonance, the issue where this question of power becomes most apparent is that of electrical power. In Community X - there are between 80-100 residents at the bottom of the (denied)) hierarchy who run up immense heating bills through attempting to heat caravans through the long hard winters. They have been on "waiting lists" for proper housing for years and are forced to live in un-insulated caravans and heat themselves with electric fires in temperatures that go below minus thirteen (celsius) . In a place which touts itself as an eco-community, such old un-insulated temporary caravans (that have become full-time homes) burn up much more carbon than a regular house and fail the insulation and safety standards guidelines set by the EU. Caravan dwellers have then to turn to cheaper gas heating which places them in serious danger from carbon monoxide emissions.

Understanding the dangers posed by Carbon Monoxide in static caravans and holiday lodges

Communalists like this, who can't pay their heating bills have their electricity cut off - literalizing the claim that "there is no power here."
Anti-Individualism and Mediocrity
Many people come to intentional communities to escape from either their own "old self" or from what they see as a dangerous culture of "Western" individualism. The snuffing out of individuality leads however to the persecution of individualists within the community and to a ritualized "Group Think" mentality which is more closed than even that of a small village. The anti-individualism also magnifies the status of leaders. This was clear in Findhorn, with the leadership of Eileen Caddy, who was treated like a demi-god with quasi-supernatural powers.

Snuffing out individualism and permitting only positive-group-speak results in only conversations and actions which cause no offense to anyone and which only everyone will understand. Dumbed down, petty, small talk about the daily activities is commonplace, as is covert bitching and banal repetitions of positive expressions, mantras, quotations learned by rote, etc. This has been reported as a problem among communitarians since the 1860s.

In any community where equality is enforced, people with talents and unique qualities tend to be shamed into acting with less ambition and into suppressing their talents. This "leveling" was something Nietzsche warned us about. If you are good at singing, or writing or gardening, you will make others who do not share your talents feel inferior, so in the interests of equality and peaceful co-habitation you must be less good at what you do and pretend not to be passionate about it. The result is a race to the bottom in mediocrity in which the people who are good at nothing enjoy watching all the talented people sink down to their level.

People with artistic talents are particularly targeted. As a result of the envy and resentment that creative people create, these people are told they must run workshops and share their art skills. They must accept and preach that "everyone is an artist" and rather than focusing on their own art they must do group projects with collectivist themes and imagery. In this way the real threat caused by the artistically talented is defused and suppressed and mediocrity reigns.

Witness the communally painted rainbow murals and hand-print group paintings that are found within intentional communities. As displays of individuality are frowned upon, the iconography of paintings, sculptures and music tend to avoid experiment and innovation and so cluster around repetitive clichés - the dove, the rainbow, the sunset, the wheel or mandala, happy children playing in the sun. It is no coincidence that these same symbols have been used by communist dictatorships and religious cults, like the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Kitsch is more than merely mediocre or lazy art, it is the deliberate stamping out of all individual self-expression.
Humor is Banned. Loneliness Spreads.
The intentional communities here hold to a belief in "positive talk", removing all negatives from oneself and ones communication with others. You are taught to train yourself to "Have only positive thoughts." As Aristotle demonstrated comedy depends upon negatives just as narrative and indeed learning depends upon conflict and weighing of two sides found in Socratic method. Jokes usually are based on confessions of inadequacy and personal failings, on prejudices and unfortunate moments in life, embarrassments and so on.

However, all such negativity is outlawed and as a result humor vanishes from the intentional community. Many multi-faith organizations actually frown upon humor and laughter. They say, "when you are spiritually developed you will no longer have the need to laugh." Without the ability to make jokes about personal failings, there is no release from the project of self-perfection, and so a vicious circle develops: increasing concern over ones perfection and how others see you, in turn destroys the possibility of laughing at oneself, which in turn makes the self-more paranoid about failing. Eventually humor becomes feared. It is stigmatized as a personal failing. It is seen as being cruel. "We should just be nice to each other and ourselves and not laugh at anybody." This condition shares similarities with the positive reinforcement and politically correct movements, both of which have attempted to outlaw humor and enforce linguistic conformity. Again this is the subjugation of daily reality to the demands of an abstract ideal not actually grounded in real human behavior but in an impossible abstract ideal.

Funny people become frowned on in intentional communities and those who believe in communally policed-language gain power. Many naturally humorless people find refuge in communes and enforce their condition on others as a universal credo. Once they get rid of the funny people and the people who ask questions they can rule with humorless, joyless intensity.

One result of this is that intentional communities are lonely places. Focus on a rigidly defined language and self-purification lead to isolation of each individual from every other. Group hugs replace one-to-one intimacy and "partner exclusivity," which are seen as needy vestiges of the old order. Derived from eastern religions, Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, strong partner bonds are seen as weakness and dependence. Tree hugging however, spread eagling yourself on the ground and kissing the earth, getting naked and being re-birthed through a naked human tunnel are common displacement activities and go some way to making up for actual one-to-one relationships. During many such exercises people often regress to states of early childhood need, crying for mothers that didn't give them enough physical affection. Outbursts of tears that are then greeted by a pile-on of communal hugs and become a perverse behavior. Everyone wants to have a hug because they are denied intimacy so they prey on the person who is upset. This writer has on more than one occasion seen a crying person feel smothered by the communal hug and yell, "Get off me, Please! I just need to be alone." What they are really craving is a one-to-one emotional, physical bond, not the artificial and heavily enforced "love everyone equally" ethos, that in effect deprives everyone of intimacy.
Reinventing the Wheel
Back breaking labor, which could be replaced with technology, becomes valorized - and technology demonized, causing unnecessary energy waste and a cult of s/he-who-works-hardest, even though much of the work is pointless. This is regression to feudal living, a fetishization of rustic poverty, back breaking toil and community labor. In California in the 1970s and 80s Gurdjieff and Vedanta inspired sects encouraged crushing rocks as a method of "destroying the western ego."

In certain unscrupulous cases cult leaders used such armies of unquestioning hard laborers as free manual labour. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (otherwise known as Osho) and his now collapsed intentional community Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, exploited his followers in such a way and got them to build his properties for free, he also made them abandon their worldly possessions by donating them to his organization while he himself road around in a fleet of Rolls Royces. Without the displays of wealth, to a lesser degree this has also been the case in Findhorn and Auroville in which much labor was given "for free" or paid in an internal currency that could not be exchanged for "real money."

