Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Facebook bans all content on vaccine awareness, including facts about vaccine ingredients. What’s next?

https://www.thedailysheeple.com/facebook-bans-all-content-on-vaccine-awareness-including-facts-about-vaccine-ingredients-whats-next/
Facebook is now allegedly moving aggressively to ban all speech that contradicts whatever “official” position is decided to be “the truth” by the corrupt establishment. This week, Facebook announced it would block all content on Facebook that questions the official dogma on vaccines, which falsely insists that vaccines have never harmed anyone, that vaccines contain only safe ingredients and that vaccines always work on everyone.

Facebook is achieving this by labeling vaccine awareness information “misinformation” or “hoaxes.” At the top of the list is the assertion that vaccines are linked to autism — something that even the CDC’s own top whistleblower scientist reveals to be true, yet the vaccine industry claims it’s all a hoax.

Notably, tech giants are now banning vaccine truth information by labeling it “misinformation” in exactly the same way they ban conservative content by labeling it “hate speech.” They simply invent a false category to justify the ban, all while crushing the free speech of users (and ultimately leading to the vaccine maiming of millions of innocent children). Under this twisted system of speech policing, they can ban any content they don’t like by simply labeling it “false” or “hateful,” even if it’s true and important.

Don’t like infanticide and the killing of human infants after they are born? That’s “hate speech against women,” Facebook will soon declare. And you’ll be banned from talking about abortion.

Concerned about fluoride and how it harms developing brains and lowers the IQs of children? That will be labeled a “hoax” by Facebook, even though it is scientifically verified through multiple studies to be true.

“Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for global policy management, said the social media network would reduce the distribution of false data and provide users with authoritative information about vaccinations,” reports AFP, via Breitbart.

Of course, “authoritative information” means whatever propaganda the vaccine deep state is pushing at the moment. The vaccine industry is steeped in conflicts of interest and a long history of suppressing scientists and whistleblowers who attempt to warn the public about the toxic effects of vaccine ingredients such as Thimerosal (containing mercury), aluminum adjuvants, MSG, formaldehyde and other neurotoxins that are openly admitted by the CDC to be ingredients used in vaccines administered to children.

Just recently, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons denounced mandatory vaccines, citing “no rigorous safety studies” and warning about vaccine industry corruption of science. Their statement includes the following:

Manufacturers are virtually immune from product liability, so the incentive to develop safer products is much diminished. Manufacturers may even refuse to make available a product believed to be safer, such as the monovalent measles vaccine in preference to MMR (measles-mumps-rubella). Consumer refusal is the only incentive to do better.

There are enormous conflicts of interest involving lucrative relationships with vaccine purveyors.

Research into possible vaccine adverse effects is being quashed, as is dissent by professionals.

Vaccines are neither 100% safe nor 100% effective. Nor are they the only available means to control the spread of disease.

Yet Facebook, under pressure from radical, deranged Democrat Adam Schiff, has now been bullied into banning conversations about vaccines in order to appease the vaccine industry and cover up its crimes.

Critics say this is just the beginning and that they fully expect that Facebook will soon ban human opinions on cancer, GMOs, pesticides, fluoride, abortion and politics. The bigger picture in all this goes way beyond the issue of vaccines, of course. With this decision, Facebook is now signaling that it will ban all conversations or content that contradicts “official positions” on any topic. Those topics will very rapidly be expanded to include GMOs, cancer treatments, water fluoridation, politics, elections, abortions, pesticides and nutrition.

It’s no longer difficult to imagine Facebook banning all conversations about nutrition, citing the absurd FDA position that there is no such thing as a nutrient which can prevent, cure or treat any disease or health condition. That’s the actual “authoritative” FDA position, so by the same logic that Facebook has applied to the vaccine debate, they could simply ban all posts about vitamin D, vitamin D, resveratrol, astaxanthin or any other supplement.

Imagine being banned from Facebook for saying that vitamin C boosts your immune function. That’s exactly what’s coming.

Even worse, Facebook could declare that “authoritative sources” have concluded President Trump colluded with the Russians. Any human opinion that contradicted that “authoritative source” would be banned on Facebook.

Mongol Hordes: Birth Of An Empire

https://rutube.ru/video/396601ba80996a4b2b2d15331bf3c73a/
Storm From The East

1. Birth Of An Empire
2. World Conquerors
3. Tartar Crusaders
4. Last Khan Of Khans

This series covers the life and accomplishments of Genghis Khan and examines the art, culture, science, and technology of Mongol civilization. Genghis Khan left not only a highly trained army, but the beginning of an imperial administrative framework, a system of taxation, a communications network—all of which were built upon and expanded by his successors. The series was filmed on location in Mongolia and also features battle re-enactments shot at historical locations throughout Europe and Asia. 4-part series, 50 minutes each.

In the Peoples Republic of Mongolia, the reputation of Genghis Khan has undergone a dramatic transformation—from despised enemy of the revolution to a virtual deity. This program examines how he emerged from obscurity, united the Mongol tribes under his banner, and transformed an obscure nomadic people into a most formidable fighting machine. It traces his spectacular campaigns through northern China, central Asia, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Russia, which set down the foundations of a powerful empire.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Rediscovering Central Asia

https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2009-thrift-the-double-edged-virtue/rediscovering-central-asia/
In AD 998, two young men living nearly 200 miles apart, in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, entered into a correspondence. With verbal jousting that would not sound out of place in a 21st-century laboratory, they debated 18 questions, several of which resonate strongly even today.

Are there other solar systems out among the stars, they asked, or are we alone in the universe? In Europe, this question was to remain open for another 500 years, but to these two men it seemed clear that we are not alone. They also asked if the earth had been created whole and complete, or if it had evolved over time. Time, they agreed, is a continuum with no beginning or end. In other words, they rejected creationism and anticipated evolutionary geology and even Darwinism by nearly a millennium. This was all as heretical to the Muslim faith they professed as it was to medieval Christianity.

Few exchanges in the history of science have so boldly leapt into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now regarded as a backwater. We know of it because a few copies of it survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-six-year-old Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, or al-Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His counterpart, Abu Ali Sina, or Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), was from the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He made his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and even music. When eventually Ibn Sina’s great Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West. Together, the two are regarded as among the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance.

Most today know these argumentative geniuses, if at all, as Arabs. This is understandable, since both wrote in Arabic (as well as Persian). But just as a Japanese writing in English is not an Englishman, a Central Asian writing in Arabic is not an Arab. In fact, both men were part of a huge constellation of ethnically Persian or Turkic geniuses in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, geology, linguistics, political science, poetry, architecture, and practical technology—all of whom were from what today we call Central Asia. Between 800 and 1100 this pleiad of Central Asian scientists, artists, and thinkers made their region the intellectual epicenter of the world. Their influence was felt from East Asia and India to Europe and the Middle East.

Today, this is hard to imagine. This vast region of irrigated deserts, mountains, and steppes between China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the Caspian Sea is easily dismissed as a peripheral zone, the “backyard” of one or another great power. In impoverished Afghanistan, traditionally considered the heart of Central Asia, U.S. forces are fighting a backward-looking and ignorant Taliban. The main news in America from the rest of Central Asia is that the Pentagon is looking for bases there from which to provision the Afghan campaign. In China, the region is seen chiefly as a semi-colonial source of oil, natural gas, gold, aluminum, copper, and uranium. The Russian narrative, meanwhile, dwells on Moscow’s geopolitical competition there with the West and, increasingly, China. By and large, most people abroad ignore the land of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni, dismissing it as an inconvenient territory to be crossed while getting somewhere else.

