THE CREATIVE DISTRACTION - Crisis in the making of contemporary liberal democracies.

THE CREATIVE DISTRACTION

Crisis in the making of contemporary

liberal democracies.

Rodrigo Lebrun • 180364

MA Design Interactions

Royal College of Art

October 2014

7726 words

3

‘Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi.’ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa,

Il Gattopardo

‘What do I know in this system? What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for, alone in an altogether human age?’ Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust

‘All progress is savage and violent.’ J.G. Ballard

‘We are like lemmings walking over a cliff.’ Noam Chomsky

4

List of images 05

Introduction - The perfect storm or just another shower? 07

Chapter 1 - The original starting point 08

Chapter 2 - The End of History and return to business 21

Chapter 3 - The End of Capitalisms 26

Conclusion - Just another shower 38

Footnotes 40

Bibliography 44

TABLE OF CONTENT

5

Image 1 Graph comparing pace of jobs “recovery” of the differnt financial crisis since WWII. Available from http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-percent-job-losses-in-post-wwii-recessions-2012-4

Images 2-5 John Beieler’s Mapping Protest. Available from http://johnbeieler.org/protest_mapping/

Image 6 Dow Jones’ ‘flash crash’ of April 2013. Available from http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/hacked-ap-twitter-feed-rocks-market-after-sending-false-news-flash/

Image 7 Times Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year: The Protester, Illustration by Shepard Fairey

Image 8 Police officers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. August, 1968. Maury Englander, FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Image 9 Houston police officers arrest a pro-immigration demonstrator in Houston for protesting in the wrong place. August, 1992. Walt Frec, AFP/Getty Images

Image 10 Washington D.C. police officers gather outside the World Bank as protesters mass. April, 2000. Luke Frazze, AFP/Getty Images

Image 11 Riot police stand guard as demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson. REUTERS, Mario Anzuoni

Image 12 Graph showing World’s GDP growth. Financial Times. Available from http://av.r.ftdata.co.uk/files/2011/03/ftblog1191.gif

Image 13 Graph showing the evolution of luxury-goods market in the world. The Economist. Available from http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/

default/files/images/2014/01/blogs/graphic-detail/20140201_woc204.png

Image 14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30 Selection of Time

Magazine covers from 2007 to 2014. Available from http://content.time.com/time/coversearch/

Image 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29, 31 Selection of The

Economist covers from 2007 to 2014. Available from http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers

Image 32 Untitled, 2010 by David ShrigleyImage 33 How Ukraine sees Crimea on Google Maps.

Available from http://www.google.com.ua/maps/@45.3888723,34.0713675,8z

Image 34 How America sees Crimea on Google Maps. Available from http://www.google.com/maps/@45.4058534,34.085092,8z

Image 35 How a trillion dollars looks like in $100 banknotes. Available from http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_exposure.html

Image 36 How 9 biggest Banks’ Derivative Exposure looks like in $100 banknotes. Available from http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_exposure.html

Image 37 Artistic impression of Arkyd Series 300 Rendezvous Prospector. Available from http://www.planetaryresources.com/technology/

Image 38 Artistic impression of asteroid mining. Available from http://www.planetaryresources.com/technology/

LIST OF IMAGES

Note to Readers

I have used the terms liberalism, liberal capitalism, the system and capitalism as synonyms. Any other political or economic system will be clearly stated.

I have also used Crisis (with a capital C), The (Credit) Crunch and the Great Recession to describe the economic/political events that have taken place since the subprime mortgage crisis. Any other crises will be clearly stated.

7

It is problematic to talk about the 2008/2009 crisis (also known as the Great Recession) as a single entity. From individuals to countries, we have all been affected in different ways and our reactions to the challenges it posed have been just as diverse. Perhaps one unifying aspect that has made this Crisis unique in history is the sheer sense of scale, complexity and speed at which events unfolded, as well as the widespread feeling of powerlessness towards it.

Several developments contributed to a critical mass that led to the events of 2008, from the advancements in technology for financial services, such as high frequency trading (HFT), to Globalisation, the rapid expansion of digital communication networks, and the deregulation of financial markets in the US and the UK in the late 1970s and early 80s, followed by much of the rest of the world since. These and other factors have worked concomitantly, supporting each other to underpin what we see as modern liberal capitalism.

My personal experience with the Crisis (and I could argue this dissertation is one of its symptoms) has been equally complex, transforming me from an enthusiastic investor in funds and shares, to a disgruntled victim in the aftermath of the Crisis, to a critic. The Recession triggered questions I would not have otherwise asked.

I’ll strive for objectivity in my enquiry. I am not aiming to set a moral standpoint on capitalism, though I admit, as a firsthand witness to the challenges it has brought about worldwide, it is hard not to have an emotional reaction. My primary goal is to understand what makes liberalism such a

powerful force and how it plays a central role in the dominant economics, politics and ideologogies of today. I am conscious that this is a huge undertaking, even for specialists in the field. On the other hand, I take heart from author and self-proclaimed socialist Benjamin Kunkel, who claims ‘nonspecialists can make sense of so vast a thing as capitalism’1, especially since specialists themselves have proved unable to explain the market’s behaviour to their own satisfaction.

Understanding the Crisis and the inner workings of capitalism has become not only a personal obsession but also fertile ground for my practice. It is undeniable that society is fed by, among other things, economics. Thus, a greater understanding of how liberal economies function will help me understand contemporary society and therefore become a better designer.

I am aiming to show in the following pages that Liberal capitalism is in a constant state of flux, with crises being inherent parts of it rather than anomalies. Being able to understand the role of crisis in contemporary society will allow me to speculate not only on future crises, but most importantly, future economics that will in turn inform new politics and society. It is this notion of crisis as rule, and not exception, that I aim to use as the starting point for my future projects at the RCA and beyond.

Finally, this is not supposed to be a work of definite conclusions - I personally don’t believe in absolute truths - but the beginning of a much greater theoretical and practical investigation.

Introduction

THE PERFECT STORM OR JUST ANOTHER SHOWER?

8

Chapter 1

THE ORIGINAL STARTING POINT

Originally, this dissertation was supposed to explore the symbiotic relationship between activism and systems of oppression. As a designer, I was interested in analysing how these two forces adapted to each other in what I would describe as a creative race.

Further investigation on the subject made me realise that the apparatus put in place by governments and corporations to curb dissent has made this a race with only one contender.

This chapter analyses historically how liberal democracies, especially the US and the UK, have managed to diminish the influence of activism in the democratic debate and in society.

The Great Crash of 1929 is a good example of how the financial world has the potential to trigger a chain of events that can, directly and indirectly, affect all spheres of life on a global scale. This is a phenomenon which is intensifying as markets become increasingly connected, accelerated in recent decades by the widespread use of digital technologies. As Alasdair Roberts posits:

‘The market economy that produced [such] bounty was also prone to manias and depressions. It destroyed traditional trades and patterns of life. It left the poor vulnerable to sudden swings in wages and food prices. It created industrial slums that were filthy and disease ridden. The capacity of the capitalist process to produce wealth was equaled by its ability to produce reasons for public outrage.’2

These issues are not necessarily financial but are reflections of it. Government policies, investments

9

in research, infrastructure and sanitation are just as sensitive to market fluctuations as share prices. Therefore, it is important to bear in mind that financial crises have the capacity to unleash other crises such as political distrust, civil and human rights violations, global warming, fear of political and religious fundamentalism, terrorism and even disease outbreaks (and how governments tackle them), to name a few. In turn, these crises are potential triggers for individual and group responses in the shape of protests, riots, civil war and even conflict between countries.

In this chapter I will be focusing mostly on protest and how its role in society has changed over the past century. My main bibliographical reference in this

chapter is Alasdair Roberts’ The End of Protest - How Free-Market Capitalism learned to Control Dissent. This book offers a historical account of the state apparatus created to curb and repress dissent, mainly in the US and the UK, and how it became a framework used by other countries around the world.

As most experts agree that the Great Recession of 2008 was the most severe economic crisis since World War II3, a spike in dissent activity was not unexpected. This is what John Beieler’s Mapping Protest4 displays in an animated timeline of protests since 1979. The work suggests exponential growth in the number of protests, especially in the past decade. The Crisis could be one of the underlying factors for this. On the other hand, it is important

img 1

1 1

not to underestimate the amplifying impact of social media, at first in the shape of blogs, and latterly Twitter, Facebook and others.

