Are we screwed, p.21
Are We Screwed?, page 21
This definitely wasn’t the type of scene I was used to frequenting. I’m not moved to dance by anarchist brass bands. I don’t join singalongs. I’ll probably never wear a pink wig and suspenders out in public. But after all the countless hours I’d spent listening to UN delegates drone on about “ratcheting mechanisms” and “intended nationally determined contributions,” the energy and the passion and the humor all around me were a catharsis. It felt important to be here. “I don’t consider myself a climate activist,” a Londoner my age, Jon Wiltshire, explained at one point. “But look at the science. If we don’t make major changes, we could be locked into three degrees. If civil society doesn’t keep the pressure on, then who will?”
Part of that pressure came from reminding the world again and again what is being destroyed right now by our addiction to oil, coal, and gas. “Our people are suffering,” a Lakota woman from North Dakota, Eaglewoman, told a crowd of people at the far end of Avenue d’Iéna. “They’re killing our people on the front lines of fossil fuel extraction.” It was equally important to remind ourselves that we are all in this thing together. That our identities should transcend the national borders we were born in. I looked around. There was a dude playing the tuba. A South Pacific woman urging people to defend “Mother Earth.” Students taking selfies on their iPhones. A French intellectual silently smoking his pipe. If we truly wanted a less destructive status quo, there could be no more us versus them. We had to discard the notion that we’re all isolated members of competing countries.
To Chloe Maxmin, the young divestment leader we met in Chapter 5, the climate talks had proven there could be no more “human as usual” for her generation. “The agreement represents the best of what humans have learned to do over centuries: to use the political arts of compromise and negotiation to overcome conflict and unite disparate groups,” she wrote. “But here’s the thing: COP21 demonstrates that even the best of what humans have learned to do is not enough. The climate emergency demands something else, something that lies beyond the known threshold of human political arts.” She went on: “We need to find new ways of being in which we are all on the same side, supporting one another as we confront the limits of physics.”46
Today’s demonstration seemed to provide a tiny glimpse of what such a world could look like. “Climate change is a global issue, and we need to fight together,” Ekaterine Mghebrishvili explained when I asked why she had traveled more than a thousand miles from the Republic of Georgia to be here. We looked out across the crowd in front of us: people from every part of the world singing and dancing and laughing. “It’s important to feel this energy,” the young woman went on, taking a drag on her cigarette. “When it’s all over, we need to take all this energy back to our countries, because the climate is not just a problem for Paris, it’s everyone’s problem.” She put out her smoke and disappeared into the crowd.
I figured it was time to go. Though it seemed unlikely anyone was going to be teargassed today, I didn’t want to push my luck. As I got onto the Métro that would take me back to the echinacea pills and herbal tea and other flu supplies I’d stockpiled at my Airbnb in central Paris, I reflected on the events of the last two weeks with equal parts hope and cynicism. You could make a compelling case for both. The year 2015, after all, had been the warmest in history. “It was much, much warmer than 2014, and 2014 itself was a record,” the NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt later explained.47 Yet the year also contained some surprisingly positive news. Global greenhouse gas emissions were set to decline 0.6 percent in 2015 after growing an average of 2.4 percent a year over the last decade. This was achieved “despite strong growth in gross domestic product worldwide,” noted the Stanford scientist Rob Jackson.48
There is no guarantee this trend will persist. Much of it depends on declining coal consumption in China. If India’s appetite for coal simply takes place, and Donald Trump makes good on his promise to revive America’s ailing coal industry, it’s difficult to imagine how we can limit temperature rise to the 1.5 degrees necessary to ensure a stable future on this planet. “We are a long way from where we need to be,” Erlend and Daniel wrote in a Facebook post on the final day of COP21. “But today for the first time the world has said we will try and get there together.” The agreement that 186 leaders had signed was an historic renunciation of a status quo that for three decades of climate talks had put national interests over the global one. “From here it is up to all of us to ensure that the pledge the global community has made on this day is met,” they wrote.
On that final point, Morgan Curtis wholeheartedly agreed. To her, the deal signed on the final day of COP21 was “woefully inadequate.” It lacked any binding protections for the world’s youngest and poorest citizens. “The text has no mention of fossil fuels,” she observed. “And we know who is to blame: the corporate interests that have ensured it doesn’t.”49 But she didn’t the consider COP21 to have been a waste of time at all. The two weeks she’d spent with young people from more than 196 different nations had given her a clearer sense of her place in the world. She now saw her own actions as part of a global struggle: “Taking that step to be a part of something bigger than yourself only gives you a sense of meaning.”
And that, perhaps, was the most important realization to be had in Paris. People my age had grown up in a world that encouraged them to distrust others. We were told that life is a competition, and that whoever doesn’t put self-interest first will lose out to someone who does. Our attempts to imagine a better future were deemed unfeasible and naïve. But in Paris thousands of young people found a collective voice in their demand for 1.5 degrees. And thanks to allies like de Brum, the moral urgency of the demand, and the global worldview it represented, it became impossible to ignore. The Métro was pulling into République. As I left the station, I no longer felt as powerless as I had on day one. Paris held out the possibility of a new status quo, a better way of structuring our world, a new way of being. And in the next chapter, I’ll investigate the young Silicon Valley movement claiming to put that promise into action.
