@e_flux wrote:
The Nation magazine has an excerpt from Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, the new book by filmmaker, writer, and activist Astra Taylor. It’s a kind of companion volume to Taylor’s recent film, What is Democracy? In the excerpt, Taylor notes that political democracy is eroding, with elections influenced by corporate money and vast numbers of citizens disengaging entirely from the process. She argues that this erosion can be counter by democratizing other spheres of collective life, especially the economy. Check out a snippet of the excerpt below.
What comes next is an open question. Capitalism is in doubt. The patriarchy is trembling. White supremacy is sputtering. Borders are going up where they once came down. Technology may tip the balance of power toward an elite that owns the robots and controls the algorithms. The natural environment is on the brink of chaos. To combat the apocalyptic apparitions, we need to conjure alternative worlds, leaping forward and looking back. As Hannah Arendt observes in Between Past and Future, tradition does not have to be a fetter chaining us to dead matter; it can also be a thread that helps guide us toward something better and still unseen.
What kind of ancestors do we want to be? With every action or inaction, we help decide how the future will unfold. What principles and commitments do we want to adopt for a democracy that doesn’t yet exist? How will we cast our votes for a society we won’t live to see?
Image via The Nation.
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