Given the dismal plight of these lands in the modern era, who can be surprised at this? Beginning a century and a half ago, Russia colonized much of the region, while Britain turned Afghanistan into a buffer to protect its Indian colonies from Russia. China eventually absorbed a big chunk to the east, now known as Xinjiang, the “New Territory.” Ancient traditions of learning had long since died out, and while the Soviets revived literacy, they suppressed free thought in both the secular and religious spheres. A new day for the region began with the creation of five independent states after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and with the establishment of a new and more modern government in Afghanistan after 9/11.

Eighteen years on, all of the new states have preserved their sovereignty and Afghanistan is clinging to life. But several of the region’s countries remain destitute, and even the most successful ones are riddled with corruption and still dependent on authoritarian forms of rule. As William Faulkner reminded us in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in 1950, there is a big difference between surviving and prevailing. Is the best hope of these lands merely to work their way back up to zero? Or can they possibly reclaim some of the luster of their glorious past, and prevail?

And glorious it was. It is hard to know where to begin in enumerating the intellectual achievements of Central Asians a millennium ago. In mathematics, it was Central Asians who first accepted irrational numbers, identified the different forms of cubic equations, invented trigonometry, and adapted and disseminated the decimal system and Hindu numerals (called “Arabic” numbers in the West). In astronomy, they estimated the earth’s diameter to a degree of precision unmatched until recent centuries and built several of the largest observatories before modern times, using them to prepare remarkably precise astronomical tables.

In chemistry, Central Asians were the first to reverse reactions, to use crystallization as a means of purification, and to measure specific gravity and use it to group elements in a manner anticipating Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of 1871. They compiled and added to ancient medical knowledge, hugely broadened pharmacology, and passed it all to the West and to India. And in technology, they invented windmills and hydraulic machinery for lifting water that subsequently spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China.

But wasn’t this the great age of Arab science and learning centered at the Caliphate in Baghdad? True enough. There were brilliant Arab scientists such as the polymath and founder of ophthalmology Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965–1040). But as the Leipzig scholar Heinrich Suter first showed a century ago, many, if not most, of those “Arab” scientists were in fact either Persian or Turkic and hailed originally from Central Asia. This is true of the mathematician and astronomer Mukhammad ibn Musa al-Khorezmi (ca. AD 780–850), who was from the same Khorezm region of the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border area as al-Biruni, hence “al-Khorezmi.” Algorithms, one of his many discoveries, still bear his name in distorted form, while our term “algebra” comes directly from the title of his celebrated book on mathematics. Similarly, Abu Nasr al-Farabi (ca. AD 872–961), known in the West as Alfarabius, whose innovative analyses of the ethics of Aristotle surpassed all those of Western thinkers except Thomas Aquinas, was a Turk from what is now Kazakhstan, not an Arab.

The extraordinarily important role of Central Asian intellectuals in Baghdad is less surprising when one bears in mind that the Abbassid Caliphate was actually founded by Central Asians. True, the caliphs themselves were Arabs who had settled in the East, but in the process they had “gone native” and embraced the Persian and Turkic world in which they found themselves. One caliph, al-Ma’mun, refused for years after his appointment in AD 818 to leave Central Asia, ruling the Muslim world instead from the splendid oasis city of Merv in what is now Turkmenistan. When he eventually moved to Baghdad he brought with him, along with his Turkic soldiers, the more open and ecumenical values of Central Asia, with their blend of influences from the Persian and Turkic cultures.

The movement from Central Asia to the Middle East recalls the ancient brain drain from the centers of Greek learning to Rome. The difference is that even as some Central Asian scientists and scholars were moving to Baghdad, Arab intellectuals were also being attracted to the great centers in Central Asia. In a kind of reverse brain drain, the extraordinarily enlightened city of Gurganj (where al-Biruni lived), in what is now Turkmenistan, became a magnet for Arab scientists, as did the well-financed and opulent court at Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan. Nor did all Central Asians who had been lured to Baghdad choose to stay there.

What territories should we include in this “Central Asia” that produced such a flowering of genius? Certainly all of the five “stans” that gained independence in 1991: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. No less central to this flowering of the intellect were the great cities of what is now Afghanistan: Balkh, Herat, and others. Add also modern Iran’s northeastern province of Khorasan, whose capital city, Nishapur, produced long ranks of innovators during those bounteous years. The boundaries of this “zone of genius” also extend across what is now the western border of China to embrace the ancient city of Kashgar and several other great centers that have always fallen within the cultural orbit of Central Asia.

It is one thing to draw a circle on the map, but quite another to explain why this region, call it Greater Central Asia, should have produced such a cultural flowering. Booming cities provided the setting for cultural life. A traveling Arab marveled at what he called the “land of a thousand cities” in what is now Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The ruins of mighty Balkh, once the capital of this region, still spread for miles and miles across the plain west of modern Mazar–i-Sharif in Afghanistan. In its heyday Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi. Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces—and solidly built homes of sun-dried brick for non-palace dwellers.

It was also richer, thanks to continental trade. Merchants from Balkh and other Central Asian commercial centers journeyed to the Middle East, Europe, China, and deep into India. Traders from those lands brought goods to the sprawling commercial entrepôts in Greater Central Asia. Since slavery thrived throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the bazaars also included large slave markets. Gold, silver, and bronze currency from these thriving hubs of commerce traveled all the way to Gotland in Sweden and to Korea and Sri Lanka.

Central Asia lay at the junction of all the routes connecting the great cultures of the Eurasian landmass. This network of routes, today often called the “Silk Road,” in its heyday transported a huge variety of goods in every direction. Glass blowing spread from the Middle East to China via Central Asia, while papermaking and sericulture (the production of silk) went from China westward. But the Central Asians were not passive transmitters. For half a millennium, Middle Easterners and Europeans esteemed Samarqand paper as the best anywhere, while the treasures of more than one medieval cathedral in Europe consist of silk manufactured in the Fergana Valley of what is now mainly Uzbekistan.

Traders also carried religions. Greek settlers in the wake of Alexander the Great (356–23 bc) brought the cults of Athena, Hercules, and Aphrodite to their new cities in Afghanistan. Then Buddhism found fertile soil across the region, and spread from there to China, Japan, and Korea. Along the way, Buddhist artists picked up from immigrant Greeks the idea of depicting the Buddha in sculpture. About the same time, Jewish communities were formed, Syrian Christian bishoprics established, and Manichean communities founded across the region. In a stratum beneath all these religions lay the region’s core faith, Zoroastrianism, with its emphasis on the struggle of good and evil, redemption, and heaven and hell. Zoroaster, who probably lived in the sixth or seventh century bc, came from the region of Balkh, but his religion spread westward, eventually to Babylon, where Jews encountered it and fell under its influence. From Judaism its concepts spread first to Christianity and then to Islam.

So when Islam arrived with the Arab armies in the late seventh century, it encountered a population that was expert in what we might today call comparative religion and philosophical analysis. Many Central Asians converted, but others did not, at least not until after the period of cultural effervescence had passed. Muslim or not, they were expert codifiers, and one of them, Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (ad 810–70), brought together and analyzed the hadiths (sayings) of Muhammad, the compilation becoming regarded as Islam’s second most holy book after the Qur’an. Secular ideas also wafted back and forth across the region. The astronomer al-Khorezmi wrote a book comparing the utility of Indian numerals (and the concept of zero) with all other contenders, while others mined Indian geometry, astronomy, and even calendar systems for good ideas. Earlier Central Asians had tested various alphabets, including ones from Syria and India. Several local languages opted for an alphabet deriving from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. It is hard to imagine a more intellectually open region anywhere.