7
The True Meaning of Sharing
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers has a radically different perspective on our society than the Silicon Valley leaders who claim to take inspiration from her culture. It comes from the fact that she’s spent much of her adult life making films about the injustices inflicted upon indigenous people. Her work is rooted in her experience as a young indigenous woman with deep ancestral ties to two continents. She thinks that those ties—and all planetary life—are threatened by the prevailing political and economic structures of our modern world. Elle-Máijá’s films are a radical challenge to them. “I feel like I have a responsibility to do something that effects positive change,” she says.1 In that regard she has an unlikely potential ally. A leader of the new youth-driven economic model arising from Silicon Valley claims to be directly influenced by indigenous cultures. He says he desires the same future as Elle-Máijá: one that’s fairer, safer, and less destructive to the planet. Yet the $335 billion industry he’s helping to create has been accused of building the opposite.
To understand how Elle-Máijá sees the world, you have go to back in time to before she was even born. “My parents have this sort of mythical love story,” Elle-Máijá once told CBC Radio.2 They first met in 1981 at a global conference for indigenous peoples in Australia. Elle-Máijá’s mom is a Blackfoot woman from the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta, who at the time was involved in a national social movement to get indigenous rights recognized in the Canadian constitution. Her dad, meanwhile, is Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of northern Europe. For years he’d been fighting a hydroelectric dam that was going to flood territory that Sámi people had lived on for thousands of years. At the conference they noticed each other immediately. In Elle-Máijá’s telling, it was love at first sight. The very first thing her dad said to her mom was “You’re going to be my wife.” “And yeah,” she said. “The rest is kind of history.”
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers was born in Canada about four years later. She spent her childhood bouncing from one country to the next. Her first move was to Norway, where she lived until she was about five or six. Then her mother decided to enroll in medical school, so the family moved to North Dakota. By then her parents’ mythical love story had begun to unravel. The family eventually moved back to Canada. But when Elle-Máijá was sixteen, her parents divorced. Her dad left for Norway. “From around my early teens to the point they split up, I’d say things were really difficult between them,” she told CBC. “And it was largely because of my father’s battle with mental health issues.”3
Elle-Máijá moved on her own to Vancouver in her early twenties. She ended up taking a degree in First Nations and gender studies at the University of British Columbia. She often reflected on the many layers of her identity. She was young and culturally aware. She lived in a global city on the Pacific Ocean and listened to experimental music and saw herself as an artist and a feminist and an intellectual. Unlike many of her peers, though, she also felt deep ancestral ties to indigenous territory in Alberta and Norway. “I often feel torn between the two places, because that’s where my ancestors are from,” she said. “But then there’s also the other side of the coin where if it wasn’t for globalization I wouldn’t exist.”
Elle-Máijá’s sense of history extends far beyond the time horizon of most North Americans. She sees the arrival of European settlers in the late 1400s—and the centuries of disease, warfare, displacement, and discriminatory policies that they inflicted upon indigenous peoples—as the beginning of a colonial conquest that North America’s first peoples are still struggling to overcome. As Elle-Máijá got older, she felt the impacts firsthand. She learned why most fossil fuel extraction takes place on or near indigenous lands, why aboriginal women are up to three to five times more likely to experience violence than their white peers, and why indigenous communities remain among the most politically and economically marginalized in North America. Those experiences led her to conclude that “our people are subject to colonial violence every day.” She added, “There’s this trauma my generation of indigenous people inherently carry … The question is how do you move forward?”
