The paper is here

The chart in Vox is particularly revealing, though I haven't found a gift link to it yet.

As you may know NOSTR (Notes and Other STuff via Relays) is another protocol for the fediverse like ActivityPub. In order to allow AP folks to communicate with NOSTR folks there are [at least] two "bridges" (mostr.pub & momostr.pink) created to allow certain level of server, client interaction between the two.

For some reason no lemmy communities nor users are ever found by either. It works just fine for mbin magazines and users. Do any of you have an idea why?

Automation undeniably has some useful applications. But the folks hyping modern “AI” have not only dramatically overstated its capabilities, many of them generally view these tools as a way to lazily cut corners or undermine labor. There’s also a weird innovation cult that has arisen around managers and LLM use, resulting in the mandatory use of tools that may not be helping anybody — just because.

The result is often a hot mess, as we’ve seen in journalism. The AI hype simply doesn’t match the reality, and a lot of the underlying financial numbers being tossed around aren’t based in reality; something that’s very likely going to result in a massive bubble deflation as the reality and the hype cycles collide (Gartner calls this the “trough of disillusionment,” and expects it to arrive next year).

One recent study out of MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in AI (yet). One of many reasons for this, as noted in a different recent Stanford survey (hat tip: 404 Media), is because the mass influx of AI “workslop” requires colleagues to spend additional time trying to decipher genuine meaning and intent buried in a sharp spike in lazy, automated garbage.

The survey defines workslop as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Somewhat reflective of America’s obsession with artifice. And it found that as use of ChatGPT and other tools have risen in the workplace, it’s created a lot of garbage that requires time to decipher:

“When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.”

Confusing or inaccurate emails that require time to decipher. Lazy or incorrect research that requires endless additional meetings to correct. Writing full of errors that requires supervisors to edit or correct themselves:

“A director in retail said: “I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research. I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

In this way, a technology deemed a massive time saver winds up creating all manner of additional downstream productivity costs. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of these technologies are being rushed into mass adoption in business and academia before they’re fully cooked. And by the fact the real-world capabilities of the products are being wildly overstated by both companies and a lazy media.

This isn’t inherently the fault of the AI, it’s the fault of the reckless, greedy, and often incompetent people high in the extraction class dictating the technology’s implementation. And the people so desperate to be innovation-smacked, they’re simply not thinking things through. “AI” will get better; though any claim of HAL-9000 type sentience will remain mythology for the foreseeable future.

Obviously measuring the impact of this workplace workslop is an imprecise science, but the researchers at the Stanford Social Media Lab try:

“Each incidence of workslop carries real costs for companies. Employees reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance of workslop. Based on participants’ estimates of time spent, as well as on their self-reported salary, we find that these workslop incidents carry an invisible tax of $186 per month. For an organization of 10,000 workers, given the estimated prevalence of workslop (41%), this yields over $9 million per year in lost productivity.”

The workplace isn’t the only place the rushed application of a broadly misrepresented and painfully under-cooked technology is making unproductive waves. When media outlets rushed to adopt AI for journalism and headlines (like at CNET), they, too, found that the human editorial costs to correct and fix all the problems, plagiarism, false claims, and errors really didn’t make the value equation worth their time. Apple found that LLMs couldn’t even do basic headlines with any accuracy.

Elsewhere in media you have folks building giant (badly) automated aggregation and bullshit machines, devoid of any ethical guardrails, in a bid to hoover up ad engagement. That’s not only repurposing the work of real journalists, it’s redirecting an already dwindling pool of ad revenue away from their work. And it’s undermining any sort of ethical quest for real, informed consensus in the authoritarian age.

This is all before you even get to the environmental and energy costs of AI slop.

Some of this are the ordinary growing pains of new technology. But a ton of it is the direct result of poor management, bad institutional leadership, irresponsible tech journalism, and intentional product misrepresentation. And next year is going to likely be a major reckoning and inflection point as markets (and people in the real world) finally begin to separate fact from fiction.