Social networks have been hailed by the media and intellectuals as one of the main factors in facilitating protests around the world. They have served as a tool for articulation, documentation, promotion and even as an environment in itself for direct action, most notoriously represented by the Anonymous movement. Perhaps one of the best known examples of their power was in the words of one of their biggest critics, Recep Erdogan. The recently re-elected Turkish Prime Minister stated, at the height of the Taksim Protests in June 2013, that:

“There is now a menace which is called Twitter [...] The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.” 5

Social networks’ potential for disruption has

been greatly amplified by the interconnectedness of financial markets, digital communication through complex algorithms, and high frequency trading. The Dow Jones’ so-called ‘flash crash’ of April 2013 showed to what extent one external agent can trigger a cascading effect with huge financial

losses. Motivated by a hacking attack of the Twitter page of the Associated Press, the index dropped 1% in a matter of minutes. Given the S&P 500’s value of approximately $14.6 trillion, its 0.93 percent collapse represented a nominal loss of $136.5 billion6, though it is argued that value was recovered afterwards. The example illustrates how social media is seen by both critics and defenders as a powerful tool to amplify and create alternatives for dissent. As Roberts points out:

‘The internet dramatically reduced the barriers to collaboration among activists and allowed the formation of expansive protest networks. These networks lacked the command-and-control structure of the old-line labor movement. At first, this did not seem to be an impediment to their effectiveness. The new technologies promised a new mode of leaderless coordination.’7

It seemed that, despite all hardships, activist movements around the world were gaining traction, support and visibility. A symbolic yet powerful acknowledgement of the fact came when when Time Magazine chose ‘The Protester’ for its Person of The Year issue in 2011. Its pages featured, among

On the opposite page images 2-5

Above image 6

1 3

others stories, the different manifestations of the Arab Spring, Indignados in Spain and Occupy Wall Street (OWS). OWS became the poster child for this new wave of movements typified by a digitally articulated, decentralised structure, self-reported and with global reach.

If OWS embodies the ethos and characteristics of social movements in the twenty-first century, the same can be said of its fate. It lasted from September 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street camp was set up in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park8, to roughly February 2012. A year later the New York Times columnist Joe Nocera declared ‘for all intent and purposes [...] the movement is dead’9.

Erdogan’s re-election in Turkey, the current political crises in Egypt and Libya, the cost of high education in the UK, the ongoing austerity in Spain and Greece (and in many other European countries), the struggle against fracking in the US and now in the UK are just some of many examples of how the power of activism to bring about economical and political change has been undermined time and time again by forces within countries, such as the clampdown on protesters in Ferguson, or even external to it, such as the supposed Russian support to separatists in eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of the protests in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

Contemporary activist movements tend to fail unless their demands comprise small, pragmatic goals that wouldn’t otherwise disrupt the current political/economical structure. Concessions, when made, are done symbolically as a means of preventing revolution, rather than bringing about actual change to the system. As journalist and commentator Owen Jones points out:

’Britain’s ruling establishment is not static: the upper crust of British society has always been in a state of perpetual flux. This relentless change is driven by survival. History is littered with demands from below for ruling elites to give up some of their power, forcing members of the upper crust of British society to compromise. After all, unchecked obstinacy in the face of demands for change risks bringing down not just individual pillars of the establishment, but the entire system of power with them.’10

If the recipe for a movement’s success is not obvious, the means for containing and suppressing

On the opposite page image 7

1 4

dissent have grown more effective and adaptable to different countries. Alasdair Roberts attributes it mainly to technocrats in Washington and in London whose remit is to guarantee the non-disruption of global markets. In his account, he lists four main components to prevent and tackle social unrest:

‘The first involved disabling the capacity to mobilize protest, mainly through measures that weakened the capacity of workers to organise. The second involved the reinvention of policing, to squash the new forms of networked protest that rose up as the power of organised labour declined. And the third involved ceding emergency powers to technocrats so that they could take steps to avoid full-blown economic calamities.’11

The 1980s was a crucial moment, when the governments of the US and the UK implemented measures to restrict the power of trade unions, as a result of organised social movements and political influence. Two main episodes - Reagan’s response to striking air traffic controllers in the summer of 1981, and Thatcher’s struggle with striking miners in 1984–85 - marked what Roberts considers a victory of Conservative leaders over unions. Further liberal policies allowed companies to move manufacturing plants, further restricting workers’ ability to organize. Global trade only intensified this trend.

As a result, the proportion of the American workforce that belongs to a trade union dropped from 22 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 2011.12 That in turn has affected the number of major strikes in the US, dropping from an average of 300 a year between 1947 and 1980 to just 54 between 2009 and 2012.13

The impact of such measures has had an even deeper effect in the UK, where the same reduction in the number of protests as the US, plus ‘an erosion of the union’s influence within the political process [...] was evidenced by a change in Labour Party rules in 1993 that limited the power of unions in selecting party leaders.’14 The emergence of New Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their support towards market economics exemplify this change of heart in the party’s ideology.

The second point in Roberts’s list is policing. Despite the fact that many governments around the world, most notably the US and the UK, have embraced the liberal doctrine of a smaller and less intrusive state through means of spending

cuts, the same can’t be said about investments in policing. Citing David Osborne, an advocate for leaner government in the US, Roberts reveals a very paradoxical approach to small government.

‘Spending is out of control,’ complained David Osborne in 1993. ‘The public is frustrated, angry, disgusted, and ready for change [...] We are in for a decade of excruciating pain at state and local levels.’15 However the Department of Justice estimated that public expenditure on policing more than tripled.

The investment in policing wasn’t restricted to the number of officers: their equipment also went through a major overhaul. Roberts points out that there was no such thing as riot police in the 1970s, just ‘officers who were dressed for normal duty, except with the addition of a light helmet.’16 By the year 2000 those officers would wear what is now called riot gear, including Kevlar helmets, full visors, chest protectors, hard shell shin guards and heavy boots. Many carried truncheons and polycarbonate shields, and a supply of nylon disposable handcuffs to restrain protesters quickly. The introduction of controversial non-lethal weaponry has made police forces even more effective in curbing activism. Protesters from around the world now face not only truncheons but also tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, sonic weapons and water cannons. More recently, LAPD have explored the possibility of using drones and, in extreme cases such as Kiev, even live ammunition was used against protesters.17-23

The clashes in Ferguson (US), which have sparked a national debate on riot policing techniques, epitomise the growing militarisation of police forces. As a result, there is a widespread feeling among protesters that police forces see them not as an integral part of the political debate in democracies, but as potential enemies.

Ferguson, though, is far from being an exception. An independent report on the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010 observed that ‘police were seen [by protesters] to be treating all demonstrators as threats to public safety [...] One senior police officer continually referred to crowds as “protesters/terrorists”.’ An important effect of new policing tactics, another study concluded, was to convey the message that protests are ‘a matter of violence, aggression, and imminent general danger.’ 24

Framing protests as terrorism is symptomatic of a change in the general public’s views of activism, and runs contrary to the general perception in the mid-nineteenth century, that crowds and revolutionaries

1 5

Top down images 8-10

Next page image 11

1 8

were seen as engines to social liberation and an intrinsic part of the democratic debate. This sentiment is best expressed in the exhilarated words of English historian Thomas Carlyle who, when describing the French revolutionaries, describes them as ‘clear-sighted, inventive, [and] prompt to seize the moment [...] a genuine outburst of Nature.’ 25

However, the following decades saw the consolidation of the liberal mindset which regarded the protester primarily as a driving force for chaos. This notion was heavily influenced by the works of Harvard-trained psychologist Boris Sidis in 1898, and the translation to English of Gustave Le Bon’s book The Crowd26. In their works, they argue that an ‘awful, destructive, automatic spirit of the mob moves in the bosom of the peaceful crowd’ and that the crowd had the power to unleash primitive patterns of behaviour characterised by ‘impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment’27. However simplistic those ideas might sound today, they helped to imprint in peoples’ minds the idea that crowds were dangerous, that manifestations such as strikes and protests could set in disarray communities, cities, the system, and that the ensuing chaos had the potential to bring society down.

