In the great tradition of the legendary documentary, Paris is Burning, the British Library is about to open officially. Open! Because reading is what? Fundamental! Wait there, Drag Race, we are all getting a bit overexcited at the prospect of the British Library reopening its doors. But even Rue Paul has to wait. It's April for the Reading Rooms and May for the galleries. But stay in touch with us online for more information. Today we're here for the 150th birthday of Rosa Luxembourg, whose life burned brilliantly, but all too short. Do send your questions, comments, birthday greetings and feedback right here on the platform. And guiding us through this celebration is Dr Catherine Connolly. She's a historian, activist and lecturer and a biographer of Sylvia Pankhurst, who is of course featuring in the library's Unfinished Business exhibition. Kate recently edited and introduced Sylvia Pankhurst's previously unpublished manuscript on America. So, cheers and happy birthday Rosa. Kate, over to you. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome you for this, what I know is going to be an absolutely fantastic event to celebrate and explore the life of an outstanding revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxembourg, who was born 150 years ago today, and came in that sort of second generation of revolutionals after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who so inspired her life and work. Someone who struggled and indeed was murdered in the struggle for working class revolution. We have a brilliant panel to help us explore her life today. It's my very great pleasure to introduce Dr Dana Mills. Dana Mills is an author, an activist, a dancer and an academic. She's a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, and she is the author of the biography, Rosa Luxembourg, which was published last year by Reaction Books. This book is a brilliant introduction, I can really, really recommend it to both Rosa's life and her writings, which combines cutting-edge research into new archival material and provides new insights into some of Luxembourg's key texts. And we'd also like to say as well that she brings to this biography some wonderful photographs that she was using from the archives as well, photographs that I'd never seen, certainly, in years of reading about Rosa Luxembourg. Dana is on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxembourg in English, and incredibly for someone whose book was only published last year. Dana has since had another book published in that time, which has only just come out in the last few days, a book called Dance and Activism, a Century of Radical Dance Across the World, which has just been published by Bloomsbury. And she's also the author of Dance and Politics, Moving Beyond Boundaries, which was published in 2016 by Manchester University Press. I always think that we should be somewhat suspicious of political theorists who are not political activists, and I can say with all confidence that we need to have no suspicions about either of our speakers tonight. Dana both combines theoretical work with an attempt to change the world, and is somebody that I'm always bumping into on demonstrations for justice, every demonstration against inequality and oppression. She is always there. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome Dana to speak on Rosa Luxemburg tonight. And she is going to be speaking alongside Kate Evans.  Her graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, was published in 2015 by Verso. I'm sure that probably all of our audiences are familiar with this book. It's a brilliant telling of Luxemburg's life and work, which I think very vividly brought to life her politics and her personality, and all its complexity and brilliance. I honestly have lost count of the number of times that I've met people who said that this book was their introduction to Luxemburg's life and what really inspired them to find out more. So this book, I think, very importantly, brings a kind of radical telling of Luxemburg's life in a very, very urgent and accessible way. And I know that it's inspired so many people. Both The Independent and The Observer chose Red Rosa as their graphic book of the year. And there are now 11 international editions of Red Rosa available. Kate Evans is also the author of Threads, a book on the refugee crisis. She's the author of Bump and Food of Love, which are two books on different aspects of motherhood. She's the author of a book Don't Call Me Princess, which is a feminist anti-fairy tale. I am very keen, certainly, to buy for my son. And she's the author of a book, Funny Weather on Climate Change. And she is going to be using art. And it's a lovely reminder, actually, that Rosa Luxemburg was very, very passionate about art and was an artist herself. And Kate is going to be using her art in a presentation about Luxemburg's life tonight. So that's very, very exciting indeed. And I think a very special way as well to think about Luxemburg. So those are our two speakers. We're also very honoured to have with us tonight Azuka Ofoka, who is an actor who began her career at the Birmingham Rep and at the Royal Court Theatre. She is best known for playing Louise Tyler in the BBC drama, Casualty. And tonight Azuka is going to be reading live the words of Rosa Luxemburg so that we can hear from Rosa herself in the course of this evening. So I hope that everybody here tonight really enjoys this very exciting multimedia discussion and celebration of Rosa Luxemburg. The way that this is going to work is that we're going to have a presentation, first of all. We're then going to have one of our readings. We're then going to move into a question and answer which I'm going to compare. And the readings are going to be interspersed in those questions. And then in the last 15 minutes, we're going to move to questions and answers from our audience, so you yourselves. So please do think throughout what you would really like to ask of our expert panellists here tonight. I'll be reading those questions out. So without further ado, it is my very, very great pleasure to hand over to Kate Evans, who is going to be providing us with a presentation which is going to be a beautiful overview of Luxemburg's life to introduce our subjects here tonight. So over to you, Kate. Hi, everyone. I'm just going to give a little tiny proviso at the start of this because I actually have chronic illness and I'm also in the menopause. So it might happen that at some point during this, I'll just suddenly forget what I'm saying. And at that point isn't that Zoom has frozen. It's actually just my brain. Somewhere in there, there's still some intelligence. It will emerge in a couple of years' time when I'm a fully qualified crone. But in the meantime, I'm just going to make the best of it.  Basically, it's an overview of Luxemburg's life taken from my book. So who is Rosa Luxemburg? Maestro, here are the slides. Who was Rosa Luxemburg? A woman. And this was my entry point to Luxemburg because I was commissioned to write a graphic novel of her because the commissioning editor, Paul Bull, was looking for a woman to illustrate and to research her story. And what she managed to achieve as a woman is absolutely astounding and also the extent to which that hasn't been remembered as a woman is also quite astonishing. And it's very much a case, I think, that people are rediscovering the genius of Luxemburg when you see other contemporary thinkers like Gramsci, for example, who are sort of unquestioningly expected to be a great thinker. Luxemburg has had to be re-evaluated. Okay, so it's an offensive term. I use the term cripple when describing Luxemburg's disability to give an idea of how much she was living in a time in which ableism was rampant. And actually, when looking at things intersectionally, it's quite interesting considering how Luxemburg's physical disability might actually have helped her emancipation as a woman in that she wasn't expected to get married. And that meant that she retained her intellectual and economic independence. A Jew. Dana is going to be able to speak more in depth than I am on this because Dana is Jewish and I'm not. But I made this representation of the great synagogue in Warsaw and tried to ground Luxemburg both within her cultural heritage and also within her atheist and radical philosophical tendencies. And I think it's interesting when you look at the extent to which intellectual Jewish Jews, maybe as a result of the rampant antisemitism of Eastern European nations at the time, but you've got a lot of political intellectual leaders coming from within the Jewish community. Luxemburg was a refugee.  And she was really obvious because she was the only five-foot-tall, limping Jewish female socialist with a gold tooth. So she wasn't really very undercover. So she escaped to Switzerland to go to university and then to Germany where she made her professional life. And I concentrate very much on the story of what happened to her in Germany, but she was also highly involved with the Russian Revolution and with Russian politics. So this is a sample, typical quote of Luxemburg and why I love her so very much. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction and the power of my expression. So Luxemburg was a lecturer. So this is one of the beauties of the graphic novel format that you can take words which are really quite dense and you can break them up into something that is easier to digest and more accessible for people. So this is a quote from Luxemburg's introduction to political economy and she's talking about the alienation of the worker. It's not submission to the vagaries of the market, a small price to pay for individual freedom. Alas, how unfree is this worker here? The distinctive feature of capitalism is the precariousness of a work of the worker and I've used this idea of a dandelion clock to show how ephemeral working life is. The capitalist controls the means of production. The worker has nothing. The only commodity he can sell is his labour power and the entire process revolves around the exploitation of that labour. The worker may think himself free, but what choice does he have other than to sell his labour? Jobs are scarce and insecure for the capitalist keeps a reserve army of the unemployed ready at his bidding. The capitalist certainly considers himself free, but what choice does he have but to press his workforce ever harder driving up his profit? But if he doesn't swim ahead of the competition, he will sink. All humanity groans with a frightful suffering under the yoke of a blind social power, capital that it has unconsciously created. The underlying purpose of every social form of production, the satisfaction of society's needs is turned completely on its head. Production is no longer for the sake of the people. Production for the sake of profit becomes the law all over the earth. Luxembourg was a leader. She was politically active. She was politically successful. She was a journalist. She was an editor. And she had this uncompromising focus on what was wrong with capitalism and the radicalism that was needed to put it right. So she was... One of the ways she came to prominence was in critiquing the ideas of Edward Bernstein, who was an established theorist within the German Social Democratic Party. And he was all in favour of just like incremental reform. And she pointed out that revolution is the only factor distinguishing social democracy from bourgeois radicalism. Without it, we're no longer struggling against the existing order, but vainly attempting to repair it. And I think really, when you look at some of the ways that democratic socialism has gone in our life, so vainly attempting, vainly not even attempting to repair capitalism is where we've ended up. So, yeah, here we go. The revolution is everything. All else is bilge. So Luxembourg was a thinker. He was really into pulling apart ideas. So this is my... I'm just going to take a couple of slides to talk about the accumulation of capital. And this was her masterwork. It should be more widely known. She's mathematically examining what would happen if you got to a world where capitalism was complete. So she points out that it's mathematically impossible. And she