Agricultural efficiency is therefore not a priority in intentional communities and sometimes comes in conflict with the need for self-purification. As one Findhornian noted "There are two ways to cut a carrot - one is as part of your slow spiritual quest, the other is the urgent need to feed 200 people." The first takes ten minutes per carrot, the second requires 500 to be cut in half an hour. In the 1990s there was a conflict in Findhorn over an automatic potato peeling machine, which drastically reduced labor and increased efficiency - as several hundred potatoes were required to be prepared every day. There was opposition however, as it was felt that the machine violated the sanctity of the process of food preparation by making things "too easy." To this day, people use the machine sparingly and guiltily, and often recount this story of the conflict they had in accepting the need for it to exist at all.
Jim Jones Syndrome
It is a well documented fact of psychology that cutting yourself off from the world leads to persecution complex. The focus on one leader who will protect all followers against impending threat from the outside world leads followers to extreme acts to demonstrate allegiance and faith and to protect the leader. The peaceful commune of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) was broken up in 1985 after they were caught planning to assassinate a district attorney.

Even in peaceful places like the intentional communities I visited, there is a palpable fear of contaminated outsiders entering and destroying the colony. A siege mentality ensues and grows, especially whenever anything goes wrong within the community. External forces are blamed. The plants are not growing because they used water from "the system" rather than rain water; the water well they dug didn't work because they are sure some local farmer has been interfering with the water table.

The community becomes so used to scapegoating the outside world for all its own failings that it becomes a walled community either literally or metaphorically. The fear of invasion or subversion from the outside world grows the more the paranoia is invested in. The community is convinced that it is always just about to be attacked. This becomes part of the community cohesion. The community increasingly comes to resemble a separate island and one constantly on the look out for infiltrators or traitors. It is perhaps no coincidence that early formulations of Utopia were without exception images of islands in uncharted places.

Any movement to outside and the world beyond, even if it be a trip to the supermarket as supplies of soy milk have run out is viewed with suspicion. It is not uncommon among peaceful intentional communities for there to be violent expulsions of people suspected of betraying community standards. These expulsions do not occur with judge and jury but with those in the invisible and denied hierarchy acting like overlords. Transgressors become punished in ways that are not in line with external societal law. One might even say that separatist groups can only survive with the threat of constant expulsions and that this goes back to the origins of communalism. Over time all such communities develop tightly policed group-think and become cults.

It is worth bearing in mind, that Jonestown, the colony in Guyana created by The Rev Jim Jones managed to foster an obsessive groupthink of impending persecution. As a communist slash religious cult it saw itself as under imminent threat of destruction from the FBI and American capitalism. The 909 members who committed suicide, through the now infamous ingestion of cyanide in Kool Aid, did so because of a fear of an invasion from the outside world that did not actually exist. Jim Jones final speech, as his followers are dying around him, is evidence of how cult leaders actually depend upon creating a fear of external invasion to hold onto their power. Evidence also of the fatal dangers of believing that your intentional community is ethically pure precisely because it is under threat of imminent destruction.
Modifying Humans to Make Them Match Utopia
Long before Skinner and behavioral science there have been numerous attempts made to wipe the slate clean and re-program human behavior, enforcing new behavior models for Utopian dwellers. A simple example is the Hutterites, Shakers, Quakers and Amish, who have all laid down, to varying degrees, laws for behavior enforced by uniformity of dress and scheduling, and through limiting access to new technologies and "the modern world." Although mostly religious in origin, within the 18th and 19th centuries over 190 intentional communities sprang up within the United States, all aiming to reshape human behavior; these experiments in living later influenced behavioral scientists.

Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) a lawyer from Dijon, who later played an important part in the French Revolution, established a Utopian community in Illinois, with sixty-nine settlers, based on his best-selling fictional account of a planned Utopian colony - Travels in Icaria (1839). "Internal bickering" broke up the real colony but other Icarian communes replaced it, the last of them surviving until 1898.

The Icarians had a regimented workday that began at six a.m and involved communal meals, in which everyone received the same portions; nothing was owned privately, not even homes, and this leveling was believed to eliminate both poverty and hierarchy with one blow. Everyone wore the same clothes so that "there is no room for envy or coquettishness," A rigorous form of behavioral modification based on clothing dominated with the intention of eliminating vanity, exhibitionism and competition "Childhood and youth, adolescence and maturity, the condition of celibacy or marriage, or widowhood or remarriage, the various professions and functions are all indicated by the clothes." "The shape of each garment has been fixed in such a manner that it can be manufactured in the most easy, rapid way possible." Within this Utopian experiment censorship was fully exercised, with all "Harmful books" being burned while "The republic should permit only certain persons to publish a work, just as it permits only pharmacists to prepare drugs."

Within Thomas More's Utopia, individual houses are not allowed to accumulate wealth and the houses themselves are exchanged by lot every ten years to ensure that the idea of ownership is not allowed to develop. "Wandering idly" without permission is punished and travel is restricted through internal passports (a law he took from the Spartan law-giver Lycurgus - to discourage wanderers who spread rumors and disease) while the life of the poor and ignorant peasant is to be eradicated, with peasants being displaced to the cities and land being given over instead to sheep farming. Health care is free and provided by the state and gambling is forbidden. Clothing is regulated as Utopians do not "excel others by superfluous display of possessions." or "pay honors to the rich"; the generic clothing comprises a leather working costume with a woolen cloak. Criminals wear fetters made of the most debased metal of all - gold. Such constant behavioral manipulation, More believed, tackled the root of the vices and creates better people. More felt such control was necessary to stomp out man's natural tendencies towards laziness and conflict and it was motivated by "pity for the undeserved misery of the exploited poor." The ultimate proposed solution was "a common life and subsistence...without any exchange of money."

Furthermore in his Utopia there would be:

"Nowhere any pretext to evade work, no winehouse, no alehouse, no brothel anywhere, no opportunity for corruption, no lurking hole, no secret meeting place."

