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From nothing, everything

The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought, spawning paradoxes that have long nourished art, philosophy, and science

by Victoria Wohl + BIO

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In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences by staging four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. His composition 4'33" was an attempt to make nothing audible. It was inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951), entirely white canvasses that work as blank screens to register shifting shadows and reflections, and project them as art. 'A canvas is never empty,' says Cage, quoting Rauschenberg, and 4'33" bears that out, as random ambient sound – coughing, shifting, programmes rustling – becomes a kind of music. These works illustrate the impossibility of saying nothing: to represent nothing is to negate it by turning it into something – an image, a piece of music, a reflection of and on movement, time and change.

Cage explores this conundrum in his 'Lecture on Nothing' (1959). The essay includes this self-refuting statement:

I have nothing to say

and I am saying it and that is

poetry as I need it .

Like the negative space against which words become visible (voids emphasised in Cage's original typography), nothing generates speech and the speaker, poetry and the 'I' who needs it. The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan develops this idea in his hypnotic sonnet 'Opening the Cage' (1966) which offers 14 variations on Cage's 14-word sentence. For Morgan, as for Cage, saying nothing is a paradoxical gesture of creative and even existential affirmation:

Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that

And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it

Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

Text-based artwork featuring repeated phrases about poetry and saying nothing on a cream background.

opening the cage: 14 variations on 14 words - i have nothing to say and i am saying it and that is poetry (john cage) (1966) by Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), part of Concrete Poetry Britain Canada United States. Used with the permission of the Edwin Morgan Trust. Photo by Tate Gallery, London

Is there a way to speak or even to think of nothing without making it something, betraying its character as nonexistent? The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought and language, demanding new modes of analysis and expression. Moreover, if nothing is something, that would seem to complicate the definition of 'something' as an entity that really exists in the world. And if it is not something, then what 'is' it? A paradoxical question if there ever was one. More than just a linguistic puzzle, the idea that 'nothing exists' challenges our understanding of existence itself and spurs more nuanced theories of reality. To speak of nothing raises questions about everything. One can see why philosophers and artists alike have been drawn to it.

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The history of nothing in Western philosophy is long and varied. Philosophers have distinguished between different kinds of nothing (what is not absolutely, not a specific something, not real, etc): its vagueness is part of the fecundity of the concept. They have treated it as a problem of theology (the heretical idea that everything may come not from God, but from nothing); of ethics (for Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness is the precondition of human freedom); and of logic, as when Bertrand Russell scandalously conceded the logical existence of negative facts.

Above all, speaking nothing has been a problem of ontology, the systematic discourse (logos in ancient Greek) of beings (onta) and of being (on). Ontology is the study not of this or that particular being but of being in general: not just every material and conceptual entity in the world but the essence (from the Latin esse, 'to be') that unites them all and allows us to say of each one that it 'is'. Ontology asks: what actually exists and how do we know? An investigation of fundamental reality, it also opens onto questions about language and thought and their access to (or obstruction of) that reality – that is, the relation between logos and onta. Thus, Aristotle dubbed the enquiry into being 'the first philosophy' and considered ontological questions the prerequisite for philosophy as a whole. Those questions have taken on new life today as physicists ponder the indeterminate ontology of the atom and cosmologists debate how something – in fact, everything – could have first emerged from nothing.

Gorgias deploys the ironies of nothing to build a counterintuitive (and frankly dodgy) case against anything

As this last question suggests, being is often defined in relation to its opposite, and the study of being almost necessarily entails the study of nothing. But what is the status of nothing in ontological enquiry? Does it belong to logos or to onta? Is it a problem of saying (as Cage articulates it) or of being (as G W F Hegel has it, for whom being at its most absolute is indistinguishable from nothing)? Does it represent the limits of human expression or a negativity within the structure of reality itself? Ludwig Wittgenstein raises this question in the final (Cage-like) aphorism of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' Philosophy's ultimate object is a being – or is it a nonbeing? – inaccessible to logos and a truth that can be spoken only through structured silence.

Ontology's fascination with nothing and its relation to both terms – onta and logos – goes back to the ancient Greeks. The sophist Gorgias (483-375 BCE) wrote an entire treatise on it. His 'On Nonbeing' proposes that 'nothing exists; that if something does exist it is unknowable; and if it exists and is knowable, it cannot be communicated to others.' Through a series of brain-teasing syllogisms, he deploys the ironies of nothing to build a counterintuitive (and frankly dodgy) case against anything, on the premise that, since being and nonbeing are opposites, if nonbeing exists – as it does, as soon as we speak it – then being must not. Sliding between two senses of the phrase 'nothing exists', Gorgias' claim would seem to be refuted by the very logos that asserts it, a logos that survives, albeit only in paraphrases and scattered quotations, to this day.

How does one speak of nothing without turning it into something, rendering one's own logos self-negating and nonsensical? As the Eleatic stranger puts it in Plato's Sophist, to speak of nonbeing is not only to say nothing but not to speak at all – which he will continue to do for many pages in arguing dialectically for the existence of nonbeing and the possibility of naming it. To speak of nothing strains against the very raison d'être of language. It is no wonder that for the ancient Greeks ouden legein ('to say nothing') meant to talk nonsense.

