Dr. bird Missed the News Article Deadline about Commonalities Between the 1960s/70s & 2020s

A comprehensive and probably far-too-critical-to-be-included commentary I sent to a journalist in a U.K. time zone about similarities between the 1960s/70s and the 2020s.

To understand why the same themes emerged in the 1960s / 70s as the 2020s, we need to go back in time.

People often like to forget that the u.s. was built by enlightenment subjects (colonial-minded able-bodied cismen) who stole land and genocided Indigenous folks. These men operated from a narrow lens of lived experience, with the assumption that they knew best. Their design had no one else's humanity in mind but their own. This has le[a]d, literally and figuratively to endless gruesome man-i-festations. Through my critical media ecological (blurred art, activist, academic) work, I approach these u.s. foundationally built in inequitable (and persistently unsustainable climate crises catalyzing) problems, and reveal ways they've manifested, similarly but uniquely, especially in both the Civil Rights (1960s/70) and what I've coined the "Envirusment" (2020s) eras.

In my new book, "We Are F**king Machines: Why We Are Like This and What We Can Do About It," I discuss these themes extensively. To understand "how" and "why" we were like this in the 60s/70 and are like this now, in rebranded algorithmic, envirusmental, and artificially intelligence forms, I've used a media ecological approach. For those who are unfamiliar, media ecologists study media in a broad sense, and particularly the ecological impact of any one new "media" when introduced into society. Since 2019, some colleagues and I have added critical cultural studies into the "field," bridging new insights beyond canonical limitations. For me, this has looked like continuing other critically minded media ecologists work, like Dr. Sarah Sharma, who has argued that systems of power are machinelike, and thus operate as "medias".

In other words, following that train of thought, I outline how I see that, extending far beyond simple citational politics, humans continue to act as media (which are never neutral, and reinforce rhetorically clear colonial capitalist biases), tracing out how hundreds of years of limited religious, political, and scientific authorities (aka colonial capitalist miseducated and disinformed humans acting as media in society building processes).

People forget that colonial logics were/are taken for granted, like fish to water, creating distinctly dehumanizing relationship(s) between us and our own bodies (leading to disassociation, denialism, self-harm, somatic illnesses, etc.), violent relationships (intergenerational traumas caused by sex miseducation, normalized and uncriminalized discriminations [framed as jokes or everyday conversation "common sense"], domestic violences, sexual harassment and violences, trafficking, etc.), community violences (that blame individuals for systemic problems [inhumane and medically inaccurate legislation, medical knowledge, environmental injustices and racisms, military industrial complex rationalized violences, genocides, etc.]), and violent relationships between each of us, corporations, and the planet (born from a biased colonial belief that land, any dehumanized people, and (other) animals can be owned, exploited, and used as if all reachable parts of Earth and lifeforms here are simultaneously expendable, incarceratable, and can be extracted endlessly).

In other words, we have come to take trademark colonial capitalist logics and practices (of manifest destiny, competition, profitability, quantification, the myth of canonical, legal, and scientific Objectivity [lack of bias] and universality [subjective ideas framed as one-size-fits all], efficiency, optimization, etc.) for granted. And as Max Weber detailed, these logics of colonial capitalist "rationality," implemented over hundreds of years, have removed the heart from the mind and replaced emotionality with logic, conflating a falsely superiorized imperialist white supremacist masculinity with mind-centric thinking and logical reasoning, while simultaneously bastardizing (especially Black and Brown) femininity with embodied knowledge, feeling, and emotionality. These themes of course bleed into, racialize, and engender every part of our lives, inclining the authority gap.

George Ritzer took Weber's work further with his term McDonaldization, detailing how these ultimately eugenic (racist, ableist, cisheterosexist, classist, etc.), short-sighted, profit centric biases (logics), and bureaucratic standards (practices) have, especially, since the 90s, bleed into every sphere of our lives, including sex.

Meanwhile, the feminization of labor took place. A time where folks had had enough with old eugenics normal colonial capitalist lifestyles of the 1950s, and continued fighting for, deserved but always dismissed, Civil Rights.

Often when describing this time period, people born in the united states repeat the limited knowledge of what textbooks taught us, while also forgetting that it was about 8 seconds ago in the grand scheme of human history that most of us were granted anywhere near human rights equal to the "founding fathers" of this nation.

For example, despite the well-known desegregation of united states schools in the 1950s, and (often single issue white) first and second wave feminist efforts, it wasn't until the early 1960s with both the Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action, outlawing sex and racial discrimination in the workplace, as well as the Voting Rights Act, that finally granted all Black folks ability to vote. But, by that time, redlining, gentrification, and the White Flight had already taken place, and/or were well underway. Therefore, white supremacist humans, who were acting as media of society building processes, had already color-paved environmental racisms and injustices into u.s. infrastructure, inclining educational and voting lines in ways that ensured systemic racisms continued.

