This may seem obvious to some of you, but that is apparently not the case with the magnificent Elon Musk, who is being acclaimed today as a hero for launching an effing car into space after having spent billions of dollars trying to get his rocket to work over the past few years. In a daring marketing stunt, Elon the Great framed his success as a wonderful homage to the late David Bowie, referencing the legendary Space Oddity lyrics.

Of course Bowie is dead now, and although he did play in another David’s latest season of Twin Peaks, there is no way of bringing him back to life to give us his point of view.

What we do know, is what he wrote in those lyrics. There is one line in particular that is on constant replay in my head right now :

“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”

Planet Earth sure is blue right now David. Lots of people have been feeling blue for far too long, and animals, plants, and billions of other living beings all over the planet have not be been spared.  And while there are solutions out there to solve most of our collective problems, here’s what one loathsome, crazily rich guy, has decided to do with his billions : send a car to Mars.

You see, while I never met Bowie in person, and I’m too young to have known what his records meant to the generations who got them first hand, I know Bowie was anything but an idiot. I know he had a passion for “good” sci-fi, and by that, I mean sci-fi at the level of Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”. Sci-fi by people who loathed the injustice they saw in the world, people who wrung their hands and stayed up at night, worrying about the threat to their existence from nuclear weapons, people who “had to” write what they felt in order to stay afloat.

I’m sure Bowie would have reacted with a great deal of caution to this marketing feat, and I bet he would have known better than the hundreds of thousands (millions, perhaps) of people who were cheering this morning because someone spent billions on sending a car into space.

In case you didn’t know, there was a time, 41 years ago, when humans sent into space images of the Earth, sound recordings of birds, whales, the Rite of Spring and Johnny B Goode, traditional music from all over the world, and greetings in 55 different human languages. Today we’re sending a car, a perfect symbol of our time. So much for imagination. What’s it going to be next time ? A 40ft ship container full of plastic Coke bottles?

Seriously people, what is wrong with you ? A “car”?! With about 3.6 million people dying every year from pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuel? With the endless traffic jams in and out of every major city in the world? After the “Great Smog” in Delhi last year? After we learned that a big share of microplastic pollution in the oceans (and our stomach) comes from car tires? As Dylan might say, “life sometimes must get lonely”. Some of us do too.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the massive idiotic inertia around you? Or perhaps it is just me  suffering from some kind of narcissistic personality disorder. Sometimes I feel like I’m part of a minority of people who have to fight all through the night to push back a tide of zombies. Zombies who love nothing more than following what others do like brainless robots. Zombies who won’t get  their butts off their couches because there are broke students riding through the night rain to deliver their ramen. Zombies who always have a good excuse for not doing their share of the collective efforts our era calls for. Zombies whose carbon emissions probably get teleported to a distant blackhole when they go on city trips by plane for the week-end, instead of getting trapped in that thin atmosphere of ours like other people’s emissions do. Zombies who won’t make much fuss about their governments sending refugees back to Turkey even after those people have seen their kids drown in the Mediterranean, as long as those zombies keep their jobs.

On days like this a lot of us must feel discouraged, because while our hands are freezing on our bikes and our hearts are warm from the thought that we’re doing less harm than those sitting in their cars, there’s a guy who just sent an (effing!) car into space by burning enough crap to cancel out our individual efforts for a hundred years (I don’t have any estimates of the emissions from the SpaceX rocket, please get in touch if you have any).

I know there’s a little bit of “us” and a little bit of “them” in each and every one of us, but I believe that in the long run, no matter what happens, it is not Elon and his fans who are going to win. I believe this, because if these people and their ideology are the future, then there is no future at all.

While millions (billions?) watch Elon’s video in awe today, I’ll keep thinking about the Arctic Terns which weigh only 100 grams, yet can travel up to 90,000 km around the globe every year during their migration. Without a drop of oil, and without making much fuss about it, because this is what Arctic Terns do.  That my friends is a real feat.

