Can 'planetary civics' save us from techno-catastrophe?

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Anthony Burke here, host of By Design on ABC Radio National, a show about the clever ideas and human stories behind the spaces, systems and objects shaping everyday life. Whether you're curious about architecture, interior design, fashion or anything in between, we reveal why design matters in a rapidly changing world. By Design on ABC Listen. Hello from David Rutledge, welcome to the Philosopher's Zone here on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen. I've been thinking this week about a comedy bit or a line from a bit that I heard quite a while ago. It was so long ago that I actually can't remember who the comedian was who said it, but it was something along the lines of everybody's getting excited about the prospect of putting a man on Mars, but I say, how about first of all, we just try putting a man in a house. And one of the great ethical issues of our time is how do we justify the phenomenal amounts of money and resources, spent on things like space exploration. When here on Earth we have something like 830 million people living in extreme poverty. These kinds of questions around big tech are so critical and so challenging and the anti-democratic forces that increasingly own and drive big tech are so alarming, that it's tempting sometimes to fall into a kind of techno pessimism to see the march of technology as something that's brought us to the edge of something truly catastrophic. And of course the ravages of climate change can make us wonder if perhaps we've already gone over the edge. Well, my guess this week is most definitely not a techno pessimist, but neither is she a naive techno optimist. She's very aware of the moral challenges that technology poses today, but she believes that we as a species are up to the challenge because we as a species are and have always been technological beings. We don't stand apart from technology, any more than we stand apart from the environment or from other animals. Humans are relational hybrid beings constantly shaped by technological mediation and so new technologies give us the opportunity to rethink and reform things like identity and subjectivity and community. This very simply put is post-humanism, and I'm talking this week with one of its most influential contemporary theorists, Rosie Brodotti. Rosie Brodotti is distinguished university professor emeritor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, but she also has close ties with Australia, and she's currently in Melbourne for the Australian post-human Summer Laboratory, which is an initiative of RMIT University's planetary civics inquiry. Rosie Brodotti, welcome to the Philosopher's Zone. Pleasure, thank you for inviting me. Now among your many professional titles is this professor of practice with RMIT's planetary civics inquiry. Tell me about the planetary civics inquiry. That's what you'll hear for. What's it about? First of all, what a joy and a privilege to be affiliated to RMIT as an Italian Australian. It's probably my first Australian job because I've always worked overseas. I visit in professor working on this post-human summer lab connected to the regenerative futures and planetary civics. It's a series of mouthfuls, but what they express is the institutional and intellectual experiment of thinking across the disciplines and across the practices, putting together things that don't usually go together, theory and practice. You know, easier said than done. I am a product of Australian continental philosophy. Max Charlesworth in Deacon, Genevieve Lloyd, I've been sitting there. I mean, theory, and this is high theory, and we were educated to be good philosophers and go to the best universities in the world. How that goes with practice was not something that we were encouraged to do in my generation. RMIT, not the research university, I've practically oriented, amazing university. I encourage art, lead and lead and practices and a community spirit. That is what I love about this. It's a time of fragmentation and loneliness post-COVID, Melancholia. Here we have an experiment in building things together. And we kind of analyze the planetary dimension in terms of two major axes. One is, shall we call it, the apocalypse. The great problems of today. The convergence, as I call it, of technological, environmental and socio-economic issues. People call it crisis, not a word that I like a lot. But in any case, acceleration, more technology, more bushfires, more inequalities, more bad news. And yet, out of all of this, come the incredible developments and amazing discoveries. So the critical but also the creative. And the other last axis, which is what I find most enlightening, is the conversation between continental philosophy, practices and aboriginous cosmologies and thought systems. And with Professor Carol in Briggs, now we've been trying to write together a curriculum where love for the country, love for the future, actually generates. And attempts to think across big divides. And I found that part truly experimental in the best sense of the term, generative and I think brave. Tell me about the planetary civics aspect to the planetary civics inquiry. I know what you mean by planetary civics, but in sort of concrete terms, if you are able to wave a magic wand and roll out a global program of planetary civics tomorrow, what kinds