uses a few mathematical formulae to do it. And I've actually read Stalin's copy of the accumulation of capital, which was shown to me in Moscow. And he read as far as page seven where the formulae are. And then after that, he hadn't cut any of the pages because of one of those old-fashioned books where the paperbacks are stuck together. So I would like to say that if you can read the accumulation of capital, you're cleverer than Stalin. So, yeah, this is her laying out the mathematical problem that has absorbed her. And then, yeah, in a world formed purely of capitalists and workers, there's just no way that the capitalists viewed in their entirety can get rid of the surplus goods, change the surplus value into money, and accumulate capital. I'm paraphrasing her here, but that's the basic issue. Imperialism. Capitalism expands by forcing its way into non-capitalist markets. It must in order to exist. So Luxembourg is talking about globalization, and she's predicting the rampant march of globalization in this idea called primary accumulation, which is capitalism getting bigger and bigger and bigger to quote the Lorax. And she's talking about some quite complex ideas around globalization at a time when the word hadn't been coined and wouldn't be for another 50 years. And then she explicitly links that to militarism and the military industrial complex. Force is the only solution available to capitalism. The accumulation of capital employs force as a permanent weapon. And because I get to be really nerdy doing being cartoonist, that is actually a First World War bayonet. German one. So Luxembourg had an amazing personal life. She... It's funny, actually. I mean, I really like the fact that I got to bring this to life in my book, and it certainly makes the book a better read for people. She wasn't famous as having a personal life, but I do think that it's inspiring and interesting for people to see that in the 1890s and 1910s, people were giving their hippies a damn good run for their money as far as free love goes. So this is a genuine quote from one of Rosa Luxembourg's love letters. I've been letting it run through my head a little, the question of our relationship. It's time for me to take you in my claws. I must terrorize you completely. I'll smother this rage and fury that you have in yourself. Such weeds can't be allowed to get in amongst the cabbages. Be kind. Be gentle. Tell me you love me. I have the right to do this because I'm 10 times better than you. I just love her so much. So Luxembourg was a prisoner. There's just a little bit here from the point where she first gets sentenced, and this is stuff that she genuinely told the court. There is a substantial risk that the defendant would freeze. So this is the lawyer arguing that she needs to be put on remand and she can't be let out because she might flee. And she genuinely said to the court, I believe that you would flee. A social democrat does not. She stands by her actions and laughs at your judgments. And now sentenced me.  Although we're talking about her in prison, she really wasn't taking any prisoners at this point. And she said, I would not flee even if I were threatened by the gallows. Sacrifices are a part of a socialist work. There is simply a matter of course. So Luxembourg has come to political, become politically remembered because she was murdered. And I would argue that it shouldn't have needed that, you know, she should be remembered in her own right. And there is, there is a way in which she can be kind of turned into a heroin or an icon or a martyr. And actually the complexity of the ideas that she was, it's housing are worth thinking about in their own right. And it shouldn't, she shouldn't need to be, you know, stuck on an altar. But this is a representation of her arrest. The soldiers who were taking her away called the Freikor and they were embittered. First World War PTSD riddled horrible men. Who drove around with skulls on the fronts of their cars, which makes it very easy for them to look like the baddies in a cartoon. So, yeah, I mean, she was murdered at the age of 48. And I just want us to all take a moment for us to realize that if that hadn't happened, she'd be 150 today. So that's very sad. Okay. Thank you very much. Next slide, which is the last slide is the cover of my book. And thank you very much. Thank you so much, Kate, for that brilliant overview of Luxembourg's life and indeed a very beautiful overview and incredibly powerful ending there. Thank you. I'd now like to invite Azuka to read the first reading, which is from a letter by Luxembourg written in 1917. What do you want with this theme of the special suffering of the Jews? I'm just as much concerned with the poor victims of the rubber plantations of Putamaio, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. I have no special place in my heart for the Jewish ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears. Thank you so much. I want to take that quote and come to Donna now. There we have Luxembourg describing the horrors of imperialism. And Rosa Luxembourg's anti-imperialism is one of the things for which rightly she is most famous, particularly her opposition to World War one right from the outset when the SPD, the largest socialist party in Europe, backed it and betrayed socialists across Europe in so doing. She's also famous for an earlier polemic which Kate Evans referred to within that party where she defended the idea that had been expounded by Marx and Engels and that socialism could only come through class struggle and not as others were saying, chiefly Edward Bernstein, who was suggesting that it could come through piecemeal reforms under capitalism. I was wondering, Donna, if you could say something about what links there are between her commitment to anti-capitalism and her anti-imperialism, please. Thank you so much, Kate, for this and thank you all for this beautiful evening. And I actually want to start from the quote and Azuka's beautiful reading and very powerful reading. So thank you for that. And somewhere that I think we need to start thinking about Luxembourg as an anti-imperialist. Luxembourg was raised in Poland and the Russian Empire. So she was a citizen of empire herself. She was a Jew, so she was oppressed as a minority and she was a woman and she was a disabled woman. So she encountered the wrongs of imperialism and the wrongs of intersectional oppression before she had words and ways to think about that. And there's a long and interesting legacy of both collaborations and betrayal between different subjects of empire and different parts of the world. But she's one of the first people to very eloquently understand that oppression and the empire is one of the chief wrongs that one must stand up to. And indeed, as you mentioned, she stood up against the First World War, but even before that she wrote the accumulation of capital, which is indeed one of the best books I think ever written on the left. Her comrade Franz Merring called her the best reign after Marx and I think that's a worthy description. One thing that is really important to remember is that for Luxembourg, imperialism is the last stage before capitalism collapses. So it's absolutely important to fight against imperialism in order to bring the next stage, which is of course socialism. However, it's also important to note that here that the German left, by and large, were very happy to continue with imperialism. They kind of thought, was that the fort away from where we are, wrongs that are seen elsewhere, we do not have connection to that. And Luxembourg was one of the first people to really connect with oppression and exploitation happening in places that she couldn't even see. And like many people of her generation, she didn't travel a lot, she had ill health and she was disabled. So she very much stayed in the region of Germany, maximum Poland when she went undercover to see the revolution. But she actually was able to very powerfully understand oppression in different parts of the world. And in the accumulation of capital, she writes about South Africa, she writes about Australia, she writes about the South of the US without ever going there and seeing what's going on. So she, one of my students said, Rosa Luxembourg was an intersectionalist before it was cool and I think that's a really good way to think about her. Because she understands that you can't fight injustice one piece at a time and it very much is the red thread of her career. So it starts when she writes, of course, reform a revolution. She says absolutely we have to stand up and continue working towards the revolution. But then it becomes much more subtle and indeed she writes also very subtly and very, like you have to work very hard to find it, but she writes about disability rights, which of course she was implicated by herself. She writes about anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and she refers to all sorts of other kinds of oppressions. So for Luxembourg, anti-imperialism is part of her very deep understanding of injustice in the world. And here I think it's worthwhile again to come full circle and think about her own fate. She was a Jewish woman who encountered a lot of sexism and anti-semitism and she knew that very well. She knew she wasn't treated as equal amongst her comrades. And she knew a lot of people around her suffered different fates that are quite similar to hers. And it's also important to note here that a lot of her close comrades were murdered by the Nazis because they were either Jewish or communists or both. So her murder was tragic and horrible. And when she penned in 1915 and said, it's the choices between socialism or barbarism, indeed her murder very much unpacked this road towards barbarism. And so her standing up against imperialism is part and parcel of this entire worldview and standing up to injustice, whether she had personal contact to that or not. Thank you very, very much, Dana, for discussing some of Luxembourg's really key ideas there with us and also for pointing out their urgency for us today. I'd now like to invite Azuka to read the second reading, which is an extract from Luxembourg's work, Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle from 1912. In truth, our state is interested in keeping the vote from working women and from them alone. It rightly fears that they will threaten the traditional institutions of class rule, for instance, militarism, of which no thinking proletarian women can help being a deadly enemy. Monarchy and the systematic robbery of duties and taxes on groceries, et cetera. Women's suffrage is a horror and abomination for the present capitalist state, because behind it stands millions of women who would strengthen the enemy within, i.e. revolutionary social democracy. If it were a matter of bourgeois ladies voting, the capitalist state could expect nothing but effective support for the reaction. Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against male prerogatives would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletarians. They are the parasites of the parasites of the social body. Thank you very much, Azuka, for that reading. And that's where I want to start with the second question for both of our panellists. We are meeting, of course, only a few days before International Women's Day, which was a day that was founded by Luxembourg's great friend Clara Zetkin. And I want to ask both of our panellists what you think were the major issues for the women's movement at the time that Luxembourg was alive and what was distinctive about the contribution of Luxembourg and her women comrades, that generation of women in the Second International. What was distinctive about their socialist contribution to the understanding of women's oppression and where it came from, but also how women's liberation could be achieved. Maybe if we could maybe go in reverse order and start with Dana and then come to Kate, would that be okay? Yeah. So thank you for a great question and, again, a very powerful reading. I think Luxembourg starts on a path that we're still trying to struggle with today, which is the question of do we see feminism as legal reforms only as something that can be tweaked by the law that has nothing to do with material existence? Can we liberate women as a separate category to other oppressed people? Do we disengage other ways in which women are oppressed? And her answer is absolutely no. It's really important to note here that Rosa Luxembourg was absolutely an advocate of universal suffrage. So she advocated for all working-class people to get the vote, but she didn't see women, or especially bourgeoisie women, who were the key category working as suffragettes, as was the case here in Britain, right? Like the foremost part of the suffragette movement with very few exceptions were very much the public faces, at least, were middle-class women who wanted the vote for middle-class women. And it's really crucial, again, to connect Luxembourg's critique of bourgeoisie feminism to her writing about material inequality and her understanding that you cannot tweak injustice and inequality by just giving the right to vote. And I think there's something really powerful in this paragraph where she basically says, the moment the working-class women will get the vote, they will be able to bring down injustice. So the state knows that all the power to bring down these stagnated structures that are obstructing injustice and equality from happening are held by working-class women. And I think there's a lot of complicated things that go on in her own biography, which are, as Kate already mentioned, she was disabled, which was very much linked to her gender identity and to how she saw herself as a person in the world. She lived in a time, I think to your question of the Second International, not only did women not have the right to vote, they didn't have rights of various other kinds. That came through the Second International. So for her, her gender was always part of something much larger, and I think that's why she understood that gender equality is always part of a larger fight and is part of a material fight. And I think one thing that she has definitely told me is someone who writes about her and engages her theoretically is that our own perception of feminism in the 21st century and when I say our, I mean especially the West and the English-speaking West is a very narrow conception of feminism and is one that is still very lacking and very much doesn't engage other forms of inequality and oppression in which we kind of think we got the vote, we have form of equality, all is great, we can have celebrations, we can have all these kind of tokens of our advance. And of course, in many ways, we are doing much, much better than her generation. But in terms of material inequality, in terms of discrimination against certain professors that are still overpopulated by women, such as nurses, such as workers in the NHS that are underpaid and still underpaid and still are treated as second-class citizens, we are still very much lagging behind Luxembourg's vision. So when we turn feminism into something that has to be complex and intersectional but also looks at the material first and sees the legal political structures as something that cannot be separated from the material world, she was the foremost thinker of democracy within the Marxist tradition, which means we need to think about both the formal legal structures and the material basis in which we live together. This is something that feminism is still struggling with and I think she can teach us quite a few lessons today in 2021, which is very sad but also very telling. Do I take up the... I can argue with you over some of that, Dana. Like, I think you're right, she totally prioritises class struggle and the need to completely reform the inequality that is inherent within capitalism. She's got that as her number one aim and that's refreshingly clear focus. But intersectionality wasn't something that she had any contemporary... She had any awareness of and I think it's a case that she does sometimes argue either or. Like, she's interested in the class struggle and so the struggle against sexism can wait. And I certainly see her almost like she passes through life as an honoree man. She had five older brothers and then a very much older sister and the very much older sister didn't get married as well because she had the same disability. And I feel that Luxembourg took one look at her and just went, I'm not doing that. And so there's this extent to which I don't know how much solidarity she does show with other women at the time. I mean, I think her critiques of bourgeois suffragists is justified and I like her focus on working class women on the strength of proletarian women. But she also... I said I was going to have a brain freeze. But she also, within the intellectual milieu in which she was going in with, she's quite careful not to get drawn into the struggle for women's suffrage. She's very careful not to be sidelined as a feminist because that's what would have happened to her. She's clear that she's a Marxist theoretician and she's arguing questions of policy and strategy with men on their own terms. So you can even see it in the photos, she's in the middle of a group of men talking with them about this stuff. She's really kind of not interested in being pigeon-told over with the women. I mean, she was incredibly good friends with Clara Zetkin and Clara Zetkin invented International Women's Day. And then in Russia, in 1917, it was women on strike for International Women's Day that started the revolution. So if you want to know what the really important role of women was then, I think February 1917, you can really see them on the streets. The soldiers came out to fire on them and apparently they ripped their tops off and went, fire on this! And then they didn't. And that's how the revolution started. Can I come back quickly on that because that's a really interesting point. And I don't disagree with you, but I think historically it's really important and that goes back to Kay's question to note that what we see today as intersectionality, which is looking at the combination of oppressions, was actually a very big key theme of the Second International. So Eleanor Marx wrote the woman's question from a socialist point of view in 1886. There were comrades, they knew each other, and there were exchanges around these themes in the Second International. And I absolutely agree with your reading that she wanted to be seen as a man and she kind of acted opposite men on their own terms. I do find it really interesting that when you look at her writings after she leaves prison, there's much more awareness of gender because I think she noticed what it's like to experience gendered violence. So she talks about the humiliation of being stripped down when she's in prison and she talks about a lot of these things in her letters. And she writes about rights of prostitutes when she's in prison, which again, look at what we're talking about now about sex work. She's basically doing that in 1916, 17. And I think she's not very explicit and it's a bit like what's going on with disability rights. She doesn't write explicitly about disability rights, but you can see how she's writing about certain elements of life and what it's like to go through life with a disability, et cetera. And it's about reading within the lines and seeing what can be drawn from there. And again, I think in the context of history, of course, when we look at intersectionality, we can go back to the Chartist, right? Like you can see those discussions when we look at women of the Chartist movement. But definitely by the time we get to the Second International, she has these correspondences. They might be kept private because again, I agree with you that it was a strategic matter. But I do think there's a place to be a bit open to this kind of, I would say more generous kind of divide of different feminisms. And again, for me, I have to say I feel very disengaged from Western feminism as it is today. I think there's something very constraining about who counts as a feminist and who doesn't. And she opened up for me a vista thinking about the materiality of oppression and who do we look at and what categories do we analyze. That can actually be very useful for where we are right now. Thank you both of you so much for getting into this really, really interesting debate. And I'm sure there's a lot more that we can say and explore about this. It might be something people want to pick up on in the discussion. I've got one more question before we move to that discussion. But first of all, I'd like to invite Azuka to read our last and third reading, which again is from the same text as the second reading, women's suffrage and class struggle from 1912. Thank you. 100 years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words. In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true of our present society. The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletarians general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. Because of the female proletariat, general equal direct suffrage for women would immensely advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle. This is why bourgeois society abhors and fears women's suffrage. And this is why we want and will achieve it. Fighting for women's suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat. Thank you so much, Azuka, for all of those brilliant readings. It's very, very special to be able to hear Luxembourg's words because she was such a brilliant writer and somebody who really inspired through the written words. So it's incredibly special to hear that. Thank you so, so much. I would like to invite everybody in our audience to think about what questions you would like to ask our expert panellists on this subject.  Any question that you have or probably be questions that other people have in their heads as well. So please do send your questions in. Just before we go to that general discussion, I've got a question for both of our panellists. That last reading we had Rosa Luxembourg looking back at socialist thought and drawing from that as she did throughout her life. And I'd like to ask both of you if you can to tell us what do you draw from Rosa Luxembourg? What do you think we should take? Her writing I feel really resonates so much with the situation in which we find ourselves. So many of the same dilemmas, so many things that haven't gone away, exploitation, imperialist wars. But what for both of you do you think do you think we can take from Rosa Luxembourg in our struggle to change the world today? And again, I'll take you in an opposite order. So perhaps we can start with Kate. The one key phrase that keeps going around my head at the moment is a phrase that Luxembourg didn't invent. Kalkowski apparently wrote it first, but she popularized the phrase socialism or barbarism. And that is just key at the moment. I mean, there's so much about Luxembourg's work that resonates. She talks about the spontaneity of mass movements. She talks about how quickly things can turn. And I think that could become incredibly relevant. I mean, we've not... Oh, don't you? In Egypt we have seen a Twitter-led revolution, haven't we? So, you know, we have the ability, potentially with social media to end up with radical social transformation happening very quickly. But also when we look at what's happening in America, with the fact that the Republican Party now appears to have made a very clear statement that it is a fascist party, we're seeing very... that barbarism is raising its head in just as clearly as it would have been in Weimar Germany watching the rise of Hitler. And the only alternative to that is to make people's living conditions better. So we have to focus on socialism. We have to present a proper alternative, a genuine change. I mean, it's not a great lesson as well, but never trust the centrists, because they're the ones who murdered Luxembourg. And I think we've seen that play out in what's happened to Corbyn, turned to a lesser extent to Bernie Sanders, but certainly the way that the Labour Party closed ranks against its leader and actively militated against social change happening from the bureaucrats in the party. So we have to rate... the reason why fascism is on its rise is because the material conditions are is that the working conditions of ordinary people is getting worse and worse. So there has to be change, and it has to be radical change, it has to be effective change. And through the spontaneous mass action of the majority of people is how it comes about. I really like Luxembourg's emphasis on democracy.   