Three Spheres of Mark Stahlman vs the Three Spheres of Michel Bauwens

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

The Stahlman Three Spheres vs the Bauwens Three Spheres

I have recently discovered the work of Mark Stahlman, President of the Center for the Study of Digital Life, who interprets human history and the present geopolitical moment, by dividing it in Three Spheres: East, West, and Digital. I make no claim to fully understand Stahlman’s though and analysis, though I acknowledge it is based on a vast knowledge base and deep lifelong engagement with the effect of technology on human society, i.e., ‘what technology does to us’.

In short, the triarchical division is based on the three underlying forms of language that shape our reality:

• The East, mainly China, was shaped by the form of its logographic writing, where images directly represent meanings

• The West was shaped by its alphabet

• Digital is shaped by it binary code

For Stalhman these are efficient ‘Forms’ in the Aristotelian sense, with interact with the effect of technologies in particular ways.

To make a long story short, with the death of ‘electric’ media and its replacement by digital media, the Western globalist dream is dying and actually already dead; but the Chinese East is reconnecting with its past tradition and reviving its civilization, while the Digital is upending everything, since its forces want to eliminate the human and create artificial self-regulating systems that dispense with human labor and decision-making altogether.

See Mark Stahlman’s stimulating editorial here at [1].

It definitely helps to see the current moment in a different way, and there is a lot to learn from this vision and interpretation of history, which is also actionable in different ways.

Paradoxically, I had arrived at my own ‘Three Spheres’ understanding, which is substantially different, although related.

My reading is the following:

I see history as a competition between relational grammars (Fiske), modes of exchange (Karatani), or as I call them ‘modes of coordination’. Michael Hudson comes close to this interpretation as well.

• The East is the state-sovereignist option, born with the civilizational states that replaces kinship-based tribalism, and their Axial Age ethics. In this model, a public institution, the state, is paramount to keep the peace in a society based on classes and a division of labor. Hudson shows how the imperial form dominated the eastern side of the Eurasian continent for several millennia, allowing for sometimes dynamic markets, but keeping them in check, especially the ‘creditor class’, by instituting Clean State Legislation and Jubilees which protected the internal populations from slavery and bondage. Even today, Russia and China have strong states that substantially control the capitalist forces and prevent their full autonomy.

• The ‘Western’ way started when the creditor class took power in Greece, it created a revolt that invented political democracy in the Greek polis. In other words, the system was based on maritime power, the domination of trade routes, the power of the creditor class but mitigated by the counter-institutions of the plebs, creating a system of assemblies and democracy. Rome’s tribunate co-existed with the domination of the propertarian patrician class, and persisted in medieval law, eventually allowing the bourgeoisie to emancipate itself in the free cities, and to create a capitalist world at its image. This ongoing struggle has produced WWI, which eliminated the imperial form; WWII in which new state sovereignist challenges endangered the hegemony of parliamentary democracy (fascism and Stalinism). The West at first subdued the Soviet system, but China found the formula to use the benefits of market dynamics without its state being over run with it. With the capitalist crisis of 2008, western neoliberalism’s hegemony ended, creating a ‘multi-polar’ world, where again, the two systems are battling it out in Ukraine, and Russia has joined the state-sovereignist axis.

• The Digital Sphere stands for the third coordination system, that of mutual coordination or stigmergy. This started with the universalization of open-source dynamics, which strongly contributed to Chinese dominance through the Shanzhai production system; the market-state synthesis of China has strong cybernetic features as well. it has previously destroyed the Soviet system, which had failed to adapt to the cybernetic potential (see Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, for how the Russians invented and then destroyed their internet, signing their death warrant). In the West, the digital has created the Transhumanist turn in the netarchical technical ruling class and its now dominant platform capitalist model, and the monstrosity of woke identitarianism in the managerial classes at their service, which must more properly be seen as the shadow side of the Digital. In a second period, the Digital has created the Crypto Upgrade. Despite its libertarian and propertarian biases, it has created the first of many socially sovereign currencies that operate non-territorrially outside of single state and corporate control; it has created a powerful business model to supercharge open source modes of production. It signifies the shift towards open ecosystemic collaboration across borders. The Digital Sphere creates the conditions for a civilizational shift towards a fourth form of Civilization, the Cosmo-Local Civilization, where ‘everything that is heavy is local, and everything that is light is global and shared’, i.e. the combination of relocalized distributed manufacturing, thermodynamically informed of its material limitations, coupled with trans-local Protocol Cooperatives, which are the seed forms for a new type of trans-local institution, the Magisteria of the Commons, which can protect future generations, the non-human life forms and the long-term availability of material resources.

• But here is the big question: after Peak-Globalization, and with unstable multi-polarity emerging, with the potential scenario of a Chinese hegemon on the horizon (which is not a certainty in my opinion, a lot of material realities militate against it), how can we achieve a non-oppressive Planetarisation, which is ongoing. Yes, Globalization is Dead, and it is now effectively bifurcating, with the financial, technological and supply chain stacks splitting in two, but that does not obviate the fact that a whole host of problems can no longer be solved at the purely local or even separate Civilizational level. The East, which is also the West before the 16th cy bifurcation, may want to accept legal egalitarianism, civil rights, and the rights of the person; the West, in accelerated civilizational decline and subject to the rapid ascendancy of a Antinomian cult, may want to reconnect not only with the distributed and democratic traditions of its medieval civilization, but with the Axial Age ethics in order to fight the ‘demonic’ aspects of the transhuman digital; the Digital forces must not choose the Transhumanist and Neo-Segregationist paths. A healthy ‘cybernetic’ future must remain centered on a humanity centered around the service to Life and the regeneration of the Earth, and perhaps, beyond.