What distinguished Central Asians from both the Arabs and the Chinese is that they were polyglots. They considered it normal to live amid a bewildering profusion of languages and alphabets, and managed somehow to master whichever ones they needed at the time. Thus, when the Arab armies arrived bearing a new religion, it was natural that at least some officials and intellectuals would learn the Arabs’ strange language to see what it offered. Traders soon thereafter began arriving with writings newly translated from classical Greek. Often the work of Christian Arabs, these translations suddenly opened challenging new ideas in philosophy and science to Central Asians. In due course, they were to master and even go beyond their ancient Greek mentors.

The flowering of Greater Central Asia was thus a product of “location, location, location,” both with respect to the trade-based prosperity that it generated and to the welter of religions and ideas that came on the back of that trade. But trade alone would not have given rise to the intellectual awakening that occurred, for not all trade unleashes genius. Perhaps it is best to think of trade as a necessary condition for intellectual takeoff, but not a sufficient one.

How important was religion to this explosion of creativity? For many, Islam was the crucial factor. When al-Bukhari embarked on his lifework of scholarship he was doubtless moved by deep piety, as were scores of other great thinkers. Al-Farabi never doubted that his research into the basis of ethics would strengthen formal religion. Others agreed with al-Farabi but insisted that free inquiry and research should guide religion, not vice versa, and certainly not be constrained by it. Still others were outright skeptics who dismissed religion as fine for the mass of society but a farce for intellectuals. This was the view of Omar Khayyám (1048–1123), the brilliant mathematician who is known today mainly for his poetry, a collection of which was introduced to the West in the 19th century as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

All this adds up to the possibility that intellectual boldness owed less to what religion did than to what it did not do. This is important, given the struggle that existed at times between religion and science in the West. But one senses that someone like al-Farabi, who tossed off a major study on musical theory in addition to all his other works, needed neither permission nor encouragement to treat the whole world as his oyster.

Pinpointing the causes of Central Asia’s golden age is all the more difficult because the great minds who gave the age its brilliance were such a diverse lot. A few came from wealthy landed families and could live off their estates, while others, such as Ibn Sina and al-Biruni, won appointments to lucrative high offices. But they were exceptions. Most of the thinkers were full-time scientists, scholars, and intellectuals, or at least aspired to be. With no universities or academies of science to support them, this was no easy undertaking. Even if they assembled a few paying students, the resulting income never provided enough to sustain them. And so, by default, they relied on the patronage of rulers.

Here was one of Central Asia’s great strengths. To be sure, a would-be scientist could strike out for Baghdad in hopes of joining the House of Wisdom, an academy of sciences established by the Central Asia–born caliph al-Ma’mun. But there were many local rulers and courts throughout the region, just as there were also in Persia to the west. All gave a respectful nod to Baghdad but considered themselves functionally independent. Each of these rulers was a kind of caliph in his own right, ruling in a thoroughly authoritarian manner and defending his territory with a large army of Turks. But they also promoted trade, collected taxes, built splendid capitals, and, significantly, spent fortunes on the arts and sciences. One such court was at Gurganj, where al-Biruni worked. Another was at the already-ancient walled city of Samarqand, where between 850 and 1000 the Samanid dynasty maintained a magnificent library, intense salons where savants discussed the Great Questions, and a lively social world centered on music and poetry.

There was nothing kind and gentle about some of these rulers; nor were all of them sophisticated as patrons of the arts and sciences. From his capital in eastern Afghanistan, Mahmud of Ghazna (971–1030) ruled an empire stretching from India to the heart of modern Iran. Mahmud was ruthless and viewed culture more as an adornment than a necessity. Yet he successfully engaged al-Biruni, who proceeded to author the first comprehensive study of India and Hinduism in any language. Mahmud also patronized the great poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi, whose grand panorama of pre-Muslim Persia, the Shahnameh (ca. 1000), influenced troubadours as far away as France and remains a classic of world literature.

The last great explosion of cultural energy in Central Asia occurred under the Seljuk Turks beginning about 1037 and continuing for more than a century. From their eastern capitals at Merv in modern Turkmenistan and Nishapur near the present-day Iranian-Afghan border, they encouraged innovators in many fields. Among their achievements was the invention of a way to cover large spaces with double domes. One of their earliest efforts can still be seen rising from the desolation of their ruined capital at Merv. Following a circuitous route that led through Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome at the Cathedral of Florence to St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, this innovation eventually defined the cupola of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

Why did the great age of Central Asia fade? The most common explanation blames the waning of the intellectual whirlwind on the Mongol invasion, which Ghenghis Khan launched from the Mongolian heartland in 1218. It is true that the Mongol invaders sacked most of the magnificent cities of Central Asia, but three objections undermine this thesis. First, all but a few of the cities quickly revived, thanks to trade and commerce. Second, far from isolating the region, the Mongol conquest increased contacts between Greater Central Asia and both Europe and the rest of Asia. This happened because the conquering Mongols abolished borders and tariffs within their vast empire. When Marco Polo passed through Afghanistan en route to China in the 13th century, he did so with a single “patent,” or visa. To the extent that cross-cultural contact was an essential ingredient of intellectual vitality, it flourished under the Mongols.

Third, even if the Mongols had set out to suppress free thought in 1221 (they did not), there would have been no need for them to do so. A full century earlier, much of the cultural energy that had crackled across the length and breadth of Central Asia for hundreds of years had dissipated. True, at Merv in the 12th century there were still a dozen libraries, one of them with 12,000 volumes, and there were more than 50 doctors in Bukhara. But as early as 1100, the focus of intellectual life had shifted from bold sallies into vast and unknown territories to the preparation of compendiums of earlier studies and careful treatises on safer, more limited subjects. A sure sign that the formerly bright flame had diminished is the fact that most of the surviving manuscripts from this period are either copies of earlier writings or commentaries on them, not original works.

If the “Whodunit?” question does not point to the Mongols, what caused the decline? Most of Central Asia’s great ancient cities today present a picture of gaunt ruins baking silently in the desert sun, the bleakness relieved only by occasional tufts of sage. Viewing them, one is tempted to blame the cultural downturn on climate change or some other ecological shift. But most studies of the region’s ecological history conclude that the climate during the boom years was nearly identical to what it is today, and that the main change was the decay of the irrigation systems that were once the region’s glory.

Looking beyond the Mongols and ecology, at least four factors contributed to the region’s decline. First, and perhaps foremost, nothing endures forever. The golden age of classical Athens lasted barely a century before the city slipped into a lesser silver age. Few of the Renaissance cities remained at a peak of cultural creativity for more than a century and a half. It is natural and inevitable that decline should set in after a high point.

In the case of Central Asia, even more than with the Arabs to the West, the mighty stimulus for original thinking had been the challenge of mastering and assimilating vast and unfamiliar bodies of thought, from ancient Greece, the Middle East, and India. By 1100 this had been accomplished, and no comparably huge body of new learning presented itself thereafter. The European Renaissance should have provided such a stimulus, of course, but by that time the great trade routes that had connected civilizations had seen better days and Central Asia’s isolation and decline was becoming entrenched.