Gorgias and Plato were both responding to the first ontologist, Parmenides, who lived in Elea in Greek-speaking southern Italy in the late 6th to early 5th century BCE. Earlier thinkers had meditated on the nature of particular beings – humans, gods, etc – but Parmenides was the first to explicitly take on being itself. In the process (and almost against his will), he also speaks of nonbeing. Parmenides illustrates the perplexities nothing poses for ontology and the poetic and philosophical creativity these generate. He also suggests the stakes. For Cage and Rauschenberg, nothing is a negative space that foregrounds the coughs and shuffles of everyday existence. For Parmenides, by contrast, the denial of nothing secures being in the abstract, but at the cost of repudiating life itself, the experience of being alive in the world.

Parmenides' fragmentary epic poem On Nature traces the journey of a philosophical initiate under the guidance of an unnamed goddess. The goddess leads 'the young man' (as he is called) away from the way of Doxa (Opinion), the world we live in and our deluded beliefs about it. This is a world of transient phenomena (objects and appearances – the Greek word phainomena signifies both) and the ambiguous names we give them: 'there will be a name (onoma) for all things, as many as mortals have established, believing them to be true: to be born and perish, to be and not to be, to change place and to alter their bright colour.'

Leaving this unstable world of appearances, the young man ascends the path of Alētheia (Truth) that leads to being. In contrast to the impermanent objects of human language and belief, being is 'ungenerated and indestructible, whole-limbed and untrembling and without end'. Compared with a perfect sphere, it is unitary and homogenous, eternal and unchanging. This great orb of presence Parmenides names – with stunning simplicity – 'being' (eon) or, more simply still, 'is' (esti). He makes unprecedented use of the participial form (eon in his dialect) and the third-person present indicative (esti) of the verb 'to be' (einai) to create new names for a new concept. The verb in these forms has no subject: it is being without a specific be-er, abstract and absolute 'is-ness'.

With this verbal innovation, Parmenides in effect invents ontology, positing not only being but also the possibility of a logos about it. The Greek verb einai conjoins a notion of reality and of true claims about it: 'Socrates is [ie, exists]' and 'Socrates is an Athenian.' Parmenides' esti in itself thus affirms an ideal correspondence between language and reality, the thesis that 'to speak (legein) and to think are necessarily "being" (eon), for "to be" is (einai esti) and nothing is not.' In these difficult (and much disputed) lines, he unites language and being: we can access reality through speech, and that speech (legein, the verb that gives us logos) partakes of reality. Esti encapsulates that union, collapsing what exists and what can be said about it into a single word. 'Is' is – a pure and perfect logos of on.

'Is not' is not only the road not taken: it is not even a road at all

Parmenides constructs and secures this ontology through the rigorous elimination of nonbeing: 'for "to be" is and nothing is not' (mēden d' ouk estin). Nonbeing is a persistent but repudiated (non)presence in the poem and a problematic – and generative – (non)element in Parmenides' philosophy. Esti is necessarily thinkable and speakable: 'that "is" (estin) and cannot "not be" (mē einai) is the path of conviction, for she attends Truth.' 'Is not,' by contrast, 'is a path that cannot be learned, for you could not know what is not (for that is impossible) nor could you speak it.' These two 'paths' are 'the only routes of enquiry for thinking', and the choice between them is the philosopher's first and most critical step: 'the choice (krisis) concerning these things lies in this: "is" or "is not".' This is not a personal choice like Hamlet's 'to be or not to be', but something more absolute and basic: an alternative between being – a definite, permanent reality that we can think and talk about – and an unspeakable, unthinkable nothing.

Our failure to grasp this alternative is what makes the mortal realm of Doxa so untrustworthy. We humans are 'uncritical (akrita) races, by whom "to be" and "not to be" are considered the same and not the same, and the path of all things is backward-turning.' Thus we mistake ephemeral phenomena for real beings. For example, we may say that 'the Moon is'. But the Moon waxes and wanes; it goes by different names and even disappears from view. Since it once came into existence (whether we explain that mythologically or scientifically), it didn't always exist. So when we say 'the Moon is' we conflate 'is' and 'is not': we use only partially true language about an only provisionally existent thing. We adulterate being with nonbeing.

Parmenides' strict division between 'is' and 'is not' underwrites a division between everyday appearances and true being. As Friedrich Nietzsche would later charge, Parmenides' division is the first chapter in a long history of philosophical denigration of empirical reality and lived experience. That Parmenides himself was not entirely numb to the sacrifice involved is suggested by his luminous description of the Moon as 'a night-shining alien light wandering around the Earth'.

Parmenides' goddess saves us from the confusion of Doxa by barring the path to 'is not': 'It has been decided,' she says, 'to leave the one route ["is not"] unthought and unnamed, for it is not a true route, while the other one both is and is true.' 'Is not' is not only the road not taken: it is not even a road at all. It is simultaneously forbidden and declared nonexistent. But if it doesn't exist, why must it be forbidden? And if it is unthinkable, why must we be persuaded not to think about it? If nonbeing simply were not (in the same way that 'is' is), there would be no need for Parmenides' goddess to direct us away from it. Indeed, there would be no need for Parmenides' poem at all. To that extent, nonbeing is the necessary underpinning of his poem and of his entire philosophical project.

