Skip to main content

Elite articulations of the fourth industrial revolution: Pseudoscience that needs to be challenged


That unregulated globalization processes have produced large-scale global inequalities in the distribution of resources and opportunities is empirically documented.

These inequalities are so dramatic and the disaffection produced by them are so widely registered that elites and their mouthpiece pundits can no longer ignore the level of inequalities.

Having acknowledged the inequalities though, particularly in the backdrop of the financial crisis, elites fall back upon propaganda to justify and perpetuate the neoliberal status quo.

Rather than look at the inequalities as the product of unmitigated globalization processes that privilege those with power, experts offer theories that render as natural the state of inequalities.

One such elite explanation suggests that the large-scale inequalities we are witnessing today are the product of the "fourth technological revolution."

Without any data to back up their claims, these elites therefore prescribe smart strategies of adaptation to the status quo rather than fundamentally interrogating the status quo or questioning the overarching logics of trickle-down flow that constitute the status quo. Wearable technologies, driverless cars, automated workplaces are paradoxically offered as solutions to global inequalities.

In the face of the data that point toward the large scale job loss in the realm of automation or introduced by innovations that replace workers, these technological fixes to problems of unemployment and inequality paradoxically are the problems rather than the solutions they are pitched to be.

However, to offer a technological solution to a structural problem retains the structural configuration while at the same time continuing to co-opt the participation of disaffected workers in technologically embodied narratives of adaptation and skills improvement.

Rather than interrogating the political-economic formations that constitute the current state of global inequalities, these elite articulations prescribe new technologies and innovations to solve the problems of inequality and poverty that were generated on the first place by techno-deterministic policy formations.

The pronouncements made by elites at global forums are neatly packaged as scientifically derived.

Close examination of such elite claims however depict the absence of data or evidence to back up the new age imaginations of the fourth technological revolution.

The pseudoscience of "trickle-down economics" continues reinforcing itself, generating investments and venture capital funding for the next technological fix to global inequality that would simultaneously generate profits for social enterprises and transnational capital.

Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Tova O’Brien and pedagogy of whiteness

So Tova O’Brien was looking for a click-bait opportunity to draw in listeners to her podcast and she found the migrant activist and Green Party politician Dr. Sapna Samant to pick on. In a gotcha moment, Tova shared with the Green Party co-leader James Shaw a series of posts made by Dr. Samant on whiteness, Hindutva, and multiculturalism, asking him if the tweets were OK. We don’t understand from listening to O’Brien’s podcast if her research team actively researched Dr. Sapna Samant’s social media posts, or whether these selective screen captures of Dr. Samant’s tweets were sent to her by someone wanting to target Samant. The thoroughly unresearched piece is poor journalism, reflective of the mediocrity that is perpetuated by whiteness , the hegemonic values of the dominant white culture in settler colonies. If indeed her research team had discovered the tweets, it’s worth interrogating why the social media posts of a migrant woman activist on whiteness are of interest to O’Brien’s po