It was Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency (NSA) employee, who in 2013 uncovered the existence and use by the US government of secret phone call and internet surveillance programs to obtain information from its users, he said , the Spaniard Marta Peirano is “one of the rare journalists who have really specialized in the intersection of technology and power”.
He did it in 2015 when he gave a prologue Online Activist’s Little Red Book, with which Peirano introduced journalists, sources and media to cryptography. This book followed in 2019 The enemy knows the system, a critical essay on the way Internet companies deal with the information they receive from their users. On that occasion, Peirano explained that these companies could transform from a “mass surveillance and manipulation machine at the service of authoritarian regimes” to “an instrument to deal with the coming crisis in the most humane way possible”.
Three years after publication, Peirano explored the possible answers in a new book The enemy knows the system: is called Against the future – citizen resistance against climate feudalism (Debate-Verlag). Because the climate crisis, the author assured in an interview with elDiarioAR, is a crisis that humanity must face together, “because everything indicates that things will get much worse before they get better,” she said.
—How did the idea for the book come about and why did you choose the title “Against the Future”?
The book is an answer to The enemy knows the system, who spoke about the technologies of our time, namely telecommunications. When I finished this book, I wondered if these tools could solve the big problem of our time: the climate crisis. Because the oldest story in the world is that of an environmental catastrophe and a technology that saves us.
“I also analyze this myth of monotheistic technology, that of the UFO that knows the problem and solves it, which has been exploited opportunistically with varying results by the great technological visionaries of our time, always proposing almost all interstellar solutions.”
“Is called against the future, precisely because it rejects the “futurism” proposed by the major Silicon Valley platforms, which speaks of an expansion of humanity to other planets at the expense of this planet, 99 percent of humanity. They speak of rebuilding a world on an Earth that has become Mars through their activities. It is the cycle of capitalism that is always proposed as the only solution to the damage it causes.”
“What do you mean by the term ‘climate feudalism’?”
—It’s a figure or variant of “disaster capitalism” that Naomi Kelin talks about in her book The Shock Doctrine. Large multinational companies provide services, answers and solutions to exploit the climate crisis to enforce infrastructures that enable control over populations for which they take no further responsibility. Most of the time, these are multinational companies that don’t even pay taxes or comply with the laws of the places where they operate. To me, that is climate feudalism.
—The dedication of the book says there is a world to solve. How is this world doing in the face of climate change?
—The book is dedicated to my three godchildren who live in three different cities and have three different problems. The world to be solved is characterized by inequality. The climate crisis is a crisis of inequalities and the solutions are not technological.
“We have enough resources to continue to inhabit the planet without destroying it, and to continue sharing it not only with the human species but also with the rest of the species that accompany us.” What we see, though , is that 90 percent of resources are misused by a really small percentage, and much less when all species are considered. It is one percent of a single species, ours.”
-In against the future He points out that the world’s biggest billionaires are betting on finding living conditions on the Moon and Mars, perhaps to get rid of humanity. What are the chances of the rest of the people who aren’t billionaires surviving and reinventing themselves?
– Somehow the example lies in what Puerto Rico is doing. One can surrender oneself to a completely predictable fate such as death or a miserable migration of millions of people in search of a habitable piece of land, because more and more places are uninhabitable and others are occupied by people who accumulate resources and do not distribute them. Millions of people searching for a place is humanity’s most predictable future if everything goes on as before.
“But he was talking about Puerto Rico, where the future seemed to be his before anyone else’s. American writer William Gibson said the future had arrived but was badly distributed. Five years ago, in September 2017, Category 4 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, devastating the island with wind speeds of up to 250 kilometers per hour and claiming around 3,000 lives. It took Puerto Rico back to the Middle Ages because it destroyed highways, schools, hospitals, its communications network and all sorts of things. In those five years, there were communities that decided to set up small networks, for example to distribute solar panels or create urban gardens. Now that a new hurricane has arrived, there are only places with solar panels and city gardens for light and sustenance. The solution is local and available to us. It’s not about going to Washington to see if the world can be changed, it’s about reaching out to the neighborhood community to convince them to share common resources.
“A few days ago I was in Montevideo to give a talk entitled ‘Less Wizards, More Witches’. For me, the wizards are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg coming to tell us, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of this great technology,” just drink your water, use your electricity, and eat your snack and little less than stealing your children. They now despise local, contextual, and community solutions.