In fact, for something that is unspeakable, nonbeing is spoken of with surprising frequency in the extant fragments. Not only is nonbeing not left by the wayside in the ascent to being, but 'is' seems to require 'is not' in order to secure its existence and nature – its very being. We are told, for instance, that being must be eternal and ungenerated, because what could it have been generated from? 'Not from nonbeing,' the goddess insists. 'I will not allow you to say or to think that, for it cannot be said or thought that "is not".' The idea that being was generated – that it came into being at some specific point in time – is anathema to Parmenides because it implies that there was a time when being was not. But even as the goddess prohibits the thought, her very insistence invites us to contemplate this forbidden genesis and its consequences: that being is the child of nonbeing and carries that origin as part of its identity.

Likewise, we are told that being is a bounded sphere of unadulterated presence beyond which is nothing but a vast inconceivable nothing. Being must be bounded in order to have a definable identity, but that identity is, as a result, defined by the nonbeing beyond it (a paradox Hegel would term 'determinate negation'). It is like an island marked out by the dark sea around it.

'Is' therefore needs 'is not' and Parmenides' language paradoxically preserves that 'is not' in the very process of eliminating it. When he writes ouden gar [ē] estin ē estai allo parex tou eontos, we can translate it as either 'there is or will be nothing else outside of being' or 'nothing is or will be, something else outside of being.' Nothing persists in the very logos that works to negate it, and that logos is a part of the poem no less than the singular perfect word of being, 'is'. Parmenides has to say nothing, and saying it is 'poetry as he needs it'.

If Parmenides must say nothing, even against his will, Democritus proclaims it an explicit and foundational element of his ontology. Writing a century after Parmenides (c460-370 BCE), Democritus developed the atomic theory first proposed by his teacher Leucippus. Virtually no fragments of Leucippus remain, and atomic theory is known mostly through later paraphrases of Democritus, particularly by Aristotle and commentators on him.

The atomists adopted Parmenides' conception of being as singular and unchanging, but they attempted to reconcile this with the empirical experience of plurality and change. First, they pluralised Parmenides' eon in the form of the atom, those 'little beings boundless in number' (as Aristotle calls them in a lost work on Democritus). Like Parmenidean being, atoms are eternal: they neither come to be nor pass away. Unlike Parmenides' monadic being, they are infinite in number and diverse in shape and size. Joining and separating, they produce the Universe and all the things in it.

Second, the atomists asserted the existence of nothing in the form of the void. 'An interval in which there is no perceptible body,' as Aristotle put it in the Physics, the void separates one atom from another, sustaining its atomic identity; it also provides the physical vacuity (kenon) in which atoms travel, combine and separate. Like the blank spaces in Cage's typography, the void is a negative space that highlights the positive presence of the atom and enables its life-giving motion. But that empty space also has a positive presence since, for the atomists, 'the void exists', as Aristotle says in On Generation and Corruption.

If the void is the absence of an atom, the atom exists as what fills a void

By asserting the contradictory existence of nothing, the atomists reconcile being and becoming, the absolute 'is' of Parmenides' path of Truth and the illusory human world of his Doxa, and give a new status to the latter. On the one hand, as a temporary aggregation of atoms, the phenomenal world is epiphenomenal or second-order, as Democritus says in his most famous fragment: 'By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour, but in reality atoms and void.' Like Parmenides, Democritus differentiates between the pseudo-being of human experience and the true reality that lies beyond it. On the other hand, since phenomena and their qualities are nothing but the effect of atomic interactions, they are intrinsically tied to that deeper reality: for the atomists 'what appears (phainomenon) is what is true,' as Aristotle complains in On the Soul. It is little surprise that Nietzsche, who considers Parmenides' being the rigor mortis of life itself, was a fan of Democritus.

The atomists' ontology thus seems to make space (as it were) for nothing in a way that Parmenides refused to do. In proclaiming the existence of nothing, however, Democritus turns it into a quasi-something, a positive entity, real enough to hold atoms apart, though not to impede their motion. The result is an oddly relative ontology. In contrast to Parmenides' absolute dichotomy between 'is' and 'is not', the atomists, according to Aristotle's Metaphysics, 'say that "what is" exists no more than "what is not" because the void exists no less than the body,' that is, the atom. Being and nonbeing are comparative, like their synonyms full (plēres) and empty (kenon). This comparative relation makes being itself relative, and relative, moreover, precisely to nonbeing. If the void is the absence of an atom, the atom exists as what fills a void. Being starts to look, as the F×

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A man and a woman on a path next to a grassy area, both holding phones; the man is shown from behind and appears to be taking a selfie while a large stag walks behind him.

Record everything!

Our memories are precious to us and constitute our sense of self. Why not enhance them by recording all of your life?

by Yannic Kappes + BIO

2,800 words

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Current technology allows for radical memory enhancement: smartphones can record (and transcribe) every conversation, and wearable cameras can capture hours of first-person audiovisual recording. We have excellent reason to record much more of our lives than we already do and thereby enhance our memory radically.

The case is simple: our memory is immensely valuable to us, and we already record much of our lives using video and photography, messenger logs and voice messages. These records are valuable to us in significant part because they enhance our memory and thereby promote its value. Recording those parts of our lives that we do not yet record would possess the same kind of value. Properly appreciated, this gives us reason to record much more (and create so-called lifelogs): nearly all of our conversations, everyday life and, in general, as many experiences as feasible.