“I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving 

Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail

Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail” (Robert Johnson)

This is most unfortunate, as Klein’s last two books (“No is not enough” and “This changes everything”), while providing a crisp analysis of our time, are very much about the countless opportunities to do things, instead of commenting and complaining helplessly. “This changes everything” was about doers who are building new ways of working, growing food, producing energy, and so on that are sustainable, respectful of humans and their environment, and, most importantly, that actually WORK. “No is not enough”, on the other hand, has two main messages beside the analysis on Trump (who for Klein is nothing but a logical consequence of the trends she’s been warning about for years) : 1) that we must be prepared for shocks and for what corporations and neo-liberal politicians will try to push for in their aftermath, and 2) that activists of all trades must unite at last to access political power in order to challenge the single economic ideology responsible for most of what they’re trying to combat.

One should be well aware by now that the way information is brought to our attention is anything but neutral. For various reasons nowadays most newspapers feel the need to give a lot of space to the loudest, richest and (sometimes) most idiotic individuals of our species. This might be because the press is for a large part currently owned by a few very wealthy individuals, or because of the dependence on advertisement.  In any case, if your name is Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon, from which you should stop buying immediately by the way – reasons available on request), and you woke up with a brilliant idea that will make you earn more money while sacking 100 000 workers, you can be sure that your idea will be in the headlines of the world’s biggest newspapers in a matter of days. If you are an unknown farmer on the other hand, who manages to both feed his family and make a living by selling his production on a small permaculture farm in an innovative and sustainable way, you are bound to be turned down by most of the news industry except in your own bubble. That’s one reason why most people are unaware of the wealth of solutions (already) at hand.

The other reason is that keeping people in a perpetual state of shock  is in the interest of the proponents of the status quo (i.e. those whose job is to make sure trillion-dollar assets such as offshore drilling platforms and car assembly lines will still be worth something in 10 years).  The sum of the information we ingest in our everyday life works toward keeping us in a state of fright and helplessness that prevents us from thinking (and imagining things). You walk past a giant ad for clothes : the models look like suicidal, anorexic junkies. You read the news on websites : collapsing ecosystems, nuclear threats, terrorism, unstoppable corporate power, and so on. And you end your day with a dystopian Hollywood movie where a handful of either very wealthy, or very unhappy and sick people survive a giant catastrophe. The message is clear : anyway, you (we) are ****ed.

Yet, and this is what Naomi Klein’s last two books boil down to,  there are already plenty of working alternatives to what is currently presented as inevitable. From permaculture to community-owned windmills to “zero-waste” shops. From companies turned into cooperatives to local currencies. So much has already been tested and implemented. There are many very serious projects of giant cargo sailships. Airbus is even working on a fully electric plane. Many of these alternatives also mean a much more equitable balance for less “developed” countries, that could become energetically and agriculturally (at least partly) independent, and are sometimes even leading the transition (e.g. Rwanda with the ban on plastic bags). And look at the substantial support that Sanders, Mélenchon’s ‘France Insoumise’ and Corbyn received in recent elections. Those were not one-time votes. These are votes by people who feel they’ve understood what the current ideology was about, and no matter how much advertisement and lies and threats you throw at them, they’re not likely to change their mind anytime soon.

Humanity has never had access to more knowledge and to more advanced tools than today. Those who think that climate change is the biggest threat that humans have ever had to face are ridiculously pretentious, and if they lived in Gabriel García Márquez’ Macondo the ghosts of their ancestors would probably come to scold them big time for minimizing what they had to go through in their time.  What do you think our ancestors had in mind tens of thousands of years ago when crossing unknown oceans and immense stretches of tropical forest, thousands of years before anybody learned to make metal tools ? My bet is that they carried on, and that they forced themselves to not give in to discouragement. Because their very survival was at stake. And even if climate change were (was?) indeed the biggest challenge ever, sitting around trying to measure just how complex the problem really is isn’t helping much. Do you think Coltrane would have ever picked up a sax if he’d first read papers about the complexity of group improvisation ?  