And the fact that Luxembourg was a temporary critic of events in Russia, and that she saw very clearly that the Lenin's abandonment of freedom of press and freedom of association and assembly and proper democracy had tainted that from the outset. And that's where she came up with her other famous quote, which is, freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently. Freedom can never be a special privilege. So with that democracy, with those spontaneous uprisings, and we have to get together en masse and create a better world. Thank you so much, Kate. Dana, can I ask you to respond to that as well? We've got a couple of really great questions in, so I'm going to have to ask you to sort of reply quite quickly so we can get some of those in as well. So I will disagree with Kate, but take some of the messages along because I think what became clear to me very early on from researching was Luxembourg is that she lived in a very dramatically different world to us. And Peter Hudes was the executive editor of her work, said to me one of the first things, she never lived to see fascism the way that we know it today. She never lived to see her comrades being murdered and being shipped to the camps. And it's really important to note that some of her closest comrades did die in the camps. And socialism and barbarism is one of those quotes that does it around a lot. And I think it is important in many ways, but it's also important to understand that fascism comes in different shapes and guises. And I think for me, one thing that she really embodies and has stayed with me throughout the process both writing the book and after it is her integrity and absolutely sticking to her principles no matter what happens. Even when she was wrong. So a lot of the things that she predicted, such as her writing about Polish nationalism, some of her critiques of the Bolsheviks were not founded and were part of a rivalry that was going on. She stuck to it and she stuck to what she believed in no matter what happened. So I think for me, the idea that you stick up to your ideals and you go with history, she had this very profound faith in history and she has this great quote from 1913 when she writes, when history will do its work, see that you too do your work. Which I think when you think about the arc of everything that has happened in the world since 1919 when she was murdered, we really have to be attentive to history but also to do our own work daily. Thank you very, very much. I am now going to go to some really interesting questions from our audience. So first of all, I've got a question for Donna Mills from Lucy Maxwell Scott. She asks, in your book on Rosa Luxembourg you have some wonderful pictures of her and beautiful drawings by her that show her love of nature. So first of all, where did you get hold of these? And if alive today, do you think she would have extended her recognition of the threat of globalism to include environmentalism? Thank you. This is such a fantastic question. Thank you so much. I think absolutely and you can really see the seeds of environmentalism in her writing, the humiliation of capital and in the anti-critique, there's quite a lot of segments about human beings' cruelty towards nature and indeed in her letters there's also some paragraphs when she writes about how when human beings are oppressive towards nature, when they abuse nature, this is the beginning of cruelty between men and men to a man and woman also, of course. In terms of source, I spent a lot of time in the wonderful Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, which has a huge part of her archive. I also had some different sources from elsewhere, but if you're ever around, I cannot recommend it enough. It's a wonderful place and that was where most of my sources were taken. And when I was talking about the comprehensive view of justice, I think that's one place where I really saw her as pioneer. I was writing the book round about when Extension Rebellion was rising its head and there were all these Fridays for future strikes and all of this going on. And I thought it was extraordinary that she really understood these complexities way, way before she had words and or access to some of the ideas that were then articulated in the public space. And she definitely was a pioneer in many ways. Of course, Marx himself writes about environment and the cruelty towards environment is part and parcel of capitalism, but she extended that and she understood that the global abuse towards nature else wins, kind of the sabotaging of earth and trees and basically other people's property, which is still obviously a staple of colonialism and other geysers is something that was embedded within her thinking. And I think the last come back I'll give to this question because it's just such a rich and wonderful question is that for me, her writing in letters and her drawings and her academic so-called writings are part and parcel of the same worldview. So it is a different genre. She expresses herself differently. She saw a letter writing as a different skill. She was a master or mistress of this skill, but it's absolutely part of her ideology and when she looks at nature, it's not that she kind of takes away her political hat. She doesn't think about what human beings do to each other, but it's very much her understanding of the world is something that is complicated and rich and demands a complex worldview in order to understand it. If you want an example of how much Rosa Luxemburg loved nature, she fed wasps in prison. She was, first off, she was in this prison where she had a little garden and that was great and she writes these beautiful letters with songbeds and then she gets put in a prison where she only has, you know, the opens in a jar and she saves her jam ration and she feeds some little wasps that come to visit. She would so have been a vegan these days. That's such a lovely story and thank you, thank you both for that. And, you know, what one of the kind of really exciting things that Dan has always stressed to me is about, you know, what new things we're discovering about Luxemburg's thought all the time as new things get translated and discovered. I have here a question from Paul Topley and I'd like to direct this one first of all to Kate Evans. Paul says, Lenin talked about socialist revolutionaries being the tribunes of the oppressed. Isn't this more a more historically accurate way of locating Luxemburg? No, I've got to answer that intelligently, haven't I? Can I plead ME on this? Hang on, the proletarians are the tribunes of the oppressed? But they are oppressed. Sorry, I don't get the question. Just bat it over to Dana and she'll say something clever. Dana, would you like to come in on this question? I mean, beyond this specific quote, which is great, of course, Lenin was a good writer. We all know that. I think I am going to hijack the question a little bit about Leninism versus Luxemburgism and Lenin versus Rosa, because I think that's an important point that we've been flirting around. And there are two streams of thought, which are Luxemburgism and Leninism. And they have at times little to do with the people who actually wrote. And it's really important to remember that Lenin and Luxemburg were comrades. They worked at the same time. They had ups and downs in their relationship. When Luxemburg writes the accumulation of capital, they are at the lowest point of their relationship. And he writes in the footnotes of his copy of the Capital that her description of people suffering in Africa is sentimental and non-Marxist, which, you know, considering he wrote a lot about imperialism afterwards, kind of shows a very different approach to writing, but they did have a close relationship. And again, they had different positions within their respective movement. So it's again, really important to remember that Luxemburg was most of her life a left outlier. She was to the left of the parties which she inhabited. And the last party that she founded, she didn't live in the position of power within. So Lenin was under different pressures to the ones that she was on under, really. They had different worldviews, which also is derived from that, but they had also different worldviews because again, Lenin wasn't a Jewish Polish woman who entered the German socialist movement from outside. He very much was at the hub of socialist activity of his time. So it's an interesting description. I think it's fair. There's enough room for revolution. We can talk about Luxemburg without Lenin. Maybe. And in the same way that we can talk about Lenin without Luxemburg, which mostly happens. Thank you. Thank you very much. We've got time for one more question. It's sort of similar to a question that I asked earlier, but what's different about this is it actually sort of asks about sort of priorities for Luxemburg as a political thinker and activist. This is a question from Fleur. And the question is what would Luxemburg think the main issue with society today would be? What would she find the most issues with in our modern world? And perhaps Kate, would you like to answer this one? Oh, I'm struggling against the thing to be, say, flippant and say, oh, she'd just be on Twitter all the time starting fights with people, but she blatantly does that in the letters as well. There's some really amusing quotes where she says, if you see so and so, would you kindly kick her out? Well, the main issue now is the environmental collapse of the world. You know, the fact that we have pushed systems of growth. And in that, we would see the two different strands of Luxemburg's thought come together. Her incredible connection with nature, you know, her, you know, beetle saving tendencies where she'll find a beetle on the path and get sad and move it to a nice place.  I mean, she immersed in it and she describes it in her letter so beautifully that I think she would be appalled if she'd been scooted forward a hundred years in time and would be able to see the deserts that we have made, the environmental and ecological deserts. And I think the extent of the degradation of our environment isn't visible to us because it's happened over multiple lifetimes. So Luxemburg would be emphatic about that, but also she would just be uncompromising about the fact that capitalism is the actual problem in getting rid of capitalism is the only solution and that is the pressing question of our day because people say, oh, we can meet our carbon commitments because we could switch to electric cars except the electric cars don't have to be electric cars, they could be hybrid cars and then we could make the energy with hydrogen and the hydrogen we could make carbon capture and before you know it we haven't stopped emitting any carbon control. The problem is the fundamental relation that capitalism has with the natural world and that it has with the exploitation of people and the runaway accumulation of wealth at the top, you know, the trillionaires, the trillions that the billionaires own that is the problem and she wouldn't be afraid to point its finger and identify it. Thank you very, very much Kate. I think that's a brilliant note to end on. It's a rallying cry and it's very urgent. I hope that everybody who's come feels inspired to go out and try and change the world and all that remains for us to do I believe is to raise a glass to Rosa Luxemburg and to wish her a very happy 150th birthday. So thank you very much to the British Library for putting this event on. Thank you so much to be Rowlett for organising this. Thank you very much to Azuka for those beautiful and impassioned readings of Luxemburg's own words and thank you of course to both of our expert panellists Kate Evans and Donna Mills. It's me, Janice. Yay! Happy birthday Rosa. Have a little talk.