The result being a state of communal enforced "decency." The joys of such enforced equal-ness and surveillance might seem oppressive to us today, but nonetheless More's Utopia and the Icarian experiment went on to influence the young Karl Marx, and we can see traces of it within the history of the left.

In imagined Utopias behavioral modification of a weak and easily tempted populace (who might regress to their old ways) has been a recurring obsession. In Johann Eberlien von Gunzburgs Utopia known as Wolfaria (1521), the persistent problems of idleness, drunkenness and licentiousness are to be cured by the drowning of drunks and punishing adultery by public execution (a tradition practiced by the Scots until 1697).

In Campanella's (1568-1639) planned City of the Sun, equality between men and women is enforced, again, by the wearing of unisex military clothes. Games that are played sitting down (chess, cards, dice) are banned, as a sedentary life leads to early death. While all seven walls of the city are adorned with murals illustrating the sciences of astronomy, geology, anthropology, zoology, botany and anatomy (with pickled specimens on display where appropriate) so that all the streets are classrooms and children learn as a by-product of play. All punishments are public and there is no jail. Those who commit sodomy are forced to wear a shoe on their heads and a sign that says they have perverted the natural order - putting the feet where the head should be and if they repeat the crime they are stoned to death by the locals, who all must take part in communal punishments.

All of which begs the questions as to how natural our current behaviors are. They are certainly not set in stone and so can be modified. But whether there is a human blank slate, or certain behaviors common to all cultures exist or have been historically seen as beneficial is a subject of much controversy. The respect for private property for example is deemed to be the one law on which civilization has been built; some even claim that it is a "natural law" but yet it is consistently derided as the root of all evil by Utopians from Plato onwards. So again and again Utopians have had to deprogram their followers from regressing to the reactionary worship of private property, wealth and even privacy, this at times has meant killing the root of the old order that is still dormant within oneself. It is no good to fight rich capitalists, you also have to destroy the need for greed within yourself. It is no use fighting sexist men; you also have to fight the "sexist within."
The Unnamed God of the Post-It Notes
Post-it notes and signs are like a virus in intentional communities. People leave message for each other as if they were posted by a higher authority. "Please don't steal the cheese." "Please don't water this plant." Names are not used because they posit blame. This causes a state of guilt that is visible before all others; everyone knows who the post-it was meant for. Rather than just coming out and confronting someone face to face, this God-of -the-post-it-notes has the final say. All though it is usually one person who writes the notes, it carries the weight of the entire commune - you (unnamed person) have transgressed against the unwritten laws of the unnamed persons, signed, the unnamed person. Passive aggressive and authoritarian, the entire situation is amplified by the lack of private property. The cheese is not your cheese (of which you can eat as much as you like) it is the communal cheese which must be rationed.

"Please respect the needs of others, the volume of your music interferes with other people's work, privacy and spiritual healing."

If people had their own rooms, their own, cheese and their own music, this would not be a problem. However, in this environment where everything is shared there is constant repressed conflict and seething resentment over incredibly small details - meals, washing up, laundry, work, toilet cleanliness, schedules for these things, rotas - who sleeps too long, who doesn't work enough, who uses too much bath water. Rather than saving people from the banal domesticity of the modern consumerist lifestyle everyone's lives in the intentional community turn into a constant negotiation over trivia. Everyone becomes a servant of, and a paranoid observer of the non-negotiable commands of the Unnamed God of the Post-It notes. And what is the God of the Post-It notes, but a frustrated universal planner, a Utopian convinced that if only everyone else would follow their plan down to the last Post-It note (and Post-It note instructions would be on every object) then the community would finally be at peace. On a humorously micro scale, the authoritarianism and attempts at behavioral population control found in communist societies in their penultimate stage (the stage at which they implode by attempting to control every human interaction) is also visible within the "good intentions" of the unnamed God of the Post-It notes.
The Final Test of the Blank Slate: Children
There is one other final and hard-to-face factor that is an unintended consequences of Utopian alternative parenting experiments. There is a reason that the average life of a Utopian project is the time to takes to settle and begin to raise children.

Children are the authoritative test of the theory that humans are born a blank slate and that all behavior is conditioned "by society" - of Rousseau's potent idea that man is "born free but is everywhere in chains." Children of Utopians should behave very differently than "old world" children, because they have been brought as blank slates into an egalitarian environment, and have been raised with positivist behavioral conditioning.

But the children of Utopians fail every test: they are selfish, they grab and steal, they fight, and love competitive sports, they bully and they lie - just like all other children. Lying, it turns out, is a necessary developmental stage in learning. These naturally dishonest, violent creatures disprove the theory of human mind as a blank slate upon which images of perfection can be drawn.

As the behaviorist J. B. Skinner (creator of Walden Two) realized, you can't pass what you've learned on through your DNA so any achievements in equality achieved have to be repeated from scratch. Utopian behavioral engineering is an ongoing struggle against something that Utopians deny even exists - human nature. Not only are Utopian parents horrified by the little dictators that they have spawned, they find that they themselves have horrible anti-Utopian cravings to put their children above all the others. The maternal bond and the need for privacy also seem to be pan-cultural. Children brought up communally suffer neglect, as other adults find ways of refusing to care for children that are not their own. The lack of childcare and of constancy in who is "mother and father" leads to kids not being taken care of at all, falling between the cracks, leading to abuse and damaged children. People care a lot more for their own kids than they do for other kids as an obligation. One frequently hears Utopians complaining that someone else's children are ruining everything.

As for mothers - we discovered after the 1970s that "free love" communes turn into coercive systems in which women are forced to sleep with men they don't want to. They also lead to male dominated harems. John Humphrey Noyes, the father of "perfectionism" and "complex marriage" fathered 58 children in his commune in the 1850s. Another Utopian collective in Holland was so radical that it's male leader removed the age of consent and slept with his own daughters and those of other parents. While, the Friedrich's Hoff Commune, led by Viennese performance art guru, Otto Muehl, collapsed with Muehl being given a "seven year prison sentence for widespread sexual abuse of minors." Variations on this sickening story have been repeated with convicted sex offender and cult leader William Kamm and Warren Jeffs with his " 50 brides." When a charismatic leader takes control and demands that others de-condition themselves, exploitation is tolerated and then becomes the norm. All of this is done, with the coercive Utopian alibi that all capitalist and patriarchal behaviors and boundaries must be swept away. Auroville, which attempts to be government-free, and money-free, has been plagued with growing reports of the crimes of Sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape and murder.