Then, it wasn't until Roe v. Wade and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the 1970s that anyone assigned female at birth (who were presumed to be women because although biological sex and gender have never been as simple as colonial binaries, they were falsely, yet systematically, conflated as the same), could open a bank account in their own name by themselves, allowing for any semblance of reproductive and financial independence for the first time in this country's history. It was also around this time that more people assigned female at birth were going to college than people assigned male at birth. But, again, Ever So Coincidentally, not long after that, cost of education was gradually raised and a debt market was created to ensnare barely legal students into loans and credit, ensuring that each new generation was more educated and even more in debt.

Simultaneously, education was being deregulated, corporatized, privatized, and specialized. Keeping in mind, as well, that it is well-documented that the transnational capitalist class (the billionaire class, that monopolize all, now transnational and globalized, industries to this day) since especially the 1980s ushered in both globalization and a simultaneous explosion of private for profit prisons. And following the blueprint of white surpremacists who acted as media before them, police officers disproportionately racially profiled and incarcerated Black and Brown folks. Capitalists didn't make changes out of the goodness of their hearts. They were seeking out cheaper laborers, and so these neoliberal, carceral, and expansive changes received bipartisan support, ushering in the age of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was cast as a great idea, allowing diversity to flourish under capitalism!

That sounds great, right?! What could possible have gone wrong with more inclusion? Well, as especially Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z now know, these changes were not all good news. So, what is neoliberalism anyway?

In short, neoliberalism is a bipartisan philosophic and economic model which began in the 1970s, but really took off in the 80s, and was popularized with Reagan. What it (aka the humans as media who enforced it) did is corporatized, privatized, and deregulated every industry (media, agriculture, transportation, education, etc.) to this day. Incrementally, these changes didn't seem like a big deal. But, now with insights from the last 80+ years, we see it catalyzed environmental, relational, algorithmic, envirusmental, and artificially intelligent ecological devastations. These changes, which run the government like a business, prioritize profit over all of our lives. And this is regardless of intention, causing -- quite literally -- every national and global human rights issue continuing to ecologically devastate us.

And to make matters worse, the education system trains us into the same biases this nation was founded upon, forcing most "greatest minds of a generation" down useful, but disconnected, specialities. In doing so, we often see only our own uniquely devastating perspectives, but often fail to understand the sociohistorical biases built into our training as features, as well as the ecological nature of the ways higher education was designed as a media to churn out colonial capitalist biased democrats and republicans. Then, the two party system itself has its own filtering mechanisms, grooming and selecting their candidates to ensure they'll repeat party approved language. This had lead to both corporate democrats and increasingly fascist conservative parties to agree, regardless of intention, that our rights are no longer a "cheap labor benefit", but instead, a liability. Ergo, why one u.s. party is following the Project 2025 playbook and the other serves as a controlled opposition to fascism.

So, how did we get here? Despite all the benefits that a colonial capitalist system has brought folks in the global north (and, especially, the united states), from treating the Global South like an enormous expendable labor force and/or trash can, when you pan out to see the fullness of my Dr. bird's view, most of us now live lives so completely domesticated into legal, political, and other forms of white-washed professionalized respectability politics that we either have forgotten that everything is made up, and that we need to stop fascism by any means necessary OR we've been inculcated into cultures of fear, and reliance on this unsustainable system manufacturing our consent via dependence (for food, water, housing) and learned powerlessness that we truly don't know what to do but lash out at each other like sports teams and vote.

Meanwhile, both parties receive massive funding from the billionaire class, while most of us live paycheck to paycheck or worse, becoming sicker, more disabled, and dying from a virus global governments, largely built upon the same taken for granted eugenics logics and practices as the united states choose to ignore for profit.

It is no surprise that many folks don't trust eugenics trained alleged "experts," that eat the rich is a popular hashtag, and many folks cheered when billionaires submersibles implode, and/or when a health insurance company's CEO was assassinated.

This year alone, billionaires invested $200 billion into AI, with the explicit intention of replacing human workers. And ChatGPT is replacing both students and professors labor in classrooms, while most folks ignore the fact that six years of COVID-19 research continues to show, we are all getting sicker and sicker via repeat infections.

This, and more, is why in my book I extensively detail how this rotten u.s. foundation, laid by biased "founding fathers" and proceeding canon, le[a]d to Limited Intelligences of our Environmental Intelligence, Relational Intelligence, Algorithmic Intelligence, Envirusmental Intelligence, and now, most recently, Artificial Intelligence.

This is all to say, the reason we are seeing the same themes in the 1960s/70s and the 2020s is because we have come to view the human body as a "machine". The way we use language builds our worlds, for better and for worse. And in this (un)sustainable colonial capitalist system, that perspective has been taken too literally, and the impact is that most everything in this system is exploiting, contaminating, sickening, disabling, and killing us. We require fundamental human changes that must begin with a restructuring of K-12 and higher education to support liberation for all and regeneration of ecological symbiosis. This is the most connected era in human history. We have never been more capable of making changes. We must share our lived experiences, connecting them to sociohistorical patterns (especially those experienced by disenfranchised folks), to actively rebuild a system that, unlike this colonial capitalist system, genuinely allows us all the space to process these seemingly endless gruesome man-i-festations, providing us what we all deserve: to not just survive, but thrive.