CNET had to correct most of its AI-written articles

CNET has issued corrections for over half of the AI-written articles the outlet recently attributed to its CNET Money team.

^{Igor Bonifacic (Engadget)}

404 Media

2025-09-23 15:41:11

AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable

A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research, based on a survey of 1,150 workers, is the latest analysis to suggest that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead has just increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”

The Harvard Business Review study came out the day after a Financial Times analysis of hundreds of earnings reports and shareholder meeting transcripts filed by S&P 500 companies that found huge firms are having trouble articulating the specific benefits of widespread AI adoption but have had no trouble explaining the risks and downsides the technology has posed to their businesses: “The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better,” the Financial Times found. “Most of the anticipated benefits, such as increased productivity, were vaguely stated and harder to categorize than the risks.”

Other recent surveys and studies also paint a grim picture of AI in the workplace. The main story seems to be that there is widespread adoption of AI, but that it’s not proving to be that useful, has not resulted in widespread productivity gains, and often ends up creating messes that human beings have to clean up. Human workers see their colleagues who use AI as less competent, according to another study published in Harvard Business Review last month. A July MIT report found that “Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return … Despite high-profile investment, industry-level transformation remains limited.” A June Gallup poll found that AI use among workers doubled over the last two years, and that 40 percent of those polled have used AI at work in some capacity. But the poll found that “many employees are using AI at work without guardrails or guidance,” and that “The benefits of using AI in the workplace are not always obvious. According to employees, the most common AI adoption challenge is ‘unclear use case or value proposition.’”

These studies, anecdotes we have heard from workers, and the rise of industries like “vibe coding cleanup specialists” all suggest that workers are using AI, but that they may not be leading to actual productivity gains for companies. The Harvard Business Review study proposes a possible reason for this phenomenon: Workslop.

The authors of that study, who come from Stanford University and the workplace productivity consulting firm BetterUp, suggest that a growing number of workers are using AI tools to make presentations, reports, write emails, and do other work tasks that they then file to their colleagues or bosses; this work often appears useful but is not: “Workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues,” they write.

The researchers say that surveyed workers told them that they are now spending their time trying to figure out if any specific piece of work was created using AI tools, to identify possible hallucinations in the work, and then to manage the employee who turned in workslop. Surveyed workers reported spending time actually fixing the work, but the researchers found that “the most alarming cost may have been interpersonal.”

“Low effort, unhelpful AI generated work is having a significant impact on collaboration at work,” they wrote. “Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output. Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37% saw that colleague as less intelligent.”

No single study on AI in the workplace is going to be definitive, but evidence is mounting that AI is affecting people’s work in the same way it’s affecting everything else: It is making it easier to output low-quality slop that other people then have to wade through. Meanwhile, Microsoft researchers who spoke to nurses, financial advisers, and teachers who use AI found that the technology makes people “atrophied and unprepared” cognitively.

Each study I referenced above has several anecdotes about individual workers who have found specific uses of AI that improve their own productivity and several companies have found uses of AI that have helped automate specific tasks, but most of the studies find that the industry- and economy-wide productivity gains that have been promised by AI companies are not happening. The MIT report calls this the “GenAI Divide,” where many companies are pushing expensive AI tools on their workers (and even more workers are using AI without explicit permission), but that few are seeing any actual return from it.

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

We are a family still trapped under ongoing bombardment in Northern Gaza.
We desperately need your help to evacuate to the south. Transportation costs have soared to over $2,000 — an amount we simply cannot afford.

Please, we are pleading for your support. Any contribution could help save our lives.
You are our lifeline. Please don’t leave us alone in this moment of despair
gofund.me/00439328

We are a family still trapped under ongoing bombardment in Northern Gaza.
We desperately need your help to evacuate to the south. Transportation costs have soared to over $2,000 — an amount we simply cannot afford.

