I started to watch Shantaram, which I found surprisingly good – it captures the atmosphere and feel of the novel and the casting is brilliant. I read the novel in 2009 and loved it, of course, like everyone I know. But I didn’t read The Mountain Shadow, Roberts‘s second novel, because I read a couple of negative reviews when it came out. I sort of passed him off as a “one book” writer. Someone introduced me to that term when describing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writer Annie Dillard; though I actually enjoyed a couple of her other books.
Anyway, after watching the first episode of “Shantaram” I had a look to see what Roberts has been doing since. I was delighted to see that he didn’t stop with those two books, but has both continued writing and has been re-inventing himself as a musician. He’s also studied under an Indian guru and become a devotee of Kali. He has an amazing look, with a red tikka down his forehead, goes shirtless, and is adorned with beads, necklaces and rings. He lives in Jamaica, which he says is a great place to produce music. He’s also been writing new novellas and a graphic novel and recording YouTube films and podcasts about philosophy, spirituality, his books and his writing techniques. At age 70 he’s wonderfully lively and creative. An inspiration.
There are a couple at climate sites where one can take a quiz to calculate the quantity of CO2 each of us produce. According to the parameters of the test, it turns that I’m pretty much a climate criminal. My wife and I share a free standing house of about 150 square meters and travel everywhere by car or by plane. That’s enough, apparently, to tilt the scale towards 11 – 13 tons of CO2 per person, regardless of diet or other factors.
I can add that all my electricity is produced by fossil fuels and a third of the water is desalinated by means of electricity.
If these crimes were not enough, I live in an apartheid state where the majority of the land was stolen from an indigenous people whose descendents continue to be oppressed today; a state that makes a living by exporting weapons and cyber-weapons and whose principal friends are corrupt dictators and war-criminals.
Being human, according to many parameters, is already to belong to a species that acts like a cancer on the earth; invading the territories of other species, de-foresting habitats, polluting the rivers, poisoning the oceans, wrecking the atmosphere and bringing about the extinction of many other life forms.
Our presence is as harmful to our environment as that of the rabbits introduced to Australia, which quickly overran the entire continent and ate up most of the vegetation. Or the European settlers in the Americas, who supplanted the indigenous population.
If we were to be put on trial for our crimes, we could claim innocence. We could claim that we ourselves are victims. We could claim extenuating circumstances and express contrition. But if we pardon ourselves and then repeat the crimes, what should be our punishment?
In the case of those rabbits, the favored solution was control or eradication:
Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the Australian rabbit population. Conventional methods include shooting rabbits and destroying their warrens, but these had only limited success. From 1901 to 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the rabbits.[2][3] The myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population. (Wikipedia)
In the case of settlers (White Americans? Israeli Jews?), they could be expelled, like the Indians of Idi Amin’s Uganda. But since humans are anyway problematic, maybe they should simply be exterminated, like the rabbits?
There has to be another solution. Extreme retribution is exacted only at the cost of losing our humanity. Murder, capital punishment, genocide, even suicide are all crimes against humanity.
Does humanity actually count for anything when humans themselves are the problem?
I would argue that what we actually mean when we talk about humanity is divinity. And divinity, rather than being a quirky religious term, means the essential existence-consciousness underlying everything manifest. We call it humanity, because to be human is to be what we are. For a rabbit, it would be his “rabbitness”. And the essential in us, as in the rabbit, is the consciousness that binds us all together. The what-we-are is the divine.
I am the gambling of the cheats and the splendor of the splendid. I am the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the virtue of the virtuous.
-Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita 10.36
So essentially, even when we are effectively undermining nature by cause of our existence, we are remaining true to our nature. Because we are part of all nature. We are the thing that we are undermining. We “inter-are”, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation.
This is not to say that we cannot mitigate the damage, offset the environmental costs, or possibly give back to the universe something in return for its generous gifts.
Even by being aware of our connectedness, our behaviour can begin to change. It may dawn on us that birdsong and snow on the mountain peaks are as essential to our existence as the shiny new phone that we lust for, or the new car. We can reevaluate our priorities and begin to make different decisions. The question is whether the changes we make – individual and collective – will be sufficient, and in time.
Those are a few recent articles. In short, both Twitter and Facebook, and Meta’s other services like WhatsApp and Instagram are in serious trouble right now. People are seeking alternatives such as Mastodon, which some of the mainstream press, like the Washington Post (see above), struggle to understand.
We love to hate these big tech corporations here on the Fediverse. I would describe myself as an avid despiser of Zuckerberg and Musk. On the other hand, if I look back a few years ago, I remember my awe when MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were finally turning people on to the web, in a big way. At the time when those services were beginning, the internet was still a place that many less technical users visited only reluctantly. They certainly didn’t participate or publish anything there themselves. Yet suddenly, when the early social networks gained prominence, people finally “got” it. They began to share personal stories and family pictures in earnest, and even discover old friends. When Facebook came along, it suddenly became possible to find former classmates, reconnect with distant family members and recover old relationships. Its contribution to the social fabric of society was huge. Twitter, at the same time, became a place that you could find journalists and writers, engage with them personally, and get the back story behind the news. Emotions that journalists would carefully hide behind a screen of objectivity in their polished stories, you could learn about from their tweets. And, of course, Twitter was the first place to visit on any developing news story.
These examples are just a fraction of the contribution made by the big social media companies. The amazing thing is that, all the while, their true agenda was figuring out how to make money from their services. In a way, we should be thankful that they did.
And yet, as we know, their solutions were inimical and destructive, first to the web, and then to people and societies. We are now at a place where we are beginning to ask how we could arrange things differently, reap the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.
Everyone on the Fediverse thinks they have the obvious answer to that; though, if you look more closely, there are problems there too, of how and how much to engage in moderation, on whether to block networks like Gab, about how to relate to new laws and increasing governmental snooping and interference.
Regarding the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, the EFF and Cory Doctorow have the core answer: there needs to be interoperability. Those big tech companies don’t deserve to be abolished, but their monopolies need to be trimmed down through legislation and regulation. They can live on, for those who want them, as honorable but interoperable platforms. If they are creative and clever, with an amazing interface that people appreciate, they will always be popular enough to make money. But they should not be permitted to stifle competition. Ergo interoperability. No more walled gardens: if the user wants to friend people on other networks, or wants people from other networks to be able to friend him, that should be made possible. May the best platforms win, but it should not be a zero-sum winner-take-all situation. Those who prefer to live on a maybe less slick, less plush, but ad-free, non-algorythmic networks should not be penalized for their choice.
And I still look forward to seeing an offline client, like Thunderbird is for email, that can bring together all of our social media posts, from around the Fediverse, from Diaspora, from Twitter and Facebook, and everywhere else.