We have all we need to solve most of our problems. Just because they’re not making the headlines every morning doesn’t mean the solutions don’t exist. At the political level, we might as well assume that nothing substantial has been done to address climate change yet. The Kyoto Protocol and the emissions trading system have let emission levels soar happily, and the Paris Agreement hasn’t translated into any meaningful change yet – or at least not yet to the extent that dire scenarios for the planet can be avoided. So how can we decide that all hope is lost when practically nothing has been implemented at any significant scale ? Now (and in the coming years) is the time to actually do what needs to be done. At the political level, as Klein urges us to do, by joining efforts across all disciplines and causes to access decision-making positions. But also as individuals, by turning away from all the harmful consumption habits and choosing the environmentally and socially sustainable alternatives. For once let’s set a trend and politics and markets will have to follow.

Creditors have been imposing austerity measures on Greece in exchange for loan extensions for more than 5 years. While it can be argued that at the onset of the debt crisis in Europe some economists did genuinely believe that austerity was the answer, over the past two years the opposing camp, the ones who never thought austerity was the way to go in the first place, have won the intellectual debate. Given the flaws in some of the key papers used to defend the pro-austerity position, and the evidence from the figures on the Greek economy,  there is no doubt today that austerity doesn’t work in the context of Greece.

Recent quotes from the following prominent economists speak for themselves :

* Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economics, thinks the most reasonable solution is “a write-off of Greece’s debt” (Time, June 29, 2015).

* Paul Krugman, another Nobel Prize : “Given reports from the negotiations in Brussels, something must be said — namely, what do the creditors, and in particular the IMF, think they’re doing?” (New York Times blog, June 25, 2015).

* Thomas Piketty, author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”: “We have single-handedly turned an American private finance crisis into a European public debt one.”(in French, Libération, June 7, 2015)

* Jeffrey Sachs, author of “To End Poverty”, “Europe’s demands – ostensibly aimed at ensuring that Greece can service its foreign debt – are petulant, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive.” (Project Syndicate, June 15, 2015)

* (and one from a few years ago) Olivier Blanchard, IMF’s Chief Economist, acknowledged in 2013 “that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.” (The Washington Post, January 3, 2013).

Now let’s pretend for a moment that it’s not democratically elected European leaders who are in charge at the “negotiation” table. To simplify things a bit, let’s say it’s the “technocrats” of the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF calling the shots. Technocrats don’t care much about European citizens’ opinion, because they can’t lose their job if people are angry. Yet, technocrats do believe in economic science.

From the above quotes it is clear that 2 Nobel Prizes, 1 chief economist at IMF, and 2 world-class professors and authors all agree nowadays that what has been imposed on Greece for over 5 years was plain wrong. Some of them have been saying (or shouting in at least one case) that for nearly 3 years, actually.

Now, rational technocrats would listen to these guys. After all, you’d expect technocrats, of all people, to be rational. We doubt that many of the people who drafted proposals made to Greece have 1/10^th of the legitimacy of Stiglitz and Krugman when it comes to macro-economics. So if it were up to them they would probably listen.

Yet that’s not what is happening. What has been happening, especially in the past few years (when the intellectual debate was more or less over, and the huge damage inflicted on the Greek society clear for everybody with eyes), goes against technocratic reasoning. Moreover, the whole process has been systematically made as opaque as possible to outsiders (i.e. anybody outside the “Troïka” (now called “the institutions”), it seems). We witness a seemingly endless sequence of so-called “last chance” meetings in Brussels. Yet, the arguments we hear and read in the news feel like those of 4-year-old kids trying to explain who started the fight to their teacher. It is almost never about the content of the proposals, or only in a way that tries to equate a country’s budget with that of a household. The issue is never put into perspective. Nobody seems to remember that the global crisis started with the finance industry in 2007/2008, and that it was not a public debt problem in the first place. “The institutions” obviously don’t want anybody to understand what is happening, and the media have their own laws, focusing on the polarization, shocks & potential meltdowns. Nobel Prizes seem puzzled by the utter stupidity of austerity measures, as we noticed, but they are mainly used to spice up the op-ed pages of quality newspapers; it’s not like the ones in charge seem to be paying much attention. (Granted, some Nobel prizes do say not-so-clever things publicly sometimes, but in principle they can be trusted on their core expertise.)