How did you guys like the conference? Yeah Yeah, thanks for clapping and sign language. I appreciate that The robot appreciates it really Thanks for being here This is an event that happens every two years although it hasn't happened in four years So it's kind of like the English language where it doesn't follow any rules But what I wanted to do since we're ending an hour early is I wanted to wrap it up by giving a talk that I gave it the first cyborg camp. So this talk is 10 years old and Hopefully it'll be interesting and then after the talk, I'm gonna shorten it It'll be maybe 20 minutes. We can do an open discussion You can ask me anything you like or anybody else anything you like Really anything you want and I will happily talk about it and then we will wrap up and Show of hands is anyone interested in writing poetry about tech tomorrow from noon to 4 p.m And an undisclosed location okay, great you two see me after class and That'll be nice. We're gonna make a tiny zine because zines are great All right, so here's an old talk Cyborgs and the information society, but I updated the year So we're all cyborgs if you hold up your phones, which may be out of batteries at this point The point is that every time you interact with a piece of technology you're a cyborg a cyborg is an organism to which Exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces. This came from us 1960 paper on space travel This is not Terminator. This is not Robocop This is the idea that humans are not supposed to go into specific environments or be like animals But yet we evolve externally through mental extensions of ourselves like writing on cave walls and writing in general or by attaching Exogenous components to ourselves so we can go scuba diving one day and climb Mount Everest in the next we are a weird species And this is the the image that goes along with that quote Extension of a fist extension of your of a tooth This is the idea behind physical extensions of ourselves yet we've had more and more mental extensions of ourselves and unlike the physical extensions of ourselves that are fairly standard and stable over the Course of two million years the hammer doesn't really change in its application or its shape our mental extensions have changed from cave paintings to spoken word to poetry to Giant computing machines that are a size of a gymnasium and have less power than a calculator To something that you sit there in your hand and it performs the function like a scrying pool Allowing you to call up anything from anywhere around the world with a press of a button a kind of techno social womb where you can Request anything at any time and you get mad if it doesn't show up immediately Traditional anthropologists are stereotyped as going to other countries thinking of people as the anthropological other and Then coming back to their first world country is insane how interesting these people are how curious their kinships are People like Margaret Mead getting it Incorrect one year and then coming back three years later and then in getting it correct It didn't really matter if you were correct or not as long as you had the interest of this other world Today our world is compressed and collapsed into one thing We are all cyborgs where cyborgs the minute we are using these tools and a cyborg anthropologist says What is the norm today because it wasn't the norm 15 years ago today? We wake up next to our phones they cry and we pick them up and soothe them back to sleep They get hungry and we plug them into the wall and yet 15 years ago We were terrified that when smartphones suddenly started to have cameras that our privacy would be dead That we shouldn't allow these into specific places and other than Japan which forces a An actual camera sound when you take a photo We've learned that when you hold your phone up and you take a photo that social protocol tells somebody that you're going to Take a picture so it's not really a big deal because the main thing is that it's not that technology isn't ready for us It's usually that we're not the ones ready for technology We have a metabolism rate and we have to think how long does it take for us to get used to a new norm We are hoarding pictures of cats and news articles right now on our phones Which is exactly what somebody does with cats and newspapers in a physical house And it's okay These are new norms because everybody does it. It's okay to binge watch Netflix It's okay to be Sitting there and waking up next to your phone before looking at your significant other in the morning because it's the new norm Who's heard of the Macy meetings in? 1941 Yeah, so three people the idea of the Macy meetings was that technologists and anthropologists got together and they said at some point Tech might not be as expensive might not be as large What will that do to the fabric of society in the future? Let's say technology wasn't the size of the gymnasium. What if it was the size of your pocket? What would alter what would change there aren't too many transcripts from these meetings But they were really influential because it was one of the earliest times where social scientists and technologists got together at the same table Later cyberganthropology was launched as a sub-discipline of anthropology at the American Anthropological Association Not the car company that you call when you get stuck on the side of the road in 1992 And it was really important because it said let's look at humans and tools in a new way and let's start to look at these non-human allies that live alongside us and How they're changing our culture and how we work into that culture. So we look at the present day We have a strange kind of Mary Poppins technology where we have an automatic production of space This is my favorite kind of ad art campaign Sometimes you get ad campaigns that work with artists which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't But this one was for Maxter hard drive and what they did is they said let's take eight years of digital photos It's somebody's hard drive and let's print them all out. And this is what it looks like And my question is how many of you are carrying around this giant load that if it were to be deleted You would have this enormous sense of loss But you wouldn't remember what you had lost because you hadn't reflected over the photos that you took Because it's so easy to take a photo that the relative usefulness of each photo Diminishes completely. I did an art residency at Banff in Canada for a while the Banff Center in 2009 and I decided because my My artist partner got detained at the Canadian border and couldn't show up with me I had to improvise so I printed out my Facebook wall in 2009. I still have this the size of an actual wall Having all of my personal information and our interactions with people in this entire gallery and I thought of it as an old Faro wall the idea that the minutiae of a Faro could be Put in sandstone forever because there's no acid rain But in a dry climate you can preserve this for a really long time And I thought well now with Facebook everybody has the minutiae of their lives written on a wall But it's not in sandstone Does it really mean anything and could we go into a digital dark age at any moment where all of this is gone? When you wake up from this era when you're 80 if you live that long What will you remember of now? Will you remember the reddit binges that you went on a Netflix series that you watched your favorite episode of friends? Will you remember the music you listen to how you fell in love? What will you remember and? The question is is any of that just stuck in a hyperlinked memory that isn't necessarily to anything real But is something that's just archived inside of a machine How many of you go to your email inboxes and instead of using a plug-in like I use in chrome that says inbox when ready Which just allows me to press the inbox when ready button and it hides all my email Otherwise that how many of you just go into your inbox and your attention is immediately hijacked and you're kind of this persistent paleontologists that searching for a keyword To a memory that you had so that you can get an email back to somebody But you get distracted by the new stuff the new dust that settled on the top of your inbox This top of your digging site how many of you are stuck in simultaneous time? Where you decide to do one thing and something else happens on that and something help it happens on that and 20? Iterations later you remember what you were really supposed to be doing How many of you are trying to have a nice moment in time? The Greeks had two words for time by the way one Kronos the industrial time and Kairos the time of falling in love the time of human time the time of watching rain on the side of a window when the Power is out when you're a kid really being there how many of you have been punctuated out of those moments by a Random haptic buzz of your phone in your pocket that you have to look at because it might be important And then you just see that it's a Facebook notification that you need to download the newest install of Facebook This kind of gives me what I like to call a panic architecture This is was my inbox after I spoke at Ted in 2010 It was horrifying and I and I started to talk to people who had Relative amounts of fame and they said well all the replies come in a few different bundles and here's how to answer all of them I started using automatic replies, which was not nice But I did that for a year and it's fine But the whole idea this panic architecture is that the amount of time and space it takes to respond to all of this stuff Is so much larger than you actually have time to do and every single thing is in the same font size So it seems the same importance even though it's not and You think that every single little thing like a piece of spam is just as important as that note that your mom Wrote you three years ago, and it's a long paragraph And you really want to respond but you only remember that you wanted to respond late at night when you're not at the computer And when you log in the computer again or on your phone you get a push notification from something else That doesn't mean anything at all. I have no idea how that interpreted that Freud yeah, he just skipped it Freight had this amazing book that I found called civilization and its discontents He warned of a possible future in which our prosthetics turned against us because they were ill-fitting And there's something you'd be said about social class here. Can you not afford the latest upgrade? Does it matter if a company has enough money? Are they required to make the interface work well with you instead of against you? How does the technology work when there isn't great Wi-Fi or isn't great cell signal? If you keep a device for too long now, it does turn against you the operating system fails There's some security issue. It just stops working all together Or if you have your secondary eye in the shape of a phone and it breaks. What does it mean? Now instead of being the norm of kind of a superhero things are broken And you have to borrow somebody else's techno social ability to get something back Or the idea that instead of plants that shed leaves that are renewable We shed our devices, but they don't turn into any new devices When the phone first came out like early phones you would go into a phone booth or you would have a room in your home that had a phone and You could talk with somebody that wasn't there It was expensive, but you could have this temper You could have this private space and you could sit there and draw on the post-it note or whatever you were doing And tangle your hand up in the crazy long phone cord or whatever you were doing But then when the mobile phone came out like the the original cordless phone that was the first time a phone could get lost And now we have this kind of idea of a temporary negotiated private space There's this person on a phone other people on the phone and they're kind of temporary negotiating which I think of is Having a peeing section in a swimming pool like you're never gonna get it be able to get rid of it but the idea is that You had this private space in your home Now that gets out into the real world and if you're talking on your phone in a public space It's like you're one and a half people and you're carrying that around So you're like one and a half or two or three people in a seat scrunched next to somebody who's taking