“By changing the lives of your neighborhood community, you are changing your community forever. in his book A paradise in hell, says Rebecca Sonit that a family with strong ties generally strengthens them in the face of adversity, but those with weak ties are destroyed. The great triumph of capitalism is convincing us that our solutions are pathetic because they actually solve things for us and not for capitalism. You are pathetic to them. History shows that they are the only possible ones. It is not the technology that saves you, but your ability to associate and coordinate to achieve a common goal.”
– In this context, in one section of the book, you refer to a sentence by the American literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
– Capitalism itself convinced us of that. For many years we have believed that competition is the basis of progress and that only the fittest survive. Israeli historian Yuval Harari says that the tool that has propelled us forward and enabled us to survive as a species is the ability to organize ourselves through stories and narratives and persuade a group of people to help us achieve a goal.
“From this point of view, we should be able to anticipate crises and create the necessary communities so that we cannot protect each other from the future, but help each other to survive long enough.” The local organization around a common goal , whether it be water, energy or creating a protocol to deal with a climate catastrophe, is where our society meets.”
—Every international meeting or summit on climate change warns, based on scientific information, that humanity is near a point of no return. However, it seems that this hint was not enough to shake up societies. What to do to make them aware of the upcoming situation? Especially when you mention that fighting the climate crisis will require sacrifices.
—The main problem in dealing with inaction is cognitive dissonance. We are not the ones who can make the big decisions to end this situation. An organized citizenry can change the political party in government, but when all parties are linked to the same economic powers, making such decisions is very difficult.
“In against the future points out that the average global temperature has been rising by an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade since the 1970s and that it would be necessary for the parties in government to fall below the target of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by drastic and likely unpopular measures against an increasingly polarized population with no hope of short-term results.
“It takes a government or ruler that is capable of political sacrifice and making utterly unpopular decisions that cause people to stop voting for them, but who is in favor of everything changing in the face of the climate crisis changes.” . But in reality it would be necessary that it is not done by just one person, but by global coordination.
They wonder in the United States why they need to take action to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions when, for example, India is not doing it. First, because the United States has been the world’s largest producer of CO2 for 50 years. This must be done for ethical reasons, for responsibility, for reparation, and because only the so-called first world countries are able to make this transition. It would be enough if they did for it to be effective. Because it is an act of justice, but also a mathematical question. It would be enough for the 26 most important countries in the world to make this transition for it to be effective and change things.”
– At one point in the book you refer to leaders like Jair Bolsonaro and, most importantly, to the increased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during his tenure. What can happen if Bolsonaro stays in power in Brazil? Do you hope that if Lula Da Silva wins the second round of voting, he can do something about this environmental situation?
“I’m going to say something terrible because Bolsonaro is not only the worst thing that happened to Brazil but also to the rest of the world.” But Lula was the one who started this deforestation process. Bolsonaro accelerated and criminalized it. It’s hard to say, because Lula will go down in history as the leader who went to prison for corruption without us knowing if he was corrupt or not, but most importantly as the man who lifted millions of people out of poverty liberated, albeit at the cost of surrender, the resources of Brazil and the planet.
“A fundamental thing is that we cannot ask an underdeveloped country to abandon development by doing the things that developed countries did between the 1950s and 1980s. That’s unfair.” Countries that still have enough Amazon rainforest left to capture a large percentage of CO2 should be funded by the rest of the planet. We should be paying Brazil to conserve its forests, not to export luxury timber or sell soybeans to feed cattle in the US or China. We cannot blame Brazil for trying to survive. Bolsonaro accelerated the deforestation process without lifting people out of poverty. In other words, Lula did something that was good for the poor in Brazil and bad for the planet and his country’s future, but there was a consideration.
“I’m not talking about helping countries like Brazil financially, I’m talking about paying them to do a job that benefits us all: it’s about taking care of the Amazon region.” We should help the indigenous people finance so that she continues to take care of the jungle areas for the benefit of all, be it in Argentina, Australia, Brazil or Alaska. After we’ve stripped them of most of their land, we should give it back to them and pay them for the conservation work they’ve done over the centuries.”
“Is there reason to be optimistic about the future?”
“I’m not optimistic in the sense that everything will turn out well, but I think it’s important to have hope that it’s worth doing what is necessary for everything to go well.”
(October 2022.diarioAR/)