of policies or institutions might embody planetary civics? Like, for example, new laws, new taxes, new global bodies, what could planetary civics look like in material terms? What a great question. To assumptions to begin with, we used to have a vision of togetherness, humanity, the world. Cosmopolitanism, we could make a list of those terms, David, that actually encourages to think globally. And a lot of those terms now are very out of date. Do not describe the contradictions of today, which are really the scale and speed of the problems are planetary. We are together in the issues of technological development, the problems of climate change, the issues of poverty, migration, refugees, they are big interlinked problems that require the transversal solutions. We can only solve them together, but the paradox is that this scale and speed of changes goes together with an incredible fragmentation with loneliness, with isolation and post-COVID, an entire generation of young kids as withdrawn into some aspects of their psyche, which they can only reach through technological mediation. So we need to recompose very basic systems, relations and connections, a sense of belonging, not only one, multiple communities that together can discuss what is happening to us and who is us, us is the earthlings who inhabit this particular planet at this particular point in time. So it is civic in the sense that it reconstructs communities and it will community comes indeed norms, but comes also shared imaginaries. You cannot have a planetary civic if you are plunged in pessimism, in cynicism and in the death drive. We need to have very affirmative, hopeful views of what we are capable of becoming as a population, as earthlings, as Australians, as in the city people, as every as can determine a community. So yes, policies in terms of regulating the technologies better, but also shall I put an old fashioned word in the picture David literacies? How about we learn to speak again? How learn to make music, and not just consume it, this will be dear to your heart, but to make it, to create some scapes of belonging. So we don't only consume music in our headphones, I have a movement back in Holland that is called Chuck your headphones and share the music. Music is made to be in public spaces and to be shared. And when I walk in the bush with my Norwegian friends, they really sing the landscape, they hum it. There is a resonance about our belonging to this planet that we need to learn again, literacies in terms of relations between sexes and genders, literacy in terms of democratic proceeding, an appeal to all the young Australians if they are listening to us, falling love with democracy. It's an amazing system, it's a bit boring, it's a bit slow, it requires you to feel a lot of forms, but it allows you to exist, it gives you a voice. So democratic literacies, civic literacies, we have a lot of reconstruction to do because these accelerations, these changes have caused a lot of damage. After all, the Silicon Valley boys have a terrible motto, don't they? Move fast, break things. Now we need to repair some of the things that broken. Yeah, well, what I've always appreciated about your perspective on technology is that it's affirmative without being blindly optimistic, it's critical without being overly pessimistic. But as we move into the age of AI, of course a lot of the fear around AI is grounded in this sense that AI is not just more technology, not just better technology, faster technology, but that it represents a new rupture in technological development. and therefore also a rupture in our human or post-human nature as technologically mediated beings. Now, I know that you're critical of what you see as apocalyptic panic in the face of AI, but are people wrong to perceive the advent of AI as something unprecedented, more than just another tool? I think several things and they are contradictory, but see if I care. The first one is that there is an acceleration, a speed and scale of acceleration that is new and things are moving unbelievably fast. Financial times, economists are now saying that the AI bubble has burst and we have to start thinking seriously about quantum computing and quantum sensorium, which is yet another level of expanding the capacity of perception. So there is, we're in the middle of an amazing scientific revolution. In the sense that the AI has allowed for a speed of computation, calculation systems that are so fast, that research that would have required years can now be done in a matter of months, and that puts us in the middle of an unbelievable scientific revolution. As a woman of science, I rejoice every day as I really get yet more the discovery developments being done at all levels from the bio-genetic sciences to information technologies. So let's not forget that we're in the middle of a huge scientific revolution in this sense indeed. It's a bit like the Gutenberg moment where new technologies come in. So there is the acceleration. I don't think that it is a difference in quality beyond this. I was thinking I'm old enough to remember the early days of television and there's very early films by Kronenberg. I was thinking of the ones where I think it's called Draw Video Draw. Video Draw. Yes. Where he's looking at how television infects your brain. And you know, this is way before internet or everything like that. That he understands that it's something here. These