Please, we are pleading for your support. Any contribution could help save our lives.
You are our lifeline. Please don’t leave us alone in this moment of despair
gofund.me/00439328

Shockingly, Perplexity says ‘the internet is better on Comet.’

Perplexity’s Comet browser is now available to everyone for free

Perplexity said its AI-powered web browser Comet and news service Comet Plus will be free to use globally.

^{Robert Hart (The Verge)}

US users stuck with AI ad targeting as EU users win more control over their feeds.

Meta won’t allow users to opt out of targeted ads based on AI chats

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}

Ampinel could be the salvation for 16-pin power connectors.

Nvidia's 16-pin time bomb could be defused by this $95 gadget — Ampinel offers load balancing that Nvidia forgot to include

^{Zhiye Liu (Tom's Hardware)}

One officer was recorded pressing the 'I' key more than 16,000 times

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

: One officer was recorded pressing the 'I' key more than 16,000 times

^{Brandon Vigliarolo (The Register)}

Meta's text-based platform Threads has taken another page from X's book and launched the Communities feature.

https://www.neowin.net/news/metas-threads-inches-closer-to-x-with-new-communities-feature/

All fields expanded, very long screenshot: imgur.com/a/steam-hardware-sof…

Note, the source will change every month. That's why I made a screenshot, so the discussion in this thread makes sense in the future. Source: store.steampowered.com/hwsurve…

Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit got +3.34% from previously 0%, while Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit lost -2.71%. So the rest of the 0.65% are either new users or upgraders from even older Linux Mint versions. Whatever the reason is, these two entries should have been a single one as Linux Mint 22 with 8.84%.

Also what is the category "Other"? It's almost 20% big, so this is not something to wave over. Bazzite got a good start, hopefully it will grow further. I'm surprised that CachyOS is this popular, much more than Ubuntu and Bazzite.

OC text by @thingsiplay@beehaw.org

cross-posted from: ibbit.at/post/70089

Demonstration on October 24, 2019, Conakry (Wikipedia Commons).

Following Guinea’s widely contested (and largely boycotted) constitutional referendum on September 21, 2025, Professor Mohamed Saliou Camara argues that the military junta has exploited the electoral process to establish authoritarian rule at the expense of social democracy.

In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, Camara, Professor of History, Philosophy, and Journalism and Chair of the Department of African Studies at Howard University in Washington, DC, shares his analysis of Guinea’s political crisis. As an authority on Guinean political and social history, Dr. Camara is the author of several works such as, His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single‑Party Politics in Guinea under Sékou Touré, Political History of Guinea since World War Two, and Health and Human Security in the Mano River Union. In his work, he also analyzes the country’s democratic transitions and derailments by the military junta under Colonel Mamady Doumbouya. Doumbouya promised a return to civilian rule but never delivered.

In this discussion, Camara delves into the junta’s suspension of oppositional political parties, independent electoral institutions, and the revision of the transition charter which basically amounts to allowing military figures to manipulate current and future elections. He summarizes the importance of civil society movements (youth-led) and heroic people like activists and journalists Foniké Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara. Their enforced disappearances in violation of international law symbolize the cost of resistance in today’s Guinean political climate.

Daniel Falcone: How do you explain the suspension of Guinea’s main opposition parties so close to the constitutional referendum and how does it compromise Guinean legitimacy?

Mohamed Saliou Camara: The only logical way the CNRD’s unilateral suspension of Guinea’s main opposition parties so close to the constitutional referendum can be explained is by considering it within the broader political climate of intimidation, cooptation, and exclusionary governance that the Doumbouya government has instituted with one thing in mind: having Mamady Doumbouya maintained in power through a highly undemocratic plebiscite.

In the past three years or so, Doumbouya and his CNRD have shown their true colors, turning the transition that they had pledged to lead in accordance with the will of the people and the common good of the country to a democratically elected leadership into a nationwide campaign of intimidation of democratic actors and civic leaders, many of whom have been silenced or forced into exile. Opposition leaders like Cellou Dalein Diallo of the UFDG, Sidya Touré of the UFR and, of course, former President Alpha Condé of the RPG are considered persona non grata while members of their parties are subjected to all kinds of political manipulation. Evidently, this unfolding climate of undemocratic governance does tarnish Guinea’s international image and, worse of all, it takes the country years back by undoing the political, economic, and sociocultural progress it has made against all odds.