Second, religions, like the cultures of which they are a part, go through cycles, beginning in dynamism, self-confidence, and experimentation and then hardening into orthodoxy. In Central Asia, this had already occurred with both Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. In the case of Islam, the greatest flowering of creative thought started early, between 800 and 1100. The hardening into orthodoxy also began early, but did not reach its apex until around 1100. Even then, there remained a few isolated outposts that stayed intellectually vital for another century or so. But in Persian and Turkic Central Asia, as in the Arab heartland and in Persia proper, the demands of a steadily rigidifying Muslim orthodoxy gradually narrowed the sphere in which free thought and humanism could be exercised.

Beyond these “morphological” realities that contributed to the withering of free intellectual life in Greater Central Asia, a third and much more specific factor was at work: the Sunni-Shia split within the Muslim faith. This fundamental division dates to the first generation after Muhammad’s death in AD 632. By the time of the rise of the first Caliphate in Damascus, the Sunnis were firmly in charge throughout the Muslim world except in Egypt, where the Fatimids, a Shiite dynasty, flourished from 968 to 1171. But even before the fall of the Fatimids the Shiite faithful were being hounded eastward, shifting the core zone of confessional conflict to Persia and Central Asia. As this occurred, the reigning Sunni rulers across the region tightened their grip on all who might be suspected of schismatic leanings. Many of the great innovators, such as Ibn Sina, had come from Shiite families. Now anyone like him was suspect.

Needless to say, the change hit the freethinkers particularly hard, but it affected no less the mainline Sunnis. Two figures from the town of Tus on the western fringe of Central Asia in what is now eastern Iran epitomized this new direction. The first, Nizam al-Mulk (1018–92), was a highly gifted administrator and also one of the best political scientists of the era. Al-Mulk’s teachers had introduced him to works by the best minds of the Central Asian renaissance. But by the time he was appointed vizier of the Seljuk Empire, the battle against Shiite dissidence was at full tilt. Fearing deviance on every side, al-Mulk proposed to establish a network of schools, or madrassas, that would instill orthodox Sunni Islam and turn young men into well-informed loyalists of the faith. Graduates would reject not only the Shiite schism but any other forms of thought that might be suspected of deviance from orthodoxy.

The second transformative figure, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a philosopher and theologian, launched a frontal attack on the dangers posed by the unrestrained exercise of reason. The title of his most famous work tells it all: The Incoherence of the Philosophers (i.e., scientists). Like the Grand Inquisitor in Feodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, al-Ghazali intimately knew his enemy, in this case Aristotelian empiricism, which had attracted the best minds of the region. Attacking Aristotle, he attacked all contemporary rationalists, and to devastating effect.

Together, al-Mulk and al-Ghazali lowered the curtain on independent thought that had been raised in Central Asia for three centuries. Yet Central Asians responded with their typical creativity. With outer forms of the faith hardened and rigidified, they evinced a fresh interest in individual spirituality. Their highly personal system for achieving a mystical experience of God required neither books, hierarchies, nor mosques, and was called Sufism. Central Asians had ready at hand many forms of such mystical and private worship, thanks to their contacts with Hindu India and their rich local traditions of Buddhism, Syrian Christianity, and even Judaism, which had thrived in the region’s trade centers. How mystical currents within these faiths contributed to Sufism is much debated, but one thing is clear: Even though the first Sufis had been Arabs, Central Asia became Sufism’s heartland. Several of the first and greatest Sufi movements arose there and spread thence throughout the Muslim world. Today Sufi poems by Rumi, Attar, and others have gained a New Age following, but in their own era they represented a turning inward and away from the civic realm.

Central Asia by no means disappeared from the world’s view after 1100. In the 14th century, Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, conquered the world from Delhi to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and then assembled learned scientists and writers in his rebuilt capital of Samarqand. A century later, Babur sprang from the Fergana Valley and went on to found the Mughal dynasty in India. A gifted writer, Babur followed the old Central Asian practice of gathering creative talent to his court.

Yet Central Asia never regained the intellectual luster it had possessed in the centuries between 800 and 1100. High local tariffs killed the golden goose that had given birth to prosperity and inter-cultural contact. Religious orthodoxy stifled the region’s most original thinkers. As the decline set in, Central Asia gradually ceased to be central to the high culture of all Eurasia and sank into the status of a remote and dusty boondocks.

From this descent into obscurity it was an easy step to Dan Rather’s coverage of Afghanistan and the region in the immediate wake of 9/11. Donning a bush jacket and filming at dawn and dusk, he presented the region as inaccessible, backward, exotic, marginal, and threatening—in short, the end of the world. Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and scores of other world-class geniuses from the region might just as well never have lived.

Even though the Central Asia of Rather’s depiction was and is an evocative image, it carries some bothersome implications. On the one hand, it conjures up a place where the best the United States and the world community can hope for is to limit the damage arising from it. This means destroying whatever threatens us and then getting out. The problem is that the thinking behind such an approach can then become self-fulfilling: A place we judged to be hopeless becomes truly so, and even more threatening than before. The fact that Central Asia and Afghanistan are situated between four—and possibly soon five—nuclear powers does not help matters.

Fortunately, this prevailing image of backwardness is not the whole story. Since the region emerged from Soviet and Taliban rule, the ancient continental trade routes have begun to revive. Indians and Koreans flying to Europe stop off there. Half a dozen countries and as many international financial institutions are busily building a network of highways that will eventually link Europe, China, India, and the Middle East. The fact that this is occurring without central direction means that its extent has largely gone unnoticed. But the road building has now reached the level of an unstoppable force. The opening of routes between Europe and China and across Afghanistan toward the Arabian Sea, India, and Southeast Asia and linking the Middle East, China, and India will, in the coming decade, transform the entire Eurasian landmass. Little that is emerging is absolutely new. Indeed, anyone interested in knowing what the new transport configuration will look like might start by examining the trade routes of the golden era.

Similarly, the opening of Central Asia between 1991 and 2001 is beginning to transform the region intellectually. Tens of thousands of the region’s students have gone to study at the best universities abroad. In an act of enlightenment worthy of their predecessors a millennium ago, the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have paid for these young people to acquire the most modern knowledge and bring it back home. They return with a passion for reconnecting their region with the global world of ideas. Within the next decade, these young men and women will assume leadership roles in their societies and in the region as a whole. It is hard to imagine that they will consider the prevailing corruption to be normal, or accept Soviet-style controls over their ideas. Even in Afghanistan the National University, the recently established American University, and thousands of lower schools are opening new prospects to the rising generation.

These young people quite reasonably ask, “Who are we?” Answers pour in from every side. Many in the Middle East and even in the West, from the White House down, tell them they are Muslims, defined mainly by the faith in which they were raised. Alternatively, some experts smugly invoke the notions of tribal or clan heritage to explain what they consider the region’s hopelessly retrograde politics. Meanwhile, local patriots hail their various national ethnic identities—Kyrgyz, Tajik, or Uzbek—each of which, they insist, is absolutely unique and like no other.

These proposed identities may have some basis in reality. But all run the risk of narrowing the horizons of the emerging generation and limiting their expectations of themselves. The attraction of some young people to fundamentalist religious organizations or narrowly nationalistic groups is also a cause for concern. But Central Asians have ready at hand a meaningful past that lifts up the individual, defines each person in terms of reason and wisdom, and places that person in the mainstream of global developments. This is the great tradition that for 300 years made their region the center of the world of intellect. Why shouldn’t Central Asians and their friends abroad place this remarkable heritage, rather than some narrowly religious or national ideology, as the lodestone of their policies today?