No matter how much Utopian communities try to get rid of the idea of sexual ownership - the female desire to chose a mate may be a constant for our species. It does however ensure the continuation of competitive behaviors, which leads us once again to hierarchies. To get rid of this, female choice would have to be stopped, a process that we associate with cultures that are oppressive.

The Shakers who were celibate and only adopted children became extinct after their adopted children refused to adopt the rules of Shakerism. The Harmony Society died out because it refused to reproduce. And the experiment in Fourierirsm known as Brook Farm ended after with many child related problems, one of which being when the children refused to be placed at the bottom of the Fourierist redistribution hierarchy and were forced to clean the toilets.

So many intentional communities create trouble for themselves by trying to replace the nuclear and extended family structure with other forms of mating and child rearing, only to find that mothers and children simply want to leave.
Intentions Are Not Enough
One of the great mistakes we make in interpersonal behavior, is to judge people by their intentions and not by the real outcome of those intentions. To let them off with saying "we meant well." The same is true for wider society and the many and repeated failures of applying Utopian ideas to reality are nearly always excused by the same means - people say "but we meant well" or "it's still a good idea, it just hasn't worked in practice yet."

It could be that the greatest failing of intentional communities is contained within this very formulation. A community that is based upon declaring intentions is apt to be fearful of outcomes that would disprove those good intentions and invalidate them. So, the burying of facts about failure (moral, practical, political) would appear to be one of the secret tasks of those who live by intentions alone, who, rather than trying to address problems as they arise would rather bury the results, hide the outcomes and continue as if good intentions were all that was required. It is precisely this denial of outcomes that leads intentional communities to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Good intentions are clearly not enough but we shall undoubtedly continue to witness the communities of those who live by the constant re-affirmation of good intentions alone, continuing to fail and to bury the evidence of their failure in order to "keep on believing." A result of this is that intentional communities will not learn from their mistakes, and will keep on springing up, not as a force that will gather momentum or lead to progress as we move through history, but as a ceaseless eruption of the same good intentions beset by the same systemic problems and doomed by internal contradictions to fail, all over again.
Watch Ewan Morrirson's Ted Talk on Utopian Communities:

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Once again we see a resurgence of interest in intentional communities and in Utopian experiments in living communally. Even Time Magazine is advocating such ways of living as a solution to the problems of modern living. Over the last ten years I have made forays into alternative living; finding and testing out Utopian intentional communities....

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Symbiosis is holding the Congress of Municipal Movements in Detroit, Michigan from September 18-22, 2019. Congress registration has closed. Click here to view the Congress program. Delegates from our member organizations, as well as at-large...

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Symbiosis is holding the Congress of Municipal Movements in Detroit, Michigan from September 18-22, 2019. Congress registration has closed. Click here to view the Congress program. Delegates from our member organizations, as well as at-large...

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We are in the time of THE GREAT PAUSE.

This video was co-produced by Evan Wiley and the teams at WorldSummit, HackHumanity and Envienta, which lays out this profound time of reflection that we find ourselves in and where we might collectively go next.

Explore the 3 pillars of activism: https://bit.ly/the3pillars

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Save We are in the time of THE GREAT PAUSE. This video was co-produced by Evan Wiley and the teams at WorldSummit, HackHumanity and Envienta, which lays out this profound time of reflection that we find ourselves in and where we might collectively go next.

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A DECOLONIAL APPROACH FOR LIFE BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM

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A DECOLONIAL APPROACH FOR LIFE BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM

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It has already been a while. In the third stage of the pandemic and past the peak of it, new routines and habits have settled in building a new normal. And physical health realm aside, in privileged Western European countries where mostly if you are not somehow 'supported for now' in your basic survival you are 'forgiven for now' bills wise, some people are considering this limbo as ' The Great Pause ' - as long as you have enough to eat. A situation far from ideal, but still a pseudo-systemic breather while it lasts for some. A once in a lifetime opportunity to experience what it looks like, and how it feels like, to opt out of the rat race. While knowing that the real pain is waiting, bigger than before, in a gaslighting dress, ahead. A feeling of ephemeral liberation if knowing how to stay in the present and proportional to your degree of internal emancipation from the system.

As philosopher, sociologist and political theorist Herbert Marcuse said fifty years ago in 'An essay on liberation': The organised capitalism uses violence on an unprecedented scale in its capacity to produce long-range contentment and satisfaction to reproduce the voluntary servitude. 'Achievements' justify the system of domination, and established values become people's own values where the choice between 'social necessities' appears as freedom. Leaving the exploitation hidden in veils, like for example the technological one, and the people amused consuming the industry of entertainment.

While some people have never questioned what he also called that condition an adopted 'second nature' being completely attached to it, mainly because of how the system alienates us from ourselves in any case, others have managed to have a broader consciousness about themselves and the world we live in with different degrees of identification, assimilation and 'counter-education', while living inside the system. They are normally the ones who work, in different ways and under any circumstances, to try to expand it. And probably also the ones who in 'unemployed' quarantine have found different degrees of ephemeral ease and an added freeing agency over time - and ultimately life being able to fully give a new focus to it - regardless of their colonially-designed social 'class' and especially if they are normally greatly oppressed, when in the previous - liminal - context. Including all those who have not only discovered a new level of awareness through that 'living in the present' motto hitting the West as a brand new millennial coping mechanism, but live realising how little is necessary to live - and to live happy - in different settings. And with having no need to adhere to external expectations of any type anymore creating a set of genuine life priorities based on personal values, turned decisions to 'adapt' as far as possible to the foreseeable future. And that's what is unprecedented, society's 'permission' to say no. In Marcuse's words, the Refusal.

Since we are not quite yet in the 'return to normal' but close, and as the final sequel to my second pandemic piece, it is time to ask, where do we go from here now that we have a greater insight? Do we want to rebuild a broken system which is literally killing us on a perpetual pandemic basis? Can we build a new paradigm with what Audre Lorde called the same tools of the old Master's house? And if not, how do we transcend them?