A survey after the 2009 G20 summit found that ‘the majority of the public has limited tolerance for disruption caused by protest.’ At the same time, most people said that they had a ‘high level of tolerance’ for police tactics such as kettling if they were to prevent the interruption of their daily routines.28 That translates into a growing general association between peace/progress and law/order.

Paradoxically, as Roberts describes, the new challenges to individuals triggered by the post-1980 economy, such as fear of unemployment, family emergencies, and retirement, instead of fuelling public unrest did exactly the opposite. A reason for that lies in the non-existence of an ‘effective mechanism for mobilizing that discontent’. The lack of such a mechanism resulted in in individual caution, characterised by ‘a stronger appetite for policies that offered security’, as opposed to collective dissatisfaction.29

The result is a clear path for government agencies, police forces and even corporations to work together against movements that they regarded as threatening, not only to law and order, but, most importantly, to business. Perhaps one of the most

controversial cases was the creation of the Domestic Security Alliance Council30 in the US, whose goal was to harness ‘a strategic partnership between the FBI and the U.S. private sector’32. As of 2010, the council had around 200 members, among them companies such as Bank of America, Barclays, American Express, Mastercard, United Airlines, Boeing, General Electric, and Walmart.31

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), reveals how the FBI repeatedly designated OWS a ‘terrorist threat [...] conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country’32.

The close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, is what Verheyden-Hilliard calls ‘police-statism’ leading to a ‘de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.’33

A less obvious, but nevertheless powerful point not present in Roberts’s list is the new nature of left wing movements, whose influence of the web, not only as a tool but also as model, helped to shape their structure and the behaviour of their participants.

Writing about Occupy Wall Street, Anne Kaun describes one protester’s experience in a way that sounds all too familiar in a world of total connectedness:

‘So you entered the park and turned left and then there was the media tent. And there the people were sitting with their laptops and not talking or discussing that much. They were just sitting there glued to their laptops. [ Josh (name changed)]’34.

This behaviour reflects an adoption of ‘the logics of the social media ecology including programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication that come with increased speed of circulation,’35 expressed as a constant urge for documenting and broadcasting the movement. The immediacy of the web led to a lack of in-depth discussion around creation, maturity and implementation of long-term ideas which are so crucial for political and social experiments such as OWS.

The general assemblies’ non-hierarchical structure posed a great challenge to the movements’ ability to set clear agendas. Leaderless movements were also easy prey for experienced politicians and others, for

1 9

whom the crowd could be appropriated and used for their own interests.

As a result, besides having to deal with all the aforementioned institutional mechanisms to fight dissent, movements have also struggled to devise, develop and implement political/economical alternatives to the current system. This seems to be the case not only for OWS, but also for the different manifestations of the Arab Spring. As a Time article posits,

‘[...] deciding what you don’t want is a lot easier

than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. [...] The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it is partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.’ 36

Finally, it is important to remember the paradoxical situation in which the same digital tools that helped and inspired contemporary activism are also part of privately owned companies. Thus, as Roberts asserts, the rise of the anti-globalisation movement ‘relied so heavily on information technologies that had emerged, in large part, because of their usefulness in organized globalized systems of production and finance.’37

The general public’s weariness of political change and activism and the movements’ inability to propose practical economical/political alternatives to liberal democracies, reinforce what Francis Fukuyama calls ‘The End of History?’38.

2 1

The previous chapter examined how liberal democracies in the West have developed ways to prevent, diminish and repress voices of political and social dissent. Psychoanalytical research on the behaviour of crowds instilled in the population a growing suspicion of movements with the potential to disrupt the flow of people and capital. As a result, governments, police forces and even corporations have been given more leeway to fight dissent.

Finally, we saw how OWS exemplifies how movements around the world have struggled to integrate decentralised structures, derived from the internet’s non-hierarchical nature, with the formulation and implementation of clear plans of action, making it even harder to devise alternatives to the current system. Consequently, movements end up succumbing or being co-opted by established and better-organised political groups.

In this chapter, we will look at the forces that helped to crystallise liberal democracy ideals and disseminate them to other countries, including those of the former communist bloc. The lack of a viable economic/political alternative to liberalism and its adoption as a global ideology is highlighted in Francis Fukuyama’s essay ‘The End of History?’. Published in 1989 in the international-affairs journal The National Interest, it suggests that Western liberal democracies represented the end-point for ideology. Fukuyama’s work is recursive as an explanation, not only for the workings of Western societies, but also for the quasi-impossibility of the emergence of consistent and practical economic/political alternatives.

His analysis begins with the end of the communist

Chapter 2

THE END OF HISTORY AND RETURN TO BUSINESS.

2 2

endeavour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how it posed a clear sign that liberal democratic nations were fated to be prosperous and the world would finally enjoy peace under the auspice of global trade. This was a shared view among the technocratic community, captured by the myth of the ‘rising tide’39 - a reference to a slogan that was popular in Washington throughout the heyday of neoliberal reform:

‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’40

This means that an unregulated market would be capable of generating so much wealth, it would spill over to make lower levels of society better off than they were previously. It also underlined the idea that incentives to private enterprises would lead to the creation and distribution of enough wealth to fix social malaise, rendering redundant the necessity for high taxation to fund social policies. Moreover, Fukuyama adds, ‘gains from growth would be so substantial that it would be easy to compensate people who suffered losses as government controls over the economy were removed’41.

It seemed a winning formula which the 1990s and the years in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble helped to reinforce. The graphic shows the growth of the world’s GDP in that period.

At the same time, the communist bloc became ‘sociophagous’ where the states’ bureaucratic apparatus permeated all aspects of civil, economic, and intellectual life in society. Rather than being representative, these states became an expression of despotism, centralisation and paranoia. In theory, as Lenin said, socialism was ‘Soviet power plus electrification’; in reality ‘it is the Party’s power plus executions’.42

With the collapse of the socialist bloc, countries around the world promptly embraced liberalism, forcing the left to reinvent itself under a new guise that would make it harder for voters to make a distinction among the main parties. For Fukuyama, this can be simply put as a desire of the elites to ‘opt for the “Protestant” life of wealth and risk over the “Catholic” path of poverty and security’43.

It is no surprise now that one of the main destinations for luxury goods produced in the West happen to be same the countries that once underpinned the communist world: Russia and China. Fukuyama perhaps falls short of stressing that the elite itself would not be enough to promote,

implement and sustain the neo-liberal reforms that led to ‘The End of History’, in the same way they weren’t capable of preventing the French and Communist revolutions in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. However, it is important to understand how the elite, established or emerging, informs a much greater and more fluid web of people and mindsets, commonly called ‘the establishment’.

The establishment, a term coined by British journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955, was used to describe the structure that underpinned post-war Britain. According to him, it was a ‘matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’44. However, columnist Owen Jones points out that shared economic interest was also essential to bring together corporate, financial and political elites.

The intrinsic link between politics and economics is outlined by Noam Chomsky. For him, concentration of wealth has led to a concentration of power; political campaigns have grown more lavish and expensive, excluding ordinary voters from the actual political debate and ‘driving new fiscal policies, tax changes, rules for corporate governance and deregulation’ whose aim is to facilitate even more the accumulation of wealth (and therefore power) in an endless cycle.45

Furthermore, we need to include in the notion of the establishment those individuals who do not necessarily exercise power actively, but whose shared mentality is crucial in keeping the system afloat. Fukuyama describes how this mentality is rooted in a prior state of consciousness, which in turn informs social institutions such as religion, politics and economics, and shapes ‘the material world in its own image.’46

Slavoj Žižek blames individuals’ quasi-lack of awareness of how the ideological process takes place, blurring the line between freedom of choice and coercion. For him, ‘the only real obedience, then, is an “external” one: obedience out of conviction is not real obedience because it is already “mediated” through our subjectivity - that is, we are not really obeying the authority but simply following our judgement’47. However, he adds that ‘the interiority of our reasoning is determined by the external, nonsensical “machine” - automatism of the signifier, of the symbolic network in which the subjects are caught.’48

It is this notion of freedom (of choice) promoted by liberal democracies that Fukuyama calls a ‘state

2 3

Image 12

Image 13

2 4

of consciousness which permits the growth of liberalism and its stabilisation’, combining ‘liberal democracy in the political sphere with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic’ - or iPads and 3D Home Theatres in a more recent version.