But this thesis faces important concerns, including worries about technological feasibility. Creating these records should ideally function without additional effort: they should be frictionless like messenger logs or the fictional technology in the Black Mirror episode 'The Entire History of You' (2011). A lifetime of records would take a lifetime to revisit in real time (with long stretches of little intrinsic interest). But we could revisit parts by searching by timestamp or tags, and the content of records could be automatically analysed, and software could generate transcripts and best-of cuts. Audiologs, transcripts and lower-resolution footage wouldn't create storage problems, either. Objections from privacy and adverse psychological effects appear more significant. I will address these objections below, and will end with a plea: try recording almost everything before you rule it out.

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Why is our memory so valuable to us? Beyond its obvious role for survival, let us focus on three key aspects: first, we take pleasure in remembering and reminiscing. Second, our memories help us understand ourselves, others and our place in the world. Third, our memories play a crucial role for personal identity: who we are as persons is determined by our memories. These constitute our selves, so you are literally made, in part, of your memories. Our memories are valuable because they help make us who we are as individuals.

A richer and deeper memory can quite literally turn you into a richer and deeper person

The exact role memory plays for personal identity is subject to a philosophical debate going back at least to John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), who discussed the idea that a person remembering their previous experiences is both necessary and sufficient for that person's identity through time. Many versions of the idea that personal identity requires some kind of psychological continuity between a person at an earlier time and a later time have since been developed. Building on this rich tradition – represented more recently by Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Derek Parfit and others – Marya Schechtman in 'The Narrative Self' (2011) argues that our selves are constituted by an autobiographical narrative formed from memories of our past experiences. On Schechtman's view, who we are is partly determined by our autobiographical narrative and the memories on which this narrative builds; see also Dorthe Berntsen and David C Rubin's Understanding Autobiographical Memory (2012).

Given such views, it seems that a richer and deeper memory can quite literally turn you into a richer and deeper person. Richer and deeper memories appear to enhance your individuality: a thin and shallow autobiographical narrative appears to lead to a less substantial self, whereas a rich, detailed and deep autobiographical narrative appears to lead to a more substantial self. Assuming the latter is more desirable, a richer and deeper autobiographical narrative and the acquisition of memories that constitute it are more desirable.

Consider current memory enhancement practices: why do we keep chatlogs, take pictures or write diaries at all? Of course reasons are plentiful: journaling can serve reflection; picture-taking has an artistic component; habit and device presets may play a role, etc. But we clearly value our records in large part because they enhance our memory. Our memory is valuable and this value is promoted by the records that enhance it.

Records enhance our memory and thereby promote the three kinds of value just identified: we enjoy reminiscing by looking at our pictures and videos, and we understand ourselves and others better by revisiting chatlogs, social media posts and journal entries (moreover, records can – for better or for worse – be shared directly with others). But our records also enhance our autobiographical memories and thus help determine who we are as persons, allowing us to have richer personalities and a more complex individuality.

A radical way to support this idea comes from the extended mind hypothesis first put forward by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998, according to which external devices and the data they store can literally be part of our mind. According to this hypothesis, we extend our minds by using parts of our environment that can function for us in the way that parts of our brain do. In this vein, Richard Heersmink argues in 'Distributed Selves' (2016) that external information can literally constitute (autobiographical) memory and thus help determine who we are as persons.

It may one day become possible to integrate records with our cognition as we do with biological memories

But the extended mind thesis is disputed, and it can be questioned whether external records themselves could indeed be memories: unlike records, memories have an autonomous character (memories come to mind, records normally don't), a sense of intimate ownership, cognitive and emotional integration, and encompass all kinds of experiences, including moods, thoughts and whole conscious episodes.

Through technology such as mind-machine interfaces, it may one day become possible to integrate records with our cognition as we do with biological memories, but today we can rely on a less radical alternative: external information can fail to constitute autobiographical memory proper but nonetheless help to inform and enhance our diachronic selves, just as autobiographical memory does. What matters about autobiographical memory vis-à-vis determining our selves seems to be our ability to construct and recount pieces of autobiography (for example, when wondering who we are or were, and how we ended up where we are). External records can enhance this ability and tie it more closely to reality, even if they don't count as memories proper.

Indeed, external records can be far more reliable in supplementing autobiographical narratives than relying on biological memories that can often be checked only against themselves. These are systematically distorted when recalled, and the act of recalling changes them further. External memory prompts aren't subject to this and could tether us more reliably to reality than biological, subjective memories can.

Just as memory disorders can diminish our personalities in undesirable ways, therapeutic memory enhancements through audiovisual records can help to restore them; see Aiden R Doherty et al's paper 'Wearable Cameras in Health' (2013) and J Adam Carter and Richard Heersmink's paper 'The Philosophy of Memory Technologies' (2017). Under ordinary conditions too, it seems that external memory records can help healthy individuals to develop richer and deeper selves. So, memory enhancement through records is valuable because it helps create pleasurable experiences of reminiscence and increases our understanding of ourselves and others, but also because it literally turns us into richer and deeper individuals, either because records themselves are external memories that constitute richer autobiographical narratives, or because their memory-like nature supports the continued creation of such a narrative. Insofar as becoming richer and deeper individuals is desirable, memory enhancement through records is also desirable.

So far, I have argued for the value of records that most of us already create daily, based on the value of the memory that they enhance. But, when properly appreciated, it seems that the reasons that motivate these memory-enhancement practices should motivate us to record a lot more.