up one nice polite seat This is one person solution Since this is ten years old. I found the person who made this I was so excited I found if he's an industrial designer. He lives in Los Angeles. I went to his studio He's doing he does art Installation rooms for a living he makes rooms for artists. He's he's amazing and he makes he's an industrial designer Just makes bunch of this stuff This was part of a video series where he made a portable cell phone booth It could pack into a backpack and he would walk around New York in like 2008 And he would go up to a deli counter and this oh, sorry put his phone on and put this thing over in this I got to take a phone call He also made a thing called a porta party Which was just a porta party booth, but it had a party in it And so you could go in and have a party safely really quickly and then like come out You'd like put people in he did all these like fun stuff He did another one that I really like called email garden, which was kind of a calm tech way of understanding how much email you got There's a bunch of strands of green plastic substrate that came out of Like a motor and the motor would push a little bit more of this green thread up With the amount of emails he got so if he went on vacation for two weeks He came back and there's just like this tangled mess of spaghetti wire of the amount of emails that he got So we could kind of see like what email he got, you know one was spam and that grew more just as visualization This concept of ambient intimacy Is the idea that and Sheldon is not here anymore But he calls it loosely but deeply entangled is that you might not be around anybody You might be completely alone. You might be in another country But there's this idea that you could always connect with somebody I don't know about the quality of the connection But if you were to print out all the people in your phone if you're in a region It might look like this depends on who you are But there could be so many people that you could connect to but you're not really there with them So you kind of have these loose connections And this this speaks to Marc Auger's concept of non-places Marc Auger was a postmodern theorist french postmodern theorist and his idea is that A place is something where you have relation history and identity So a home you have relation you have identity you have history in a place But in a non-place you have none of those things in a traffic jam You have no relation to anybody else except for your car You have no identity except commuter and you have no history on the road because the road is not something You can stand on everything that's compressed into two dimensions on the side of your windows of your vehicle And so a lot of industrial revolution gave us these non-places where we were as humans were put on pause And the way to bring some of that back to have a place in a non-place is to Have a phone To talk to somebody so now we're filling our space again with music and other things But it's kind of like a social light like it's not a real deep Connection it's just a band-aid So when we become cyborgs, you know having a second self before You're even born and having this production identity outside of yourself This was my original second self the case organic is an art project that lasted for 10 years And i'm transitioning to another identity by the way I'll I guess i'll write a report on it But the idea was to craft a second self outside of myself that would produce my primary identity in a in a feedback loop um And really it just becomes this kind of interface for social grooming where You could present yourself In analog life and there's there's an art to that But a lot of people are presenting themselves in digital life as their exact self They're getting just as upset as they would in real life But you can carve it you can create it you can see what happens And for somebody who was isolated in the medwest and didn't really have a lot of peers when I grew up I could make a forum and I could try and all these different identities But now we kind of have a template itself Where here's where you put the text here's the facebook profile What it was originally was like you would speak on the well And you would network and you would have whatever identity and you were the text that you were and you were known for Your construction of self through text Now it doesn't mean that this cut across all of the social demographics and social classes because you still had to have Access to a computer But it did provide us a way to Not be constrained As donna harroway would say by like the flesh As a cyborg you could create yourself in any way you wanted to you wouldn't have to be constrained by gender or social class You could create that in real time And I thought as somebody who grew up not necessarily with all the privileges in the world that I might be able to Do that and have a feedback loop that would produce an identity That was more equal than the one that I grew up in And these kind of psychological effects that we get accustomed to it's kind of like a spreadsheet game You want plus one follower plus one like and you forget. What are you actually producing? What will be remembered in five or ten years? Hypersigials from grant Morrison is kind of this idea. I got really excited about Serial experiments lane when I was like 14 Really shy girl with brown mousy hair Uh didn't really understand the world yet went online to the yardo and could suddenly produce an identity So I I definitely followed this as a template for what I was doing But along the way kind of realized you can see how oldest references That the internet was both a playground that you can enjoy but also a factory for Producing things you could produce fame you could produce bullying you could produce torture You could produce fake news as we've now seen It's just this kind of space of a database game And the reason why it's so compelling is that the real world the rewards have slowed down It's not that you can just buy a house suddenly With the current economy, but you can buy one in farmville You can't I mean really old reference But you can buy some that you can do something faster And if you can do something faster in this virtual world, isn't that more compelling? If you go into minecraft in the first night in minecraft you have to prevent the creepers from killing you Your psychology binds to that game as an animalistic response that harkens back to what it is to be human to survive And you're bonded to that game in a way that you haven't been in real life Why is that less compelling than you know, why are these virtual worlds? I mean Farmville is a virtual reality an augmented reality facebook is a two-dimensional virtual reality What we forget when we talk about vr and ar and all these overbuilt systems Is that it doesn't take much for our imagination to attach to something That's why legos are so compelling. They invite our imagination to attach to something and we co-create the thing with our imagination Of course that leads to spreadsheet games social grooming psychological effects And the kind of training wills whoever had who had tamagotchi's when they were growing up. Yeah This is really funny because I think of this as like a training will like please feed the pet so that it survives Please feed your friends with text and emojis so they the friendship survive Like I'll go through I'll set a time and be like I need to text people with emojis Make sure that I continue to have friends because if I forget I won't get access to this pile of norwegian people I grew up in an analog backyard. It was really fun Um, I was growing more physically than I was socially and I brought my tape recorder backyard. It was really fun time Um, but a lot of people don't have backyards anymore. They're they're in apartment buildings And an apartment building doesn't have that random free range kid zone anymore They're constrained and so they go into a kind of digital backyard where you can talk with anybody across any border without a passport maybe your best friend is 10 miles away Maybe they go to a different school And you don't just have the idea of hanging out with like 10 friends After school and then like maybe your mom calls you at night. There's this idea that like it's really dangerous I go to some other countries and people just run around and they're not into door. They explore. They're just hanging out and coming back So I'm worried about this kind of disconnect between social and physical development Especially when you have this kind of augmented reality for bullying where, you know, I got bullied all the time as a kid But when I got home from school, I was safe It was great But now like I can't imagine having to grow up with this where like the bullying will follow me as a virtual Cloud forever and ever until my parents switched me schools. My parents did switch me schools because of the bullying I went to 10 schools but You know, there was at least something that could be done. I was very lucky Um, so how do you kind of merge tech with real life instead of having the tech being constrained to sitting there in front of the tech?  You're looking at a history of what I was doing But Mika Satomi did this cool thing where she made this uh vest that you could wear And you could play video games on the person's back And then in doing so you would be giving them a massage while playing a video game So the idea is that you would connect the labor of the fun labor of a game But you wouldn't be wasting that you'd be able to give somebody a massage Kelly dobson said why do we have why do machines have to speak our language? Why can't we speak their language? Why do we have to tell them like on and off and have all this voice activated stuff? So she had a blender where you go And a blender would go This other guy, this is a that's an old picture of me. Um, this this uh, this guy in um In germany decided that he would make a system called the northpaw And the northpaw would just be a haptic buzzer that would buzz in the direction of north It would be like a belt that you would wear with like 12 buzzers And it would always buzz in the direction of north and what this guy and everybody found is that When you wore this you would develop a sixth sense for wherever you were And he found that like a month later he would dream and he would have a buzz to where his home was in the dream um But this you know these three things definitely inspired like my foray into calm tech like trying to take some Information and put it into a different sense with this one trying to use uh labor in one sense and make it fun for somebody else And stop putting voice activation into everything.  I think right now one of the One of the issues is that we kind of have a fractal production of value There's there's value and then there's an interface with more value and then there's kind of a Kind of a value crisis where everything seems to have value at the same time And that gives us the kind of intermittent Reinforcement that we have as like scionarian rats where we're just clicking the button to find the food I've started to change this I keep my phone in airplane mode. I decide a couple times a day that I want to check something And then maybe once a week I answer a lot of the stuff But I'll keep it. It'll be like do I need to do that right now? No, I need to not worry about it It's been a really hard process because this stuff gets your anxiety up I want more of the kairos time.  