The relationship between consumerism and ideology traced in ‘The End of History’ seems to be in line with Baudrillard’s juxtaposition of Foucault’s theory of power and Deleuze/Lyotard’s theory of desire. For him, Foucault’s new concept of power - one that ceases from being negative, ‘founded on interdiction and law for a positive, active and immanent conception’49 - coincides with Deleuze and Lyotard’s notion of desire - one that moves from lack and interdiction to ‘positive flows and intensities’46. Baudrillard concludes that in Foucault, power coexists with desire and vice-versa:

‘These are certainly twin theories to their core [...] This is why they can be interchanged so well [...] and generated as of today all the byproducts (“enjoyment of power,” “the desire for capital,” etc.) which are the exact replicas of the previous generations by-products (“the desire of revolution”, “the enjoyment of non-power”, etc)’50.

For Baudrillard, power is ‘something that is exchanged. Not in the economical sense, but in the sense that power is executed according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge and ruse. And if power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it purely and simply disappears.’51 Motion appears as a prerequisite for power to exist, resembling Marx’s dialectical nature of capital, which also only exists in motion. Capital itself would disappear if not in a constant state of interchange with the market. Capital, like power, requires flow.

For power to become a commodity, a process is required that György Lukács calls ‘reification’, where ‘the extension of commodity fetishism to all human consciousness and activity in a society where the commodity for has become “the universal structuring principle” (of modern capitalist society).‘52 Therefore it can be argued that, contrary to Baudrillard’s assertion, power can also be set in motion when traded economically.

Going back to Baudrillard’s interchangeability between power and desire, it can be assumed power is set in motion during the commodity exchange. This theory can be used to explain how power is shared among individuals through consumerism at

‘The End of History?’. Power through exchange could explain Theodor

Adorno’s notion of class consciousness. For him, it is the relationship with means of production that defines an individual’s class. The key resides not so much in the ownership of those means, but the contrast between their disposition and alienation. Adorno believes these are concepts that define class more strongly than quantitative status classifications based on average living standards. Therefore, consumption gives individuals disposition of modes of production, granting them subjective power and the idea of status or higher social class.

Consumption, as seen in Lukács, extrapolates the realm of consumer goods. Culture, the arts and even politics are now commodities just like other goods. In this sense, ‘political and cultural institutions could no longer be understood as merely “superstructural”, a second-order reflection of economic phenomena; what is in place now,’ according to Adorno, is an ‘administered world’, where all those fields are seamlessly interconnected, regardless of any perceived antagonism.53 As a result, even manifestations of dissent questioning liberalism have been appropriated as commodities, with their own use/exchange value attached.

Slavov Žižek, in a recent article in The Guardian, argues that there has been a shift in the accent of marketing in the past decade: a new stage of commodification that the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin designated ‘cultural capitalism’54. Žižek points to how environmental activism was caught in this trend, turning from a voice against the depletion of natural resources driven by the needs of capitalist consumption, to become itself a ‘new lifestyle’ embodied in a range of ecologically conscious products, where ‘what we are effectively buying when we are buying “organic food” etc. is already a certain cultural experience, the experience of a “healthy ecological lifestyle”.’55

The consumer, as a result of this experience, ceases to be a passive observer, though a commodified one. He becomes part of a movement, sure of making a positive contribution to society, ‘like a soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in a superstitious belief that this will somehow influence the outcome’.56

Gustave Le Bon’s statement that the twentieth century (and, for that matter, the current one) would be the ‘era of crowds’ has proved right, but

2 5

fails to capture the new nature of mass-gatherings, which have shifted from the political arena expressed by the mass action of citizens (in the form of strikes, demonstrations, marches, and riots) to the entertainment industry. The following example gives us a sense of magnitude in numbers, alongside a totally lack of political engagement:

‘The number of people who gathered in the New Orleans Superdome to watch Super Bowl XLVIII in 2013 exceeded the total population of Boston in 1830, the average attendance at a Bruce Springsteen concert in 2012 exceeded the population of Chicago in 1850.’57

For Žižek, this is how ‘capitalism, at the level of consumption, has integrated the legacy of 1968, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters.’58

The arts, and we can use this term as an analogy for cultural production as such, were also part of this process of commoditisation in which, according to Jean-François Lyotard, the object, its making and network of meanings become irrelevant. The main question is its value in the ‘pictorial site (gallery, exhibition), for it is only from this position that it will acquire a ‘pictorial’ value, since it is only if it is in this site that it can be taken out in exchange for its price=through sale (and possibly afterwards resold by the art lover to be placed in a museum).’ 59

One paradoxical situation is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Disobedient Objects, in which objects used in protests against a variety of causes, including liberalism, are taken out of their context, therefore losing their use-value, to bear only an exchange-value. The museum’s environment subverts the objects as tools for dissent and endorses their value as art within a collection.

Adorno takes the idea even further, demonstrating that the work of art, in its attempt to be free of use-value and therefore free of a market ideology, ends up turning into the absolute commodity, bearing only exchange-value. He posits that ‘as the “absolute commodity” the work of art cannot escape the antagonism between the forces and relation of production which governs capitalist production.’60

This represents what Jean-François Lyotard calls an ‘End of the ideology of ‘culture’ [...] one no longer claims to produce an object that is supposedly valuable for itself or in its ‘use’; but value is defined by exchangeability’.61

For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is ‘recruitment of the entire world into the same big story’, capitalism. The self-referential nature of postmodernism, Jameson claims, showed how specialisation and division of labour seized the arts as much as anything else. ‘For Jameson, modernity, like post-modernity, was just another name for evolving capitalism’.62

2 6

Chapter 3

THE END OF CAPITALISMS

The previous chapters saw the ideological redefinition of activism as a political tool, in order to reinforce the establishment’s mechanisms of self preservation, and even the creation of an entire industry to support oppression. We also saw how ‘The End of History’ wasn’t just a phenomenon restricted to those in power, but a notion embraced by different levels of society, in which consumerism became the symbolical celebration of liberal capitalism’s perceived ability to generate and distribute wealth.

As a result, the liberal ideology established itself as the sole economic/political option, from countries all the way down to the individual, securing a very solid basis for the current establishment to thrive.

In this chapter we’ll look at how the current Crisis, and a supposed collapse of capitalism, has become the latest contradiction and as such, has become not only a commodity itself, but also an instrument of ideological importance for the survival of capitalism.

It is important to remember that ‘The End of History’ refers to an exhaustion of ideological alternatives to liberal capitalism, not a situation in which countries enjoy the same level of development or wealth. In this case, the concept means that ‘they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.’63

It can be argued that capitalism requires a gradient of inequality, be it of wealth or of development, to sustain the flux of capital. The idea matches Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization in which markets and capital create a constant flow, from more developed to less developed economies. Such movement would

allow crises/contradictions in one economy to be transferred to another.

This rings true to property developments and gentrification as much as it does to cycles of booms and busts. For Kunkel, ‘spatial fixes and switching crises might succeed one another endlessly, in great floods and droughts of capital’. As Harvey points out, capital is ‘always on a particular route or at a particular place’.64

There is a paradox inherent in the assumption that crises (which tend to inflict widespread pain, trigger social unrest, topple governments and fuel revolution) could, instead of weakening capitalism, strengthen it.

The communist endeavour failed because of, as Camatte states, ‘the failure of a future that was thought inevitable’.65 Marxists thought that capitalism would collapse under its own weight, triggered by a ‘conflict between productive forces and capitalist relation of production’ or by the uprising of the proletariat.66

The fact that the communist revolution as an intrinsic development of capitalism didn’t come into being testifies and expands the notion of Creative Destruction, a term coined by the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter. It describes how capital is capable of disrupting and eliminating existing modes of production to favour those with potential to generate more surplus-value. However, it does not account for the idea that a structural crisis in capitalism, risking its own collapse, might be capable of strengthening the role of capital in society, while undermining institutions in place to control it and prevent its disarray.

In order to preserve its constant flow, capital

2 7

has the capacity to subvert and repurpose, among other things, codes, religions, decency, trades, education, cuisine, speech, the ‘levelling of all “established” differences into the one and only difference: being worth…, being exchangeable for’67. It can even extrapolate and redefine itself, in that sense, Fukuyama is right when he predicts ‘The End of History?’ as being an ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’ but wrong in assuming it wouldn’t lead to a ‘convergence between capitalism and socialism’68. Such convergence did in fact happen, but not in a way Fukuyama and Marxists expected.