Consider conversations and other experiences we don't normally record, such as a conversation with a friend: if every conversation generated a chatlog (automatically transcribed by a digital device) or took the form of letters, you might come to cherish these like you cherish your biological memory. Searchability of such records is key, but we know that current technology allows this already. There are so many conversations we could record but don't. More seems to be more here. We already record much, but significant parts of our lives remain fleeting (so many conversations, unexpected events, and much of everyday life including periods seemingly without remarkable events).

Most people already record some noteworthy events (audiovisually or through writing). But remembering and recording unexpected, spontaneous but notable, mundane or recurring events is often just as valuable in retrospect. And even where single events aren't obviously worth recording, many of them together form a significant part of our experience and contribute to who we are, just as painful or otherwise negative experiences can. Thus, even the value of records that aren't pleasurable seems evident since they let us remember and understand ourselves better, even if we rarely revisit them.

Recording social interaction allows reminiscing about it more accurately, improving our understanding of what was said and our picture of ourselves and others. Consider the last worthwhile conversation you didn't record – wouldn't it be good to have such a record, just in case? And if you had such a record, wouldn't you want to keep it? Granted, most current (audiovisual) records miss much of our experiences, including inner speech, conscious experiences and emotions. But I am neither arguing that extensive audiovisual records should replace biological memories or other techniques such as journaling, nor that current recording technology can capture everything worth remembering.

Imagine all the pictures you've ever taken and every message were deleted – how would you feel?

We already record much, you might say, why then record even more? Recording more might be valuable, but should we record everything? There is a risk of a status quo bias here. It is, however, unlikely that we have chanced upon the sweet spot of recording just the right amount. Answering what this is presumably requires personal reflection and experimenting with the technology, to determine which records one values, and decide what kind of person one wants to be.

Playful imagination can help assess alternatives to our present way of life. Have you ever wished for perfect recall? Lifelogs are almost like this, although voluntary, accurate and restricted to recordable sensory modalities. Our present recording practices indicate how much we value memory enhancement. Imagine all the pictures you have ever taken and every logged message were deleted – how would you feel and why? I would feel devastated, like having lost a part of me and a prized basis of understanding myself and others in my life. Likewise, we can imagine already possessing extensive records (of every conversation we ever had, say), then losing many of them to end up with what we in fact possess. I imagine this as a comparable loss.

We can reflect on our relationship to our enhanced counterparts by thinking about people with memory disorders who use lifelogs for therapeutic purposes. Our present recording practice isn't only more desirable than the situation of people with impaired memory, but also better than that of past people who lacked the ability to create written or audiovisual records. From the imagined perspective of people with access to a universal, friction-free lifelog, our situation would likely appear comparably less desirable. This vision from the future gives us reason to pursue more extensive recording: more will be more!

Not only would we benefit from recording more, our family and future generations could too. Diaries and letters already allow glimpses into the lives of our ancestors. But imagine how much better we could understand them had they (say, your great-grandparents, or perhaps Ludwig Wittgenstein) recorded everything! As it is, we don't possess a single audio recording of Wittgenstein's voice.

You might also want to allow posteriority access to deadbots: language models trained on records of the dead to simulate responses their originawere firing at farmers protesting a law that absolved agribusiness from obligations to workers. In Uzbekistan, also in 2020, farmers protested the cluster system, whereby land was forcibly given over to corporate clusters, which were usually run by individuals close to the political elite. Over the past five years, serious farmer protests have occurred in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, Nepal, Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, Uganda – and the list goes on.

Much of what is usually reported as 'terrorism' or 'militancy' has its roots in the collapse of the countryside

Behind the protests lies an even greater swell of invisible discontent. In my travels through the villages of Latin America, Africa and Asia, I have everywhere encountered the fury of farmers faced with assaults on their land, and with policies designed to allow agribusiness and industrial processors to capture more and more of their income. 'There is no point the government offering poverty relief to farmers,' a farming organiser told me in India, 'when your policies are keeping them in slavery. You first have to unchain the farmers' arms and legs.'

Sometimes, the peasant crisis hits the media for other reasons. The Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s drew strength from agrarian protests in the Middle East and North Africa – even if the farmers were quickly marginalised after the fact. Much of what is usually reported as 'terrorism' or 'militancy' also has its roots in the collapse of the countryside. Boko Haram and other militant groups operating along the southern edge of the Sahara draw their forces from farmers and herders displaced by desertification, climate change and the closure of traditional nomadic routes. 'Jihadist groups,' writes one expert, 'have realised that certain groups have been left to manage the devastating impacts of climate change on their traditional livelihoods on their own,' which has 'created fertile grounds for recruitment.'

Mass migration is another symptom of this crisis. Most rural refugees head for the nearest metropolis, but tens of millions are driven across international borders. The caravans of migrants leaving Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras for Mexico and the United States are largely made up of such refugees. Other routes lead from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad through North Africa to Europe, and from East Africa to western Asia.

Photo of a woman in a colourful sari harvesting rice in a lush green paddy field under a cloudy sky.

Valli Kupuswamy, 55, weeding her paddy field. Photo by Sanjit Das/Panos Pictures

Then there is suicide. According to farmer advocates I have interviewed, more than 400,000 Indian farmers have taken their own lives. The greatest concentration has been in the cotton-growing regions of Maharashtra; cotton is a critical global resource, whose price is of acute political concern. A sophisticated mesh of laws and markets induces cotton farmers to continue selling below the cost of production – and so to enter a debt spiral from which they often find no mortal exit.