In this time where we have had the historically unique chance to ask ourselves simultaneously what is truly important to us personally and as a collective, what activities are essential to our social and natural habitat wellbeing, and what it is that we depend on when our lives are - in a clearer manner - under threat, we have proved -with movements like Invisible Hands on a nearly global scale- one thing. We have proved that we can show up in solidarity for each other, self-organising outside institutionalised structures while in the middle of the global disruption of the ecologically and socially abusive, self-interested status quo. Self-interested in an ill manner because when the natural world will sink, no amount of money will save anybody from a self-sabotaged human nature. Mutual Aid are systems that commoners have always stepped up with when the state, market or monarchy fail to provide basic needs in a state of emergency. And that solidarity is not a simple volunteering altruism. The commoning political bases of autonomous solidarity indeed transform our relationship with a failing state, as a decentralised practice of reciprocal care based on communal wellbeing. It is now then time to get fully political, and go from Mutual Aid to Dual Power.

Before the state makes us pay back for its 'generosity' in different distorted ways and with different distorted narratives. Before we see ourselves navigating a capitalist economic crisis on top of it to go deeper in our respective designed and imposed oppressed positions. Not even considering what they have been cooking up behind the scenes in their power-grabbing political agendas to exploit us even further. Let's consider the possibilities crises afford us for the growth of wiser solidarity for each and everyone. Mutual Aid is just the beginning. History is full of community-rooted participatory politics emerging out of a crisis, radical Mutual Aid that links service provisioning with the construction of Dual Power. From the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, to ACT-UP and Occupy Wall Street. Today, various decolonial and abolitionist formations have been established involving Mutual Aid adjusting to the present crisis. They are mobilising these informal networks in more deliberate ways, understanding the legacy of past Mutual Aid which taught us that political self-determination is not possible without economic self-determination. Something that has been well understood by for example the American Woodbine or the British Cooperation Town, claiming spaces for food sovereignty.

While social distancing is a problem for mobilisation, communication is still available and we are not far from the gradual 'back to normal.' Dual Power is the process of creating collective counter-power organising society in parallel the status quo. A framework where popular power is built outside the governing institutions of our present system to challenge and displace them through truly democratic ones becoming the new structure of a liberated society. It is a strategy, rather than an ideology, to be used to advance a variety of forms of social change. However, the advantages of the strategy make it most compatible with perspectives that emphasise the exercise of power at the community level, that seek to make the revolutionary movement accountable to the people, that see the capability to revise and transform society as common rather than rare, and that seek decentralised forms of power as the key to personal and social freedom. That is grassroots dual power, the bottom-up transformation and gradual replacement of the mechanisms of society. The horizon extends to autonomous formations capable of challenging the political and economical system that brought us where we are and where we will soon be at, through economic mutualism to start with. We shall not forget we are the engine in the Master's hierarchical house. With no engine, there is no such house. That is how 'powerless' we are. And life will forever be worth fighting for.

Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, argued that intolerable situations such as ours could be cast aside by the public's revolutionary withdrawal of support from governing institutions where power is understood as the ability to make others do things, often through violence or coercion to enforce control, obedience and domination. These governing institutions are by design colonial since they imply a master/slave hierarchy: the state has power over people, humans have power over nature, men have power over women, rich have power over poor, 'white' people have power over racialised people, and so on. Which is the cause of all of our overlapping and intertwined problems. In her book 'On Violence', however, she defines political power as the people's ability to act in concert - the capacity for collective action, and thus a property of groups, not individuals. Leaders possess their power only because their constituents have empowered them to direct the group's collective action since all individual power emerges from collective support. When people begin to peaceably withdraw their support and refuse to obey, a government may turn to violence, but its control lasts only as long as the army or police choose to obey as well. And for that withdrawal of obedience to happen we need viable alternatives.

Symbiosis is a continental confederation of grassroots institutions and movements building Dual Power towards a directly democratic and ecological society from the ground up. Symbiosis founding community organisers John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie Horvath, Dayton Martindale, and Matthew Porges state that in the early stages, crafting an alternative political infrastructure is local, but community organisations are designed to be organised as a network. And that by working together and mutually reinforcing one another, these institutions can qualitatively change the power relations of a city or neighbourhood and lay the groundwork for new macrostructures of self-governance and civil society. Also that through engineering new institutions of their own, communities can cultivate a creative and communal spirit that will empower them to take control of their lives, connect to one another across cultural and geographic distances, and gradually develop the egalitarian foundations of a new society.

Movements would assemble direct-democratic and socialistic institutions in civil society; coordinate these through a system of decentralised and confederated democratic assemblies, such as neighbourhood councils, with a dual power relationship to existing state structures; transform systems of local governance to place these popular confederations in control of the public sphere to encourage the further development of the socialist civil society that made such reform possible in the first place; and further confederate these municipal democracies to create first regional and then eventually global decision-making bodies rooted in bottom-up democracy capable of addressing problems such as globalisation and the ecological crisis, transitioning us into a libertarian ecosocialist society.

- John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie Horvath, Dayton Martindale, and Matthew Porges in "Community, democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and beyond"

In any case, in an easier and more aligned way than ever, after having experienced a global collapse, the choice is between totalitarian abuse and citizen empowerment. Between a life in common in ecosocial terms and neoliberal fantasies of unlimited growth and tightly integrated global markets enslaving and dividing us by different layers of oppression and privilege so we don't dare to come together while our natural home's life - and ours - are on a countdown. Between life-affirming and death-affirming organisations. Between breakdown and breakthrough. So now commoners come together with allied movements and disillusioned people of goodwill from different political views realising it is a systemic problem. And that there are bigger life-threatening problems than self-determination to be fearful of. What before sounded crazy (because of fake bad press) and unattainable, reaching a deadline sounds common-sensical and compelling.

When people now see tangible victories thanks to Mutual Aid in response to the struggles we face under capitalism, they in turn get more involved believing in radical change and in a transformative political movement which provides immediate support in the face of rampant landlordism, gentrification, and if not miserable then always overworked conditions, holding a broader long-term vision for a better society. While decolonialism and self-organising requires consciousness, unlearning and self-education in our current context, autonomy is not an unreachable utopia but the only genuinely egalitarian, oppression-free and communal form of social organisation which has already existed in our history, and still does in some communities. A process where different movements and cooperatives are already bringing food and turning a guiding direct action-based light on, paving the way. An easy one to believe in once it is being built in front of us. And the only opportunity for humanity's potential not only to fully be, but to fully become.

