<nettime> Farewell to World Order

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Something extremely scary just happened in a tiny Swiss village. The
liberal world order forged in the wake of World War II was abandoned by its
chief architect, the United States. Amidst the wreckage, citizens of the
wealthy European countries and other "middle powers" - such as Brazil,
India and Canada - can at least look forward to valiant attempts at forging
a new China-centric multilateralism, while suffering the militarization of
their own societies. No such luck back in the former liberal heartland,
where our nascent civil war seems fated to get much worse, without anyone
even knowing what "better" would look like.

World order is difficult to perceive for ordinary people - and even for
some remarkably crude national leaders. It sounds like a hollow
abstraction, a piece of flimsy academic gauze over the hard truth of a real
world "that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is
governed by power" (dixit Stephen Miller). Yet the meaning of world order
is crystal clear for the governing elites at Davos - or some of them
anyway. Mark Carney, former UK central banker and current PM of Canada,
nailed it in a single phrase: "public goods, open sea lanes, a stable
financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for
resolving disputes." The US in its prime, conceiving itself as first among
equals, provided these benefits in the form of peer-reviewed public
science, a two-ocean navy, rule-governed asset markets, nuclear dissuasion
and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. These five
aspects of world order intertwined to form the basis of prosperity for the
global middle classes - and the basis of grotesque opulence for the global
oligarchs. But that naked opulence, so conspicuously on display in Davos,
has undone the eighty year-old foundation of relative peace and
unprecedented prosperity.

Because of a discrepant balance in the trade of manufactured goods, Trump
believes that the rest of the world is "ripping us off." Quite a claim for
a country that accounts for less than 5% of the global population but 15%
of global GDP, and whose currency is used to denominate two thirds of
emerging market debt, two thirds of global foreign exchange reserves and
two thirds of global securities issuance (ballpark numbers provided by Adam
Tooze). The manufacturing deficit that Trump decries is certainly real:
since the 1970s, US corporate capital has hollowed out the country by
shipping most of its low-end manufacturing overseas. But the books actually
balance when you count the export of sophisticated producer equipment,
networked tech and financial services, plus massive foreign direct
investment and the sale of the famously stable greenback, in the form of
low-yield Treasury bonds. On the basis of this full accounting, America is
clearly raking it in - which might explain why its average per-capita
income is so much higher than that of any other large country. Why then
does Trump and half the American political class so ardently believe that
the rest of the world is "ripping us off"?

The answer is that you pay for what you get - in some cases, many times
over. American citizens paid very heavily for the country's globe-spanning
military, both in taxes and in blood. And when the soldiers came home
physically and psychologically damaged from the endless wars, they found a
homegrown economic order that really did rip them off, not only by
destroying stable manufacturing employment but also by denying them
affordable medical care, jacking up their rents, repossessing their cars
and homes after every financial crisis, and subjecting them to the cultural
violence of so-called "entertainment," increasingly coupled with invasive
networked consumer surveillance. Resentment grew at the spectacle of
opulence presented by the elites and the professional classes of the
financialized cities, and at the increasingly onerous bureaucratic
regulation of industrial activity, carried out in order to maintain the
liberal facades of equality, racial justice and "sustainability" in theory
only. If the US center-left had produced a champion of the social underdog
- Bernie Sanders rather than the iniquitous Hillary Clinton - then maybe
world history would have taken a different turn. Instead we got the
insurgency of a populist extreme right, piloted by a boorish and aggressive
pussy-grabbing real estate mogul turned reality TV tycoon, who cravenly
serves his own class while mouthing various kinds of nationalist rhetoric
(religious, capitalist, militarist). Immigrants let across the border under
no legal framework whatsoever in order to feed the casualized labor machine
have now become the scapegoats for all this resentment, deftly deflected
from its real targets. Returning soldiers, ex-cops fired by their
departments for brutality, and marginalized homeboys enraged by racist
rhetoric now form the modern-day equivalents of Hitler's brown shirts,
terrorizing the populations of progressive cities whose inhabitants, to
their credit, are bravely learning how to fight back, with empathy,
intelligence and considerable fear about the next turn of the repressive
screw.

It is very weird to see this outburst of presidentially driven sadism
unfolding on formerly peaceful streets, while the giant corporations who
took such undue advantage of the US-led world order now organize themselves
in the deperate attempt to engineer one last global economic boom. This
attempt rests on two pillars: first, the fossil-fuel sector that powers
American excess, and second, the tech titans who want to steal our jobs and
rot our brains with the accelerated rollout of electricity-hungry AI.
"Drill baby drill" is an attempt to retain the energetic wellspring of
America's former industrial and military might, without any concern for its
planet-wrecking ecological consequences; while AI, or artificial idiocy, is
conceived through the twisted lens of a "struggle for dominance" with
China. As I recall, just a year or two ago people who could have known
better began drooling with delight at their oh-so-clever prompts, and at
the pathetic responses offered by their new narcissistic mirrors. Just like
those who built the cryptoverse - now the favored terrain of billionaires
looking to definitively abandon any ties to national populations - these
starry-eyed vanguards of AI were the useful fools of evil bastards who want
to wipe our minds with predatory tech, while destroying our green earth
with coal, oil and methane.

Who knows where this all goes next? Since annual war games consistently
show the US military ignominiously losing a military conflict in the Taiwan
Strait, one can hope that all this political turmoil does not end in
another world war. Maybe the Chinese receive some extra comfort from the
fact that the high-end vacuum toilets of the glorious new American aircraft
carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, are repeatedly plugged, without any
perspective of a definitive fix, by the abundant shit of thousands of
sailors currently parked off the coast of Venezuela. Or maybe even the
Chinese - like the Latin Americans and the US left - are out-and-out
terrified at what the end of the old, rotten, self-serving US-led world
order may bring.

I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. All I can do is serve my
community, and resist.

solidarity, Brian
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