This means focusing more of our support and theirs on reopening the great continental transport routes, instituting freer borders, lowering tariffs, and reducing meddling from the governments. Free trade must also extend to the world of ideas. This means creating the unfettered intellectual space that enabled Ibn Sina and al-Biruni to hypothesize on evolution rather than creationism and even to contemplate the existence of other worlds. Though they each lived under a different government, nobody intercepted their mail and nobody censured their heretical thoughts. In fact, rulers competed to become their patrons and to support their work.

Would this happen today in Central Asia? Several governments in the region are glad to talk of unfettered continental trade but bridle at the prospect of an unfettered exchange of ideas. Yet in every country in the region, there are distinguished champions of the kind of intellectual openness that will give rise to modern Ibn Sinas and al-Birunis. With the emergence of the new generation, increasing numbers of these people are in government. The idea of a fresh flowering of Central Asia may seem a distant prospect, but it is not impossible, especially if Central Asians become more familiar with their rich heritage and draw from it relevant lessons for the present.

If this is the challenge to inhabitants of the region today, the challenge to their international partners is to treat the regional states as sovereign countries, not as culturally inert objects to be shoved around on a chessboard. It is not enough to view them simply as a “zone of [our] special interest,” as Vladimir Putin’s government does; as a source of raw materials, as the Chinese do; or as a fueling stop en route to Kabul, as the United States does. The better alternative is to acknowledge that somewhere in the DNA of these peoples is the capacity to manage great empires and even greater trading zones, to interact as equals with the other centers of world culture, and to use their unique geographical position to become a link and bridge between civilizations. Such an awareness will raise expectations on all sides, and encourage the region’s international partners to view it as more than the object of a geopolitical game.

This, too, won’t be easy, but acquiring a deeper knowledge of Central Asia’s past is an essential place to begin.

S. Frederick Starr is chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He was the founding chairman of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute and has served as president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute.

Just finished watching Play It Again, Sam (1972) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018)...


Sunday, November 17, 2019

Smitten teen girls stir up #FreeJahar mania for Boston Marathon bombings suspect

https://nypost.com/2013/05/12/smitten-teen-girls-stir-up-freejahar-mania-for-boston-marathon-bombings-suspect/
This love is terrifying.

Thousands of American teen girls are crushing on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev, 19 — and leading a social-media movement to exonerate him.

The swooning teens will not accept allegations that the bushy-haired college kid — whom they refer to by his nickname, “Jahar” — and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, killed three and maimed hundreds by setting off bombs at the April 15 race and killed an MIT police officer during the ensuing manhunt.

While some scrawl the hashtag “#FreeJahar” on their hands with markers, an 18-year-old in Topeka, Kansas, is going to the extreme — she wants the Dzhokhar’s words inked on her arm forever.

“Getting one of Jahar’s tweets tattooed on me tomorrow. Guess you could say I’m a #FreeJahar supporter,” “@keepitbluntedd” tweeted on May 7.

The tatted-up teen, Alisha, told The Post she’d soon put Tsarnaev’s April 7 tweet on her upper inside of her arm. It will read, “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”

The waitress insists she believes Tsarnaev is innocent because the evidence against him doesn’t add up. She read through all of his tweets.

“He was just this pothead 19-year-old boy who didn’t care,” she said. “I don’t see it.”

She said she’s “[taking a] stand for what you believe in even if everybody else doesn’t believe it.

“We live in this country where we are innocent until proven guilty and it’s not our job to prove that he’s innocent. It’s the government’s job to prove that he’s guilty,” she added.

She says she’s not a groupie.

“I feel like he doesn’t have a voice. Somebody needs to stand up for him and not the little high-school girls who just think he’s cute,” Alisha said.

“@FreeJahar97,” who identified herself on Twitter as “Gianna,” a 16-year-old with “big boobs,” likened Tsarnaev to a heartthrob.

“Yes i like Justin Bieber and i like Jahar but that has nothing to do with why i support him. I know hes innocent, he is far too beautiful,” she tweeted on April 25.

Another fan is Ariel Barnes, 19, of Columbus, Ohio, unemployed and hoping to snag a job at Walmart, has never met Tsarnaev.

“I try to make it a point that I’m not a fangirl,” Barnes said. “I feel like he’s my brother.”

As “@Shadowlily1993,” she tweeted to critics: “Yall can judge me as much as you want. I’m on his side. This kid needs people behind him. . . . I hope to meet him one day he fascinates me.”

On YouTube, she compiled a playlist inspired by Tsarnaev’s tweets that includes Death Cab for Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels,” Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and Wiz Khalifa’s “Mezmorized.”

A Tsarnaev pal from Chelsea, Mass., Troy Crossley, 20, refers to supporters as “family.” He now has 16,333 followers on Twitter.

“I feel like I am a family member of him and I don’t understand the girls who do that, especially with him being suspected as a terrorist,” Barnes added.

“A lot of his Twitter posts come from lyrics of a song. That’s just me figuring out the songs and trying to widen my musical taste,” Barnes said.

Other videos include “Jahar’s porn,” a clip of bumblebees getting busy and one repost of the teen dancing.

“Jahar is only six days older than me and it just really hurts to think that someone my age that has so much potential and was so happy to be a US citizen would do something like this,” she said.

A Facebook group, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Free Jahar Movement, has more than 6,000 followers. A post on its page asks whether the brothers were “actors” who believed they were taking part in an emergency drill at the marathon.

Dzhokhar has inspired anonymous authors to pen steamy online fan fiction, as well.

On Wattpad, “Stringcheesekitteh” wrote the three-part story “Tsarnaev,” set in the prison medical facility where Dzhokhar is being held. In the tale, a young resident psychiatrist finds herself mesmerized by his eyes — and flirting with danger.

The author wrote that the story was not meant to “offend anyone” and did not express “strong sentiments for or against the suspect.”

Anonymous works on Pastebin.com include fantasy sex and romance scenes with the terrorist.

One scribe imagined Tsarnaev having one last moment of intimacy before getting arrested.

“He kissed your neck, sucking on it to leave his mark, biting down on it every now and then,” reads one scene set just before his arrest.

The fictional Tsarnaev responds, “Cmon, baby give me something to think about in jail.”

Another tale imagines the day he is set free.

“ ‘I missed you like hell. I was a mess without you, don’t ever leave me please,’ I said as I bought [sic] my fingers up to his ear, running them through his curls.”

Tsarnaev’s looks and online persona — his joking tweets, photos and a video clip of him dancing — are candy for his worshippers.

On Instagram, “Izzyperez007,” posted a collage of Dzhokhar. “Love you Jahar and support you!!” the user gushed.

When commenters called her “crazy” and “obsessed,” she wrote, “I am going to make shorts that say #FreeJahar on my butt,” she wrote in comments.

On Instagram, “_saraforjahr_” keeps a daily countdown of the days left until Tsarnaev’s May 30 hearing. On Thursday, she posted a shot of Tsarnaev’s mop of curls flopping as he wrestled another boy. “He will be free whether the government likes it or not!” she wrote.

Tumblr blogs are springing up, too. Justice for Jahar is decorated like a teenybopper mag, with a collage of his pics with the words “luv u,” “perf,” and “fab” in pastel pink embellishing it.

The blog is designed by a young woman in the Netherlands. She declined an interview.

One Twitter user “@freejaharlove” on Friday tweeted, “#FBI please put me inside prison with Jahar I cannot tolerate you lies anymore.” The tweeter also waxed poetic, writing, “I am only the dust on my Lover’s (Jahar) path and from dust I will rise and turn into a flower.”

Online messages encourage supporters to write to Tsarnaev at Devons Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts.