Like I've gone on a road trip with some people in this room And it's been really nice to just sit there and have uncompressed time and write note poetry and publish a little zine Or you know just to have that human time Um Because if you don't have that are you being really reflective? Do you know who you are? Are you just repeating the same thing for 10 years and I would ask all of you What is it you want to do with your life? How do you want to live? Are you actually happy? Is any part of your day something that you enjoy Living with and if it's not try putting your phone under a cast iron pan for an hour and seeing how you deal with your life Or a digital downtime Yeah, that's a good quote everything in moderation especially moderation. There's an old talk from 10 years ago. Thanks so much for listening in the end So do people have questions was that reasonable? That was a really weird giving that talk We can talk about anything for um 15 minutes 20 minutes and then maybe we can wrap up Does that sound good or we could continue longer? We're supposed to go to like six but Arthur Do we want a microphone for the livestream? Okay, hold on Wait, wait In the last 10 years, uh Have you encountered examples that you had add to that presentation? Like there's some neat things that you that have come about in the meantime Yeah, I wrote a book on the calm tech part in the self reflection part. Um I wrote a book on the sound part which will come out like next month um I did a startup on one of the parts Yeah, I did like all this is like broken out into like a talk on vr A talk on here like yeah, there's there's been a lot that I would add that that's all kind of Matured more or less. Yeah But there's there's a lot here. I mean the problem with this talk is that there's no real point and um That was always like, how do I piece it out and then figure out Which thing is appropriate for which era right like when I first came to talk on alerts and how annoying they were in 2014 in norway nobody cared. It was rated a two out of five on the presentation level Like people didn't like this talk and they were really mad. They're like, why aren't you talking to us about cyborgs? We hired you to give a talk on cyborgs and you're talking to us about alerts And I said well, I have to practice this talk and in a couple years Everybody will be annoyed with alerts and they'll wonder about how to have our attention back And I have to start giving it now because it's not going to be very good for like a year or two And I'm sorry And so, you know eventually people were like, yeah, we really carry about alerts But if I had tried to give a talk on alerts in 2010 like not even that not even enough people had alerts and phones Yeah But they were kind of like there was a recession going on like people were worried about more stuff than alerts So then what was that like? Well Maybe that was a good time to do a startup on reconnecting people to like civic geo things which Went from an open source project to something bought by a large corporation Yeah, so that one was strange. Um, and then yeah, the other one was Yeah, I guess it's it's been broken up and then like vr came back Like part of this talk, which I didn't give was about steve man and all his vr and ar projects Which I just studied for historical purposes And then like vr and ar came out and I could like break out this deck and suddenly people wanted me to speak at These virtual reality conferences. So I think my timeline is always like I'm usually three years ahead. And so as long as I just Care about it instead of just knock myself in the head and be like, well Nobody cares about it. Therefore. I shouldn't care about it And I say, okay, nobody cares about it. Maybe I should really care about it and work on it so I've just Learned to trust my gut. Like if I really care about a thing, I'll quietly do it not tell anybody about it Because people will say, oh, you have too much free time on your hands or that's dumb or don't talk about that So I just Quietly do something in the background wait for it to be reasonable to release it and then quietly release it Have people hate it for a couple months or a year Deliverately give it in front of people that hate it Until it holds up on its own, which is not fun to do It's like a musician like releasing some really bad music And they have to deal with it and they have to go on tour with it for like a year But thankfully people have liked this stuff over time. So Oh, yeah Recent report that the exec there's the digital divide has flipped And the executives in silicon valley are keeping screens away from their kids And people with the least resources are using screens as babysitters Is this fundamentally changing our humanity growing up with Screens instead of human interaction and any comment you want to make on that? Yes, and then I'll get your question um Yeah, so all the executives I know in silicon valley send their kids to a walder steiner schools.  So she had to stay home with me So I got I got lucky, but it definitely impoverished my family. It was not great So I got like a lot of cool attention and training from my parents, which was nice um And I didn't really have a lot of screen time um I guess the screen time issue is that if the tv is that close to your face And the led screen has specific frequencies of high energy blue light It leads to corneal degeneration before the age of 14 So corneal acres can detach and it leads to uh needing surgery later in life Also, like the depth of understanding reality like you're not getting the depth perception and training that you would have like climbing outside in a tree like there's massive things also like delayed gratification if you're used to Pressing on a button and getting everything and you think your kid is really smart because they learned how to turn a page On the ipad and that's really smart instead of Considering it's 40 years of industrial development and design that has gone into it Then you end up in a situation where like It's not really parents fault like the parents who can't stay with their kids and occupy them in some other way Or give them a notebook to write in like they have to do something with their kids You know, so I don't fault anybody for that But for the people who have resources. Yeah, they make sure that I think like before the age of seven kids should have Physical and social and mental development learn to work in teams learn to do a long-term project over the course of six months So that they understand how long it takes and then in schools Make sure that there's art and and culture and all of the other stuff that takes a long time to train So that there's something other than tech because if you only get tech It can lead to depression and anxiety and feelings of worthlessness because you're just comparing yourself to the highlight reel of everything That's been produced online and you don't see as I was talking on the future prairie podcast any of the middle stuff You don't see any of the development. You don't see what it takes to make something Um, so if you don't see any of that then, you know, you're you're kind of getting cheated out of What it takes to do something and it kind of enriched childhood, which we can't blame anybody for but that is a danger And in terms of like dividing people. Yeah Like you're you're looking at a generation who either is really depressed and commit suicide or gets opiate addiction Uh, or a whole other group of people that learns to create and creates the next generation for people So hopefully they'll create a really good generation for us in the future or they might not but there's Hopefully there's more people around to do that. That's really bleak. Uh, please ask the next question Yeah, I was just gonna say uh, this is kind of uh, similar to what the his question. Um, I loved all of that. Um, I um, working with uh, kids with disabilities Is what I've I've been doing with um, and specifically with kids with behavior disabilities People, uh, just kids that just don't know how to treat each other They, you know, a lot of them are very violent and explosive Almost every single one of them that I've worked with in four years Has a technology addiction actually and it's a very common very very common thing And I actually just had a conversation with a co-worker about how, um Our jobs with our we're teaching these kids how to regulate emotion How to teach how to teach people teaching people how to treat one another It it could potentially be the the oldest job, you know, that's around So I was just gonna see what what you might have to say about that. Yeah, um I think I'm on the hook to write another book after this one and the only thing I can think of to start with is You know that you have that the the The rat and the cocaine lever thing or the rat presses the cocaine button until they die Yeah, the sconeering rat right like those different versions of this test There was a study done later For these rats and what they noticed is that they had another control test rats with enriched environments and rats with unenriched environments You just throw a rat in a cage with nothing else to do and they're then press the lever forever But the rats with families and activities and free time and cool stuff ignored the lever So I think instead of saying like it's a technology addiction We could say what is unenriched in somebody's life and how do you bring back that meaning and kairos time and culture And if you can bring that back, you're gonna see a level off in that addiction That's what i'm hoping the hypothesis from the rats applied broadly to humans non scientifically might do All right caveat caveat caveat But I think it's important to look at that and say, you know, how do you enrich Somebody's life and how can we do that without a lot of money? Well, actually the cool thing about culture is that it grows between spaces It grows in periods of political weirdness, you know, and if we can embrace that Then we're going to have a chance I think Hopefully it's a more hopeful Thing than the last answer to the question. I'm trying to be more positive I would agree with that. It just it takes it's hard to teach self-care to somebody who hasn't grown up with it And who has parents who haven't taught them that Yeah Thanks for your talk In thinking through your metaphor of the sarcophagus room And and where information lies. Yeah I When I think of the stanford group the captology group that bj fog is put together Over the years and the sort of the birth of instagram I wonder if you could address A way in which What I think you're pointing at which is How do we Encourage kids or students etc to emerge out of their sarcophagus rooms Into the light of day Into the outside world What keptology is there for the living world? Thanks, jair. Uh, jair also runs a conference. What is media? What is life with university of oregon? I would suggest checking that out every year That's how I met the X church group vr spawn a lot of things. Thank you for being here um Well, I don't know if I have any of the answers But I would say like yeah this the next generation of children They're getting their driver's licenses later. They're not socializing in the same way Um, they're socializing through not with like through a device through a mediator not with Each other and that's just a you know, it's a it's a change Um, I'm right on the cusp of the two generations So, you know, I got my driver's license at 18. Like, you know, I got everything late Um, and I would say I was highly depressed because I didn't know that there was anything else in the world Like I was stuck in just tech and until a strange individual introduced me to the idea of other stuff like I couldn't really get out of that So, you know, if you eradicate arts and music and other cultural programs in schools And you just give people tech and you think adding more tech and iPads are the answer You're robbing people of a potential future that they could have had because they didn't even know it existed So how do you do that without any more arts funding because that's hard to find? Right, how do you do that when it's very it's good for the economy to have people that are depressed because they'll Pay more for stuff and they'll sell their stuff for less and they'll be online like a run-on sentence Right at some point that will invert and it won't be good for the economy anymore And hopefully that day will come soon because it's really getting annoying um but in terms of like introducing people that like All I could do in school is join clubs And joining clubs because they can be run on a very small budget You know, you can get secondhand instruments. You can get weird clay supplies You can do a saturday science class if One of those random great teachers stays after school and doesn't grade papers that night and doesn't spend time with their family That night because they're running your wednesday science after school class That you know, that's one way And another way