These are among the symptoms of the crisis of the global peasantry in the neoliberal era. We should be in no doubt: this is a political crisis. Everywhere, states are breaking their contract with peasants, and turning instead to anti-agrarian alliances with global corporations, local bigwigs, organised crime and gangsterism. Unchecked, this crisis will deliver terrifying consequences; it may even threaten our survival as a species. It is, in my view, the most important story of the 21st century.

For most of history, peasants supplied the basic economic resource: without them, there was no state. A special bond therefore existed between peasants and kings. Successful rulers – for instance, in China, Persia, India, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, West Africa, the Andes – nurtured the agrarian economy by instigating irrigation works, protecting peasant landholdings, guaranteeing crop prices, feeding populations when harvests failed, and controlling merchants, middlemen and land speculators. Many such systems were destroyed by European colonialism; restoring them was a major objective of Asian and African postcolonial governments. Similar issues gripped 20th-century Latin America, where agrarian democratic movements were continually pitted against landowning oligarchies and anti-Communist alliances.

Photo of a lush green hillside with trees under a cloudy sky, with distant hills partially shrouded in mist.

Valle de los Ríos Apurímac coca farm in Ene y Mantaro (Peru). Supplied by the author

In the decades leading up to 1980, many developing countries saw uncompromising and dramatic agrarian reform. Governments redistributed land, ensured farmers had firm titles, and protected them from the need to sell in times of hardship. Seeds became a critical national resource; states set up seed banks and research centres to preserve the seed heritage, develop high-yield varieties, and guarantee supply. States also formalised agricultural markets, set minimum prices, and often themselves became procurers of last resort. At their best – in South Korea, for instance, or Mexico – such strategies enhanced both standards of living and agricultural output.

Many of those reforms were overturned during the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s and '90s. Engineered by such agencies as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, this process forced states to reorganise themselves around the competition for global capital. They therefore established new alliances, not only with those agencies, but crucially with global agribusiness. As a result, significant control of rural affairs has been handed to international banks and corporations. Today's peasant crisis springs from there.

For many peasants, land represents economic security and heritage, ancestors and the generations to come

This is not to say that global markets are replacing peasant farming with more 'modern' techniques. It is true that, in some crop sectors, plantations have replaced small farms. Wheat production, for instance, can be carried out on a large scale with little human labour, using mechanisation and typically high inputs of fossil fuels and fertilisers; such techniques have been generalised from Mexico and Ukraine to Kazakhstan and India. Oil palms, too: in parts of southeast Asia, small farmers have been forcibly dispossessed, and then brought back as wage labourers on corporate oil-palm plantations. And chickens: poultry megazones in southern China – where poultry farming was previously a peasant preserve – now concentrate close to a billion chickens in factory-like conditions.

Not all agriculture, however, can be industrialised. Rice, which is the staple for half the planet, is ill-suited to big plantations; it requires intensive human intervention and is best grown on small family farms. Despite decades of corporate influence, therefore, rice is still produced by about half a billion peasants. The same goes for other essential crops. Cotton production has been mechanised in the US and Europe, but the quality suffers, which is why peasant production continues to dominate; small family farms in India and China contribute by far the largest proportion of global supplies.

Photo of a woman in colourful clothes picking cotton in a field under a clear sky.

A cotton farmer harvesting in Maharashtra, India. Supplied by the author

Not only do peasants have essential skills, they are also, from the corporate perspective, desirable partners – precisely because they are small, politically weak and easy to coerce. In some sectors, corporations have even made the profitable discovery that peasants – whose first commitment is to the land – will continue to farm at a loss. The neoliberal reorganisation of the countryside has not, therefore, eradicated the peasantry. Instead, peasants have been legally reconstituted in such a way as to maximise efficiency and profit. In the process, states that had previously stood with their populations against multinational corporations – which they often viewed as a neocolonial influence – have switched sides, aligning with large capital against their agrarian masses.

The first focus of neoliberal reform in the countryside has been to turn the global peasantry into agribusiness consumers. Seeds were at the heart of this: under the banner of World Trade Organization property protections, international foundations and funding agencies persuaded developing countries to illegalise traditional seed saving and exchange, and to dismantle state seed banks. Farmers were therefore dependent on corporate products – which often lasted only one season, and so could not be saved. Small farmers in many countries have protested against the resulting loss of 'seed sovereignty' and biodiversity. Thousands of Ghanaian farmers, for instance, protested the 2013 Plant Breeders' Bill which advanced agribusiness interests by criminalising farmers who saved seeds for planting the next year; the bill was withdrawn under pressure, but reintroduced in 2020 under a different name.

Photo of a person in a red cap harvesting rice in a sunny field with mountains and clouds in the background.

A farmer working at the rice harvest in Goseong-gun, South Korea. Photo by Björn Steinz/Panos Pictures

Proponents of corporate seeds often point to the Green Revolution, a 1970s triumph of American laboratories and foundations. This was built on genetically engineered high-yield seed varieties allied to intensive irrigation and fertilisers. Its legacy is dubious indeed: in the state of Punjab, the home of India's Green Revolution, agricultural land is saturated in chemicals, aquifers are disastrously depleted, and farmers are locked into an ever-rising cost cycle. In the era of the climate crisis, however, peasants themselves are desperate to find more resilient, higher-yielding seeds. With alternative seed sources removed, corporations have enjoyed a bonanza. Bayer (Germany) and Corteva (US) control 80 per cent of patents for genetically modified seeds. Allied to seeds are corporate fertilisers and pesticides; along with ChemChina and Sinochem (China) and BASF (Germany), for instance, those same companies control about 60 per cent of the global pesticide market.