technologies are altering our consciousness. They're altering our neural perceptive, cognitive systems. They're going into us to cut a long story short. And consequently, the effects are new. I'm unprecedented. I think we underestimated the changes that that did. What we have now with this new invasive technology is that they become surrogate of our neural system. They expand and they enhance everything that we could possibly do. And it is fantastic, except that we, earthlings, are not prepared for it. We are not ready. And because we have been used to, and in a sense, trained to approach these technologies as things that you consume, we're passive consumers of the effects of AI. And we don't see ourselves as co-producers, partners, co-designers. These machines, these technological, operatic, are absolutely part of us. We need to develop a more expanded sense of what counts as our subjectivity. I call it nomadic, post-human. It's a compound. It's a mixture. It's us, the microphones, the screen, the air that we breathe, the memory that we carry, the clothes. You have to think of yourself as a day, as a compound. And this is, of course, the lecture, the lesson of my philosopher, Master Gildelers, who talked about the complexity. Why are we so scared of complexities? The human brain is immense. When I see my students in class, I know that they're bored out of their mind, although I'm a great teacher, because their brains are so massive and what we throw at them is so minimal. I think the AI makes it possible for us to expand and enhance our fields and doors or perception if we handle it in that spirit. And the tragedy, I think, of the way it's being governed at the moment is that we don't present it as an opportunity to expand and create communities. And the dominant ethos of Silicon Valley of the big tech companies is pretty lethal. What they have done is taken these immense technologies and they have reattached it to the minimum understanding of the human, which is liberal individualism, me, myself, and I. Now that is a recipe for disaster. And what we're trying to do with the post-human predicament with the critical theory that opens up this is to say, let's use these technologies as a way to recompose their us, complex entities, working together to try to make sense of this incredible revolution and to try to push it in the direction of well-being and if possible, democracy. So I think it's more the way we are governing the technologies, the technologies themselves. On ABC Radio National and ABC Listen, this is the philosopher's zone with me, David Rutledge, and I'm in conversation this week with Rosie Bredotti. Rosie has a long string of academic and professional titles, among them being practice professor with RMIT University's College of Design and Social Context, and she's currently in Melbourne working with RMIT's Planetary Civics Inquiry, more info on the philosopher's zone website. You mentioned democracy there, which seems to be one of the real sticking points because when we have a tiny handful of corporations controlling the infrastructure of AI, it makes me wonder about the likelihood or even just the possibility that AI could ever be truly democratised. And I want to ask you, what structural changes do you think might successfully redistribute power? Do we break up the large corporations? Do we send Elon Musk to Mars on his own? What sort of things do you have in mind? Oh, he will go to Mars on his own. Don't worry. No, nobody else is going to want to go. They used to be a terrible radical feminist joke in the 70s. If you can put one man on the moon, why not all of them? I know it was those days when you can have politically incorrect jokes, but I think it's valid. Oh, where? So I'm glad you bring this up because without wanting to be in any way depressing, it's not in my temperament or in my training, I do think that we need to look critically at the ethical and political implications of the projects and that have been written up by the tech companies in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk and Peter Tiele of Palantir in particular. Tiele is an interesting character because he has a PhD in philosophy from Yale, where in Metajed, Van's, they became friends and they went to power together. And Tiele's dissertation was on René Girard and the concept of the sacrifice. You need to read, have the courage to listen us to read this text, to see to what extent the destruction of democracy is part of the project. They consider democracy in the form of parliamentary representation, in the forms of rules and regulation, the rule of law, one vote per person, universal suffrage. Democracy is accountability and transparency and social justice as antiquated systems. Why? Because they are slow, because they require procedures and consultation and the motto is move fast break things. And they are all massive supporters of the far right movements that are in power both in the US and other parts of the world in a project called Project 2025, which you can go and read online, which explicitly says, in this phase of transition, while the technology is finding its new modus operandi, its new coexistence with humans, we are better off with an autocratic system, with illiberal systems, so that there is one person in command that can make decisions for you. Unfortunately, this is having an effect on the younger generations. In the EU, we discovered that particularly