is like how do you do that as a kid when you can't run down the street and go see a show Like how can you do that when all the culture you see is compressed into mp4 on youtube? And you're in a tiny thing. So hopefully there'll be something more Maybe lego's non-branded lego's maybe a piece of paper in a pad Maybe like uninterrupted quiet time You know an hour a day where you have to be self-reflective Maybe allowing people to be on a computer one or two hours a day Like I did a survey of like a thousand people. How did you learn to program? And a lot of people said well, I didn't have access to the family computer except for once a week So I got these computer programming books and I like wrote it out And then I and then I typed into the computer when I got it and then I screwed up and then there was a bug And then I thought about the bug for a whole week and then when I went back to the computer I fixed it But then it did something weirder and then I had an idea of what happened and I became a really good programmer It was because they weren't allowed to be on it as much And that's kind of the same as like if you can take a picture of anything does a picture mean anything But if you have like three pictures you can take What are they going to be of right? So I think it's just kind of the idea of like if there's an escalator in front of a gym people take it Like if we artificially like limit some of these things suddenly they become more valuable And we get more of the delayed gratification back And we make use of the weird stuff in our environment instead of just clicking a button and getting it reward I'm hoping that might be steps toward an answer Matt you had a question Thanks amber another great talk and a really nice dialogue going So I just wanted to pick up the thread from what we were talking about a few minutes back I was wondering if you've connected with people like Tristan Harris or Any of these silicone valley heretics who started time well spent or humane tech dot org and and whether or not you see That initiative like really taking hold within the culture in silicon valley and Whoever else just in the tech circles that you run in Was this all headed? Yeah, I Hung out with Tristan for a whole day in new york had dinner with him on another occasion talk to him bunch So for those of you don't know Tristan Harris Is an ex-googler and the great thing about being an ex-googler is you can say i'm an ex-googler It's like saying i'm an ex-christian or i'm an ex whatever x anything a complete swap Right and because google is so much in the news and he's a fairly attractive person It's easy to take a big photo and put them on the front page of the atlantic The real big thing that got him was his friend or somebody who didn't even know him made some poetry about it Walk down the streets of new york and put that as a video that became viral about time well spent So it was really interesting to look at that and and when I met Tristan a couple times He was overwhelmed because everybody wanted him to speak at a conference They wanted him to write a book and he was raising funding and getting a whole group of people around him just to take In the intensity So it wasn't that he was trying to do this or he's smug about it. He's just a human that's overwhelmed By the thing that he was trying to not be overwhelmed by so What I like about his effort is that on the time well spent website There is a series of chrome plugins and other tools to get your time back from tech and I would encourage everybody to Look at that. That's really good But in terms of like a long-term solution, you know There are plenty of ex-googlers and ex-facebook people that say let's get our time back But I don't like to think in terms of a year like I like to think in terms of 10 years Like what will exist in 10 years? How we're all will our time be spent? You know like oil painting and watercolor and music will be Around right but like maybe not the current social media interface that we have so I prefer to spend my time On those things that are unmasterable right Which take a really enormous time to do something with and that you can quietly do by yourself that like give you More meaning and I think there's right now. It's just an exciting trend to say tech is bad And let's have some time back and yeah, you know I think with the calm tech effort that I've been trying to do is I've dredged up some stuff in the 80s and 90s In sarahx park that I believe to be more human Universals about attention and what I'm trying to do is take those to the top of companies and say Hey, you don't need to be afraid of people hating tech and you don't need to be afraid of tech But you need to be more deliberate about how you integrate it into your company because it costs you more if you integrate it badly And that's it. So it's a simple message that I think should be able to Not Not be too exotic and not be too exciting or spicy, but just like Slowly feel the cracks between These spaces as a very slow glacier type movement I prefer to do that Then think about a thing at a year at a time because initially I was like, ah, you know, this is intense But then I was like, wow, you're overwhelmed. Oh my gosh. Like well, I'll just focus on this You can focus on that and great. I'll just amplify your chrome plugins and Send me messages every once in a while, you know, so it's peaceable. Yeah So good question. I hope it's an adequate answer Arthur Just building on that Tristan was interviewed in a wired podcast with uh no, you've all hara right and um The author of sapiens and homo des Recently came out with his 21 lessons for the 21st century. Yeah, and I'm wondering how you might address that um concern he has of technological disruption and um, what you see You know as the challenges going forward. Yeah, what is it 21 rules for the 21st century? Is that actually a really good piece? I would suggest like He's writing some pretty good stuff. What what is his name again the author of sapiens? right you've all known a horari so a fantastic writer, but um What was I going to say? How was I I want to address what wait? What was the last question? Oh, oh, thank you. Thank you So if you go back in time to agriculture revolution industrial revolution, there was always this Terror that like, you know, you had kids chained to machines in manchester in the uk Like that was terrible Like now you have kids chained to machines, but they're iPods and it's the internet It's playground of factory and they're paying you know Titting to the to the sheep god and you know playing ads Yeah, how's that different? Well, it's different because the kids last longer, right? They are not dying of like cotton lung Right, but they're still indentured servants, right? So like this is like we're in another generation of that And it's really that whole spectrum Like it's not everything is horrible and everything is great for some people things are okay For some people things aren't really good And we have just to have to say we're at a teenage point in this where we're basically at you know 13 year old forum thread disaster But all of us are taking it seriously instead of just shoving it off And I think that's one of like the great disappointments of the last five years is that like Trolls we've emotionally reacted to instead of saying, okay, this is a forum thread gone wrong Okay, next form. Oh no, the whole world is in the same forum thread and it's gone really horribly wrong You know, but we used to have and I think that's the issue of scale right now. I'm less afraid of I'm more afraid of this this scale issue You just have forums and you had small communities on forums and if somebody was going to commit suicide or they were crazy or whatever You would have a hundred people in that forum or it would be a motorcycle enthusiast forum is about specific interests And you could say, oh, well, I think I know that person's phone number call or go over their house or figure out something But how can you do that with a centralized system of content moderators who are paid nine to five and chain smoke on their breaks?  They're not completely attached to anything does empathy scale You know You have to ask these questions of like what works the scale and what doesn't work at scale And I think if we go back to the greek city states model The greek city states worked pretty well because you had small states and people could switch leadership around And you didn't have too many more people now This is you know, this is just my 10 year old self saying I read play to and i'm cool, you know And I like the idea of city states. It could be completely wrong But that model was Small enough and distributed enough That people had ownership when things went wrong Like if we could fix our own potholes in the city or we could plan our own trees Or we could decide our own city design that could be interesting if we could decide to live in a walkable community And not have these giant cars everywhere if we could have barcelona city blocks, right? But instead things are defined for us by like some larger structure The temple itself online or myspace or whatever user experience decides to change and I think that Is one of the fears that I have about technology is that I want to go down the street and have the television repair person repair my tv I want to know them I don't want to have live in that community maybe for a while and grow roots there and develop something slowly over time I want older people to have respect and look good and stay smart I want people to be well dressed and quality close that are not able to be made at scale Like I kind of want something that's a little bit more real than this kind of like Point-and-shoot trash it quickly society and that's really hard to have and so that's kind of like my reflection on the 21 rules for Something something that he wrote which was good, you know Is that we're going through growing pains right now Hopefully we'll settle in but this era right now is temporary just like every other era is Think longer term you deserve it Don't get so caught up right now Because in 10 years things can change in 15 years. We were just getting phones with cameras Things can really really change the next five years and we actually have The ability to help change that so you know I feel like I'm like preaching or something like don't go home and think on the couch and watch the next Rewound of netflix. There's no reruns on netflix. It's all rerun You know, but like do something you know write like Remember how you used to maybe write in a journal or like paint something for yourself and you didn't have to send it to the web Like if you actually sit down and wrote for 30 minutes tonight and didn't publish it What would that mean? What would that look like? Like we don't have to make stuff for other people We can make it for ourselves and I think if we get a little bit of that back the hard time And have each day have something slightly unique in it Cool things could happen. You will surprise yourself like the single biggest thing that this is so silly inspirational quote But it was like bill gates was like people underestimate what you do what you can do In five years, but overestimate what you can do in one. So as long as you just sufficiently set the timeline You can do whatever you want Because things change a lot so Glacier time Not river time rivers are like super exciting. I don't want to be super exciting. I want to be boring But I want to be doing something that makes Somebody remember something The end Okay, that's cyborg camp. Thanks for coming Dave moser on the second floor says please send people up to be scanned better lighting today He's on the second floor you have about a half an hour before he is going to tear down or maybe even longer But we need to make sure not any how much time do we really have To be polite to you and other organizers Okay Okay, sounds good. Uh, yeah, so second floor up. Dave moser can do a 3d scan and send it to you Thanks for coming see you in two years Oh wait, I would like to thank the live streaming crew. I would like to thank all the volunteers I I'm really bad at this part. Thank you everyone for making it possible Uh drink all the beer and whatever else is out there