By now, the global peasantry spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on industrial seeds and chemicals. While farm production is unquestionably higher as a result, this expenditure is dangerously out of phase with peasant income. Traditionally, peasants have tried as much as possible to do without cash, which usually arrived in bulk at harvest season. They spent little on seeds and fertilisers, and they fed themselves, as much as possible, from their own resources. Today, peasants need to put up significant amounts of cash at the time of sowing, and throughout the growing season, in order to get to harvest.

Much of the world's peasantry is now victimised both by free markets and by state-controlled socialist hangovers

Climate change also forces many peasants to resow several times, raising the cost of cultivation, sometimes by a lot. Since they are also spending far greater amounts on such regular expenses as children's education, most of this cash needs to be borrowed. Most governments have agricultural credit schemes, but some peasants lack the collateral and paperwork to cover their needs in this way. Others quickly exhaust their potential and must seek loans elsewhere. Hence the enormous importance, in Asia and Africa especially, of rural moneylenders. Often charging 10 per cent interest or more per month, moneylenders can leave immense human destruction in their wake.

Second, neoliberal policies have transformed agricultural markets. Over the past few decades, farmers have been increasingly shut out from the revenues accruing from their production. The means by which this exclusion has been achieved, however, are varied and complex.

Obviously, large corporations have the power to dictate market prices, to the detriment of millions of tiny producers. In that sense, open markets seem to militate against farmers. But the whole story is more nuanced. Developing-world farmers of cocoa, sugar cane or cotton rarely get market prices for their product. Standing between them and those prices, often, are the very same state institutions that were set up in the 20th century to protect farmer income. These marketing boards, and their fixed prices, have since drifted to an almost opposite function.

Photo of people gathering hay in a rural setting with brick walls and trees in the background.

A family of rice farmers in Bihar, India. Supplied by the author

In 1947, for instance, Ghana set up market monopolies to ensure fair prices were paid to cocoa farmers. Now, those institutions interpret the 'national interest' in the opposite way. They act to keep prices low, and so to generate a subsidy, not only for the state, but also for exporters, processors and chocolate consumers. In 2023-24, international cocoa prices soared as high as $12,000 per tonne, but farmer income was capped at the government price, which oscillated between $1,800 and $3,000 per tonne. The interactions between international confectionary giants and West African government agencies are complex, but the results are not. In the 1970s, cocoa farmers earned up to 50 per cent of the value of finished chocolate; this fell to 16 per cent in the 1980s, and is probably now around 6 per cent. While thtors would have given. These might become uncannily life-like if trained on sufficient data – whether that would be desirable remains an open question; for a discussion, see Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska's paper 'Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars' (2024). For instance, some philosophers continue teaching chatbots to impersonate their predecessors.

Finally, a highly speculative possibility: digital immortality. Could collecting comprehensive data about someone lead, one day, to a reconstruction of that person? This idea faces vexing questions about personal identity and the underlying causes of consciousness, not to mention the morality of undertaking such a reconstruction; for a discussion, see Dan Simmons's novel Hyperion (1989) which features a 'cybrid' (a human-AI hybrid) with the personality of John Keats, as well as Paul Smart's essay 'Predicting Me' (2021).

Given the preceding argument, memory enhancement through ubiquitous recording possesses significant value that any counterargument has to overcome: merely raising problems does not suffice to rule it out, though – a point illustrated by Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates laments the negative effect of writing on biological memory. Nevertheless, we must discuss two serious challenges that could significantly constrain what we may record.

The first concerns privacy and data autonomy. People have a presumptive right to privacy and at least some control over what data about them is collected. In most cases, consent must be acquired. Sometimes this is straightforward. Many allow people they trust to record much, and might become more eager to consent once they appreciate the value of extensive recording. Still, many will not ever want to be recorded. The resulting gaps in our records could partially be filled by journaling but, as with non-recordable experiences, sometimes we'll have only our biological memory to go back to.

But both accidental and intentional leaks (such as in revenge porn) remain a threat exacerbated by extensive recording practices. Powerful bad actors are another. Tech companies and governments have interests in records that often conflict with those of the general public. When Siri's co-creator Tom Gruber praises AI-assisted memory enhancement, we should be wary, and the prospect of a police state with access to data on everything we've ever done should make us think carefully before proceeding down this path.

We should enable people to enhance their memories safely and responsibly

We could consider a less privacy-friendly argument. If records partially constitute ourselves, prohibiting those required for deeper personal narratives infringes on the very core of our being and forces us to remain shallower than we could be. We would not restrict people with biological super-memories or excessive journal writers, and there is no prohibition on turning oneself into such a person. Analogously, if recording technology can constitute someone's self, sanctioning it may appear an objectionable infringement upon our ability to self-constitute. Conceivably, privacy concerns could require the suppression of natural memory, but they don't. One might think memory enhancement should be treated likewise. Evidently, this argument must address the fact that external memories are easier to share and subject to less distortion than biological ones.