among young boys, about 40% of Gen Z is actually think the democracy is a slow and ineffectual system and wouldn't mind having a strong man in power. Because it's quicker, it's faster than it solves the problem, then you don't have to decide for yourselves. And significantly, the Gen Z here women are succantly vote differently and think differently. So what do we have here? An ideological message being conveyed on the technologies which by themselves are message free. They are just technology, the scientific processes, but we have an ideology, a system of value, a political message being conveyed by these big tech firms. I live in Europe, the European Union has been very clear about this. We have passed a number of regulations and we have taken to court the big AI and big tech companies on several occasions with Google, Mask, all of them, big lawsuits to protect the key rules of a decent form of governance for these technologies. Regulations, transparency, accountability, ecological footprint, taxation, salaries, fairness, all rules that the big tech companies simply reject. And the EU regulations which I know Australia is also looking into are a model that irritates the Trump administration. And they are one of the fundamental reasons why they are so vehement against Europe. And they consider us as antiquated democracies and all the horrible things that they're saying against the European Union is because we are determined to put in regulations and what I would call a digital social democracy, that we can have this technological leap forward, we can benefit from the technologies. I love them. There is a scientific revolution going on, but not if it is run as a neo-fudel system of domination. And here it would be the call not to arm, but to activity on the part of all citizens to actually get involved in these discussions. Don't be afraid. It's not Frankenstein. It's a big leap forward, but it is us. It's our brains, our money, our investments, our universities. And to return to the experiment of RMIT, a major institution that has fully grasped the potential of the moment that we are going through, if you have a curriculum which is about planetary civic and regenerative futures, you are simply saying let's discuss together what we are capable of becoming, what better project than that? What kind of more than human, enhanced human, or just more fully humans? Are we capable of becoming? That should be so attractive. Or am I over optimistic? Over optimistic, I don't think so, but it's easy, I think, to almost inevitable to get swamped by the problems, the ethical issues. I mean, if we look at space exploration and the ethics there are of, I'm very interested in this cultural divide that we see today between the techno optimists on one hand, who are very excited by the idea of colonizing Mars, activists on the other hand who say, no, no, we should be putting all that ingenuity and all those resources into addressing at least some of the many interlocking crises we have here on earth. It's not an optimistic perspective that one, but I think it's a very valid one. How do you navigate that tension, that hierarchy of priorities? I think you have just written the mission statement for universities and particularly for humanities faculties, which I would like to call the post-humanities faculties. What are we asking our fellow citizens to do at a time like this? Because if you want to come to terms with the question that you just put, strike a balance between techno optimism and technopesimism between euphoria and complete depression requires knowledge, time, a disposition that most people don't have, people want to get on with their life. We can't become philosophers all of us overnight. And yet the times that we're going through the mutation that we're undergoing would almost require a generalized becoming philosopher of everybody, which is of course my dream, make philosophy, an asset for everybody. Make philosophy great again. There you go, we can start a new movement. I think the first step for me in thinking what kind of more than human, post-human, otherwise human we're becoming is to hold the frame for a moment on the notion of human because it's taken for granted, but in fact it's a very complicated one. And discussing what basic unit of reference you use to define the human is a huge starting point. And we did this in our discussion with Professor Carolyn Briggs, now we at RMIT, where we compared the human in a original cosmology and the human in my tradition of continental philosophy in the Australian tradition of Jenny Lloyd just be knows that the laws all of that. And what do you mean by human? The human was never a neutral term. It never is. So when we start talking about transhumanism and that's Elon Musk who wants to solve technology with more technology or post-humanism, which is a critique of the transhuman saying let's use the technology in a more democratic, open, constructive manner, we are throwing the word human around without actually having decided among ourselves, what do you mean? When we talk about the human, the human in a original culture is always already embedded in what we would call the natural world, its country. It belongs, it involves the nature culture, birds and skies, it's very grounded, it's a holistic understanding of the human, where ours is not. So we need to look at human and humanism as the first step to answer the question of how do we