What is happening also goes against all democratic reasoning : in addition to the lack of transparency and the almost childish framing of the whole battle mentioned above, no population in Europe would be happy to witness this kind of intrusion in their own country, and the resulting suffering. If it were clearly explained to them, no citizens in the EU would back what their leaders are trying to do with Greece, purposefully or not. Also, the risks for the EU of an exit of Greece are too high in terms of credibility (both inside and outside the “Union”) for rational democratic leaders to take the chance. Stiglitz and many others go even further by arguing that the Eurozone “was never a very democratic project” in the first place.

So it doesn’t make sense, neither from a democratic nor a technocratic point of view. And it can’t possibly be collective lunacy.

What is it then ? Who’s holding the steering wheel ? Answering this question will not help the Greek people nor will it give us the answer to what might happen if Greece remains in the EU or if it quits. But we’d love to know. It might shed a whole new (and possibly frightening) light on European “high-level” politics. If democratic leaders and technocrats were really in charge, they could have changed their minds when strong evidence against austerity started being published. It would have been ‘rational’ for them to do so. Yet no such change occurred. Which suggests that “the institutions” have somehow been manipulated all along, possibly by people who made them “an offer they couldn’t refuse”. So they’ve stuck to the plan, despite the risk that this might eventually lead to the end of the Eurozone which European leaders of the generation of Merkel and Hollande cherish so much.  This may sound far-fetched, but the Institutions’ stubbornness is simply staggering.

Anyhow, no matter who is really pulling the strings, Tsipras’ government challenges the current balance of powers. By calling on Greek citizens to decide whether they should accept the latest austerity measures imposed by creditors (or not), Tsipras actually poses the right question: do the Greek people want to regain their sovereignty by backing up a government which legitimately represents them? Or do they accept to hand it over completely to the group of non-democratic institutions and individuals who are to a large extent responsible for their current suffering ? Next Sunday’s referendum will be a symbolic battle for democracy. It might create a great opportunity not only for the Greeks, but for all European citizens to recover the democratic power they have lost without noticing.

There are a few obvious and immediate advantages to this model.  It is more flexible for consumers than what taxis and public transport can typically offer (as one of our colleagues, an Uber fan, loves to say). It is also cheaper. And it looks like an easy way to make money if one needs to make ends meet. Airbnb seems to have the same appeal to many people.

There is a catch, though. As Robert Reich pointed out in a recent article, General Motors is worth 60 billion dollars and employs 200 000 people, while Uber is worth 40 billion and has only 850 employees. The rest of the people working for Uber (around 160 000 drivers) are “independent contractors”.  Which means that the majority of the people working for Uber don’t get the social protection other workers – in formal employment – get. Plus Uber doesn’t pay the tax rates they should.  But then again, not paying much taxes is big business’  favorite sport these days, as LuxLeaks, Swissleaks etc. can testify. Nevertheless,  Uber is, due to its business model, one of the clear champions in this sport. It’s definitely not “Uber taxed”.

There seems to be a general trend these days towards less and less labor regulation, a race to the bottom.  The informal economy is now also becoming bigger in the North, it seems. In our part of the world, the push is coming from governments and EU technocrats alike (see the cuts in the minimum wage in Greece and Portugal as imposed by the Troika) as well as from big corporations with their innovative (and often downright illegal) ways of employing workers.  Uber is certainly not the only company out there threatening former welfare state labor laws. The rest of the tech giants are also characterized by an astronomical value in Wall Street with very few employees – as compared to the old manufacturing giants. Perhaps it will prove again a bubble, like the dotcom bubble a decade ago. But even in that scenario, chances are there will be survivors.  Giants. And they might be lean and mean – see Amazon for example as a case in point, one of the survivors last time.