Answering these challenges requires much more work but, given the value of extensive records, I believe that concerns about privacy and autonomy should be addressed through technological means (like open-source software, encryption, automatic acquisition of consent, data deletion if desired) and legal means (like robust privacy rights and regulation of bad actors). Given my positive argument above, powerful reasons exist to implement such safeguards. We should enable people to enhance their memories safely and responsibly.

Another important challenge is that recording everything could conceivably have negative psychological effects. Kn×

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A farmer in a hat ploughing a muddy field with a horse in a scenic hilly landscape under cloudy sky.

The world needs peasants

Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalised

by Maryam Aslany + BIO

4,200 words

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In 2007, the United Nations released a State of the World Population report noting that human life on Earth was quietly passing a tremendous benchmark. In 2008, the proportion of people residing in the countryside was falling – for the first time in history – below 50 per cent. Today, just 42 per cent of humanity lives in the countryside.

For many city dwellers, the urbanisation of our species is natural and inexorable. Extrapolating from past trends, they imagine a future in which the great majority has abandoned the land, leaving it bucolic, automated and empty. In the process, they predict – with some relief! – the imminent extinction of an ancient character: the peasant.

That word is avoided in polite conversation; in many languages, it is used as a term of abuse or contempt. Because peasants themselves are seen as an embarrassing vestige, the antithesis of 'progress'. Whether Right or Left, Western thinkers have taught that, in order to become modern, societies have to get rid of their peasants. While Adam Smith looked forward to peasants giving way to landowners (for then 'the land … would be much better improved'), Karl Marx foresaw their replacement by modern socialist management. It has been taken for granted that agriculture will eventually be monopolised by large capital and machinery, and cities will absorb the majority of the human population.

Painting of three women gleaning in a field with haystacks and workers in the background under a cloudy sky.

The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet (1857). Courtesy and © Musée d'Orsay. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt

Even in industrialising Europe, the process was not exactly like that. Yes, the traditional countryside was largely destroyed between the 18th and 20th centuries – but the resulting exodus was far greater than could be absorbed by urban factories. Sixty million Europeans had to escape, instead, to the New World. But, in any case, Europe plays a unique role in capitalist history, and it is wrong to extrapolate from it. Other regions have followed other paths.

In large parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, urbanisation is slowing. Most of those who will enter factories have already done so. Those who value the securities of village life, meanwhile, have little appetite for urban slums, isolation and hypercompetition. Therefore, while humanity was urbanising at a rate of 1.06 per cent per year between 1950 and 1970, that rate has now dropped to 0.74 per cent, and it will fall to just over 0.6 per cent by 2030. Since the world population has tripled since 1950, absolute rural numbers remain greater than ever before. By my calculations, as many as 2 billion people live in the countryside of Africa, Latin America and Asia, where small family farms dominate. After 300 years of 'modernisation', in short, peasants still constitute as much as one-quarter of our species, vastly outnumbering assembly-line workers, miners, office drones or taxi drivers.

Photo of a woman in a field holding a tool over her shoulder with a mountainous backdrop and overcast sky.

A M Menkethana, 59, returning from her rice field in Weweldigiliya, Sri Lanka. Photo by GMB Akash/Panos Pictures

Peasants are defined by family farms, usually 10 acres or less, whose output is optimised both for subsistence and for cash income. The work is carried out primarily by (unpaid) family labour. Far more than farmers in rich countries – many of whom are effectively state employees – peasants are entirely exposed to the fluctuations of climate and markets; their fortunes can vary greatly from one year to the next.

Peasants are fully integrated with the 21st-century economy, which could not operate without their production of sugar, cotton, cocoa and other essential commodities. Although they control less than one-quarter of the world's agricultural land, peasant farming is highly efficient, and estimates suggest 70 per cent of the world's population depends on them for some or all of their food. In many crucial sectors, peasant production is also more favoured by industry, and more suited to social conditions. Peasant agriculture is better than industrial alternatives, also, at managing soil health, water resources and biodiversity, so it is widely seen as a shield against climate change. Without peasants, in short, the global economy could not function, and our natural systems would collapse.

Life still depends on the peasantry. We are all affected, therefore, by the fact that the peasantry is today in an acute crisis. A crisis that rarely receives adequate attention in public discussion.

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On rare occasions, the countryside does make it to the front page. In September 2020, large-scale farmer protests erupted in India following the passage of new legislation that gave corporations a greater role in agricultural markets. Farmers across multiple states – especially Punjab and Haryana, where many relied on the state to procure their wheat and rice – staged demonstrations and blocked highways to New Delhi. Delhi is a global media hub; naturally, there was widespread coverage.

Photo of people gathered around a scarecrow effigy, holding flags under a blue sky, in a protest setting.

Protesting farmers burning an effigy of the farm laws at a protest site outside Delhi. Photo by Harsha Vadlamani/Panos Pictures

Such coverage is rare; farmer unrest, however, is endemic. In November and December 2020 – while the roads to Delhi were blocked by tractors – soldiers in Peru were firing at farmers protesting a law that absolved agribusiness from obligations to workers. In Uzbekistan, also in 2020, farmers protested the cluster system, whereby land was forcibly given over to corporate clusters, which were usually run by individuals close to the political elite. Over the past five years, serious farmer protests have occurred in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, Nepal, Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, Uganda – and the list goes on.