strike a middle road between let them all go to Mars and fulfill the transhumanist dream. The transhumanist dream is to make a master race of technologically enhanced humans that can go on to the next phase of evolution. That's in the project of the transhumanist. Critical post-humanists like me are saying just a moment, is this the only way we can use this technologies? Can we also use them? Also, I'm not saying only, also use them to improve the earthlings lot on this earth. Can we, you know, develop new forms of literacies, new digital literacies that we can work with these machines? We quantum computing, we will be able to gather data that our neural system is not capable of hearing or perceiving. We will be hearing the inaudible and seeing the invisible. What an amazing opportunity is, how do we, do we actually develop? The question is who are the we, who is the community that is now in charge of enhancing this human? I think this is the discussion. I would put this conversation at the top of my agenda. What are we becoming? Who is the we that may want to go to Mars? I can't imagine very fit young people wanted to go up there and colonize space. We need a legal framework for it. We need rules and regulations for what is going to happen out there in outer space. But the leap to outer space is already happening. The moon station will be up at the end of this year or early next year. NASA and the European Space Agency are selecting the new generations of astronauts also with equal opportunities programs in mind. They have reserved positions for women, for disabled people because nobody is disabled in outer space. They are creating a kind of a selection of diversity of humans to put out there in space. The space economy at the moment is worth something like 600 billions right now, says the financial times. It is doomed to destined to triple. It's a huge financial investment and it is an extraction economy that will have a station on the moon to shoot the robots to Mars to take down the minerals that are more difficult to find here on earth. I can imagine a whole section of our listeners saying, "grown, why bother?" And I actually concur with the skepticism. At the same time, you cannot really stop our insatiable curiosity and this drive to further knowledge and to further our position in the cosmos. It would be a bit obscure and distressed to be against. It would prefer not to be in a neocolonial mode, not in a new feudal mode, but the fact that we may actually be an intergalactic species. That's an idea that has been around for a while. So I'm not in itself opposed to it. Yeah. One of the terrestrial issues, problems that we have at the moment, we see unfolding, is this issue of climate displacement, migration caused by climate change. I call it a problem mostly because it's endlessly articulated as a problem, as a crisis to be contained, as something that is really all about the response of nation-states. I'm interested in broadening that out. In the face of increasing climate displacement, how does posthumanism reconsexualize, reimagine this kind of migration beyond the response of the nation-state? I feel like there are opportunities there, but it doesn't really get talked about in that way. I think you're right. There's so many crucial and fascinating topics emerging from this cartography, this analysis of the moment of the mutation. I call it a posthuman convergence. So many problems, issues, provocations that we should be talking about. The category of migration is almost useless in the sense that it is so broad now and it covers such enormous, I'm talking about millions, no people, that we should be really talking about planetary mobility in an age of great mutations. Because the whole imaginary baggage of migration really brings you back to colonization, brings you back to old stories that prevent an understanding of what's happening now. What is happening now is a mutation. It's an evolutionary mutation due to the intersection of the technological, the environmental, and the socio-economic. It's a huge opportunity and if we get it wrong, it will be a huge risk. But there are so many of institutions and big think-thanks that are working on it that I think I'm optimistic enough to think that we will not get it wrong. We need to decolonize the imaginary that we bring to the discussion on what was migration and talk about the new forms of mobility deterioration that come with the choice made by sectors of our industry and economy, the big tech companies, to do two things, declare the planet Earth obsolete because it is crowded because you can't mine anything without running into also problems and because people clamor for rights and democratic proceedings that the big tech firms do not agree with, and to declare outer space as the new frontier. There are documents coming out of a Palantir that say this is the biggest colonial opportunity since 1492, verbatim. So decolonizing the whole discussion and say, are you repeating the all colonial exercise in outer space? Now, have we learned nothing from what we've done on this planet? Increase the awareness and attack frontally. This populist right-wing emphasis on steady, unitary, rock hard identities. This is my land. It's mine. It belongs to me and it's me and it's us. And it's this kind of fascistic complete reiteration of unitary identities. We are people made of mobility. All of us come from somewhere else in