@ribo » society

Liberating women in our everyday lives

Alejandro — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:50:57 +0000

The liberation of women is still an ongoing process. In the last 50 years we have made great advances in the legal, economic and political rights of women. There is much to do in the world on this. But there is much more to do in the social and cultural dimensions. In our societies, we still hear how women are verbally misrepresented, attacked or discriminated. We still see how women are sexually attacked and violently beaten. We still treat women as inferior beings, which don’t think like us, and so don’t deserve the same responsibilities. Even if consciously we don’t realise it, in our everyday lives we often treat women as objects, trophies or servants. When I say “we”, I am not only referring to men, I am referring to society, men and women. It is our cultural values and social practices that put women in this position. Some benefit from it, many suffer from it.

The real liberation of women. The one in which they have the opportunity to be women without being attacked, discriminated against or dominated. It does touch me directly since I was born. Now, it touches me even more.

My mother is a very intelligent and resourceful person. She is full of energy and love. When she was young, she wanted to learn, study, know the world. Unfortunately, she was born in a country where women were second-class citizens, from a father who considered women the servants and property of men. When she was seventeen years old, she visited England for some months to learn English, staying in the house of friends of her father. When my grandfather was told that she was going out with boys, he traveled with his car from Barcelona all the way to Birmingham to take her back. No questions. No option for my mother to say what she wanted. Her father didn’t allowed her to study in the university, though she wanted to. He wanted her to marry a man and serve him for ever. She did that. She was abandoned with two kids, and unconsciously she has reproduced some of the values and practices that make men think of women as servants, objects and trophies. She did it with all her love for caring for her children.

Now, I know. Unknowingly, I’ve treated someone I loved (and I still love) deeply with these values and practices. Obviously, not at the level of my grandfather, I would not. But I unconsciously put myself in a position in which for years I ignored and disregarded the woman I loved. Like in Henkri Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, this is normally done in small, tiny actions. We act according to our rational and emotional impulses which drive our behaviour. Social practices, and more intensively in a sentimental relationship, are built by these micro-actions. They happen without us being aware of them. The reproduction of values and practices is mainly done by them. A smile, a bad reply, a “thank you”, a gift, a kiss, a call, a monologue in which one talks and the other is forced to listen, a bad face, a lie…

To have this enlightenment I had to lose her love. A very heavy price. A very important lesson for all of us.

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Capitalism is dead — Long live Compartism

Alejandro — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:15:53 +0000

The title of this post seems counter-intuitive. Common sense tells us that battling successfully against the consequences of the financial crisis, capitalism is more alive than ever, thriving in India and China, making states tremble on their foundations. Yet I dare to say that, against this common sense and in line with Marxists, anarchists, socialists of all kinds and other anti-system movements, capitalism as we know it, i.e a socio-economic system based on the ownership and accumulation of capital, is showing its last moments of life. Yet I don’t affirm its decease for the reasons that these other ideological movements assume i.e. capitalism is failing, but because thanks to both its success and its deficiencies, it’s letting way to a new system that, like capitalism itself and contrary to communism or I would even say (paradoxically) anarchism, doesn’t need to be imposed for its popular acceptance, for it feeds from a characteristic that makes us human. In capitalism it was greed, in compartism it’s generosity.

Yochai Benkler, one of the gurus of collaborative networks thinking, has a book called The Wealth of Networks , in where he tells us about how information technologies allows the emergence of networked collaboration that may have important economic and social consequences. Based on Benkler’s ideas, TED Talks tag videos with Gordon Brown, Jonathan Zittrain, Anupam Mishra, David Logan and others with the theme The Rise of Collaboration. One of these videos shows Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain giving examples of The Web as random act of kindness. It is this socio-economic and cultural change towards a world based on collaboration and sharing, facilitated by the Internet, which is at the base of the emergence of compartism, the ideology of generosity.

Compartism, from the latin verb compartire (to share), is based on the idea that we are better off when we share, and not when we accumulate as in capitalism. In his book We-Think: Mass innovation not mass production Charles Leadbeater says that

In the 20th century we were identified by what we owned; in the 21st century we will also be defined by how we share and what we give away.

This is what in a nutshell compartism is about. The Internet has broken old barriers that did not allow us to collaborate, but instead brought us towards individual competition for property of limited resources. Today, we have a new environment – determined by technology, politics, culture and environmental issues – and new tools that give collaboration, sharing and giving away a new role and become instrumental in being successful as individuals and as a whole. Winners are not those that work with capitalist rules of accumulation and greed, but with sharing and generosity. As it was with capitalism, this new ideology of compartism materializes as a need for our future and not only an ideal construction of a few. But don’t be fooled by the generous ideal of compartism, for a compartist society won’t be an egalitarian society, for those that will know and share better than others will have an advantage, which they will certainly use. How fair this future society will be, will still mainly depend on our actions and not only on our ideology.

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The social benefits of online piracy

Alejandro — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:22:40 +0000

For many, “online piracy” appears to be a bad thing. The music, film and software industries and governments want to convince us that IT IS bad. Bad not only for the poor artist or programmer, but also for innovation and for society as a whole. However, many practice it. Many copy songs, movies or software using the Internet. And I say, many do a good thing.

Before the Internet, people could indeed photocopy a book, copy a record on tape or duplicate a movie on VHS, these were possible, though somehow cumbersome and quality-reducing mechanisms of reducing the cost of our “intellectual consumption”. Without them, many people would have probably read less books, listened to less new songs and watched less stories on the screen. Nevertheless, the scale of it was small, thus its social effect tiny. Today, the liberty and usability feature of the Internet have opened unimaginable venues for these “unauthorized” reproduction of intellectual goods, the scale is, indeed, very, very relevant. Thanks to file sharing, hundreds of thousands of people have at their disposal a myriad of intellectual products that were unattainable before, be it for price or accessibility. Thanks to “piracy”, these people, adults and children, are expanding their intellectual scope, they are probably becoming more demanding, in search of more and more varied things.

I see in this a very good development. A society made of individuals that have much easier and cheaper (even free) access to intellectual products is a better society. Some would say, that people are all consuming the same, action movies with the same cliches, nothing to be proud of. I sincerely doubt it, there are some (probably many) that are finding new perspectives of life and expanding their knowledge thanks to the variety of books, courses, software, films, music easily available on the Internet. Others would say that with more piracy, companies will have less incentives to produce these products, so one day, it will end, production and innovation is gradually killed. I think the contrary is happening, more people are innovating and producing – e.g. podcasts -, because it is easier and cheaper to do it, you basically need good ideas. At the same time, when people like something they still buy the product on physical support – e.g. Radiohead new record that was donationware online until it was released on CD, selling very well. Production and innovation are not killed by sharing intellectual products on the Internet. The only ones that should be afraid of this should be those that produce the same over and over again, those that do not create an intellectual added value, to which a person can feel attached in ways that generate more consumption and revenue for the producer.

Overall, “piracy”, defined solely as file sharing (not for economic benefit), is a social good. It does produce clear benefits, it should be promoted it. The only ones that should be trembling are those that have been profiting for years of a captured market under oligopolic rules, in which the consumer was forced to swallow the small range of products that was offered to him/her for a very high price. Luckily, this is finished, or is it? I am afraid big companies and their captured governments will not concede defeat without a good fight. We shall see…

NB: This post was originally written on February 12 2008 on my previous blog (Blog of Change)

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