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'THE GREAT PAUSE' - GODS & RADICALS PRESS

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It has already been a while. In the third stage of the pandemic and past the peak of it, new routines and habits have settled in building a new normal.

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"“Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”

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For a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

"We are ready, we're all-in," the governor gushed. "We are New Yorkers, so we're aggressive about it, we're ambitious about it ... We realise that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way."

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor's briefing to announce that he will be heading up a panel to reimagine New York state's post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

"The first priorities of what we're trying to do," Schmidt said, "are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband ... We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better." Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair's goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop "a smarter education system". Calling Gates a "visionary", Cuomo said the pandemic has created "a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates's] ideas ... all these buildings, all these physical classrooms - why, with all the technology you have?" he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent - and highly profitable - no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, the CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalised pitch. "There has been a distinct warming up to humanless, contactless technology," she said. "Humans are biohazards, machines are not."

It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration "in the community" was already booming. But in the future that is hastily being constructed, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.

This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen "shared" on a mediated platform. It's a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control), and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It's a future that claims to be run on "artificial intelligence", but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centres, content-moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyper-exploitation. It's a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fuelled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalisation. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids' mental health. About "smart cities" filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.

And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication - eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail or transportation.

That was the ancient past, also known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Thanks to Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the gleaming showroom for this grim future - but the ambitions reach far beyond the borders of any one state or country.

And at the dead centre of it all is Eric Schmidt.

ell before Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive lobbying and public-relations campaign, pushing precisely the Black Mirror vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants - with public schools, hospitals, doctor's offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.

It's a vision Schmidt has been advancing in his roles as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the US Department of Defense on increased use of artificial intelligence in the military, and as chair of the powerful National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, which advises Congress on "advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments and associated technologies", with the goal of addressing "the national and economic security needs of the United States, including economic risk". Both boards are crowded with powerful Silicon Valley CEOs and top executives from companies including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and of course, Schmidt's former colleagues at Google.

As chair, Schmidt - who still holds more than $5.3bn in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company), as well as large investments in other tech firms - has essentially been running a Washington-based shakedown on behalf of Silicon Valley. The main purpose of the two boards is to call for exponential increases in government spending on research into artificial intelligence and on tech-enabling infrastructure such as 5G - investments that would directly benefit the companies in which Schmidt and other members of these boards have extensive holdings.

First in closed-door presentations to lawmakers, and later in public-facing opinion articles and interviews, the thrust of Schmidt's argument has been that since the Chinese government is willing to spend limitless public money building the infrastructure of high-tech surveillance, while allowing Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei to pocket the profits from commercial applications, the US's dominant position in the global economy is on the precipice of collapsing.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) recently got access, through a freedom of information (FOI) request, to a presentation made by Schmidt's NSCAI in May 2019. Its slides make a series of alarmist claims about how China's relatively lax regulatory infrastructure and its bottomless appetite for surveillance are causing it to pull ahead of the US in a number of fields, including "AI for medical diagnosis", autonomous vehicles, digital infrastructure, "smart cities", ride-sharing and cashless commerce.

The reasons given for China's competitive edge are myriad, ranging from the sheer volume of consumers who shop online; "the lack of legacy banking systems in China", which has allowed it to leapfrog over cash and credit cards and unleash "a huge e-commerce and digital services market" using digital payments; and a severe doctor shortage, which has led the government to work closely with tech companies such as Tencent to use AI for "predictive" medicine. The slides note that in China, tech companies "have the authority to quickly clear regulatory barriers, while American initiatives are mired in HIPPA compliance and FDA approval".

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A slide from the Chinese Tech Landscape Overview (NSCAI presentation) discussing surveillance. Photograph: NSCAI

More than any other factor, however, the NSCAI points to China's willingness to embrace public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a reason for its competitive edge. The presentation touts China's "Explicit government support and involvement eg facial recognition deployment". It argues that "surveillance is one of the 'first-and-best customers' for Al" and further, that "mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning".

A slide titled "State Datasets: Surveillance = Smart Cities" notes that China, along with Google's main Chinese competitor, Alibaba, are racing ahead.

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A slide from the Chinese Tech Landscape Overview (NSCAI presentation) discussing surveillance. Photograph: NSCAI

This is notable because Google's parent company, Alphabet, has been pushing this precise vision through its Sidewalk Labs division, choosing a large portion of Toronto's waterfront as its "smart city" prototype. But the Toronto project was just shut down after two years of ceaseless controversy relating to the enormous amounts of personal data that Alphabet would collect, a lack of privacy protections, and questionable benefits for the city as a whole.

Five months after this presentation, in November, NSCAI issued an interim report to Congress further raising the alarm about the need for the US to match China's adaptation of these controversial technologies. "We are in a strategic competition," states the report, obtained via FOI by Epic. "AI will be at the centre. The future of our national security and economy are at stake."

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Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet affiliate, planned to build a neighbourhood 'from the internet up' on Toronto's lakefront. But the project has been shut down after two years of controversy Photograph: AFP via Getty

By late February, Schmidt was taking his campaign to the public, perhaps understanding that the budget increases his board was calling for could not be approved without a great deal more buy-in. In a New York Times article headlined "I used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China", Schmidt called for "unprecedented partnerships between government and industry" and, once again sounding the yellow peril alarm, wrote:

"AI will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a defense department priority ... If current trends continue, China's overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.

Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research, wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure ... Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world's leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win."

The only solution, for Schmidt, was a gush of public money. Praising the White House for requesting a doubling of research funding in AI and quantum information science, he wrote: "We should plan to double funding in those fields again as we build institutional capacity in labs and research centres ... At the same time, Congress should meet the president's request for the highest level of defen ce R & D funding in over 70 years, and the defense department should capitalise on that resource surge to build breakthrough capabilities in AI, quantum, hypersonics and other priority technology areas."

That was exactly two weeks before the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, and there was no mention that a goal of this vast, hi-tech expansion was to protect American health. Only that it was necessary to avoid being outcompeted by China. But, of course, that would soon change.

