Are we back to the 1930s again?

Great financial crises bring chaos, but they can also give capitalism a much-needed jolt

The crisis we're still living with resulted from too much predation and not enough creation – a vast extraction of value from the real economy by finance that coincided with a failure to feed new sources of growth in science, entrepreneurship and creativity.

The last great financial crisis, in the 1930s, unleashed war and chaos. But it also led to an extraordinary period of social creativity [...] This was one of the many moments when capitalism was remade, its energies channelled, tempered and constrained in new ways [...].

Always the crucial driver has been to prevent the worst abuses of the predators [...] while corralling the creative, productive power of capitalism to improve living standards.

Today's position is no different. [...] Perhaps it's only when everything has been tried, and has failed, that we'll be ready to try something genuinely new.

...from Are we back to the 1930s again? Here's why we shouldn't panic

Geoff Mulgan
The Guardian, Monday 18 March 2013

Secularizing the Tech Debate
By Geoff Shullenberger
Dissent magazine

...we must decide the future of network technology and our relation to it through reasoned collective deliberation.

[...]

[The idea] that technological “disruption” is progressive and unavoidable has served to stifle or limit debate about the social, economic, and political effects of such developments.

[...]

Internet evangelists help consolidate the technocratic capture of democratic institutions and legitimize the expansion of corporate and state surveillance.