Girls crazy for killers is not uncommon, says Sheila Isenberg, author of “Women Who Love Men Who Kill,” noting serial killer Ted Bundy had his share of fans.

“Ted Bundy had a huge coterie of groupies. Young women, teenage girls, women in their 20s, who went to court everyday, and followed his trial,” Isenberg said.

“Jahar has his groupies because of social media. They are able to get in touch with each other and whip up a frenzy about him,” she said.

Sooner or later, Isenberg said, young women will find ways to directly correspond with him — either attracted by the upper-hand position in the relationship or the 15 minutes of fame it’ll bring.

“It’s easier to get a date with this Jahar guy than it is with Leonardo DiCaprio.”“It’s nota normal healthy thing just to make sure he gets a fair trial to tattoo the words of a the Boston Bomber on your body,” Isenberg said.

Near the Vancouver Art Gallery in Downtown Vancouver. Spring of 2019.

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum located at 750 Hornby Street in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is a permanent collection of about 11,000 artworks includes more than 200 major works by Emily Carr, the Group of Seven, Jeff Wall, Harry Callahan and Marc Chagall.

The gallery has 3,850 square metres (41,400 sq ft) of exhibition space and more than 11,000 works in its collection, most notably its Emily Carr collection. It has also amassed a significant collection of photographs. In addition to exhibitions of its own collection, the gallery regularly hosts international touring exhibitions. The gallery also features a variety of public programmes and lectures. The gallery also has a gift shop, a café, and a library.

The Vancouver Art Gallery was founded in 1931 and had its first home at 1145 West Georgia Street. In 1983 it moved to the Hornby Street location, the former provincial courthouse. It was renovated at a cost of $20 million by architect Arthur Erickson, which completed his modern three city-block Robson Square complex. The gallery connects to the rest of the complex via an underground passage below Robson Street to an outdoor plaza, restaurants, the University of British Columbia's downtown satellite campus, government offices, and the new Law Courts at the southern end.

In March 2007, the 2010 Olympic countdown clock was placed in the front lawn of the VAG. It was open for free for the public to see. The clock has since been disassembled, with one half going to BC Place and the other to Whistler Village.

In November 2007, the gallery announced plans to move to a new building at Larwill Park, a block formerly occupied by a bus depot on the corner of Cambie and Georgia streets opposite the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. The new building would be about 30,000 square metres (320,000 sq ft), almost 10 times the current building size, and would include more gallery space for the permanent collection now in storage, a larger exhibit space for visiting international works, more children's and community programming, and an improved storage and display environment. Construction was planned to begin after the 2010 Olympics with a tentative opening date in 2013. The projected cost was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the gallery hoped to secure funding from provincial and federal governments, as well as private donors.

In May 2008, a different site was chosen for the new gallery, on land occupied by the Plaza of Nations near BC Place. The new plans would double the gallery size to 320,000 square feet (30,000 m2). In 2013, the decision was made to go back to the Georgia and Cambie site.

In April 2014, Vancouver Art Gallery selected Herzog & de Meuron, from a group of five shortlisted firms, from across the globe following a series of in-depth interviews and site visits to significant projects designed by each firm. The finalists, announced in January 2014, represented five of 75 firms from 16 different countries, who submitted their credentials through an open request for qualifications (RFQ) process issued by the gallery. The new Vancouver Art Gallery building is Herzog & de Meuron’s first project in Canada, working in collaboration with Vancouver-based Perkins + Will as executive architect in the realization of the design.

In September 2015, the gallery unveiled its conceptual design for the new building in a public event held at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

The art gallery is located in the former main courthouse for Vancouver. The 165,000-square-foot (15,300 m2) neoclassical building was designed by Francis Rattenbury after winning a design competition in 1905. Rattenbury also designed the British Columbia Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel in Victoria. The building was used as a provincial courthouse until 1979, with the provincial courts moving to the Law Courts, located south of the building.[4] The building was named a National Historic Site of Canada in 1980.[4] Both the main and annex portions of the building are municipally designated "A" heritage structures. The Vancouver Art Gallery moved into the former courthouse in 1983.

The design includes ionic columns, a central dome, formal porticos, and ornate stonework. The building was constructed using marble imported from Alaska, Tennessee, and Vermont. The new building was constructed in 1906 and replaced the previous courthouse located at Victory Square. At the time, the building contained 18 courtrooms. An annex designed by Thomas Hooper was added to the western side of the building in 1912. The Annex Building is the only part of the VAG that was not converted to use as an art gallery. It was declared a heritage site and retains the original judges' benches and walls as they were when the building was a courthouse.

On the Georgia Street side of the building was the Centennial Fountain. This fountain was installed in 1966 to commemorate the centennial of the union of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. The Centennial Fountain was removed in 2017 as part of the Georgia Street plaza renovations. The plaza opened to the public in late 2017.

A regular gathering spot for protests and demonstrations, the Vancouver Art Gallery's lawn and steps hosts gatherings several times a week. The Vancouver Art Gallery is the monthly meeting spot for Vancouver's Critical Mass, as well as flash mobs, the Zombie Walk, pro-marijuana rallies, and numerous environmental demonstrations. The steps on both the Robson Street and Georgia Street sides of the building are popular gathering spots for protest rallies. The Georgia Street side is also a popular place in the summertime for people to relax or socialize.

The Vancouver Art Gallery's permanent collection includes approximately 11,000 works from Canadian, and international artists, and acts as the principal repository of works produced in the region. The collection is organized into several smaller departments, contemporary art from Asia, photography and conceptual photography, works by indigenous Canadian artists, and artists from Vancouver and British Columbia.

The gallery’s European historical collection includes Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century by Jan Anthoniszoon van Ravestyn (1570–1657), Jan Wynants (1630/35–1684), Isaac van Ostade (1621–1649), Pieter Neefs the Elder (1578–1656), Jacob Marrel (1614–1681), Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), Balthasar van der Ast (1590–1656), Ambrosium Bosschaert the Younger (1609–1645), Jan Josefsz van Goyen (1596–1665), Abraham Storck (1635–1710), Roelof de Vries (1631 – c.1681), Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707), Adriaen van der Kabel (1631–1705), Salomon van Ruysdael (1600–1670), Flemish-Cornelius de Heem (1631–1695), Roelandt Savery (1576–1639), and a fine first edition of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes' Disasters of War.

The Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives is a non-circulating collection specializing in modern, contemporary and Canadian art. The Library holds more than 45,000 books and exhibition catalogues, 100 journal subscriptions, 5,000 files on Canadian artists, sound recordings, slides and auction catalogues that document painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, video and emerging art forms.

The Archives contain the official papers and records of the gallery’s activities since its founding in 1931. In addition, there are the personal papers of painter and educator B.C. Binning and the Bill Bissett special collection, which comprises over 100 items, including books and serials where Bill Bissett’s concrete poetry was published.

The Vancouver Art Gallery offers a wide range of public programs throughout the year, including FUSE, scholar’s lectures, artist’s talks, as well as dance and musical performances. In its most recent year, the gallery has featured over 60 presenters, including Timothy Brook, writer Sarah Milroy, and leading Emily Carr scholar, Gerta Moray. In May 2015, the gallery welcomed architect Jacques Herzog as he presented his first lecture in Canada on architecture and the new Vancouver Art Gallery building.

Every Sunday, the Vancouver Art Gallery offers Weekly Family Programs, welcoming all children under the age of 12 to attend the gallery and its events free of admission costs. In addition to Weekly Family Programs, the gallery holds its Family FUSE Weekend event 3-4 times per year.