The Great recession of 2008 onwards is a great indicator that this might just have been the case. ‘Too Big to Fail’ has become a commonly used expression to describe how the collapse of one financial institution, as Ben Bernanke declares, ‘whose size, complexity, interconnectedness, and critical functions’69 would lead to the collapse of the whole system. It has become the reason to justify bailout policies in the magnitude of trillions of dollars in the US alone (estimates put the sum at around 29 trillion dollars)70. Ironically, these policies have been dubbed ‘financial socialism’71, and state interventionism, though antagonistic to liberal ideals, has become the main source of liquidity for companies affected by the Crunch. As a result, as Chomsky highlights, there has been a further increase in risk as credit agencies now take into account the inevitable future bailout of ‘Too Big to Fail’ companies.

This policy has proved extremely unpopular and, despite the fact that financial institutions were to blame at first, it has triggered widespread criticism of democratic institutions in major economies around the world. The rise of right wing governments in Europe, the wave of protests in Brazil and the recurring shutdowns in Washington over the debt ceiling worked in partnership to fuel popular mistrust in political institutions.

In this context, big tech corporations have seized the opportunity to promote their visions of a fast-paced, all-transparent and participative society, as an alternative to perceived sluggish, opaque and old democracy.

This sentiment is expressed in the views of Raymond Glendening, founder of Ruck.us - a political online social platform. According to him, ‘Politics is the last sector of American culture that has yet to be revolutionised by technology. When you look

around, every sector of our lives has a plethora of options except for political engagement’.72 However, this data-driven all-transparent world is in conflict with broader notions of freedom and humanity. As Morozov asserts, ‘Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing, all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well’73. This would lead to a ‘perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible, but possibly even unthinkable’74. The result is the introduction of new political institutions whose values are still in line with those described in ‘The End of History?’.

It is important to bear in mind that if creative destruction constitutes an ‘essential fact about capitalism’ full-blown revolution isn’t.75 In that sense, for Too Big to Fail measures to succeed, society has to support them, even if only unconsciously.

The possibility of a financial meltdown and the fear of its cataclysmic consequences as means of unifying society can be traced back to British philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his theory for social cohesion, he describes how fear of a common enemy has the power to bring individuals together.76 It is this fear, according to him, that led to the first human gatherings all the way to nation states.

Perhaps the question is: what exactly do we fear? Chaos? The disruption of our daily routine? According to Jean-François Lyotard, it is the fear of death. He describes how capitalism is ultimately a libidinal economy, where the only options available are subscription or death. In his words: it is ‘that or die’.77 This is a pervasive fear, from the worker on the factory floor to the highest echelons of society. In this sense, bailing-out the financial system was the only alternative to society facing its own demise.

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, ‘capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being “the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production”’.78

Measures to restore the economy are henceforth only temporary fixes, since markets are perpetually ‘in need of monetarization’, as if it were always necessary to inject money into the economy from the outside according to a supply and a demand.79 This rings true to the Great Recession, since the Crisis was one of liquidity (The Crunch) which led to mass-monetarisation of markets through bailout policies. But moneterisation isn’t restricted to

2 8 2 9

From left to right /top down

images 14-31

3 0 3 1

macro-economic systems: it can be traced all the way to the individual in what Deleuze/Guatarri describe as ‘investment of desire’.80 Desire is, according to them, the common denominator in the economy, thus ‘The wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale.’81

For Frederic Jameson, capitalism is anything but a finite entity: in reality, it is in constant mutation. As opposed to Mandel’s definition of late capitalism, implying a degree of obsolescence, Jameson saw it as dusk and dawn, simultaneously destroying and introducing modes of new production. This would happen not only geographically, but also chronologically in relation to emerging technologies.82

However necessary these contradictions are to capitalism, ideologically they have to be perceived as something positive, something from which the whole society could benefit. The objective is to preserve the aforementioned ‘state of consciousness’, in which the flow can thrive. It is creative destruction renamed as progress, evolution and revolution, as we shall to see later in this chapter.

As Lipovetsky describes, ‘supposed “contradictions” of capital are a question of configurations of time [...] capital’s essentially destabilizing temporal looping of the present through the future against all stabilising re-instantiations of the past.’83

As Ballard declares, ‘all progress is savage and violent’84. We can thus conclude that progress is just an ideological euphemism for crisis, meant to preserve the social pillars that keep capitalism afloat.

As we discussed previously, the Great Recession led to public questioning of democratic institutions. This opened up a discussion on what would be the right type of political system and institutions for a world shaped by the digital revolution.

It is important to understand how revolution has turned from a dreaded word, meaning violence and instability, into a marketing jargon used to describe fast-paced progress. Progress has become a tired word, it represents not only a gradual improvement but it has been widely associated with the current environmental problems faced by the planet in the past half-century. Revolution, on the other hand, embodies the values of disruption and speed

which have become synonymous with the liberal democracies in the age of information economy.

Revolution in reality comprises what Žižek calls ‘over-rapid historicization, whose function is to mask its historical, socio-symbolic determination’85. In other words, through that process historical links are broken, allowing events (in this case technical innovations) to been seen as new rather than the products of gradual evolution.

The present (digital) revolution doesn’t only imply the speed at which things evolve, it is meant to describe a rupture with previous modes of production and introduce a future with infinite possibilities. What the process of rapid-historicisation does is to repeat this event ad eternum.

The revolution path is a very useful ideological device because it masks the inherent financial, social and even moral risks taken by the emerging tech establishment.

Revolutions, according to Clay Shirky, are unpredictable - they can only be diagnosed in real time. Hence ‘the more serious you are about believing something is a revolution, the more you are confessing that you can’t predict the future’86. This might sound like a very humble statement, however, according to Morozov, it is a way to ‘insulate our techno-futurists from criticism. If they get things wrong, which they do all the time - they can write off such mistakes as the cost of doing business in our hyperrevolutionary times’.87

That’s very much in line with Philip Tetlock’s views on forecasting in politics. For him, when specialists claim they’re ‘80 or 90 percent confident, they’re often right only 60 or 70 percent of the time.’88 In both cases, what we see is specialism devoid of responsibility. Tech consultants, financial specialists and government advisors all make use of unforeseen events to justify their mistakes, but also to assert their views of an ongoing revolution. Shirky, concludes Morozov, promotes the idea that ‘every crisis is to be recast as an opportunity’ that ‘nothing will work, but everything might’.89

This is in line with how corporations and the tech industry have eagerly worked to introduce new frameworks for politics. Digital platforms such as Ruck.us, LiquidFeedback and Americans Elect are just a few examples of such behaviour. Perhaps a very subtle, but nevertheless sinister point is expressed by Thorstein Veblen, who predicted that the technical class, the scientist and the engineer are to become ‘locus of revolutionary agency’90, not the

Image 32

3 2

proletariat. If the current political crisis is one of representativeness, what are we witnessing now is the exchange of one elite for another.

The US Government’s National Science Foundation, in a report called Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, claims that ‘the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC) will bring about a veritable “transformation of civilization”’. It is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy sees as ‘Prometheanism of the right’ whose ‘advocates are champions of neoliberal capitalism’.91

In this new civilisation, algorithms have become the ‘general machine regime in the information economy[...] continually accumulating, integrating, linking and synergizing informational fixed capital[...] at every level of collective production, commercial circulation and consumption.’92 It is a role whose characteristics start to resemble quite strongly those of capital.

The algorithm-controlled information economy has the potential to inform (if it is not already doing

so) a new age of information politics which, according to Tiziana Terranova, would stretch ‘all the way from production to circulation, from industrial logistics to financial speculation, from urban planning and design to social communication’.93 The pervasive role of design and technology is outlined in the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, in which the experimental collaboration between design, engineering, and programming would lead to the emergence of ‘another socius’.94 The tech establishment would then pick up where industrialists left, leaving crisis not only an inherent part of the market’s workings, but also a means of intensifying its scale and speed. It is not necessary to prevent crises anymore, since they have become commodities in themselves.

According to Zizek, it is erroneous to assume that capital is its own limit, where productive forces became, at certain point, an obstacle to their further development: that these forces have outgrown their frame and demand a new form of social relations.