Australia, all the more, but it's true of everyone. We have feet not roots and we carry our cultural roots with us wherever we go. So we need to create institutional and social spaces, but they come together with mental spaces and new forms of literacy, whereby the other, the stranger, the immigrant is obviously part of everything that we are and that we are becoming. We need to stop the class and race segregation that frames the discussion on migration. I think the true migrant now will be the one that go to outer space and they carry the frontiers of our civilization to other planets. Do we even play a role on choosing these ambassadors of humanity? Maybe there is some alien population out there watching the first humans coming, oh my god, look at these migrants coming here to create problems. That wouldn't that be ironical? Where are the forms of literacy, of discourse, of understanding and acceptance that we all come from somewhere else? Without that knowledge, I think there will be only more and more weaponization of borders, more social violence and more inability to rule, to regulate this massive mutation that we are undergoing. There is also this issue of how to encourage, disseminate this kind of thinking among people who, you know, the sort of the great massive voters who are perhaps not ready for it, not interested in it. You know, I think we can expect to see nation states increasingly walling themselves off against climate migrants, especially as voters come to think about migration. There's something that they fear is going to put strain on housing and jobs and welfare and this kind of thing. Can I annotate that quickly? I think so long as we have populist parties and we have many of them in Europe that exploit the issue of migration framing it wrongly and then using it as a pretext to increase fear, resentment, paranoia. These are the elements of the negativity that the political classes are putting into our world. I think we need as citizens, say, just a moment, just a moment here. You don't have to frame everything with such cynical pessimism. I think there's cynical pessimism of populists left and right of the center. All populists are the same. It's both a simplification and a way of poisoning the social atmosphere. So that everything becomes an apocalyptic problem, hordes of migrants and the death of the human. These are forms of widespread simplification that defy the claim of a proper understanding and modes of literacy. The proper way to express the problem. So I think the populists are in a spinosis terminology. People who spread lies and inadequate understanding of the present. They're form of mental laziness. They're taking shortcuts. I believe our listeners, our citizens are more intelligent than that. Yeah, I take your point. And of course it's true that when it comes to these fears that migrants are going to put strain on housing and jobs, this is a discourse of scarcity that is often, perhaps most often, politically manufactured. I get that. At the same time, though, this sense of solidarity, it can't just be a moral proclamation. There has to be some sort of economic structure to it, which is why I wonder how you feel about how to address these material anxieties without simply saying you're just being xenophobic on one hand or saying on the other hand, you need more philosophy. You need a whole different kind of education. Yeah, true, true. No, I think the question of regulating migration, many, many sort of issues on this, the EU is actually taking in more legal migrants and having enormous difficulties regulating what we call the illegal flows. But although that even that language is inadequate to describe the scale or the problem, again, the technology here could be used for a form of social justice and migration justice, sort of international justice. In the sense that, again, working with now weatan and our original colleagues at RMIT, data sovereignty, the extent to which populations that are at risk because of climate change, because of forced migration are using the technologies to store their cultures, to even store in the case of some Pacific Islanders the DNA of their populations, saving it for the future, using the technology as an archive. And while you have to leave the country where you were born and bred to move elsewhere, but you carry your memory with you as you go, the technology could create all forms of interactions. And we need to have a technologies for freedom and for social cohesion movement where we look for solutions. And so that people are given other alternatives and just run for the lives. And why are we weaponizing borders? Why is surveillance war? There seems to be the only outlet that we have given to the huge new technologies that we have. And of course war traditionally has absorbed a lot of our new technology historically. Now could we not have sort of economies of peace where we actually use the technologies to create new economies, micro economies connected to indigeneity, to forced exodus because of climate change, a creative socially useful adaptation of the technologies to the new realities. We always think of the technology as disembodied and disembodied. And that's why my critical post human thought I say no, we need to keep the technologies, the environmental issues and the socio-economic together. The technologies are embedded and embodied, they need water, they need electricity, they need energy. Without