Friday, November 15, 2019

The Cybersyn Revolution

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/
Five lessons from a socialist computing project in Salvador Allende’s Chile.

While we’re often told that the past holds lessons for how to approach the present, we rarely look to older technologies for inspiration. Rarer still is it to suggest that the historical experiences of less industrialized nations may have something to teach us about the technological problems of today — let alone that a decades-old socialist project might offer ways to think about technologies touted by Silicon Valley capitalists.

Yet a computing system built in socialist Chile in the 1970s — Project Cybersyn — offers inspiration on how we should be thinking about technology and data today.

Project Cybersyn was a bold technological project tied to a bold political project. It emerged in the context of Chile’s peaceful road to socialism: Salvador Allende had won the Chilean presidency in 1970 with a promise to build a fundamentally different society. His political program would make Chile a democratic-socialist state, with respect for the country’s constitution and individual freedoms.

Giving the state control of Chile’s most important industries constituted a central plank of Allende’s platform, but created management difficulties. The government had limited experience in this area. Yet by the end of 1971, it had taken control of more than one hundred and fifty enterprises, among them twelve of the twenty largest companies in Chile.

The problem of how to manage these newly socialized enterprises led a young Chilean engineer named Fernando Flores to contact a British cybernetician named Stafford Beer and ask for advice. Flores worked for the government agency charged with the nationalization effort; Beer was an international business consultant known for his work in the area of management cybernetics, which he defined as the “cybernetics of effective organization.”

Together, they formed a team of Chilean and British engineers and developed a plan for a new technological system that would improve the government’s ability to coordinate the state-run economy.

The system would provide daily access to factory production data and a set of computer-based tools that the government could use to predict future economic behavior. It also included a futuristic operations room that would facilitate government decision-making through conversation and better comprehension of data. Beer envisioned ways to both increase worker participation in the economy and preserve the autonomy of factory managers, even with expanding state influence.

Members of the Chilean government believed the system would bolster the success of Allende’s economic program and, by extension, Chile’s socialist revolution. Beer named the system Cybersyn in recognition of cybernetics, the scientific principles guiding its development, and synergy, the idea that the whole of the system was more than the sum of its technological parts.

Even decades removed from its inception, Project Cybersyn still holds valuable lessons for today. First, it reminds us that the state plays an important role in technical design, and can help shape innovations that aim to benefit society and support marginalized groups rather than achieve narrow efficiency goals or single-mindedly increase profits. Second, we need to be vigilant about the ways in which design bias can limit the efficacy of technologies for increased democratic participation and inclusion.

Third, while the current stream of new products suggests that technologies become obsolete quickly, using older technologies can actually solve problems while holding down costs and generating less waste. Fourth, protecting privacy is necessary to prevent potential abuses of centralized control of data. Finally, we need to think creatively about changing social and organizational systems if we want to get the most out of technology; technological innovation alone will not make the world a better place.

The state and its priorities shape how technology is designed and used.

The state plays an important role in shaping the relationship between labor and technology, and can push for the design of systems that benefit ordinary people. It can also have the opposite effect. Indeed, the history of computing in the US context has been tightly linked to government command, control, and automation efforts.

But it does not have to be this way. Consider how the Allende government approached the technology-labor question in the design of Project Cybersyn. Allende made raising employment central both to his economic plan and his overall strategy to help Chileans. His government pushed for new forms of worker participation on the shop floor and the integration of worker knowledge in economic decision-making.

This political environment allowed Beer, the British cybernetician assisting Chile, to view computer technology as a way to empower workers. In 1972, he published a report for the Chilean government that proposed giving Chilean workers, not managers or government technocrats, control of Project Cybersyn. More radically, Beer envisioned a way for Chile’s workers to participate in Cybersyn’s design.

He recommended that the government allow workers — not engineers — to build the models of the state-controlled factories because they were best qualified to understand operations on the shop floor. Workers would thus help design the system that they would then run and use. Allowing workers to use both their heads and their hands would limit how alienated they felt from their labor.

Beer’s idea for democratic participation had its flaws: for example, he didn’t consider how coding worker knowledge into the software of a computer system might result in the eventual disempowerment of workers, especially if the political context changed.

But Beer showed an ability to envision how computerization in a factory setting might work toward an end other than speed-ups and deskilling — the results of capitalist development that labor scholars such as Harry Braverman witnessed in the United States, where the government did not have the same commitment to actively limiting unemployment or encouraging worker participation.

Braverman published his classic text Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, at around the time Beer was working for the Allende government. In it, he observed how technologies like computer-controlled machinery contribute to the automation of labor and lead to the deskilling of workers, even in highly specialized fields such as engineering.

He found the same process at work in the context of office computer use. Computers make office work increasingly routinized and give management an easy way to monitor the amount of labor each operator has put in. The increased speed of work has the potential to result in more layoffs.

Beer saw computerization differently, not least because the Chilean state insisted that its socialist computer system be designed for different ends than the ones that Braverman described. This gave Beer the freedom to reconceptualize how technologies might shape work on the shop floor and to see computers as a means of empowering workers.

Project Cybersyn shows that the state can create the conditions for new directions in design thinking. The state can require (and inspire) technologists to consider how systems benefit the interests of the broader citizenry, which may or may not align with profit, market success, efficiency, technical elegance, or coolness in system design. Computer innovation wasn’t born with Silicon Valley startups, and it can thrive by taking on design considerations that fall outside the scope of the market.

The systems of the future must be free of the biases of today.

Inherited biases won’t be shed overnight, which is why we need to remain vigilant about the ways bias can enter into and shape system design. Left unchecked, technologies for increased democratic participation and improved human-machine interaction can also exclude and marginalize sectors of the population. Here, too, Project Cybersyn offers important insights.

Project Cybersyn is best known for its operations room, a futuristic-looking space that was designed to facilitate democratic decision-making. It consisted of seven chairs arranged in a circle within a hexagonal room. The design team insisted on an odd number of chairs to prevent a tie when voting. They also rejected the presence of a table, which they felt encouraged the shuffling of papers instead of lively discussion.

A series of screens lined the walls of the room that displayed data on the state of the economy as well as warning signals indicating areas in need of urgent government attention. The wall displays used color, light, and graphic design in ways that helped occupants quickly grasp the complexities of Chile’s industrial sector. Early plans for the room even included space for a minibar.

The chairs in the room exhibited similar hallmarks of careful design thinking. For example, occupants would navigate the displays of information using the “big hand” buttons located in the armrests of the chairs. These large geometrical buttons replaced the traditional keyboard and reflected the class awareness of the design team. They reasoned that Chilean workers would not have experience using a keyboard, and that the geometric buttons offered a user-friendly alternative that allowed for worker participation.

The team considered high-level government officials as the other likely users of the room. These officials also had limited keyboard experience, but for a different reason: they had female secretaries. As Beer noted, adopting a keyboard would “insinuate a girl between themselves and the machinery … [when it] is vital that the occupants interact directly with the machine, and with each other.”

The buttons therefore provided a way to eliminate women from this decision-making space. They also encouraged forms of masculine expression. As Beer wrote, the buttons could be “thumped” when an occupant wanted to make a point.

Such design decisions were not neutral. They reflected who the design team believed would hold power in Chile’s revolutionary context and enforced that vision. Male factory workers and government bureaucrats would have decision-making power. Other kinds of workers, such as clerical workers, and women, would not.

These design decisions illustrate a shortcoming in Chile’s revolutionary imagination. They also illustrate how our assumptions about gender and class can travel with us, even as we imagine a future that is more egalitarian and just.