Capitalism differs from previous modes of production in the sense that the latter either goes

Image 33

3 3

through periods of accordance, in which relations of production reach periods of ‘accordance’ leading to stagnation, or ‘periods of convulsion when the contradiction between forces and relation aggravates itself ’, resulting in the collapse of the system. Capitalism, on the other hand, has the discord forces/relation embedded in its design. It is this discord that propels the development of productive forces and an ever-expansion of the conditions of production.95 As Zizek asserts:

‘[...]herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism is capable of transforming its limit, its very impotence, in the source of its power - the more it ‘putrefies’, the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionise itself to survive.’96

We can speculate as to which are the present conditions that could lead to the emergence of new contradictions in capitalism and its respective reformulation. It is a fertile ground for designers to

imagine how they would inform new economies, cultures, geographies, societies and ultimately people.

Digital media and political theorist Benjamin H. Bratton argues for the emergence of a new ‘nomos of the earth’, where physical and virtual spaces would exist simultaneously.97 The redefinition of sovereignty could be a possible source of tension, in which national governments (China, the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Egypt and such likes) coexist with transnational organization (the IMF, the WTO, the European Banks and NGOs of various types) and corporations such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. Google’s display of different borders between Russia and Ukraine depending on the users’ location is one example of such tension.

Another point of pressure is the increasing virtualization of capital. As Gilles Lipovetsky observes, ‘capitalism is made of these movements of the saving and advancing of time, to the point where the famous ‘contradictions’ of the system must be

Image 34

3 4 3 5

related to these very same questions of time, not to supposedly objective laws.’98 This idea paired with the aforementioned notion of rapid-historicization renders time, and therefore value, increasingly fractional to the point of its total virtualization. As Nick Land describes, ‘formal assets are options, with explicit time conditions, integrating forecasts into a system of current (exchange) values’99. It as a ‘commercialization of potentials’, in which ‘values which do not ‘yet’ exist, except as probabilistic estimations, or risk structures, acquire a power of command over economic (and therefore social) processes, necessarily devalorizing the actual’100.

What we see is a potential disruption of a mode of production where surplus-value generated through over-rapid-virtualization exponentially exceeds the world’s GDP. A 2013 account puts the value of the Derivative Market (virtual) between $600 and $700 trillion whilst the world’s GDP (real) is at about $50 trillion.101

Finally, and perhaps the best known example of emerging (if not already established) contradiction, is the eminent collapse of the planet’s climate system.102 It is fair to say that we still rely on physical goods which require conventional modes of productions, such as food/agriculture. Natural resources depletion have the potential to introduce new contradictions in capitalism in the coming decades. John Bellamy Forster’s book, Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, offers a glimpse of what sort of challenges capital will have to overcome to keep existing.92 He mentions a study by a group of scientists, including the leading American climatologist James Hansen, highlighting the

Image 35 Image 36

3 6

existence of nine ‘planetary boundaries’, all of them with the potential to disrupt production and lead to capital paralysis. Levels of carbon in the atmosphere, loss of nitrogen from the soil, and the overall extinction rate for nonhuman species have already been exceeded. For David Harvey, ‘compound growth for ever’ — historically, for capitalism, at about three percent a year — ‘is not possible’.103 This is in line with Bellamy’s views, citing The Weight of Nations, he puts that Technological innovation, leading to more efficiency, is rendered null as it is outpaced by production growth.104

This constitutes not only a potential threat to the human existence, it could also trigger, even on a much smaller scale, ‘a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems’ such as the ‘prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars.’105

Benedict Singleton offers a more optimistic approach to the problem, hinting at how liberal capitalism might deal with such challenges. He defends the idea that humans should stop trying to ‘live in harmony with nature’, and conscientiously give up their place in the natural order so as to ‘accelerate toward ever more alien spaces’.106

Singleton describes how companies, such as Google-backed Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have patented robotic asteroid capture mechanisms to mine rare metals in what he calls ‘a gold rush at the vertical frontier’.107 He also mentions the geopolitical tensions that might arise as new players go into space. Finally, he concludes saying that a ‘civilisational backup on another planet might be a good hedge of our bets.’108

3 7

Top down images 37, 38

3 8

Conclusion

JUST ANOTHER SHOWER

This dissertation began as an attempt to identify the agents in the creative interaction between activism and systems of oppression. Over the course of its research it became clearer that voices of dissent are facing growing and more complex challenges, not only in the most obvious ways, such as with the introduction and growing militarisation of police forces around the world and the operations of intelligence agencies and even corporations, but also ideologically, in the way the public opinion has been continuously reshaped to perceive protests and activists not as part of the democratic process and historically an agent of change, but as a nuisance.

Disruption isn’t measured in terms of social gains, but in most cases in losses to the economy and tax-payer money,109-111 creating even more animosity between activists and the ordinary citizens. This shows the general public’s predilection for stability rather than dissent, even if it means the perpetuation of the conditions that lead to insecurity and disparity between different classes.

As a result, I judged it important to expand the notion of the establishment to include ordinary citizens whose values match those of the political and economic elites. They democratically endorse the establishment and give leeway to governments and corporations to fight dissent.

They also have a more instrumental role, by making sure that the flow of capital (through consumption) continues and intensifies. Consumerism, in turn, creates a fluid relation of class consciousness, where individuals position themselves according to their relation with means of production and not objective means, such as average income. As a result, it is fair

3 9

to say that conditions outlined in Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History?’ are as true now as they were 25 years ago.

It is this cohesiveness that, contrary to the wish of many Occupiers, Indignados, and others, have allowed the liberal democracies to remain pretty much unscathed in the aftermath of previous crises and in the most recent one starting in 2008.

The Crisis can be considered a new turning point in modern capitalism, creating conditions for what some critics call Financial Socialism, where the role of the state, instead of regulating markets creates a safety net that allows ‘Too big to fail’ companies to take even more risks.

This is a practical example of how liberal capitalism can reinvent itself at critical moments, turning contradictions into new avenues along which capital can flow. Crises as anomalies are merely a construct. Similarly to war, the fear of societal collapse creates critical mass for public opinion’s support for measures which, once in place, enable a new cycle of expansion.

Crisis, then, is not just a quintessential capitalist trait. In reality, it seems to be the very thing that keeps the liberal capitalist system alive. It is an idea in line with the concept of Creative Destruction, but amplified, since it is not just modes of production which undergo transformation. In this case, the actual system transforms itself.

This is a situation that only tends to become more common as connectivity brings immediacy and growing interdependence to markets. I personally don’t believe that new bubbles (at least those of liquidity) would constitute new contradictions, thought they might be responsible for new crises. In this sense, the bailout of financial institutions has become the current paradigm.

The examples of emerging contradictions covered at the end of the last chapter constitute an initial, but nonetheless essential approach to the subject. Their complexities and respective implications demand a much deeper investigation and it is hard to predict whether, when and with which intensity they will occur.

Like their predecessors, future crises could inflict great human cost, be it from violence or sheer poverty. Moral judgments aside, crises are embedded in capitalism: they allow the flow of capital to happen geographically, chronologically and within societies. Contradictions permit the introduction of new relations of production, allowing the system to

adapt and grow.Perhaps the main question isn’t necessarily which

of the scenarios introduced is the one most likely to trigger the end of capitalism, but whether capital coming to a halt would precipitate its collapse, or if this collapse in itself would constitute another contradiction, redefining the capitalism once again.

As seen over the course of this dissertation, these new contradictions could set new modes of production, redefine notions of personal identity, culture, national borders and society itself, from the behaviour of its governments all the way down to that of its individuals. In this sense, the crisis becomes the very turning point at which history ends, but also begins.