The massive propaganda that the CNRD has been spreading notwithstanding, most Guineans are disappointed and worried, because when Doumbouya’s junta overthrew Alpha Condé and justified the coup by citing Condé’s falsification of the existing constitution to run for a third term, Guineans welcomed the change and were encouraged by Doumbouya’s pledge to return the country the constitutional order in a timely and democratic manner. Now, Guineans are disappointed by his betrayal of the people’s trust and expectations. Furthermore, they blame Alpha Condé for having made Doumbouya the powerful head of the newly created Special Forces and having provided him with the opportunity or excuse to orchestrate the September 2021 coup.

Daniel Falcone: What are the consequences of the newly created Directorate General of Elections (DGE) for “fairness and transparency” in the recent referendum? (This may impact the general elections upcoming in December).

Mohamed Saliou Camara: Just like the constitution being touted for a referendum, the DGE is customized to give legitimacy to Doumbouya’s desire and determination to stay in power against the pledge he made when he overthrew Alpha Condé. To be fair, though, the CENI (Independent Electoral National Commission) that it replaced also catered to the powers that be when it came to managing elections and tallying the results. For instance, the Guinean electorate is still baffled by the CENI’s decision to declare Condé winner of the second round of the 2010 presidential election over Cellou Dalein Diallo who had won the first round with 40% of the votes against Condé with only 18%. In fact, CENI’s bad reputation can be traced back to the Lansana Conté era.

Therefore, I would argue that keeping that agency or replacing it with a DGE makes little difference in the general context of what one may call Guinea’s non-democratic electoralism. We should not, however, lower the standards or our expectations, if for no other reason because two wrongs don’t make a right. Yet, we should point out that elections in Guinea have very rarely been transparent, free, and fair; regardless of what national officials or foreign observers say. We, who have experienced, witnessed, and been caught up in the whirlwind of Guinean politics, we know what it has been and why the current situation is a culmination of a long spiral.

Daniel Falcone: To what extent does the draft constitution impact the transition charter’s promise that junta leaders would not be eligible to run in future elections? It looks like political groundwork is being laid for Mamady Doumbouya to stay in power.

Mohamed Saliou Camara: The short answer to this question is that the draft constitution alters everything in the original transition Charter. In fact, and as indicated earlier, before the issuance of the Charter itself, Doumbouya had made a solemn pledge that neither he nor another member of his junta would be a candidate in the elections that will come at the end of the transition. Guineans, Africans, and the International Community gave that pledge the value and momentum that it should carry as the word of honor of a military officer to his nation. In the last three years, however, a massive campaign has been developed through comités de soutien that popped up across the country in highly corrupt circles to advocate for Doumbouya to be the candidate in the next presidential election.

Doumbouya’s CNRD has been distributing large amounts of money, cars, and similar gifts to people of all walks of life who are eager to create or adhere to such support committees and promote the “Oui” vote in the constitutional referendum. This is happening while Guinea’s Central Bank is running out of cash even to pay government employees. Where is that money and those cars coming from to fuel the rampant trend of political corruption? Many Guineans suspect that they are coming from the massive amounts of gold, bauxite, iron ore and similar mineral resources that foreign countries and industries are extracting from their country that remains impoverished despite its immense natural resources.

Daniel Falcone: What role are civil society actors and youth-led movements playing in the current moment and could you speak to the significance of figures like Foniké Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara in the pro-democracy struggle? I met organizers protesting by the UN that commented on the invisibility of their rights and human rights issues.