Rarely do white North Americans acknowledge that trauma or the existence of a vibrant culture that persists despite it. But by some accounts, the worldview of indigenous people is at the heart of a new economic model emerging rapidly from Silicon Valley: the sharing economy. Unlikely as it might seem, one of the leading architects of that economy, which could be worth $335 billion by 2025, has directly credited the indigenous people he met during a summer exchange on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota for inspiring his business model. “Their sense of community, of connection to each other and to their land, made me feel more happy and alive than I’ve ever felt before,” John Zimmer told Wired in 2014. “We now have the opportunity to use technology to help us get there.”4
Zimmer is the Millennial co-founder and president of Lyft, a ride-share company that at the time of this writing was valued at $5.5 billion. Along with others such as Uber and Airbnb, Lyft is at the forefront of an economic shift where people pay for access to things—cars, power tools, vacation homes—instead of owning them. Zimmer argues he is helping to “build community, save people money, and reduce our impact on the environment.”5 The politics of this shift are often difficult to figure out. “Is it Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or Green?” asked one observer.6 But people like Zimmer have captured the imagination of influential thinkers. The author, futurist, and European Union adviser Jeremy Rifkin, for one, thinks the sharing economy is leading us to “a new understanding of ecological sustainability”—one that potentially “provides the means to lift hundreds of millions of human beings out of abject poverty.”7
Yet the sharing economy has inspired an equally fervent backlash. Companies such as Lyft have been accused of trampling unions, underpaying workers, undermining competitors, and making bold environmental claims that amount to little more than greenwashing. All of which has led Salon’s Andrew Leonard to dismiss the sharing economy as “the living, breathing essence of unrestrained capitalism.”8 He is not alone in thinking people like Zimmer are more interested in profits than in the values of indigenous culture. “For-profit ‘sharing’ represents by far the fastest-growing source of un- and under-regulated commercial activity in the country,” the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber wrote in 2014. “Calling it the modern equivalent of an ancient tribal custom is a rather ingenious rationale for keeping it that way.”9
Tech companies are well known for making grandiose claims about their social impact. But in this case the rhetoric and reality are difficult to sort out. For the past six years Harvard sociology professor Juliet Schor has studied the sharing economy. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, her team has conducted more than 150 interviews on it. She concluded that “the reality is more complex” than its boosters and detractors often acknowledge. “Will the sector evolve in line with its stated progressive, green, and utopian goals, or will it devolve into business as usual?” Schor wrote midway through the project. “It is too early for definitive answers to these questions, but important to ask them.”10
If it’s true the sharing economy somehow reflects the worldview of indigenous peoples, or is even aspiring to, then Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers has questions of her own. She agrees that indigenous peoples have a vital role to play in building a safer and more equitable future on this planet. “Our people have been in our communities since time immemorial and have never lost our connection to the land,” she said. “I do think there’s a lot to be learned from indigenous people.” Yet they’re dealing with the worst impacts of climate change—and of the political and economic system causing it. (The battle to protect Standing Rock Indian Reservation’s water from an oil pipeline is one example.) A new business model that purports to draw inspiration from indigenous cultures can’t ignore that. For its claims to be credible, it “can’t just take bits and pieces of Indigenous knowledge systems,” she said. “It has to acknowledge the fact that so many of our people are in basic survival mode.” And more importantly, it has to do something about it. The new generation of tech leaders to which Zimmer belongs actually has to challenge the status quo instead of perpetuating it.
John Zimmer was not the first young Silicon Valley leader to cite the influence of North America’s native peoples. That title likely belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. Over dinner one night, the technology journalist David Kirkpatrick asked Zuckerberg to explain Facebook’s impact on society. Their exchange was described in Kirkpatrick’s 2010 book The Facebook Effect. “Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?” Zuckerberg said. “I’ll contribute something and give it to someone, and then out of obligation or generosity that person will give something back to me. The whole culture works on this framework of mutual giving.”11 Zuckerberg was referring to an ancient gift-giving ceremony called the potlatch, which has been practiced for thousands of years by the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of British Columbia’s southwestern coast.
In those ceremonies, which were accompanied by feasts and dancing, tribal leaders would give away blankets and flour and other supplies to the community. Important guests sometimes received silver bracelets or boats. The potlatch provided a way for indigenous communities to create alliances, redistribute riches, undermine rivals, and of course, flaunt their wealth. “The potlatch has always been the structure that enables people in our society to work together,” Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chief Bill Cranmer explained to the New York Times.12 To Zuckerberg, Facebook is the foundation of a digital potlatch. “When there’s more openness, with everyone being able to express their opinion very quickly, more of the economy starts to operate like a gift economy,” he told Kirkpatrick.13 Such a shift presents a chance to restructure our society, since “a more transparent world creates a better-governed world and a fairer world.”
Zimmer is the same age as Zuckerberg. And the sharing economy he’s creating is in some ways an extension of the Facebook founder’s thesis. It rests on the conviction that the more people become connected through digital technology, the more open and trusting they’ll be. This enables behavior that previous generations would have considered unthinkable: inviting strangers into your car, giving them the keys to your house, letting them borrow your power tools. Zimmer’s contribution to this so-called sharing economy is the ride-share company Lyft, which lets anyone with a smartphone access a large fleet of ad hoc taxis driven by regular people. In a 2013 interview with Fast Company, Zimmer explained that Lyft’s business model was inspired by his visit many years earlier to the poorest native reservation in the United States.
Zimmer grew up in the small New York suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, a place where “people were focused on the corporate ladder, or success being defined by material objects.” In high school he spent a summer volunteering at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, where the average household income of its eighteen thousand Lakota inhabitants is $3,500. Only 40 percent have electricity and running water. Unemployment is 90 percent. Yet Zimmer was struck by a worldview that felt more meaningful to him than the one he grew up with. “By going to see this other culture, where they valued connection to the people and the nature around them, it really impacted me,” he said. “I felt more alive and more happy than I’d ever felt.”
It changed how he saw his hometown in Connecticut. “I came back, and I was like ‘What’s wrong with everyone here? Why is everyone so focused on these material things? How come they don’t know about all these other people who are living in poverty?’” he said. “I think everyone, myself included prior to that trip, just didn’t have that perspective.” He claims that spending time at Pine Ridge changed the direction of his life. “I decided that whatever I did long term, I wanted to help build real community, genuine people-to-people connection, because I felt like we were all starved for it,” he says. “If there was a way to use entrepreneurship to help [get there] … that would be my dream.”14