4 0

FOOTNOTES

1 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, (London New York: Verso, 2014), page 5

2 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capi-talism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press), Kindle, location 165

3 International Monetary Fund, ‘WORLD ECONOMIC OUTLOOK, April 2009, Crisis and Recovery’, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf (accessed on 12th September 2014)

4 http://johnbeieler.org/protest_mapping/ (accessed 3rd September 2014)

5 Constanze Letsch, ’Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM.’, The Guardian, 3 June 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/02/turkish-protesters-control-istanbul-square (accessed on 3rd September 2014)

6 Mike Obel, ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average Plunges 145 Points After Fake Tweet That White House Had Been Attacked, President Obama Injured.’ International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/dow-jones-industrial-average-plunges-145-points-after-fake-tweet-white-house-had-been-attacked (accessed on 12th September 2014)

7 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capi-talism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press), Kindle, location 1008

8 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capi-talism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press ), Kindle, location 61

9 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capi-talism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press ), Kindle, location69

10 Owen Jones, ’The establishment uncovered: how power works in Britain’The Guardian, 26th August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/26/the-estab-

lishment-uncovered-how-power-works-in-britain-elites-stranglehold (accessed on 8th September)

11 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capitalism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press ), Kindle, location 114


13 Ibid., location 951




17 Fredrick Kunkle, Fredrick, ‘One protester tased, arrested at Occupy D.C.’, The Washignton Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/one-pro-tester-tased-arrested-at-occupy-dc/2012/01/29/gIQAx-qRKaQ_blog.html (accessed on 5th September 2014.)

18 UOL, ‘Repórter da TV Folha é atingida no olho por bala de borracha durante protesto em SP’, UOL Notícias, http://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noti-cias/2013/06/13/reporter-da-tv-folha-e-atingida-no-olho-por-bala-de-borracha-durante-protesto-em-sp.htm (accessed on 5th September 2014)

19 Russia Today, ‘Occupy ‘pepper-spray cop’ awarded $38k settlement’, Russia Today, http://rt.com/usa/uc-davis-pike-comp-641/ (accessed 5th September 2014)

20 Matthew Weaver, ’G20 protesters blasted by sonic can-non’, The Guardian, 25 September 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2009/sep/25/sonic-can-non-g20-pittsburgh (accessed on 5th September 2014)

21 Renee Lewis, ’Turkey protesters battle police in attempt to reach Taksim Square’, Al Jazeera, 31st May 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/31/tur-

4 1

key-gezi-protest.html (accessed 5th September 2014)

22 Charles Davis, ‘The LAPD Thinks It’s at War and Now It Has Drones’, Vice, 22nd August 2014, http://www.vice.com/read/the-lapd-thinks-its-at-war-and-now-it-has-drones-822 (accessed on 5th September 2014)

23 The Telegraph.’Ukraine crisis: snipers filmed ‘shooting at protesters’ in Kiev’, The Telegraph, 20th February 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10651980/Ukraine-crisis-snipers-filmed-shoot-ing-at-protesters-in-Kiev.html (accessed on 5th Septem-ber 2014)







30 Naomi Wolf, ‘Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy’, The Guardian, 29th Decem-ber 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-free/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy (accessed on 12th September 2014)

31 http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/Leadership.html (accessed on 12th September 2014)

32, 33 Naomi Wolf, ‘Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy’, The Guardian, 29th Decem-ber 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-free/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy (accessed on 12th September 2014)

34, 35 Anne Kaun, ’(No) Time for activism: the chang-ing face of protest movements’, Eurocrisis in the Press, 11th July 2014, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisis-press/2014/07/11/no-time-for-activism-the-changing-face-of-protest-movements/ (accessed on 4th Septem-ber 2014)

36 Kurt Andersen, The Protester, Time Magazine, 2011


38 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The National Inter-est, Summer 1989, http://ps321.community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf

39, 40, 41 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capitalism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press ), Kindle, location 742

42 Jean François Lyotard, “Energumen Capitalist”, in #Ac-celerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay,

Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p. 138


44 Owen Jones, ’The establishment uncovered: how power works in Britain’The Guardian, 26th August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/26/the-estab-lishment-uncovered-how-power-works-in-britain-elites-stranglehold (accessed on 8th September)

45 Noam Chomsky, Occupy, (Penguin, 2012) p.28


47, 48 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London ; New York : Verso, 1989), p. 36-37

49, 50 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, (New York : Semiotext(e), 1987) p17,18

51 Ibid., p43

52 Simon Jarvis, Adorno : a critical introduction, (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1996), p53

53 Ibid., p57/58

54, 55, 56 Slavoj Žižek, ’Fat-free chocolate and absolutely no smoking: why our guilt about consumption is all-con-suming’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-Žižek (accessed 21st May 2014)


58 Slavoj Žižek, ’Fat-free chocolate and absolutely no smok-ing: why our guilt about consumption is all-consuming’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/artand-design/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-Žižek (accessed 21st May 2014)

59 Jean François Lyotard, “Energumen Capitalist”, in #Ac-celerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p. 158

60 Simon Jarvis, Adorno : a critical introduction, (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1996), p 118


62 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present

4 2

Crisis, (London New York: Verso, 2014), p60


64 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, (London New York: Verso, 2014), p42

65, 66 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p35



69 ‘ Too big to fail’, Wikipedia, Last edited on 2nd September 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail (accessed on 21 September 2014)

70 L, Randall Wray, ‘BERNANKE’S OBFUSCATION CONTINUES: The Fed’s $29 Trillion Bail-out of Wall Street’, EcoMonitor, 9th December 2011, http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2011/12/09/bernanke%E2%80%99s-obfuscation-continues-the-fed%E2%80%99s-29-trillion-bail-out-of-wall-street/

71 Frédéric Lordon, ‘Le jour où Wall Street est devenu so-cialiste’, Le Monde Diplomatique. October 2008. p. 4,5

72 Evgeny Morozov, To save everything, click here: technol-ogy, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist, (London : Allen Lane, 2013) p113

73, 74 Ibid., p xiv

75 Alasdair Roberts, The end of protest - How free-market capitalism learned to control dissent, (Cornell University Press), Kindle, location 83

76 Bertrand Russell, ’Lecture 1: Social Cohesion and Hu-man Nature ’, Reith Lectures 1948 - Authority and the Individual, Transmission 24th December 1948, http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1948_reith1.pdf

77 Jean François Lyotard, ‘Every political economy is a libid-inal economy’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p. 170,171

78 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, ‘The civilized Capital-ist Machine’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association

with Merve, 2014) p.118

79, 80, 81 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, ‘The civilized Capitalist Machine’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Fal-mouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.128

82 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, (London New York: Verso, 2014), p54

83 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p18

84 Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its Critics’, in #Acceler-ate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urba-nomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p379

85 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London ; New York : Verso, 1989), p.50,51

86, 87 Evgeny Morozov, To save everything, click here: technol-ogy, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist, (London : Allen Lane, 2013), p48

88, 89 Philip Tetlock, ‘HOW TO WIN AT FORECAST-ING’. Edge.org, http://edge.org/conversation/how-to-win-at-forecasting’ (accessed on 16th September)

90 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.4

91 Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its critics’, in #Acceler-ate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urba-nomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p. 367

92 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p27

93 Tiziana Terranova, ‘Red Stack Attack!’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanes-sian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.295

94 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.27

95, 96 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London ; New York : Verso, 1989), p. 50,51

4 3

97 Tiziana Terranova, ‘Red Stack Attack!’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanes-sian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.301

98 Gilles Lipovetsky, ‘Power of Repetition’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Ava-nessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.183

99, 100 Nick Land, ‘Teleoplexy’, in #Accelerate: The Accel-erationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.400

101 M.C.K, ‘Back to the futures?’, The Economist, 4th February 2013, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/02/derivatives-markets-regulation (accessed on 30th September 2014)

102 Alex Williams and Nick Snircek, ‘#Accelerate - A mani-festo for an accelerationist politics’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Ava-nessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanom-ic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.269

103 David Harvey. The enigma of capital : and the crises of capitalism, (Oxford England New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2010) p9

104 John B. Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. ‘The ecological rift : capitalism’s war on the earth’. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Kindle. Location 2797

105 Alex Williams and Nick Snircek, ‘#Accelerate - A mani-festo for an accelerationist politics’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Ava-nessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanom-ic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.269

106 Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mac-kay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p.31

107, 108 Benedict Singleton, “Maximum Jailbreak”, in #Ac-celerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, (Falmouth, United Kingdom Ber-lin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014) p382

109 Nicola Clark, ‘Air France Pilots Extend Strike Af-ter Request for Mediation Is Denied’, The New York Times, 27th September 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/business/international/mediation-denied-pilots-extend-strike-.html?_r=1 (accessed on 28th September 2014)

110 Lee Romney and Maria L. La Ganga, ’Occupy Oakland: Losses to the city top $2 million’. Los Angeles Times, 15th November 2011, (accessed on 28th September 2014)

111 The Economist, ‘They do protest too much’, The Econo-mist, 11th December 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/12771265 (accessed on 28th September 2014)

4 4

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Ars Electronica (2007), Goodbye privacy. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007.