In the two months since, Schmidt has put these pre-existing demands - for massive public expenditures on high-tech research and infrastructure, for a slew of "public-private partnerships" in AI, and for the loosening of myriad privacy and safety protections - through an aggressive rebranding exercise. Now all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years to come.

And the tech companies to which Schmidt has deep ties, and which populate the influential advisory boards he chairs, have all repositioned themselves as benevolent protectors of public health and munificent champions of "everyday hero" essential workers (many of whom, like delivery drivers, would lose their jobs if these companies get their way). Less than two weeks into New York state's lockdown, Schmidt wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation.

"Like other Americans, technologists are trying to do their part to support the front-line pandemic response ...

But every American should be asking where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19 pandemic is over. How could the emerging technologies being deployed in the current crisis propel us into a better future? ... Companies like Amazon know how to supply and distribute efficiently. They will need to provide services and advice to government officials who lack the computing systems and expertise.

We should also accelerate the trend toward remote learning, which is being tested today as never before. Online, there is no requirement of proximity, which allows students to get instruction from the best teachers, no matter what school district they reside in ...

The need for fast, large-scale experimentation will also accelerate the biotech revolution ... Finally, the country is long overdue for a real digital infrastructure ... If we are to build a future economy and education system based on tele-everything, we need a fully connected population and ultrafast infrastructure. The government must make a massive investment - perhaps as part of a stimulus package - to convert the nation's digital infrastructure to cloud-based platforms and link them with a 5G network."

Indeed, Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision. Two weeks after that article appeared, he described the ad-hoc home schooling programming that teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together during this public health emergency as "a massive experiment in remote learning".

The goal of this experiment, he said, was "trying to find out: how do kids learn remotely? And with that data we should be able to build better remote and distance learning tools which, when combined with the teacher ... will help kids learn better." During this same video call, hosted by the Economic Club of New York, Schmidt also called for more telehealth, more 5G, more digital commerce and the rest of the preexisting wish list. All in the name of fighting the virus.

His most telling comment, however, was this: "The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon." He added that people should "be a little bit grateful that these companies got the capital, did the investment, built the tools that we're using now, and have really helped us out".

chmidt's words are a reminder that until very recently, public pushback against these companies was surging. Presidential candidates were openly discussing breaking up big tech. Amazon was forced to pull its plans for a New York headquarters because of fierce local opposition. Google's Sidewalk Labs project was in perennial crisis, and Google workers were refusing to build surveillance tech with military applications.

In short, democracy - inconvenient public engagement in the designing of critical institutions and public spaces - was turning out to be the single greatest obstacle to the vision Schmidt was advancing, first from his perch at the top of Google and Alphabet, and then as chair of two powerful boards advising US Congress and the Department of Defense. As the NSCAI documents reveal, this inconvenient exercise of power by members of the public and by tech workers inside these mega-firms has, from the perspective of men such as Schmidt and the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, maddeningly slowed down the AI arms race, keeping fleets of potentially deadly driverless cars and trucks off the roads, protecting private health records from becoming a weapon used by employers against workers, preventing urban spaces from being blanketing with facial recognition software, and much more.

Now, in the midst of the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and uncertainty about the future it has brought, these companies clearly see their moment to sweep out all that democratic engagement. To have the same kind of power as their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of functioning without being hampered by intrusions of either labour or civil rights.

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Schoolchildren walking below surveillance cameras in Akto in China's Xinjiang region. Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

All of this is moving very fast. The Australian government has contracted with Amazon to store the data for its controversial coronavirus tracking app. The Canadian government has contracted with Amazon to deliver medical equipment, raising questions about why it bypassed the public postal service. And in just a few short days in early May, Alphabet has spun up a new Sidewalk Labs initiative to remake urban infrastructure with $400m in seed capital. Josh Marcuse, the executive director of the Defense Innovation Board chaired by Schmidt, announced that he was leaving that job to work full-time at Google as head of strategy and innovation for global public sector, meaning that he will be helping Google to cash in on some of the many opportunities he and Schmidt have been busily creating with their lobbying.

o be clear, technology is most certainly a key part of how we must protect public health in the coming months and years. The question is: will that technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy, without asking critical questions that will shape our lives for decades to come? Questions such as these, for instance: if we are indeed seeing how critical digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks, and our data, really be in the hands of private players such as Google, Amazon and Apple? If public funds are paying for so much of it, should the public also own and control it? If the internet is essential for so much in our lives, as it clearly is, should it be treated as a nonprofit public utility?

And while there is no doubt that the ability to teleconference has been a lifeline in this period of lockdown, there are serious debates to be had about whether our more lasting protections are distinctly more human. Take education. Schmidt is right that overcrowded classrooms present a health risk, at least until we have a vaccine. So how about hiring double the number of teachers and cutting class size in half? How about making sure that every school has a nurse?

That would create much-needed jobs in a depression-level unemployment crisis, and give everyone in the learning environment more elbow room. If buildings are too crowded, how about dividing the day into shifts, and having more outdoor education, drawing on the plentiful research that shows that time in nature enhances children's capacity to learn?

Introducing those kinds of changes would be hard, to be sure. But they are not nearly as risky as giving up on the tried-and-true technology of trained humans teaching younger humans face-to-face, in groups where they learn to socialise with one another to boot.

'If one of us gets sick, we all get sick': the food workers on the coronavirus front line

Upon learning of New York state's new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Andy Pallotta, the president of the New York State United Teachers union, was quick to react: "If we want to reimagine education, let's start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counsellors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state," he said. A coalition of parents' groups also pointed out that if they had indeed been living an "experiment in remote learning" (as Schmidt put it), then the results were deeply worrying: "Since the schools were shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of screen-based instruction has only grown."

n addition tothe obvious class and race biases against children who lack internet access and home computers (problems that tech companies are eager to be paid to solve with massive tech buys), there are big questions about whether remote teaching can serve many kids with disabilities, as required by law. And there is no technological solution to the problem of learning in a home environment that is overcrowded and/or abusive.

The issue is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly contagious virus for which we have neither cure nor inoculation. Like every institution where humans gather in groups, they will change. The trouble, as always in these moments of collective shock, is the absence of public debate about what those changes should look like, and who they should benefit - private tech companies or students?