the earth you cannot run your data centers. And you know what Elon Musk said when he was asked by the financial times, you got this huge data centers to feed your AI industry, but they use a lot of electricity and they need a lot of water to be cooled off. And Elon Musk said yes, we have our own generators, their solar power operator generators, so that we are autonomous. And then the newspaper went to check and the generators were diesel-operated generators. So how much can you hate this planet? That you make your technologies contingent on more environmental depletion and more extraction economy. If we could keep the more imbalance, then it would be possible to imagine that we embed these technologies in new economies that could actually be scaled on a multiplicity of cultures and cultural locations. They need not all be why boy is dreaming of going to heaven, surely. Yeah, like a lot of people I'm very excited and inspired and energized by this idea of planetary citizenship that you're articulating so well. But I also worry that concepts like the nation's state, you know, as unfit for purpose as it is becoming, it's so deeply sedimented in our social identity formation. It's so fiercely defended as such, violently defended. But if we ever do arrive at some sort of mass commitment to planetary citizenship, it's only going to happen on the other side of some sort of catastrophe. Like in the way that it took the Holocaust to get us to the universal declaration of human rights, it took the Great Depression to give us the modern welfare state. Do you worry that planetary citizenship will only emerge after something comparably devastating has taken place? No, there are not with you David and two issues. First of all, nation states are more necessary than ever and as terms of regulation. They need not be a colonial unitary nation state. The model of the EU federation of states or any international organization that is transnational and becomes a unit of reference to regulate and you need a territory to regulate. I am very concerned by cryptocurrencies because cryptocurrencies are an attack on national banks, on central banks. You have currencies delinked from territories, from nation states, from any regulation, a gift to organized crime. An organized crime is absolutely active on that front. So, nation states are, let's say, legal frameworks that are territorial in nature to regulate and govern the transition. And I do not think that the motor of human evolution is catastrophe. The first declaration of human rights is the French Revolution and reiterated by the American Revolution 1792 very, very limited. because it didn't give rights to women or to Jews or to black people. But it is an attempt that then developed over the centuries. I think there are a series of attempts in something that could be called a progress-oriented vision of human history. I am a daughter of the Enlightenment after all. And I do not think that the catastrophe that we are heading for is inevitable. I think that the crisis is real. But I think we need to get involved a lot more in solving it. One of the problems is a kind of passive resignation. It's too late. The problems are too big. I can't do anything. There is a lot that we can do as citizens to discuss these issues. And I think the first thing, and this is where everybody has to become a bit of a philosopher, take notice, take an overview of the scale of the problem, of what and the great opportunities are the quit understanding. Let's understand what's going on, and then let's get active to find ways of using these technological moments. In a different manner, it's programming differently. It's telling to the Jews, don't just consume these technologies. If we want to defeat the tech brothers attack on democracy, we have to develop our own technologies. It will be slower. It will not be break things in our move fast, but we can get to that. We don't have to rely only on one monolithic and monological system of thought. There can be surely a variety of ways of becoming posthuman, the spectrum of different ways of becoming AI driven. So I think experimenting, having the courage to understand properly and discuss with others, and then intergenerational, intercultural, international conversations. I think I've just given you the definition of planetary civics, David. I think you have. And look, I will just before we go. I'll just mention for the listeners that we have an episode coming up on Accelerationism, which is, of course, this philosophy of move fast and break things taken to its ultimate terrifying conclusion. But I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's been one that has talked me down from some terrifying conclusions of my own. And I hope that's been the same for everybody listening. Rosie Brudotti, great to talk and thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for the invitation. Keep on going. Rosie Brudotti, practice professor with RMIT University's College of Design and Social Context in Melbourne, professor Emerita at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and a whole lot of other things as well. There is so much more to know and to read about Rosie Brudotti. And we'll put a link to her website on our website. This has been the philosopher's zone produced on Bungalung Land by me, David Rutledge. Great to have you along this week and I hope you can join me next time. Bye for now. [Music]