We can do more with less, and help the environment in the process.

New technologies come with significant environmental costs in terms of the consumption and disposal of electronic devices. Global sales of electronic devices doubled between 1997 and 2009. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2009, people in the United States disposed of 29.4 million computers and 129 million mobile devices. The US had the highest amount of e-waste in the world in 2012, with a reported 9.4 million metric tons generated. Much of this waste is handled in places like China, India, and Pakistan, where the recovery of valuable materials such as gold can expose workers to lead and other toxic metals.

The current market for electronic products depends on planned obsolescence: old products quickly become outdated and unfashionable. But extending the life of our electronic devices helps to address the e-waste problem. Project Cybersyn showed that it is possible to create a cutting-edge system using technologies that are not state-of-the-art. It demonstrates that the future can be tied to the technological past.

When Project Cybersyn was built during the 1970s, there were approximately fifty computers in all of Chile, and most were outdated. Nor could Chile call up IBM for help. IBM decreased its operations in Chile following Allende’s election because they feared the Chilean government would nationalize them. The Nixon administration had also instituted an “invisible blockade” to destabilize the Chilean economy and prevent Latin America from becoming a “red sandwich” with Cuba on one side and Chile on the other. This further limited Chile’s ability to import US technology.

As a result, Beer and the Chilean team came up with an ingenious way to create the data-processing network they needed to link the country’s factories to the central command center: they would connect the one outdated computer they had for the project to another technology that was not state-of-the-art: the telex machine — or rather, several hundred of them. And it worked.

In 1972, a national strike that grew to include forty thousand truck drivers threw the country into a state of emergency and disrupted the distribution of food, fuel, and raw materials for factory production. The government used the telex network created for Project Cybersyn to determine which roads were open, coordinate the distribution of key resources, and maintain factory production.

The Cybersyn network improved government communication and substantially increased the speed and frequency at which the government could send and receive messages along the length of the country. It lacked the technological sophistication of ARPANET, the US military communications system that was the forerunner of the Internet and a contemporary of Chile’s telex system. But the Chilean network used fewer technical resources at a lower cost and proved highly functional nonetheless. Older technologies were creatively re-envisioned and combined with other forms of organizational and social innovation.

New technology isn’t actually as immaterial as many would think. We often speak of our data being stored “in the cloud” — a notion that implies a lack of physicality. But data farms depend on substantial quantities of natural resources. A 15-megawatt data center can use up to 360,000 gallons of water per day, and the recently completed NSA Utah Data Center requires a million gallons of water per day and 65 megawatts of power. A progressive transformation of new technologies would encourage greater selectivity in data collection and challenge the practice of storing of vast amounts of data simply because we can.

Project Cybersyn also demonstrates that more can be done with less. The Chilean project did not try to copy the Soviets’ form of economic cybernetics, which collected a wealth of factory data and sent it to a centralized hierarchy of computer centers for further processing. It accomplished the same task by transmitting only ten to twelve indexes of production daily from each factory and having factory modelers spend more time thoughtfully identifying which indexes were most important.

Privacy protection can mean the difference between an abusive system and a system that protects and promotes human freedom.

Protecting privacy is key to preventing abuses of centralized control. New technological innovations such as smartphones, the increased use of data-driven analytics, and the push to create smart cities and an “Internet of Things” all make the collection of data easier and permit the recording of vast amounts of human and nonhuman activity.

In the 1970s, critics often characterized Project Cybersyn as a form of authoritarian, centralized control because it collected data on factory activities and channeled them to the Chilean government. New Scientist, for example, ran an editorial that declared, “If this [Project Cybersyn] is successful, Beer will have created one of the most powerful weapons in history.”

But such interpretations confused how the system actually operated. The misinterpretation was often ideological — in Chile they were tied to more general criticisms of the Allende government by the right-wing political opposition, which claimed that the Allende government was destroying Chilean civil liberties.

In fact, Project Cybersyn did not function as a form of abusive centralized control because it included mechanisms to protect and preserve factory autonomy. These protections were engineered into the system’s design. The government, for example, could intervene in shop-floor activities only after the software detected a production anomaly and the factory failed to resolve the anomaly within a set period of time.

Human and technological limitations placed an additional check on government intervention. Operators in the factory, for example, could not monitor thousands of production indexes a day, but they could track ten to twelve of the most important. Limiting the number of indicators also made it easier for the software to detect the most pressing emergencies in need of government action. However, it required Chilean engineers to make decisions about which data the government truly required.

Such limitations made much of the factory’s activity invisible to the Chilean government, preserved freedom, and protected Chilean workers from Orwellian abuse. They created a layer of privacy that could have allowed workers to participate in economic management without the overbearing control of outside state bureaucrats.

Beer’s framing of Project Cybersyn also gave the workers a way to understand how this form of data-driven regulation worked by allowing them to create the factory models that formed the basis of the Cybersyn software. Theoretically, it allowed them to open up the black box of the computer and understand the operation of the analytical processing taking place within it.

Only theoretically, however, because the Allende government was cut short by a military coup that resulted in the death of President Allende and ended Chilean democracy for the next seventeen years. Military dictatorship and economic policies often described as “neoliberal shock treatments” ended work on Project Cybersyn before it reached completion. For advocates of economic liberalism, it made no sense to have a computer system that helped the state regulate industrial production.

Nevertheless, Beer’s framework is useful because it reminds us of the importance not just of computational transparency, but of democratic control. If code is law, as Lawrence Lessig famously proposed, then the code used in the new technologies that shape our lives should not be the exclusive domain of engineers and programmers.

We need to think big, because technology alone will not create a better world.

We need to be thinking in terms of systems rather than technological quick fixes. Discussions about smart cities, for example, regularly focus on better network infrastructures and the use of information and communication technologies such as integrated sensors, mobile phone apps, and online services. Often, the underlying assumption is that such interventions will automatically improve the quality of urban life by making it easier for residents to access government services and provide city government with data to improve city maintenance.

But this technological determinism doesn’t offer a holistic understanding of how such technologies might negatively impact critical aspects of city life. For example, the sociologist Robert Hollands argues that tech-centered smart-city initiatives might create an influx of technologically literate workers and exacerbate the displacement of other workers. They also might divert city resources to the building of computer infrastructures and away from other important areas of city life.

He contends that progressive smart cities should first try to understand human interactions in urban environments and how they systematically produce power inequalities. Technologies should then be integrated into city environments in ways that ameliorate these disparities.

Beer shared Hollands’ perspective. Throughout the Cybersyn Project, Beer repeatedly expressed frustration that Cybersyn was viewed as a suite of technological fixes — an operations room, a network of telex machines, an economic simulator, software to track production data — rather than a way to restructure Chilean economic management.

Beer was interested in understanding the system of Chilean economic management and how government institutions might be changed to improve coordination processes. He viewed technology as a way to change the internal organization of Chile’s government.

If he were alive today, Beer would undoubtedly lament that e-government initiatives to put existing forms online or computerize existing processes miss opportunities to make organizations themselves more effective.

We must resist the kind of apolitical “innovation determinism” that sees the creation of the next app, online service, or networked device as the best way to move society forward. Instead, we should push ourselves to think creatively of ways to change the structure of our organizations, political processes, and societies for the better and about how new technologies might contribute to such efforts.

The challenges faced by Cybersyn’s protagonists were not unique to their era — we will face similar ones. While the project was far from perfect, its lessons should not be ignored by those seeking a future where technology is democratically harnessed for social good.