Mohamed Saliou Camara: Civil society actors, especially youth-led movements, rose against the CNRD’s campaign after it reneged its pledge to lead a legitimate transition and let the people choose democratically the country’s next leadership. They began to hold peaceful protests and town halls to mobilize, inform, sensitize, and guide civil society communities so they can decisively stand their ground and help preserve the legitimate rights and interests of the nation. This is exactly when the CNRD began showing its true colors by arresting, kidnapping, detaining, and killing leaders and members of these movements.

Such leaders as Fonikè Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara, whose fate remains unknown to this day, are henceforth heroes whose example many more are determined to follow, especially within the Guinean Diaspora. Despite what the protesters around the UN told you, Guinean Diaspora protests are more visible because the junta has unleashed a campaign of intolerance against anyone who challenges its intentions and dictatorial actions inside the country.

The post Guinea and the Challenges for Social Democracy and the Left appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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cross-posted from: ibbit.at/post/70103

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The audience judged Bello’s position the more persuasive of the two sides.

In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas Friedman of The New York Timeslampooned those of us who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a Jurassic past.

Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing poverty in both the Global North and the Global South, deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries, massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis, the rise of the far right, and intensifying geopolitical conflict.

Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.

Snapshots of a Dreary Era

Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:

Snapshot No 1: Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel, and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The “China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of 2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War II, in 1941.

Snapshot 2: The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of over $1 trillion.

Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

[I] want to stress that the word “collapse” [in the case of the United States] is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1950 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 per cent in 2010–2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.

Accompanying this massive increase in inequality in the United States has been an increase in poverty. Globally, according to available data, since the financial crises of 2007-08, wealth inequality has risen, and now the top one percent owns half the world’s total household wealth.

Let me turn from this nostalgic recounting of the past, and once more, let me focus on our good friend Apple. It is now leading the so-called reshoring process. It has read the handwriting on the wall and, though this will negatively affect its bottom line and scramble its operations, to protect the remainder of its super profits, it is leading the reshoring of its supply chains, with a planned $600 billion investment in the manufacture within the United States of its iPhone, iPad, MacBook, as well as in the fabrication of semi-conductor chips. Boasting that Apple manufacturing plans will create 450,000 jobs in the United States, CEO Tim Cook admitted to being a hostage to Trump’s push to deglobalize the operations of American firms, saying, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.” Where Apple goes, others follow, among them U.S. chipmakers Intel and Nvidia, automotive leader Tesla, and pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson.

But American firms are not the only hostages to politics. Among the foreign firms that have bowed to Trump’s ultra-protectionist push via unilateral tariff increases by regionalizing or nationalizing their supply lines are Hyundai Motors, Honda Motors, Samsung electronics, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.

Although reshoring or relocation has proceeded by fits and starts over the last decade, under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, it is likely to accelerate over the next few years, despite constraints and inefficiencies, as economic nationalism rises in the United States and the West. In 2023, an exhaustive study of North American firms showed that that more than 90 percent of manufacturing companies in the region had moved at least some of their production or supply chain in the past five years. Another study conducted at the same time showed that by 2026, 65 percent of surveyed companies would be buying most key items from regional suppliers, compared to just 38 percent in 2023. With Trump imposing unilateral tariffs on Mexico and Canada, companies are realizing that relocating to the NAFTA partners may not appease Trump; they will have to relocate to the United States itself, despite the disruption and chaos that might accompany that process, such as that which saw 300 workers vital to the Hyundai facility in Georgia arrested by ICE and deported to Korea.

Rage: Triggered by the Left, Expropriated by the Right

The tremendous global anger and resentment at the dystopia to which corporate-driven globalization has led us is perhaps the biggest reason why deglobalization will be the trend for a long, long while. That rage first came from the left, which inflicted a reversal from which corporate-driven globalization never recovered during the historic Battle of Seattle in December 1999. But it was Donald Trump and other forces of the far right that successfully rode that anger to political triumph in the United States and Europe in the coming decades.

