There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is…
There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the idea of ‘economies’, (apparent) markets of individuals exercising their individual freedom of choice. /1 https://t.co/lsEvMAbzet
But in reality, humans have never acted more socially, collectively, than they do right now. We’re just looking in the wrong place. The ISS took 3 million people-years to build, 26 billion work hours. Compare that historically. Great Pyramid of Giza? 400,000 people-years. /2 https://t.co/jaHYAniFJg
The Coliseum in Rome? 100,000 people years. The ISS dwarfs those earlier collective projects, and what’s more the ISS is a fully international collective effort, unlike those earlier projects. It requires cooperation at an historically unprecedented scale. /3 https://t.co/Y3fzGKzWb1
As @EdConwaySky and others such as the magisterial Bruno Latour said (for decades), the social operating systems of our lives are MATERIAL. Not the hot air of debate and politics. It’s our vast socio-technical systems that are our collective weaving together of social bonds. /4
That’s what not only keeps the lights on, it’s what binds us together, socially. I’ve Tweeted multiple times about this being the secret to the longevity of Roman civilisation too. It built things, and in doing that it bound its people to each other, socially. /5 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o
What I call Reality Politics is the recognition that it’s this material reality of our lives that is the only really important thing for us to look at. Opinions and ideologies are, quite literally, just hot air that float over the top of the actual reality of our lives. /6
Team sports, just getting in the way, arguing over things that have quite simple material solutions that are opinion-agnostic. As Latour once called dit, an object-oriented democracy is what we need. Reality-based politics. /end