What the hell is Globalization?

The two big ideas that seem to be connected most closely with the word globalization are almost opposite in terms of morality. The first, and, in my circles, most common big idea is the capitalist exploitation of the majority of the world's non-white people and their land by the minority of whites. This exploitation seems often to wear the clothes of the more moral connotation of globalization - the great equalizer. Globalization, according to this view, is making the world flat, bringing wealth to the poor, cell phones and internet, factory jobs and Coca-Cola. Of course, most intelligent people I know realize that the philanthropic motives that greedy corporate PR campaigns profess are bullshit, but this does not mean that globalization is all bad. There are benefits to interconnectivity, even if the West seems to invade native cultures like a virus, we can still offer impoverished societies ideas and resources to inoculate themselves against the chaos of growth.

This is just a long intro to a few pieces of media that I have come across lately. Most of them reinforce the depressing reality that us rich folk (...face it, if you're an American with a computer, you are rich. Rich, rich, rich.), are living on the backs of the rest of the world. But some of these pieces offer some optimism and maybe even a hint at what the hell we are supposed to do about the mess we are complicit in making.

The Story of Stuff is a lecture by a smart and eloquent woman named Annie Leonard accompanied by some cute black and white animations. It explains how our production and consumption patterns work. Some dreary, and some uplifting highlights, the toxicity of today's breast milk, the concept of "externalized costs", and a list of things you can do to move the planet another way.

Less practical, except insofar as having a clearer concept of what the world of people looks like is practical, is the website Gapminder.org.

"Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels."

...or some fucking amazing graphs that animate and illustrate global trends like, population, mortality rates, internet use per capita, or birth rate. The thing that got me hooked was this lecture by Hans Roslings, titled optimistically, "The seemingly impossible is possible." He uses graphs of UN statistics to breakdown a lot of misconceptions about the so -called "third world."

Last night, I fell asleep listening to an article from a 2005 issue of The New Yorker about a character by the name of Jeffrey Sachs, who has been popping up everywhere. He is an economist who espouses the optimistic view that we can eradicate poverty in our lifetime. He also loves capitalism and has been criticized for introducing harmful economic practices to developing nations, and changing his tune when he began to see some of these negative consequences. (I downloaded the article from a promising website called AssistiveMedia.)

He is mentioned as well in an episode of one of my favorite radio programs, Open Source with Christopher Lydon. Julia Buxton is the only guest and she brilliantly analyzes the fallacy of "free-market cures for Latin economies." In 2006, they did a show with Jeffrey Sachs as a guest. I haven't listened to that one yet.

There is an amazing article that appeared in Vanity Fair. It is about "feral zones" in developing countries, in particular it examines the amazing power and organization of Brazil's largest prison gang, the Primero Comando da Capital (PCC).


Homo Faber

What was Hannah Arendt talking about again? Speaking of Hannah Arendt...and again.