In other words, the politics of rage, not the economics of narrow efficiency in the service of corporate profitability is now in command. In the United States, globalization created two antagonistic communities, one that benefited from it due to their superior education and incomes, the other that suffered from it owing to their lack of both economic and educational advantages. The latter is the vast sector of the population that Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables,” but is better known as the “Make America Great Again” folks or MAGA base. That community will not easily forget either the sufferings brought about by the deindustrialization spearheaded by Apple and other well-known TNCs or the slights they endured from Hillary, whom they regard as being in the pocket of Wall Street.

A second reason for the strength of the deglobalization wave is that the multilateral order that served as the political canopy or system of governance for free trade and unobstructed capital flows is on the brink of collapse. The World Trade Organization, which was once described as the jewel in the crown of multilateralism, no longer functions as a system for governing world trade, partly owing to sabotage by the United States, when under Obama and later Trump and Biden, Washington could no longer rely on favorable rulings in trade disputes. The International Monetary Fund has not recovered from its reputation of promoting austerity in developing countries and its push for unfettered capital flows that brought down the Asian tiger economies. The World Bank also is discredited for its complicity in imposing austerity measures as well as for the wrong-headed policy of export-oriented industrialization for Global North markets that the Bank prescribed as the route to prosperity for developing countries—one that is now especially fatal for those who followed it given the ultra-protectionism sweeping the United States.

Third, national security, both economic security and military security, has displaced prosperity through trade and investment as the principal consideration in relations among countries. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have banned the transfer of advanced computer chips to China, and more such measures will follow. Reorganizing and regionalizing, if not nationalizing, access to and supply lines for key resources for advanced technologies like lithium, rare earth, copper, cobalt, and nickel is now an overriding concern, the aim being not only to monopolize these sensitive commodities but to prevent competitors from getting hold of them.

Two Routes to a Deglobalized World

The issue is not the inevitability of deglobalization but what form deglobalization will take. Deglobalization marked by ultra-protectionism in trade relations, unilateralism and isolationism in economic and military relations, and the creation of a domestic market geared principally towards the interests of the racial and ethnic majority is one way to deglobalize. That is indeed where Trump is leading the United States.

But there is another way to deglobalize, the key elements of which I laid out in my book Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy 25 years ago.

One, we do not demand a withdrawal into autarky but continued participation in the international economy, but in a way that ensures that instead of swamping it, international market forces are harnessed to assist in building the capacity to sustain a vibrant domestic economy.

Two, we propose that via a judicious combination of equality-enhancing redistributive measures and reasonable tariffs and quotas, the internal market will again become the engine of a healthy economy instead of being an appendage of an export-oriented economy.

Third, we promote participation in a plurality of economic groupings–those that allow countries to maintain policy space for development, instead of imprisoning them in a single global body, the World Trade Organization, with a uniform set of rules, one that favors the interests of transnational corporations instead of the interests of their citizens.

Fourth, inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi, we advocate the re-embedding of the market in the community, so that instead of driving the latter, as in global capitalism, the market is subject to the values and rhythms of the community.

And finally, in contrast to the far right, we uphold the notion of community as one where membership is not determined by blood or ethnicity but by a shared belief in democratic values.

That is the alternative we offered a quarter of a century ago. This fluid system of international trade that allows especially the economies of the Global South the space to pursue sustainable development is not far from the flexible global trading system before the takeoff of globalization in the late eighties, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Twenty five years ago, we were promoting and we continue to promote a route of progressive deglobalization, one that avoids the extreme of the doctrinaire dystopia of corporate-driven globalization, on the one hand, and, on the other, savage unilateralism and protectionism. This route to deglobalization is not new, nor, some would claim, particularly radical. Keynes’ common sense advice, addressing the global situation in the 1930s, is very relevant to our times, “Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.”

Had we taken this route, I dare say, the chances are great that we would not be in the terrible mess the world is in today, with the threat not only of trade war but of real war at its doorsteps. There is still time to take this route, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.

The post De-Globalization: Towards the Left or the Right? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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