Recently, I read a book written by someone from Silicon Valley,  “Who owns our future ?” by Jaron Lanier. The core idea of the book was that the “new” economy is fundamentally flawed in the sense that a big chunk of the created value is not accounted for. For instance, Google sells information to companies about its users’ tastes, but the information used by Google is provided by the users for free. Facebook isn’t much different. Mind you, Internet surfers don’t just provide this info for free, many seem hell-bent on providing all this info to these tech molochs.

This is precisely what the tech giants are really good at: capturing a much greater share of the created value than traditional businesses. And they’ve put a lot of effort into it. Look at the sophisticated tax evasion schemes that Apple and others have devised, they’re certainly  “smart”. Look at some of those “champions” ’ plans to create floating cities off the US territorial waters to bypass labor and immigration laws. Look at the stock of cash Apple is piling up without even considering to invest it. As mentioned,  “traditional” corporations have also gotten their act together in terms of escaping taxes in recent years (see the recent accusations targeted at McDonald’s), and let’s not forget “the villain from Ryanair” or other innovators with disruptive business models of a decade ago, but the fact that the industry with the fastest growth nowadays redistributes a comparatively smaller share of the value to society is nevertheless striking.

On paper the tremendous amount of money these companies are making is good for economic growth, our society’s fetish. But in reality they’re a menace to society, in the long run, because they don’t play the redistribution game.  In short, Zuckerberg et al are the adult version of “Dennis the Menace”.   Every dollar they don’t pay in taxes, whether it’s due to their disruptive & no doubt smart business model, or to ingenious “tax optimization”, is a dollar that won’t go to social protection, education, or health in the end. So by the time their plans will have succeeded, a big share of the workforce might consist of “independent contractors”, doing the jobs that computers and robots can’t do, with very little protection offered by a state that went bankrupt. If this really happens, who will be left to buy their fancy gadgets ?  …  If you know the answer, let us know.

Just wait until a smart geek coming straight from Harvard finds a loophole in the laws to let 5-year-old kids work  (no doubt it will have a more politically correct label – like “Children becoming entrepreneurs”), and we will have discovered time-travel (back to the 19^th century or even earlier).  Spock will be proud of us.

What’s disappointing about all this is that it’s hardly new. Throughout history, some people have proved to be very good at making many others work for free (or close to it) and at stacking up outrageous wealth; at exploiting many for the well-being of a few. The tech giants have been doing this with software and lobbying lately, while their predecessors had to use weapons and watchdogs. Nowadays, as many have observed, information and power are getting closer and closer to each other.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not technophobic, I’m not the “off-the-grid” type. I actually have a strong interest in computers, I know how to program, and I’m always amazed by the power of computers to do what they’re brilliant at. I also happen to have spent some time in an Ivy League college, and I love science-fiction.  This background gives me an edge to try and understand the profile of the Silicon Valley champions whenever I read something about their lofty declarations in the press or about their investment in fancy tech or social entrepreneurship projects.

I am pretty sure that most of them believe that they are among the smartest people on Earth, and that they are able to solve problems in a much more efficient way than the rest of us (computer science is all about solving problems efficiently, by the way). This, in their opinion, gives them the right to despise the state and the law, and to bypass them whenever they feel it’s relevant. They probably believe that they‘ve found much better ways to make society better off than by paying taxes. (Again, there are quite some right-wing entrepreneurs with the same attitude of superiority towards government, see the Ayn Rand “free market loving” crowd for example, albeit for different reasons. My point is that many of the – presumably more “liberal” – Silicon Valley entrepreneurs aren’t all that different, at least in this respect (looking down on government, deep down, unless if they need to lobby it), even if they look down on the Ayn Rand crowd as well, perhaps. )

Plus  they’ve spent a significant part of their lifetime in front of a computer screen. This may sound trivial, but I can tell you that it takes a lot of time and commitment to become good at programming. This latter point, combined with the fact that they’ve certainly grown up in a relatively well-off environment (Ivy league schools are expensive, in case you didn’t know), means that many of them view and understand the world in a way that would seem pretty strange to most of us.