Baudrillard, Jean, Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.

Berlin Biennale (7th: 2012: Berlin), Forget fear’. Cologne: Walther König, 2012.

Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. London New York: Penguin, 2012.

Chomsky, Noam. Problems of knowledge and freedom. Lon-don: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972.

Flood, Catherine, and Gavin Grindon. Disobedient objects. London: V&A Publishing, 2014.

Foster, John B., Brett Clark, and Richard York. The ecological rift: capitalism’s war on the earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Kindle.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. London: Penguin, 1979.

Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: a critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.

Kunkel, Benjamin. Utopia or bust: a guide to the present crisis. London New York: Verso, 2014.

Lasn, Kalle, Design anarchy. Vancouver: Adbusters Media Foundation, 2006

Lotringer, Sylvère. Schizo-culture. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2013.

Mackay, Robin, and Armen Avanessian. Accelerate. Fal-mouth, United Kingdom Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd. in association with Merve, 2014.

Morozov, Evgeny, To save everything, click here: technology, so-lutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist. London: Allen Lane, 2013

Robbins, Derek, Bourdieu and culture. London: Sage, 2000.

Roberts, Alasdair. The end of protest - How free-market capital-ism learned to control dissent. Cornell University Press. 2013. Kindle

Žižek, Slavoj, The sublime object of ideology. London; New York: Verso, 1989

FILMS

Corporation, dir. Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, 2003

History of Modern Britain, dir Tom Giles,Fatima Salaria,Francis Whatley, Robin Dashwood, 2007

Insider Job, dir. Charles Ferguson, 2010.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, dir.Mark Achbar, Peter Wintonick, 1992

The century of the Self, dir Adam Curtis, 2002

The Pervert’s guide to ideology, dir Sophie Fiennes, 2012

The yes man fix the world, dir. Jacques Servin, Igor Vamos, Kurt Engfehr, 2010

NEWS ARTICLES

Clark, Nicola. ‘Air France Pilots Extend Strike After Request for Mediation Is Denied’. The New York Times. 27th Sep-tember 2014. Accessed on 28th September 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/business/international/mediation-denied-pilots-extend-strike-.html?_r=1

Davis, Charles. ‘The LAPD Thinks It’s at War and Now It Has Drones’. Vice. 22nd August 2014. Accessed on 5th Sep-tember 2014. http://www.vice.com/read/the-lapd-thinks-its-at-war-and-now-it-has-drones-822

Goodin, Dan. ‘Hacked AP Twitter feed reporting fake White House attack rocks markets. ‘ Ars Technica. 23 April 2013.

4 5

Accessed on 8th September 2014. http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/hacked-ap-twitter-feed-rocks-market-after-sending-false-news-flash/

Jacoby, Russell. ‘Thomas Piketty ou le pari d’un capitalisme à visage humain’. Le Monde Diplomatique. August 2014

Jones, Owen.’The establishment uncovered: how power works in Britain’The Guardian. 26th August 2014. Accessed on 8th September. http://www.theguardian.com/socie-ty/2014/aug/26/the-establishment-uncovered-how-power-works-in-britain-elites-stranglehold

Kunkle, Fredrick. ‘One protester tased, arrested at Occupy D.C.’. The Washignton Post. 29th January 2012. Accessed on 5th September 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/one-protester-tased-arrested-at-occupy-dc/2012/01/29/gIQAxqRKaQ_blog.html

Letsch, Constanze, ’Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM.’ . The Guardian. 3 June 2013. Accessed on 3rd September 2014. http://www.theguard-ian.com/world/2013/jun/02/turkish-protesters-control-istanbul-square

Lewis, Renee.’Turkey protesters battle police in attempt to reach Taksim Square’. Al Jazeera. 31st May 2014. Accessed 5th September 2014.http://america.aljazeera.com/arti-cles/2014/5/31/turkey-gezi-protest.html

Lordon, Frédéric. ‘Le jour où Wall Street est devenu social-iste’. Le Monde Diplomatique. October 2008.

M.C.K. ‘Back to the futures?’. The Economist. 4th Febru-ary 2013. Accessed on 30th September 2014. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/02/derivatives-markets-regulation

Obel, Mike. ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average Plunges 145 Points After Fake Tweet That White House Had Been Attacked, President Obama Injured.’ International Busi-ness Times. Accessed on 12th September 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/dow-jones-industrial-average-plunges-145-points-after-fake-tweet-white-house-had-been-attacked

Romney, Lee and La Ganga, Maria L. . ’Occupy Oakland: Losses to the city top $2 million’. Los Angeles Times. 15th November 2011. Accessed on 28th September 2014.

Russia Today. ‘Occupy ‘pepper-spray cop’ awarded $38k settlement’. Russia Today. 23rd October 2013. Accessed 5th September 2014. http://rt.com/usa/uc-davis-pike-comp-641/

The Economist. ‘They do protest too much’. The Economist. 11th December 2008. Accessed on 28th September 2014. http://www.economist.com/node/12771265

The Telegraph.’Ukraine crisis: snipers filmed ‘shooting at protesters’ in Kiev’. The Telegraph. 20th February 2014. Accessed on 5th September 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10651980/Ukraine-crisis-snipers-filmed-shooting-at-protesters-in-

Kiev.html

UOL. ‘Repórter da TV Folha é atingida no olho por bala de borracha durante protesto em SP’. UOL Notícias. 13th June 2013. Accessed on 5th September 2014. http://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2013/06/13/reporter-da-tv-folha-e-atingida-no-olho-por-bala-de-borracha-du-rante-protesto-em-sp.htm

Weaver , Matthew. ’G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon’. The Guardian. 25 September 2009. Accessed on 5th Septem-ber 2014.http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2009/sep/25/sonic-cannon-g20-pittsburgh

Wolf , Naomi. ‘Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy’. The Guardian. 29th December 2012. Accessed on 12th September 2014. http://www.theguard-ian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

Wray , L. Randall. ‘BERNANKE’S OBFUSCATION CON-TINUES: The Fed’s $29 Trillion Bail-out of Wall Street’. EcoMonitor. 9th December 2011. http://www.economoni-tor.com/lrwray/2011/12/09/bernanke%E2%80%99s-ob-fuscation-continues-the-fed%E2%80%99s-29-trillion-bail-out-of-wall-street/

Žižek, Slavoj. ’Fat-free chocolate and absolutely no smok-ing: why our guilt about consumption is all-consuming’. The Guardian. 21st May 2014. Accessed 21st May 2014.http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-Žižek

PAPERS AND ESSAYS

Fukuyama, Francis. ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest. Summer 1989. http://ps321.community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf

International Monetary Fund. ‘WORLD ECONOMIC OUTLOOK, April 2009, Crisis and Recovery’. April 2009. Accessed on 12th September 2014. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf

LINKS

http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/Leadership.html

‘Too big to fail’. Wikipedia. Last edited on 2nd September 2014. Accessed on 21 September 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail

Russell, Bertrand.’Lecture 1: Social Cohesion and Human Nature ’. Reith Lectures 1948 - Authority and the Individual. Transmission 24th December 1948. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1948_reith1.pdf

BLOGS

Anne Kaun. ’(No) Time for activism: the changing face of

4 6

protest movements’. Eurocrisis in the Press. 11th July 2014. Accessed on 4th September 2014. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/2014/07/11/no-time-for-activism-the-changing-face-of-protest-movements/

Brian Ries ‘For Crimea, Google Shows Different Bor-ders Based on Your Location’. Mashable. 11th April 2014. Accessed on 29th September 2014. http://mashable.com/2014/04/11/crimea-google/

Tetlock, Philip. ‘HOW TO WIN AT FORECASTING’. Edge.org. 12th June 2012. Accessed on 16th September. http://edge.org/conversation/how-to-win-at-forecasting’.

EXIBITIONSDisobedient Objects. Victoria and Albert Museum. London . 26 July 2014 – 1 February 2015

MAGAZINE2011 Person of the Year: The Protester. Times

Magazine’s.14th December 2011

THE CREATIVE DISTRACTION - Crisis in the making of contemporary liberal democracies.

Documents

Transcript of THE CREATIVE DISTRACTION - Crisis in the making of contemporary liberal democracies.