The same questions need to be asked about health. Avoiding doctor's offices and hospitals during a pandemic makes good sense. But telehealth misses a huge amount. So we need to have an evidence-based debate about the pros and cons of spending scarce public resources on telehealth - rather than on more trained nurses, equipped with all the necessary protective equipment, who are able to make house calls to diagnose and treat patients in their homes. And, perhaps most urgently, we need to get the balance right between virus tracking apps, which, with the proper privacy protections, have a role to play, and the calls for a "community health corps" that would put millions of Americans to work, not only doing contact-tracing, but making sure that everyone has the material resources and support they need to quarantine safely.

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Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic

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For a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile. "We are ready, we're all-in," the governor gushed.

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DeepMay Bootcamp is a 10-day intensive in the mountains of the North Carolina that brings together students, instructors, and organizers in a communal and intimate setting to radically expand our boundaries of technology and techique.

At the camp, everyone shares in the care of the space, and the duties of cooking, cleaning, and tending. Rather than a traditional education or industrial teaching models, DeepMay operates with mentorship and leadership at its core, arming students with skills, but also providing guidance to world-building projects.

While DeepMay teaches high value skills, DeepMay strives to cultivate a sense of collective power from collaborative projects built in the courses.

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DeepMay Bootcamp is a 10-day intensive in the mountains of the North Carolina that brings together students, instructors, and organizers in a communal and intimate setting to radically expand our boundaries of technology and techique. At the camp, everyone shares in the care of the space, and the duties of cooking, cleaning, and tending.

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Everywhere we look, technology fuels the madness of capitalism. Alexa infiltrates every home as Amazon shares facial recognition data with ICE. Each smartphone app stakes claim to the personal data you signed away under the implicit threat of losing access to the world. Rare-earth minerals for computing are extracted with exploited labor while landfills are filled with thousands of consumer electronics past their planned obsolescence. Cures and therapies promised by biotech remain inaccessible at best and cleverly marketed poisons at worst. Meanwhile food systems collapse and climate catastrophes are dealt with by fantasies of atmospheric shields and the resurrection of murdered ecosystems, as if we were recolonizing a foreign, inhospitable planet. Technology seems irredeemable in the face of this horror. DeepMay is not an attempt at a redemption of technology - we are far more ambitious than that.

The DeepMay vision of "autonomous polytekne" refers to a radically different cognitive and bodily process than what is currently associated with technology. If this seems only rhetorical, consider some common experiences of working in tech. Like any craft, it is seeded by curiosity, an obsession with an enjoyable problem, or a desire for new functionality and the decision to build it oneself. Students are often routed into some variation of institutionalized schooling or certification, perhaps with hefty debts attached. Even those who are largely self-taught must market their skills to make a living, or accrue funding for their vision. We find ourselves selling our labor to make websites we don't care about, or branding products to imply a better world can be bought. Your craftsmanship is laid to waste as your well-written piece of code gets integrated into a machine you'd rather break than buy. From the university to the start-ups, avenues of inquiry are explored insofar as they create a market advantage. The dominant technological episteme progresses by mapping complex landscapes, reducing uncertainty, and demonstrating control as rapidly as possible in order to capitalize on the results. This continued acceleration has acute mental and physical tolls - long hours in front of a screen, unforgiving deadlines, and the systematic transmutation of our passions into exploited labor. Liberating ourselves from this progression requires a new operating system and a different set of collective practices. DeepMay is a sincere attempt to realize a new technics altogether.

The DeepMay format is an immersive bootcamp in the mountains of North Carolina with tracks in Data Science, Design, Web Development and, this year, Hacking. Ten days provides enough time to build a significant foundation in a chosen track, while creating a sprint for intensive study and focus. The size of the camp is capped at approximately fifty students to facilitate a greater depth of connections. We came to know each other well - our shared needs and desires continuously invoked a different world, and our fledgling skills began to unveil how we may build it together. The neoliberal ethic of a work-life balance creates perpetual oscillations between fragmented realities - eating healthy, hitting the gym, maintaining a social life, while always maximizing productivity. At DeepMay, a consistency between these otherwise discrete spheres was established through the rhythms of communal life. We exercised together each morning and took turns cooking for the camp. Late into the night people could be found huddled together in front of a laptop solving a problem, or returning refreshed from the wood-fired sauna. Taking a long hike together did not feel like a side activity or a distraction, but as aligned with the purpose of the camp as time spent coding. A general ease of spirit facilitated spontaneous creations: a Javascript application that produces psychedelic visualizations, a network map to visualize our mutual relations, and quality DeepMay memes continuously shared over the cloud of our mesh network. We know we are on the right track if our greater aspirations find expression through the mundane joys of daily life.

The DeepMay tracks reflect skills highly relevant to developing autonomy. Social movements and community initiatives often find themselves using platforms that limit their ability to freely share ideas, communicate securely, and realize sophisticated coordination. It is crucial for us to relay compelling narratives, destitute the currency of information, build our own platforms, subvert the logics of existing systems, and create an effective presence. Examples of initiatives that emerged from the first iteration of DeepMay include design for a community food distribution network in Atlanta, an ongoing project called AirBnBusted that maps development and gentrification, and materials to aid the development of a prison abolition website and database. This year we are placing greater focus on pre-work to lay the foundations of the curriculum before the camp, as well as micro-projects to allow students to pursue what they find most interesting and organically develop collaborations.

DeepMay is steadily working towards building its own autonomous infrastructure, from an on-site wireless mesh network, to messaging platforms enabling remote coordination on this project. With over twenty programmers, designers, academics, developers, and hackers organizing a bootcamp over five time zones, methods for project management are continuously revisited and experimented with. Beyond the bootcamp, we anticipate regular Build Days - virtually coordinated DeepMay meet-ups in various cities. These are the first steps towards building a network of highly skilled co-conspirators that can rapidly prototype the tools required to pursue Path B at the scale we need to defect from our current trajectory.

We want to give the future a fighting spirit. Join us by signing up at deepmay.io.

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Everywhere we look, technology fuels the madness of capitalism. Alexa infiltrates every home as Amazon shares facial recognition data with ICE. Each smartphone app stakes claim to the personal data you signed away under the implicit threat of losing access to the world.