And here’s the thing with science-fiction. Sometimes the tech giants, especially Google, remind me of teenagers fascinated by the gadgets in sci-fi movies and dying to make them real. The problem is that they seem to be stuck at the surface. Good sci-fi writers only used these gadgets to tell a much deeper story about a possible future. And more often than not, this depicted future was rather gloomy (read Neuromancer and The Minority Report, or watch Terminator). It’s as if the possible implications of technology for society described by sci-fi writers were lost on them. And they have so much money that they can afford to make at least some of the gadgets real, even if some of them are dreadful, like artificial intelligence or robots that can crawl up a wall like a lizard. There are some people sounding the alarm (see Stephen Hawking on artificial intelligence, for example), but by and large they are being ignored.

Silicon Valley’s people’s  profile and love for science-fiction provides many of them with a twisted approach to technology. They want to “make a better world” and “fix what’s broken” (society, the human body, the earth). But their “better world” is likely to feature hoverboards and space elevators, which might be pretty low on the list of needed items for people living in Syria or Guinea right now. So “digital socialism”, in the words of Evgeny Morozov (last week in the Guardian), it is certainly not.  And let’s not get started on the geo-engineering fixes some might have in mind.

Let’s be honest and admit that the world will need more than intelligent apps and Wi-Fi balloons in the sky. And don’t tell me that you seriously believe that the handful of (mostly white, male) billionaires who rule Silicon Valley actually care about the fate of the vast majority of the world’s population.  Because I’m pretty sure they don’t (with the notable exception of Bill Gates and his wife and perhaps a few more). When they talk about “fixing” an essentially broken world, what they really mean is smart cars that drive themselves or flocks of drones that deliver their load faster than slow human truck drivers. When they talk about “augmenting humans”, what they’re really trying to do is engineer their way into immortality. And when they talk about making this planet “a better world”, I doubt that they are really focusing on alleviating the pain of countless people suffering every day from social exclusion, disease, war and starvation, to name just a few of the less desirable options to spend one’s life for billions of people in the world. The global health community might want to keep this in mind, even if there are no doubt some exceptions to this rule; I don’t want to argue that every philantrocapitalist with Silicon Valley roots has distorted plans.

I for one am more and more convinced that every relevant philosophy from now on should start from the following simple fact. The first anatomically modern humans appeared around 200 000 years ago, and we have only slowly discovered science and technology since (e.g. iron was only discovered about 3000 years ago). Yet less than 200 years after the invention of the internal combustion engine, we have already managed to irreversibly  alter the world’s climate and to durably pollute a substantial portion of our planet (thereby pushing many species into extinction).  Now that’s damn “efficient”!

So in my humble opinion, technology is not the answer. And as opposed to what Christophe Nolan tried to tell us in the over-lauded movie “Interstellar”, space isn’t our escape door either if things go really wrong in the coming 50 years. Our planet is not disposable. Accumulation of wealth by a few individuals and the death of social protection are no credible answers either.  It remains to be seen whether we will be able to find new forms of social protection (like a basic income for all?), fit for this age of globalization & robotization. We might, but we also might very well not.

Chances are that the time will come when we will have no choice but to judge human societies on their resilience and their ability to survive, rather than on the number of billionaires in a country or the flatness of their sleek cellphones. Chances are that the (remaining) tribes living in the Amazon jungle will then rank much higher than the rest of us in the “developed” world, including some of the smart geeks at Amazon.com and their buddies in Silicon Valley.

But on the bright side, the latter will at least have sleek gadgets to go down the drain with a virtual – “Uber” –  bang…